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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 20:41:33 GMT 9.5
cyrilr, I claimed nothing. I merely summarized, most briefly, the article. I fear that your education is deficient. To the contrary, you claimed various things, including your rebuttal that it is "false" that batteries don't displace peakers. I took issue with your blanket statement, as it is obfuscatory. Don't take it personally. This isn't an easy topic to wrap your head around. For instance, at a 100 MWe, 2 hour battery level, added to a say 33000 MWe grid, you may well have a replacement percentage, and depending on the grid that could well be close to 100%. The issue is that this does not imply that installing say 10000 MWe of 2 hour battery will displace 10000 MWe of peakers in the 33000 MWe grid. The real value will be closer to 1000 MWe than 10000. The problem is 2 hours of capacity is very little. Fine for marginal generation, higher penetrations start to see diminishing returns. To compensate, more hours of battery capacity have to be added. This quickly becomes uneconomical so it won't be done. This is true even if batteries were to become much cheaper: the cost problem isn't even in the right order of magnitude, as Professor Murphy explained numerically. dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/My claim is correct: batteries (certainly not with a mere 2 hour capacity) do not displace peakers at the scale required. Your claim that this is false is correct on a scale that is not relevant (ie marginal generation). Readers please draw your own conclusions.
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 18:59:54 GMT 9.5
Ah I see the problem, mea culpa, the line chart doesn't stack - so it seems to cross but doesn't actually. If you select the "area" chart it stacks the lines so that fixes the problem.
You're right their website isn't very mobile friendly I guess.
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 18:57:49 GMT 9.5
No, I understand you reported the article, and pointed out to your claim - which is advocacy on your account - that utility batteries replace peaker plants. They don't, unless you want to be pedantic and say that at the margin they do. They don't on larger scales. On small scales anything goes - the battery can be a dud, if it is rated at 1% of a grid's capacity, it can be accomodated easily. Even with zero output.
And yes, all this IS about utility scale batteries. It is not advocacy to point out basic concepts in power grids such as the concept of "marginal". It is not my fault that you can't understand basic concepts.
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 18:21:27 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 18:18:43 GMT 9.5
Let me spell out the issue since you've missed it David.
Wind plus solar plus battery grid doesn't work. It needs a lot of dispatchable peakers to work. There are no grids that have wind and solar and battery without dispatch backup.
The challenge for the future is to have grids that have no fossil fuels. Not a marginal situation with lots of gas peakers and a little battery and solar. We need no fossil grids to meet the GhG reduction targets. 80% below 1990 levels or so by 2050. Due to economic growth and population growth, that means more like a 95% reduction by 2050. Let's not split hairs here - that means zero fossil grids. I want you and everyone else to think about this.
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 18:15:10 GMT 9.5
... Have you ever checked the sales numbers for gas peaking plants over recent years? You seem not to have noticed that all the manufacturers of gas turbines are having great difficulty in finding enough customers. Why do you think that might be? Several; for one thing they have sold far too many in the past, hence we have too much capacity of such flexible plants. So much that you can install a battery system and "claim" it does not need more peaking gas turbines.
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 17:39:55 GMT 9.5
CAISO has an available capacity of over 33000 MW www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx100 MW in a 33000 MW cap grid is marginal, can easily be treated as negative load. Hell it's in the margin of error for forecasts (!). This proves nothing. You obviously have no perspective on this matter and don't seem to have much clue as to the basic concepts of marginal generation, effective load carrying capacity, etc.
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 17:33:53 GMT 9.5
Batteries don’t substitute peaking plants. ... This is false. The vertically integrated utility in this area is the privately-owned Avista Utilities. They now buy from a wind farm attached to the feeder from Spokane, with dispatchable generators, and here in Pullman and points south. So they considered purchasing a peaker for balancing rather than modifying the flows through hydropower facilities. But the opportunity to acquire, almost for free due to a federal grant, a battery matching the power of the wind farm at maximum and with a one hour duration put an end to the peaker acquisition. The battery is a great success. It responds instantly to disturbances; my lights never flicker any longer, even during lightening strikes. I'm sure that I've mentioned this before, possibly on this thread. Tch, tch. This works reasonably well in a grid with lots of dispatchable generation, and a small battery system added, i.e. on the margin. Not in a renewables grid where the sole choice is between a gas peaker and a battery - there isn't such a choice, unless the battery has enormously more than 4 hours of storage. Which isn't feasible. dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/Tch, Tch. Have you ever checked the sales numbers for gas peaking plants over recent years?
