Quote: (01-17-2017 10:15 AM)Arado Wrote:
Hmmm, I guess those are fair points about lithium, but
a) there is no guarantee that lithium ion batteries will always be the standard battery - there is lots of research going on looking at alternative forms of energy storage.
How much do you know about battery and energy storage research? I have friends doing research in this field and I'll tell you, they are not exactly that optimistic about the future of energy storage. It's a very challenging problem to get safe, useful and low-cost energy density applications - somewhat easier if you want grid-scale energy storage as you can do things like have vanadium flow batteries:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/arti...ntest.html
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Vanadium flow batteries store their energy in tanks. The electrolyte — the fluid that transfers charges inside a battery — flows from one tank through the system back to the same tank. The tanks can be fish tank size or bigger than an above ground pool. As a result — and you will see this over and over again — it’s much easier to adapt flow batteries to industrial-scale applications without adding a lot of cost.
But in terms of batteries for houses, cars etc, lithium will reign. On a very simple level: energy density is based on the number of atoms you can squeeze into a certain volume - as each atom will supply one electron. The smallest atoms in size: hydrogen (reacts with everything, so useless), helium (noble gas, will not give up electron), and lithium. Lithium ion batteries are hard to beat for energy density (which is what you need for compact scenarios like Tesla cars or Powerwalls).
The Department of Energy had a
$120 milion fund for battery research in 2012, with the goal of 5-5-5: 5 times denser, 5 times cheaper in 5 years. Net results: no significant progress. There aren't any low-hanging fruit in battery research left and progress will be tremendously slow.
As for flow batteries (different than regular batteries) - it's hard for me to tell how much of the research is on a path to nowhere, driven up by researchers' eagerness for funding and how much of it is real. The fact that we don't hear much about alternatives to lithium-ion batteries should tell us a lot.
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Point being, that solar and wind are now undercutting hydrocarbons on unsubsidized price. This is a radically different situation then a decade ago, and in 5 years or so I don't see how hydrocarbons will even be able to compete if the cost curve continues to decrease at the rate it is going on now.
Solar and wind are competitive in some geographical areas, not all. And that too, only for electricity production. Energy at large is a bigger field, and renewable energies have made very little impact on heating and transportation, two huge consumers of energy. As for hydrocarbons - one only needs to look at the price of gas to see they're not out of the race yet. A few years back solar was making gains relative to coal. And boom, natural gas came along (thanks to fracking) and make even the historical cost curve of solar look sluggish. I wish I could find the plot, but gas has been very impressive the past few years.
As for solar and wind, they're not immune to supply and demand concerns: return on investment is calculated by looking at upfront cost (which is dropping very rapidly) and what price you can sell/buy electricty at. Right now targets for solar are for 5 cents per kWh. But as more people install solar, there is going to be a much larger supply of electricity. Suddenly the spot price for electricity is 2 or 3 cents per kWh and the time to get your up-front cost back is prolonged by a factor of two. This could potentially make solar and wind unappealing as you would now get lower prices and thus the initial front-up cost may not be worth the investment. In fact, Germany has had issues with negative spot prices: utilities paying YOU to consume electricity because there's just too much on the grid. See:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factshee...n-negative
You want me to pay money to buy a solar panel when I can get paid to consume the excess electricity my neighbors' solar panels produce? <-- a real possibility.
Oh and that doesn't the fact that electricity at night-time is still going to cost money considering the sun doesn't shine at night.
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The battery + solar system is now being used by the first adapters, but as it gets cheaper then it will migrate to the masses and then even expand to areas that aren't even super sunny - for some of those areas wind can be pumped in to supplement the grid when it is cloudy.
Battery + solar is not competitive with hydrocarbons. And in fact, the tremendous cost of batteries + more sluggish decline in cost for batteries may make the combination uncompetitive for a very long time.
Wind too has the issue of intermittency. What happens when you have no sun and there's no wind to pump into the grid? In this aspect, natural gas turbines absolutely kill. Not only do they produce half the carbon coal and oil does, thus being cleaner by default, the start-up time for a natural gas turbine is 30 minutes. No other base power source comes even close.
And then we have to take into account that the US has several distinct and separated electric grids. This is a GOOD thing. You don't want the entire US having a black-out because one plant unexpectedly shut down in the Midwest. Here's an image showing the separate electric grids:
Most of the wind resources we have are in the dead middle of the country. Not all grids are going to have access to this wind - so just pumping in wind from other areas isn't that trivial.
Don't get me wrong, I love renewables a lot. And I wish them the best, but I also do my best to be realistic about them (and all technologies). Their ascent to absolute domination is by no means guaranteed. There are many more hurdles to overcome and quite a few are not insignificant. One prime example is the issue of how much renewable energy can a grid take. Doofus researchers from Stanford that don't include start-up times for power plants say every US state can be 100% renewable by 2050. But when you include start-up times, grids experience weekly blackouts past 30% renewable. Heck considering renewables only contribute 1% of the electricity in the United States, even 30% would amount to tremendous growth in the renewables industry.
Can batteries mitigate that issue? Maybe. But the grid itself is very complex. It's an absolutely beast and hard to understand even for electrical engineers. Right now energy storage is only useful for frequency modulation in the grid (i.e. keeping the grid electricity frequency at 60Hz in the US). In other words, all batteries are doing right now is keeping the grid slightly more stable. It is not storing energy during the day and then dispersing it at night-time.