sfsuphysics
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Wait... wut?
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Ford Mustang Mach E Leak: Mustang goes Electric
NightReaver
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Ah, nevermind. It's not nearly as widespread as I thought. Interestingly enough I didn't know more modern nuclear reactors were capable of large degrees of load following. Learn something new I suppose.
sfsuphysics
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Yeah I was going to say, if we have the ability to large scale store energy for use at other times solar absolutely would be a godsend.
Storing power is still one of the biggest challenge of our time, would the excess power, until recently pumping back up water into higher altitude reservoir for hydro power was one of the only cheap and efficient way to do it, but obviously geographically limited.
If one day a lot of people would have 150+ kwh worth of battery in driveway and parking lot, that would be an other way to do it.
If one day a lot of people would have 150+ kwh worth of battery in driveway and parking lot, that would be an other way to do it.
Axman
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Drop a 10-story shaft with a 50-ton weight on a screw prop. Raise the weight with longitudinal gears under power, lock the weight when no power is needed, drop the weight and recover something like 65 percent of the power used to raise the weight.
And that is virtually no energy stored (well a really big amount in human muscle work but not in modern energy usage term), if I am not mistaken
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/potential-energy
50,000 kg, 30 meter high is 4 kwh or 25 cent at $0.06 the khw if you would be 100% perfect and rised it at 0 cost. How much would it cost and the size it will take to store only 20 cent of electricity. You about the equivalent of half a liter of gasoline of potential energy stored in that 50 ton at 30-35 meter high before transformation lost.
Water is one ton by meter cube and you need the size of small lake at a good height to be relevant I think.
It has been almost impossible to store electricity at interesting volume/price, turning wheel momentum, weight in air and so on.
Something like this where it is possible (on grid where peak solar can over produce demand significantly):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_...Pumped Storage,storage capacity of 24,000 MWh.
Over 380meter of elevation, can store 24,000 kwh, but it did cost 1.6 billion to do in 70s-80s money (which for infrastructure project grew faster than inflation since I think in the USA).
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Axman
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Not quite, it's 2.5 kWh, which is still pitiful. That's a house for a day with no AC and definitely no electric car. That's insane. I would have thought it would have been so much more.
I know a mechanical engineer in the early 2000s that looked at the cost/density of storing electricity during over production to use later on to pump back hydro (here in Québec) and apparently very quickly you gain an awe and incredible thankfulness of how ridiculous cheap electricity we get is.
I think we underestimate how much energy is 1kwh or 100ml of gasoline is because we are so use to it by now, not so long ago I heard someone said it is nuts my gym pay for AC electricity instead of using all of us pedaling, a human going on unstop at a good speed on a stationary bike 8hours a day for 30 days would not made enough electricity to lift that 50 tons weight.
And I think it put in perspective how crazy it is that the Ford-F150 with the big battery option seem to be above 175kwh. I wonder how long ago such battery at that weight would have cost above 1 million, must not have been that long ago.
The average house usage for an American home is 30 kwh (or 12 time the 50 tons block at 30 meters higher) , 2.5 khw a day would be a $90 yearly electricity bill at 10 cent. 2.5khw is the average electricity use only for the lights.
Axman
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Yeah, I was just about to make a correction, but I appreciate you doing it for me.
So basically, if we all lived on a cement generator the size of a grain silo, we could use it to watch an all-night Firefly marathon.
sfsuphysics
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So instead of a 150kWh auto we just give everyone a dozen 50 ton blocks with huge 30 meter high towers! Problem solved!
I think Australia, someone from down under correct me if I'm wrong, has the option of getting different rates or something if you have Tesla Powerwalls (or similar) and the power company can use your battery to store energy. I know here in the US (or at least California) while it is possible to do it Tesla won't let you because the power companies don't want it as they'd be afraid of people buying cheap power at night and selling it back when it's in demand and they're not about to write any checks, they already fought tooth and nail to kill off solar.
That sound strange, why would Tesla care what the power companies think ?....
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residenti...energy/getting-credit-for-surplus-energy.page
California Assembly Bill 920 allows PG&E and other state utilities to offer payment for surplus energy sent back to the electric grid by your home renewable energy systems. Our NSC program is based on this bill. Get answers to queries about NSC.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-...gy/demand-side-management/net-energy-metering
NEM allows customers who generate their own energy ("customer-generators") to serve their energy needs directly onsite and to receive a financial credit on their electric bills for any surplus energy fed back to their utility.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-powerwall-virtual-power-plant-california-grid-solar-energy-2021-7#:~:text=Tesla will let Californian owners,prevent blackouts in the state.&text=Tesla said it launched the,anticipated "potential grid emergencies."
To me that sound like Testla wanting to sell expensive Testla made powerwall, instead of using their car has the battery instead (or to preserve the lifetime of the car battery), the Ford F-150 has a selling point of being made to power your house during shortage or sell current in comparison.
The power company are still buying it from people at a lesser price that what it would cost them to make said current and still reselling it and making money no ?