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 2:40:54 GMT 9.5
That said, ice making (or hot water) at night is a huge synergy for a nuclear grid. The kind of thing, together with EV charging at night, that can get you very close to a 100% nuclear powered grid. Electrofuels can get you to 100%. The waste heat can provide space heat and DHW for entire metro areas. I've run the numbers. The only unknown (to me) is the specifics of industrial process heat. What is your preferred method for the fuel production? HT or LT electrolysis, or electrochemical H2? Carbon source?
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Post by cyrilr on May 15, 2020 0:24:16 GMT 9.5
Batteries don’t substitute peaking plants. This is nonsense.
What a wind and solar grid needs is 4 power plants: wind, solar, battery AND peaker gas plant. Plus a ton of transmission.
Compare this to an alternative grid having only a combined cycle gas turbine plant.
Gee whiz which grid will be cheaper, the one with 4 powerplants and huge transmission infrastructure. Or the one with only one power plant.
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Post by cyrilr on May 14, 2020 22:16:25 GMT 9.5
Making ice overnight works for some commercial or even a few industrial applictions, because there's a reliable excess of power every night in a typical grid with lots of baseload power. So it works well with coal or nuclear.
With wind, it would not work well. The wind is all over the place, V^3 power profile. Whipsaw armageddon. Some days you have dozens of cycles, some days no power, so weeks no power, some days and weeks too much power. Only so much you can do with a diurnal schedulable load. Very useful for nuclear power grids like France's, marginally useful for a hypothetical (that is to say theoretical) wind and solar grid.
Perhaps we can use excess solar to make ice at night... oh no wait oops there's a problem with that scheme. Forget I said anything.
A little extra solar output at noon isn't long enough to make the ice, likely needs all sorts of investments in ice making capacity. Even then there's the usual problems of cloudy weather and wintertime. Here in Holland the January capacity factor for PV is 1%. That is not a typo. Talk of excess solar PV is rather a good joke to me, and the suggestion that it could be used economically commercially reaches ROFL levels.
That said, ice making (or hot water) at night is a huge synergy for a nuclear grid. The kind of thing, together with EV charging at night, that can get you very close to a 100% nuclear powered grid.
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Post by cyrilr on May 14, 2020 15:26:12 GMT 9.5
Another myth is that of the "energy transition". Very common - we moved from biofuels to coal, then the oil age, then gas and nuclear. And in the future we will be solar powered! The history of energy "transitions" actually has a different lesson: in absolute terms, there are no energy transitions. When we discover a new energy source (or find better ways to use an old source) we don't throw away the old. We use the new energy source, in addition to the old, and the old keeps growing along with the new. Before the Industrial Revolution the world was a miserable place powered mainly by biofuels. With the steam engine improvements of the Industrial Revolution, coal came into dominance. Or did it? We use more biofuels today than we did before the Industrial Revolution. Similarly when oil became important around the 1920's, did we stop using coal? No. Indeed coal consumption continued to increase. And then when natural gas became important after WWII, did coal and oil diminish? No, they continued to grow. And then, nuclear power became important in the 1970's. Again, no surprise, biofuels, coal, oil and gas all increased alongside. Now we have a supposed "renewables revolution". Guess what will happen? Will the renewables replace previous energy sources? What does 200 years of history tell us?
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Post by cyrilr on May 14, 2020 15:08:29 GMT 9.5
Does this look like a renewable energy transition to anyone?
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Post by cyrilr on May 14, 2020 15:08:11 GMT 9.5
A typical grid has 70% of maximum demand at all times, 24/7. Traditionally the demand increases towards maximum starting about 6 am and grows to a maximum late in the day, declining abruptly at 11 pm. So the 70% so-called baseload is well met by steady nuclear power plants. It is the daytime load that was met by gas turbines that is now giving way to solar panels in sunny regions. Increasingly these have attached utility scale batteries to store the noon maximum excess against the evening demand. See: California duck curve. All well and good but wind turbines are, in my opinion, disruptive. These require gas turbines for load balancing in regions without hydropower to perform that duty. A better way to go would be to have schedulable demand so that the portion of baseload can be increased, allowing more nuclear. Electric vehicles are a primary example of this, as they'd be charged mostly at night anyway - another fact that the solar enthusiasts don't want to admit... nuclear works better with EVs than solar.
