The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

Coal fired power stations don't get new bearings when they start to wear out, they just get shut down.

The lithium batteries used in grid scale batteries seem to come off the same production lines that make batteries for electric cars. You just pull out the old units and replace them with mass-produced new parts.

The thing that people seem to miss about solar farms and grid scale batteries is just how modular they are. Wind farms are use bigger module

- huge wind turbines - but they do use a lot of them and it's much easier to churn them out in volume that it is to produce the huge steam and gas turbines you find in power stations.

Think how much more fun you could have if you actually understood what you were doing.

We all know that, I believe. There are two ways to handle the waste - bury it deep enough, or use reprocessing/recycling to reduce the worst of the waste. (Of course a better idea is to use more advanced nuclear reactors that produce more electricity for less waste.)

Handling nuclear waste is technically and economically feasible - though it is difficult and expensive. That does not mean countries (other than Finland) are willing to spend money on it - governments much prefer to kick the can down the road to future generations. But there can be no doubt that handling nuclear waste is far easier and cheaper than dealing with the consequences of all the CO₂ and other greenhouse gases that we have released.

The climate /is/ getting warmer, sea levels /are/ rising, extreme weather /is/ getting more extreme. The consequences are real and obvious. Yes, people (at least educated people) are getting steadily more concerned about it. Yes, politicians are finding it harder to ignore. And yet it is still politically easier to ignore the problem, make token efforts, or blame someone else. Florida could be wiped out by hurricanes and New York flooded by rising sea levels, and Trump would say it is because of trans people and/or China, and that would satisfy his brainwashed followers.

Sure. Why would anyone want to do it wrong?

What an idiotic thing to say. It is totally irrelevant where the lithium - or any other element - came from. What matters is the availability /now/, here on Earth, and the costs (of all kinds) of extracting it in appropriate quantities.

Lithium is a limited resource. That does not mean that the universe does not contain much lithium, it means that the commercially extractable lithium sources are limited.

Lithium mining (I am using the term "mining" very generally, including metal extraction from lithium brine) is a massive environmental impact. You don't get to say that other mining is bad if done badly, therefore lithium mining is okay. Alternatives that can be used in batteries - or will hopefully become usable in batteries - include sodium, aluminium and iron, all of which have vastly smaller environmental impact in their extraction.

Yes, vanadium flow batteries have their advantages. And if someone comes up with a better basis for flow batteries that doesn't need a relatively rare, expensive and toxic liquid, that would be great. And yes, there are many other ways to store energy. Sodium ion batteries are currently the most direct comparison to lithium ion.

I think you are missing some key understandings about what makes batteries "safe" or "unsafe". Yes, a lump of pure sodium metal is more reactive than a lump of pure lithium metal. No, that is not the issue in battery safety.

I am not interested in propaganda, but facts. And I am in no way pro-petrol or a denier of climate change or its causes.

I see the current lithium-ion based electric cars as a necessary stepping-stone to a good, safe, sustainable and environmentally positive solution for electrification. We would not have better alternatives like sodium ion or aluminium ion batteries, or other up-and-coming technologies without the investment that has been made possible by the current electric car ecosystem. Lithium ion batteries have been the only option for cars that can give the required energy and power densities at an acceptable cost. But the sooner they are replaced by something better, the better it will be for the world. And for non-mobile applications such as grid storage, there are already better alternatives.

Lithium /is/ dangerous - the extraction is environmentally costly, it is a limited resource, and lithium ion batteries are very much a safety concern. That does /not/ mean that petrol is safe or environmentally sound - far from it. It means we can and must do better.

The fossil carbon extraction industry doesn't want that. They keep on lying about the cost of renewable energy in the hope that people will keep on buying their fossil carbon. Some gullible suckers take their lying propaganda seriously.

How did you manage to post such a daft misapprehension?

Most cars are used mainly for short trips. Most people expect to use them to make long trips from time to time and pay a lot more attention to their performance when they are stuck in the car for six to eight hours.