No it wouldn't. Solar is stupidly expensive and inefficient. It's used across 3.3% of the US, because it costs too much and would bankrupt the country. California has their heads so far up their ass that they are going to shut down a perfectly good clean, nuclear power plant that supplies 9% of their energy (they did the same in Southern California with San Onofre) and build 5 new gas power plants (forget solar). As US/Europe shut down working power plants and kill their economies, China builds new coal power plants that produce 20x the emissions and make their economy stronger.
Again, best strategy is to use safer, cleaner, cost effective technologies like nuclear/geothermal/hydro and put money saved into feeding our kids and developing more efficient alternatives.
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[21CW]killerofall
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You are wrong as this is false. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-energy-united-states
I assume that the source mentioned in the picture is crap since the site has been defunct since 2015.
Armenius
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NASA uses gallium arsenide solar cells that are 34% efficient in energy conversion, but they're currently 100x more expensive than the silicon solar cells that are common and are only 15% efficient. It would be great to see that technology become affordable for us, but it is still no replacement for centralized power generation. I saw a research paper somewhere that was talking about every house and building having these cells and that array would contribute to the power of entire cities, but that sounds like an unrealistic pipe dream at this point. And you still have the issue of actually manufacturing the panels and them becoming unrecyclable toxic waste once their service life has expired.
US government is wrong? Can you please show me your math that counters this?
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You could be right but from my understanding in for all of solar panel making, solar panel installation, battery system for them, 6 year's would be a relevant amount of time, specially if in 2015 they looked at the year say 2013-2014 where the data existed.
People got much better at installing them and obviously the battery side of things is changing fast has well.
It could have been 0.17 cent a KWH in 2014 and less than 40% of that now if you are in a good sun locations.
Nafensoriel
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Issue with that is "peek watt" which most people miss.
Unfortunately while wind and hydro have actually gotten better cost efficiency wise solar plays a ton of data shaping games to try and claim equal competitiveness. You would be EXTREMELY hard pressed to find an unbiased data source for the true cost of solar.
If you also factor in recycling costs solar is better than coal and oil but the worst in the pack compared to everything green.
Krenum
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lol
DWolvin
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Te
Yuuup! That's why there need to be much more work on energy storage / load leveling. Our grid needs modernization in general, but I think pumped hydro/batteries/heat storage (or whatever can knock them off the podium) are going to get much more important. I'm also hoping that some of the advanced reactor tech (Thorium and whatever the one is that runs on and eats other reactors' waste) gets actual interest.
I am right. Please do your own math and don't rely on the lies from government or green media. You will see how false the narrative really is and how damaging solar is to our economy.
Bingo. It's a total lie. Solar is only 20% efficient, 24 hours a day. They also aren't factoring in lifetime replacement costs, where solar lasts only 25 years whereas nuclear can for 50+. The plant that California is shutting down has been operating for 36 years and they wanted to renew for another 40 years, but the state wouldn't let them.
NightReaver
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Just more government sabotage at work. The real reason why we can't have anything nice.
I am not sure you even took into a consideration what you quote, the fact that would have been right in 2015 does not mean you still are considering we are talking an industry that in recent time had a 90s CPU level of improvement.
It is hard to find anywhere saying othewise that the cost went down at a ridiculous rate from the mid 2000s to now, those kind of recent production at thoes kind of price:
https://www.spglobal.com/marketinte...tart-to-level-as-batteries-supersize-56971432
Would have been impossible just 3-4 year's before I think. India and Vietnam are making a lot (a giant amount) of them now, something I doubt they would do if they were costly and seem a clear indicator that it is more than corruption or electoral pleasing (like wind is in some place or solar would be in many place with less sun than American deserts).
Has for the plant, advancement would be so massive in that amount of time than starting a new one could make a lot of sense.
sfsuphysics
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Yeah generation of power to sell the the grid is ok, although power companies (PG&E & SoCal Edison) supposedly were not too happy with having to effectively give 1 to 1 compensation. But buying energy from the power company and selling it back is no bueno, and Tesla really doesn't care what the power company thinks but it has to comply with local regulations which doesn't allow them to sell back power.
No they're not (from the article)
As to Tesla wanting to sell more Powerwalls, yes and no. Last I heard (it's been a number of months though) is you can't get a Powerwall unless you also get their solar installed too, they claim not having enough for everyone (which is understandable) but still. I do think that you can use your car as an extension of the powerwall though, I know a guy who used it to power his house (and fish tank) during one particular outage.
Randall Stephens
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They’ll get the work done during an oil change.
Cool, we'll use your source.
So given the best case estimate they provided, a 50MWh PV with only a 4 hour battery still costs 2.3x more money than gas. Of course, factor in the actual efficiency (20% vs 55%) and lifetime (25yr vs 20yr) and that rises to at least 5x more expensive. Thanks for the example!