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Post by cyrilr on May 14, 2020 15:02:34 GMT 9.5
[moved to other thread]
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Post by cyrilr on May 14, 2020 14:47:46 GMT 9.5
Another opinion not backed up by facts - or even its own content. "Taiwan has been a regional leader on climate policy, with plans to roll out 27 gigawatts of renewables to supply 20 per cent of total electricity needs by 2025. " Translation: Taiwan is a renewables leader in Asia and won't get 80% of its power from renewables even years from now. Power (electricity) is at most a quarter of total primary energy demand, so we can be sure that renewables leader Taiwan will get less than 10% of its primary energy from renewables years from now. Then there is the usual spin on "10x as much solar capacity". 10x a trivial amount is still a small amount. If I have $1 and increase my money ten-fold, I have $10. Whopping! There is nothing in the linked article that suggests that Asia is transitioning to renewables. There is everything to suggest the contrary, and that renewables enthusiasts are still the intellectual lightweights they were decades ago. The one thing that has changed is we use enormously more fossil fuels today than decades ago.
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Post by cyrilr on May 14, 2020 14:34:10 GMT 9.5
"only" a 13% drop? Renewables spin. How come the renewables people always make downsides look like positives?
A 1000 MWe plant that only produces 870 MWe halfway through its life is not good at all. This would be a lemon to a utility. They now need to buy 130 MWe of expensive replacement power somewhere.
It is similar tot the spin on how crap capacity factor, non-dispatchable solar and wind are "variable" yet reliable, dispatchable baseload power is "inflexible" as it cannot accomodate the "variable" renewables. Yeah, we had a reliable powerplant that didn't need unreliable fickle energy sources with no capacity, but we built those unreliables anyway and now we blame the reliable plant for inherent deficits of the fickle sources we added as a diversion to cover up how useless these things are in powering the nation. Great strategy, these people have got the nation's interest at heart clearly.
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Post by cyrilr on May 13, 2020 20:48:30 GMT 9.5
Also, I suspect that the gel would dry out quickly in a desert sun application. Water only gets you 2.5 MJ/mm per m2 of cooling energy. Not even an hour of energy in the full desert sun. The desert where presumably the researchers tested their gel is just down the Red Sea coast from en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeddahwhich appears to have one of the most miserable of desert climates. The gel probably needs testing elsewhere as well but if it is inexpensive it may prove a worthwhile addition. Desert climates are probably among the best since they are dry and tend to have reasonable humidity at night. Tropical climates with high humidity would have plenty of water but humidity would also impede evaporative cooling. Kind of like a "swamp cooler" air conditioning working well in the desert but not doing much in a tropical humid climate. Perhaps large scale application of this gel in a large desert solar farm could impact the micro climate, or impede the effectiveness of the gel (if it can't saturate because the surrounding panels' gel has already sucked out all the available moisture). Probably would be attractive to add some sort of mesh or screen and rain diverters to protect the gel, make it stick longer and to allow more gel to be applied. Re-applying may be ok in low wage countries but if labor is expensive this could become $$$ added.
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 21:23:58 GMT 9.5
Correction. It is not powered by the wind farm. It is powered by the grid. It is just the usual administrative lie about kWh consumed being matched by the wind farm generation. You can’t power any factory with wind. Way too fickle.
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 21:18:34 GMT 9.5
cyrilr --- I did read the entire article regarding perovskite solar cells. It should be obvious that indoors neither UV nor temperature are a problem. It should be obvious that glass encapsulation eliminates humidity. It should be obvious that this is potentially a solution for a small market, not attempting to replace silicon where substantial power is required. It should be obvious that this is a gadget. Gadgets are not helping us kick our multi billion ton a year coal oil and gas habits.
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 17:21:56 GMT 9.5
Also, I suspect that the gel would dry out quickly in a desert sun application. Water only gets you 2.5 MJ/mm per m2 of cooling energy. Not even an hour of energy in the full desert sun.
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 17:19:50 GMT 9.5
cyrilr --- In the desert there is no problem producing domestic hot water. The problem is obtaining the water in the first place! The gel obtains its water overnight. And in a desert application, I don't doubt that "up to 20%" improvement in power production when the sun is at zenith. With a 0.5% temp coefficient a 20% improvement would suggest a 40 deg C cooling. That seems wildly optimistic for the equivalent of a wet towel. If your panel is boiling hot you have other issues of durability. In the desert you probably put up other tech such as CdTe which has lower temp coefficient. I do doubt claims made by solar researchers. A healthy attitude because most of the claims never lead to anything (or wildly overestimate potentials).
