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The Electric Revolution

acbytesla

Penultimate Amazing
acbytesla
Joined
Dec 14, 2012
Messages
39,402
We are undergoing an electric revolution. It is disruptive to established industries and individuals. And those individuals and industries are fighting it through political protectionism.

The combination of solar, wind and other renewables is an existential threat to the fossil fuel industry. This isn't some pie in the sky, overly optimistic view of the future. This is fact.

Renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels for at least a decade. The only obstacles to full scale disruption have been their intermittent nature, the inability to store that power and the absence of a charging infrastructure. But those obstacles are quickly melting away. Solar and wind are still intermittent power sources, but the problem of storing electricity is being resolved much faster than any could possibly have hoped for. Now we have always been able to store electricity, it however hasn't been economically viable for most.

But continued improvements in batteries have made them dramatically cheaper. First it was lead acid, then nickel cadmium, then lithium manganese cobalt, then lithium phosphate and now solid state and sodium phosphate batteries. We've seen the price of storing 1 kilowatt of electricity decrease from $3,000 US to $80 for lithium phosphate batteries. And now CATL, the world's largest largest battery manufacturer has announced that full scale production of sodium phosphate batteries to begin in December for $19 a kilowatt.

This is not merely disruptive, it's a bomb for energy producers. It's independence for many.

My question for all is, should we embrace the revolution or fight it?
 
We are embracing it in Australia. With solar, per capita, we are leading the world and will soon close down all our coal fired power stations. When more affordable batteries become available (the holy grail would be sodium) we will get them and will become self sufficient for most of the year.

Many (most?) European countries are embracing it as well, and China is making up ground rapidly.

Of course, there is an elephant in the room…….
 
lionking said:
We are embracing it in Australia. With solar, per capita, we are leading the world and will soon close down all our coal fired power stations. When more affordable batteries become available (the holy grail would be sodium) we will get them and will become self sufficient for most of the year.

Many (most?) European countries are embracing it as well, and China is making up ground rapidly.

Of course, there is an elephant in the room…….
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Yeah, I know.
 
lionking said:
We are embracing it in Australia. With solar, per capita, we are leading the world and will soon close down all our coal fired power stations. When more affordable batteries become available (the holy grail would be sodium) we will get them and will become self sufficient for most of the year.

Many (most?) European countries are embracing it as well, and China is making up ground rapidly.

Of course, there is an elephant in the room…….
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China brings more renewables online every year than the rest of the world put together....

The 'elephant' is....not.....
 
Embrace it, of course. In due time it will be affordable to most in the civilized world.

Meanwhile we do what we can to get there with stuff like solar water heating.

If the government isn't willing to jump in there are many options for the homeowner to install.
 
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Prestige, are we waiting for Mills to start producing his Brilliant device or ????
Nuclear is already here on the industrial scale.
 
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theprestige said:
Electrochemical batteries at scale are dumb. Pumped storage hydropower is the way to go. But really, just wake me when we get to the nuclear revolution.
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I guess I wonder what you mean by at scale since that is kind of a subjective term.

I'm not sure that at $19 a kilowatt electrochemical batteries are dumb. I'm in favor of both pumped hydro and nuclear. But nuclear is expensive at the moment. Much more expensive than fossil fuels and other renewables. I keep waiting for developments in nuclear that make it affordable. But I don't see that fusion will ever be. Maybe molten salt and thorium. But even they are at least ten years off before they make a dent.
 
acbytesla said:
I guess I wonder what you mean by at scale since that is kind of a subjective term.

I'm not sure that at $19 a kilowatt electrochemical batteries are dumb. I'm in favor of both pumped hydro and nuclear. But nuclear is expensive at the moment. Much more expensive than fossil fuels and other renewables. I keep waiting for developments in nuclear that make it affordable. But I don't see that fusion will ever be. Maybe molten salt and thorium. But even they are at least ten years off before they make a dent.
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It seems we are more or less in violent agreement.
 
acbytesla said:
I guess I wonder what you mean by at scale since that is kind of a subjective term.

I'm not sure that at $19 a kilowatt electrochemical batteries are dumb. I'm in favor of both pumped hydro and nuclear. But nuclear is expensive at the moment. Much more expensive than fossil fuels and other renewables. I keep waiting for developments in nuclear that make it affordable. But I don't see that fusion will ever be. Maybe molten salt and thorium. But even they are at least ten years off before they make a dent.
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Please, please, surely you mean $19 per kwh? I can't make sense of your post otherwise.
 
We saw the tobacco lobby, who knew they were killing people, first cover up the harms created by tobacco then fight tooth and nail against any attempt to curb their sales practices. We saw the asbestos industry fight tooth and nail to conceal the fact that their product was lethal. (They knew far earlier than anyone else. My father died in 1989 of asbestos exposure that happened 60 years earlier and I thought there was no point in pursuing compensation because surely back then nobody had any idea it was dangerous. But I was wrong, they did, and my mother got a payout.)

This is the latest, and they've learned from the earlier exercises. They also have an army of useful idiots amplifying their message online.
 
We recently had solar panels and a battery installed on our house. We run an electric vehicle, and have electric central heating - both heavy power loads. Even so, it is a rare day that we use any mains power at all. Our solar system means we are pretty much self-sufficient. Our electric vehicle is charged up for free. Any surplus power goes back into the grid and we get a (nominal) credit for that. We are officially a "micro generator", not a "household consumer".

This is a common setup across Australia. Even major power-consuming facilities like our big hospitals use their roof acreage for panels, generating most of their own power and storing it in basement batteries.

Australia also has a major pumped-hydro scheme - Snowy 2 - coming online now. Yep, it was expensive, but it does produce steady dispatchable power across the grids.

Our biggest problem is our power grid, not our power production. Not all of it is "modern" enough to allow reliable delivery and we have plenty of places where there are no redundant deliver routes in case of failures. A few years ago during some storms there were major blackouts, not because "solar and wind failed" as the gutter yellow press claimed, but because the grid failed at some non-redundant points. So this needs to be emphasised: Power grids are the weak point for shared renewable power. Just chucking in tons of panels and batteries is only half the solution.
 
I have a 5kWh battery on the side of my house (just got solar panels installed).

I could use pumped storage instead. If I dug a basement for a swimming pool, and built another on the roof, I could pump water up on solar power, then regenerate power as it flows down. With around 6m head of water I think I'd need roughly 300 tons of water to match the capacity. Maybe 15m x 10m x 2m. So, unfortunately the pool will overhang the house a bit. On the upside, a lid on top would have room for lots more panels.

I think I'll stick with the battery for now.
 
Norman Alexander said:
We recently had solar panels and a battery installed on our house. We run an electric vehicle, and have electric central heating - both heavy power loads. Even so, it is a rare day that we use any mains power at all. Our solar system means we are pretty much self-sufficient. Our electric vehicle is charged up for free. Any surplus power goes back into the grid and we get a (nominal) credit for that. We are officially a "micro generator", not a "household consumer".
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Gosh. You guys with your sunshine! What power capacity is your solar installation? The 4kWh we generated today would be a drop in the bucket to charge a car.
 
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