Time to face reality. Solar is dangerously expensive and threatens our economy.
https://www.technologyreview.com/20...-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/technologyreview said:
Mchart
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I've seen a few corporations basically do this with water. At day a bunch of water is moved to the top of a reservoir using the excess power, at night the water is released and goes down the hill/channel and the kinetic energy turns turbines. It's effectively a giant battery.
However, this is a fairly novel approach that requires a lot of space to implement.
I just don't see any solution to real sustainability outside of nuclear, or a technology that we're completely unaware of.
Darunion
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I never looked into it but I remember as a kid all the commercials about how geothermal energy was the sustainable energy of the future.
Mchart
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Problem is that a lot of areas you'd have to dig really deep to get at it. It's not like everyone is sitting on top of a hot spring or something.
You can do geothermal loops for one-off setups, but those require a lot of room as you're either building a giant pond for the loop, or you're lucky enough to live on the ocean/a big lake and also can legally build a loop into said body of water.
sfsuphysics
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Yet my solar panels literally paid themselves off after 3 years with incentives, and yeah sure the government... but without incentives I go a different route and they would have paid themselves off about 10-12 years and that's with electric rates being what the current are which unfortunately in California is only going in one direction as history has shown. Now I can't run a nuclear plant at my house, gas fired electricity wouldn't work either, but I can do solar to make energy for myself. I don't disagree one bit with nuclear being the best option, but I can't change legislation, I can't make nuclear be accepted, what I can do is make my own power, I'm not trying to feed the grid.
Yes the power company has to work harder because my zero energy usage during the morning & early afternoons adds a bit of a demand spike in the late afternoon/evening and that probably is a net negative for the grid as a whole, but you know what? I don't give a fuck, PG&E is a FOR PROFIT corporation that while yeah do need to follow rules from the California Energy Commission, many of which they write themselves and pass on, they also have a duty to make as much money as possible for their shareholders, so at that point any 'social contract' with me caring what is 'most efficient/cheapest' for the whole grid goes right out the window. And absolutely yes LiIon batteries as a large scale solution would be stupidly expensive, but my original statement was to someone else who initially claimed we store unused energy at night for daytime usage, and if we already had a way to large scale store energy solar is great.
Don't get me wrong, I agree nuclear is better, but nuclear ain't getting done. We have a grand total of 2 power plants under construction in the US (started in 2013) both in Georgia, both are simply additions to the already existing nuclear power facility so technically they aren't new plants just an expansion of an old plant, we will see if they get completed because their loan guarantees are set to expire next year... remember for-profit power companies, you can be angry at California all you want fact of the matter if nuclear has largely died across the country as a whole, some of it is political, some of it is the "hippies", but also a good chunk of it is companies literally going bankrupt and projects getting cancelled.
So at the end of the day, "our economy" doesn't involve me much at all, multibillion corporations and their shareholders who only care about profit at the end of the day. Meanwhile my solar has paid itself off, and my electricity for bill for the entire year typically floats around the $200 range, and that's with stupid expensive California rates too.
serpretetsky
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I'm not familiar with cost estimates for power plants, but MWh are a unit of energy, not power. Are you sure they didn't already take into account the actual energy production limitations of solar panels? ( it would be very strange of them to report units of energy for energy that does not exist...)Cool, we'll use your source.
So given the best case estimate they provided, a 50MWh PV with only a 4 hour battery still costs 2.3x more money than gas. Of course, factor in the actual efficiency (20% vs 55%) and lifetime (25yr vs 20yr) and that rises to at least 5x more expensive. Thanks for the example!
[21CW]killerofall
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This is not how geothermal works. You can do it just about anywhere (for single home use) and usually you only need to dig 5-6 feet below the frost line, unless you are doing a vertical loop. https://www.geothermalforall.com/installing-and-buying/installation-process
sfsuphysics
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Geothermal power it does work like that, geothermal heating/cooling it works like you're mentioning two different beasts. I've found that most people are in the "dig a really deep hole" category as far as heating/cooling, and that is not cheap at all for some reason (probably lack of options primarily), now air heat pumps are gaining popularity as the ability to pull heat from even the coldest air is getting better it makes it hard to think about digging a well for geothermal heating/cooling. Either way it is a very large upfront cost that will only pay dividends in the far future.
[21CW]killerofall
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You are right but you can do geothermal power generation by using old oil and gas drill holes. I believe that this is actively being trialed in Canada for cost liability.
sfsuphysics
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Possibly, I think oil holes go down much deeper than typical geothermal (power) wells need to go so they'll get to the hot stuff eventually. The upside is there there are a lot more oil and gas holes than there are geothermally active (and accessible) regions, downside may cost considerably more to get the fluid you need that deep. Still interesting if it can happen.
[21CW]killerofall
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So I just bought one today. I had to drive 90 miles one way to find one in stock.
Randall Stephens
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Do the lower grill shutters open and close? Are they in fact shutters?
Yes, they open to cool the battery when recharging.
The douche bag work just got one. It is pretty nice I have to say in person. I do find the GT looks better. Funny thing is he has no place to charge it since he lives in a townhouse without a pad. He has to drive out of his way to a charging station.