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 17:15:37 GMT 9.5
cyrilr --- The indoor location plus glass encapsulation eliminates all of the environmental causes of perovskite degradation mentioned in the article you linked. So, indeed, this may well solve the pesky problem of tiny batteries which require replacement every year or three. It doesn't deal with the intrinsic problems of gaps, UV, thermal, which were also mentioned but you chose to ignore or not read those. These compounds are intrinsically unstable. They would make good explosives or reagents. Not the kind of stuff you'd be looking for in a harsh desert sun with violent thermal and UV cycling. Its fun stuff, but I doubt it will ever be able to compete with silicon or CdTe.
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 17:11:16 GMT 9.5
Also. In Table IV you can clearly see by the ratios that U, Ce, Te, Pa, Zr, and Ru are zone refined - concentrating toward the back. R.E. seem to have a small zone refining effect but there does appear some and in the right direction (the average of the first two increments is greater than the average of the last two increments for R.E.). But clearly volatilization explains the large loss of R.E. Curious that Ce goes to the back though, not that this matters, it's innocuous and can go into the recovered fuel.
Even a quite small distribution rate would be acceptable as zone refining is a simple process, so more passes can be added.
As long as Pu does not volatilize I don't see major issues. If it does volatilize we would have to recover from the distillate using some different process.
Zone refining of salts (fluorides or chlorides) is also something I'm interested in, but hard to find good references.
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 16:52:27 GMT 9.5
Results are sensitive to arc speed and specimen size, so these need to be optimized. Don't see big challenges here.
Take a look at Table II. Distribution coefficient for uranium is about unity, for almost all FPs is well below unity. Then Table III, the uranium has clearly moved to the back, along with Te, Ru, Zr. But R.E. are removed from the back. Volatilization does explain some (and in case of Cs and Sr all) of the loss. Don't see why that matters very much - I am actually thinking of an integrated vacuum distillation unit + zone refiner, basically where the zone refiner is in a vacuum vessel fitted with offgas filter and distillate trap. Whether zone refining or volatilization removes it is not that relevant. I don't expect Pu to volatilize at all, Pu is demonstrated to be able to be zone refined for bombs.
Agree on mixed results for Pa. Ruthenium is clearly zone refined, concentrating in the end, it goes with uranium but not a big deal.
as to "far from refining the fuel they destroyed it" now you're the one making claims not supported by the reference. But Th fuel definately is different from U/Pu fuel. I think the results are encouraging but need a U/Pu fuel experiment. Even if Pu goes with R.E. though it would still be a useful processing method (or did you not actually read my previous comment).
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 16:28:10 GMT 9.5
You couldn't have read it. The glass encapsulation protects the perovskite, of which the chemical formulations continue to improve the effective life. You couldn't have understood the instability problems if you think a glass pane will protect it. There are intrinsic (not just extrinsic) stability problems. There's lots of ideas on how to solve them, but a long way from demonstrated to work in real applications. www.ossila.com/pages/perovskite-solar-cell-degradation-causesIndoor might be an interesting first application, but I personally expect the stability problem will limit perovskites to niche applications for a very long time (ie not a competitor to silicon or CdTe, both of which have advanced incredibly and are very stable and durable).
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 16:20:37 GMT 9.5
Glad to hear that Rod, our faithful blunderbuss, is getting better. The one book I would recommend reading is the late Cohen's book from 1990. Dated, but mostly still relevant and its risk assessments are beyond equal. The book is available online as well, if you prefer to stare at pixels rather than ink: www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 16:17:16 GMT 9.5
That seems wildly optimistic. Typical solar panel temperature coefficients are 0.2% to 0.5% per degree Celsius. So a 10 degree cooling improvement would increase power by 2 to 5%. To get 20% would require 40 to 100 degrees of cooling, which is not credible for passive surface evaporating cooling. A better option seems to integrate a cooling coil of sorts into the back of the panels, so as to generate some useful low grade heat for domestic hot water and such (perhaps as a preheater to an existing water heater).
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Post by cyrilr on May 12, 2020 16:11:56 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on May 11, 2020 19:21:36 GMT 9.5
Found a great reference. "Fission product separation from thorium-uranium alloy by arc-zone melting" by R.D. Burch, C.T. Young. catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100902743As expected Cs and Sr are volatilized out effectively. Zr stays with U, also expected. Lanthanides (R.E.) removal rate better than I expected. Pretty good actually, a limited number of passes would suffice (perhaps only 1 for IFR fuel). Now all that is left is to figure out TRUs behavior. If they stick with the lanthanides then that end can be cut off and processed differently, with a greatly limited flow into that second process.
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