In Australia there is a "Go Get" scheme which parks cars all over the place and if you want to use one you can book it on line and get into it by waving your Go Get" card over the sensor on the car.

My wife and I tended to book smaller cars than the one we own - where my wife had insisted on a fully adjustable front passenger seat so she could sit comfortably while I was doing my half of the driving on long trips (which didn't happen often).

You can neglect them if you want to, but it's still a huge chunk of stored power, and some ingenious engineer will probably work how to use for some job that none of us has thought of yet.

The "Tesla power walls" are essentially the same batteries, and electric car owning households are tending to have both.

Quite the opposite. Fully understanding blinds one to possibilities.

I was just a few minutes ago discussing that with a couple of my guys.

We don't have to understand it, we just have to make it work.

Ultimately, nobody understands how the universe works. So inventions lurk.

And being unsure, staying confused, is the way to invent things. Rigid theorists, equation slingers, often get locked inside their restrictive world, which explains why so many important things are discovered by amateurs.

I'm about to Spice a neat circuit that we don't fully understand.

You do seem to be prey to irrational anxieties.

Most of them involving cheap electric bikes and electric scooters, with inadequate battery condition monitoring.

Rupert Murdoch owns a lot of Australian newspapers, and they publish a lot of stories that keep the fossil carbon industry happy. Electric cars catch on fire much less often than gasoline powered cars, but his newspapers make a lot of fuss about every electric car fire they can find.

There aren't any. If you fission U-233 (which is what thorium reactors do) you get slightly different proportions of exactly the same isotopes as you get from U-235 which pose essentially the same problems.

You don't get any Pu-239 from neutron capture in U-238, but that's a feature rather than a bug.

Nuclear fusion is more promising and hydrogen-boron fusion doesn't produce any neutrons at all - or wouldn't if anybody could get it to work.

https://hb11.energy/ <snip>

We used to have oil heat when I was a kid, Dad would put a few gallons of diesel in the tank once in a while if they accidentally ran low, this was back when diesel was like $1 a gallon or whatever.

But nobody who owns a detached home and can afford the switch to something else wants to have oil heat anymore here, and at the very least if they can't switch fuels entirely they're sun setting their forced-air HVAC in favor of a mini-split setup.

People with gas are installing mini-splits also though I think the overall cost/benefit is less clear there, depends more on how many hot days you have that require active cooling I think...mini-splits seem very effective at spot cooling.

Our condo has a propane-fueled combi boiler with baseboard hot water, no central AC just use window units in the office and bedroom when needed, we're still relatively young enough and New England isn't yet sweltering enough that we feel central cooling is a sine qua non (particularly in a ground floor unit) :)

Maybe someday when we're closer to retirement but we're regularly not even home during the heat of the day in summer, anyway.

Incidentally I forgot to mention it goes without saying lots of homeowners have solar PV arrays, PV & minisplit/hybrid setups seem pretty popular

Weeks? Unlikely in the extreme. Whatever the pending report says, it will get the full wire-brush scrub by everybody, a process that will yield many causalities. So we also need time for the political funerals.

Also see below.

Yes, all true, but the politicians and news reporters don't care in the slightest.

The only solution is to create better politicians and news reporters? It is often proposed, by those same politicians and reporters. Sometimes replacement does happen. And nothing changes. Hmm.

Joe

The best possible use for the spent fuel from our first generation thermal neutron reactors is to use it as fuel for "advanced" fast nuclear reactors.

We let this technology languish for 50 years, but China and India have taken up where we left off, and they have the industrial manufacturing base and government support needed to pull it off.

Somebody told me years ago that the advantage of oil heating is that there are many suppliers. You are not tied to one.

I don't know what qualifies as mini-split, but over here, splits are very common. I have one running just now in this computer room. The cool air actually flows to the entire top floor of this house (I keep the door to downstairs closed), of course warmer with the distance from the split (I have a portable fan pushing the air to my bedroom). Still, it allows me to pass the summer in some confort for a limited cost.

I could have a better system by having a multiple-split system. One outside unit connected to two or three units inside.

They are simple to install in existing houses that have no ducting, and maybe, no winter heating either.

On 6/10/25 8:56 AM, john larkin wrote: <...>

For systems that can feed back to the grid there are usually settings that determine how much of the battery storage can be sent to the grid so there shouldn't be an issue with running down the battery even if the energy is coming from an EV.

My solar PV system has battery storage and I subscribe to Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. When the grid is under stress I allow up to 50% of the storage to be used by the grid for which I get paid $2 per kWh.

I usually get a few hours notice through the App on my phone and I can opt-out for any event. This is in California although Tesla operates similar programs throughout the country.

Tesla vehicles do not (yet) support Vehicle to Grid (V2G) operation although the extra hardware required is minimal as the conversion from AC to DC in the car is already pretty much bidirectional to achieve high-efficiency. (Just using Diodes is too inefficient)

Reporters and politicians frequently don't know enough. English language "science" reporters - at least for the main-stream press - never seem to have studied any kind of science. This wasn't true in the Netherlands and the mainstream press science reporting there was a whole lot more reliable than it had been in England and is now in Australia.

The Spanish problem is probably the same one that the world's first grid scale battery solved back in 2017.

Some ingenious engineer could design a generator and mechanics to attach to petrol or diesel cars and use that for electricity supply - as an emergency backup for the grid, it would be a huge improvement over using electric car batteries as it is much more scalable. Apart from a few jerry-rigged setups in places far from reliable electric grids, it is never done. So what makes you think using car batteries, in cars, is a realistic idea? It would make the cars more expensive, make their charge state unpredictable (and no one would accept that), fail to provide reliability for the grid as cars are often not connected, and wear out the absurdly expensive car batteries sooner. It is a silly idea.

No, they are a /totally/ different concept. And no, electric car households very rarely have both - most electric cars are not Tesla, and only a tiny proportion of Tesla owners have "power walls".

However, the "power walls" is basically the concept I am suggesting - except they should not be using lithium batteries. They should be using sodium ion batteries - taking perhaps 20-30% more space and weight, which does not matter nearly as much for a fixed storage box rather than a car. The price for the batteries would be around a quarter and the environmental cost of their production would be perhaps 5% - and that's taking into account the lower lifetime cycle count of current sodium ion batteries compared to lithium.

It should not be so difficult for you to understand that the requirements for a battery in a car, and the desired usage of a car driver, are massively different from the requirements and usage for small local grid storage.

Estimates by proponents of molten salt thorium reactors are between a hundredth and a thousandth of the levels of the more problematic waste materials for the same generated electricity. No doubt they are overly optimistic, but they are still massively more efficient. For the long-lived transuranic radioactive isotopes, the thorium cycle in a molten salt reactor gives about 5% of the quantities you get from standard light-water uranium reactors, and the waste is in a form that is easier to separate and recycle. Conventional uranium reactors use less than 1% of the uranium for useful energy production - the rest is wasted. With molten salt thorium reactors, close to 100% of the thorium is used.

Even with uranium fuel rather than thorium, breeder reactors and higher temperature molten salt reactors can greatly reduce the worst parts of the waste while generating power.

The problem with the nuclear industry is that it was viewed as a bug, not a feature. That is why thorium reactors where pretty much abandoned in the race to build bigger bombs. Priorities have changed since then, and lots of countries are working on thorium and molten salt breeder reactors.

Nuclear fusion has /always/ been promising. I am sure it will be achieved eventually, but if we wait for it to be a commercially realistic source of a substantial proportion of the world's energy production, we will already have lost the ice on Antarctica, flooding the homes of about a quarter of the world's population, and raised the temperature of the homes of another quarter to uninhabitable levels.