Fun fact! At the current rate of about 8000 vehicles a month there will be that much battery driving around in 2038. Sales are doubling annually though.
Presumably EV sales will level off somewhere below 1 million/yr, if that happens there will be roughly this much battery imported every two years.
This is also a great place for all that “wasted” energy to go.
Even just putting a completely dumb 240V 2kW charger on an off peak meter (like hot water cylinders use) and only using it for load shedding would probably cover most of the storage needed. 16kWh/day is overkill for most driving profiles, then the only issue is convincing whoever owns the carpark to install/rent an outlet.
I think that we need something like that. I expect that someone will set up a virtual power plant as a way of managing the service and capacity. Either that or it just becomes a ‘must have’ through legislation.
I would like to see the requirement for any new built house to have solar and some amount of storage as a requirement. It just seems to make sense!
Australia’s solar market is un-price-gougey enough and electricity costs enough that I don’t think anyone would really consider not putting solar on a new build with a battery ready inverter. An investment that yields 50% return in the first year is a no brainer.
Virtual power plants seem a bit too silicon-valley, no need to demand people to submit to someone else controlling the AC when you can just ask instead. I don’t see anything wrong with a bounded variable time of use/feed-in tarriff (ie. Electricity will cost at least x, at most y, time-average z over the year, you get 30% of retail for feed-in and the prices are published day ahead). Let people own their own charger, inverter, and battery and decide for themselves what thresholds are for the controller (or opt into software).
(VPPs) Yep, but i guess if it doesnt work, we may need something different? VPPs can take advantage of wholesale swings in cost to better leverage the market. Maybe that is how a business is encouraged to put in charging capabilities (capex), they become part of a VPP, that will soak solar during the day. (jots idea down in my tech-bro notebook)
VPPs will likely work, and likely be foisted on us (fincance ghouls need something to leech off of). I was just dreaming of a better world where instead of calling it arbitrage and extracting the surplus value via a trading market, people could just go “I’ll set my car to charge on eco” and not have their value extracted.
As I get older, I realise it is because no one can be knowledgeable about everything, this is a niche that we know, and there will be many that don’t understand or really care.
Money pimuts it into something they understand, they want more for doing nothing, so they do it.
I don’t think I’ll lose much sleep worrying that these predictions estimate that, at worst, we’ll see 80% of nominal production this winter. That’s basically noise as far as seasonal variation is concerned.
This shows pretty well that we need two kinds of storage. One relativly high efficent, but more expensive for 9% of use cases. The other one large, low cost to built, but larger losses are possible. So I would say pumped hydro, batteries and similar storage in the first category, while biomass and hydrogen are good canidates for the second one.
However priotrity should be to go towards the reaching the 99%. That is a really good position for the rest and well 61% of global electricity still comes from fossil fuels.
If I remember correctly some geysers stopped working natural hot springs stopped being hot. Things like that. I’ll see if I can find some other than an old man’s memory to back it up.
Yeah, this is a thing according to my recent visit to Yellowstone. Natural geysers are very rare and increasingly rare as people tap geothermal energy.
Geologist by training here and it’s been many years but as I recall, subsurface geothermal systems can be quite complex, especially in regional systems like Yellowstone, Iceland, New Zealand etc.
The hope, as I understand it, revolving around geothermal in the United States is tapping into much larger areas, namely the basin and range region, where subsurface temperatures are much higher than other areas. In this area, while there are many natural hot springs, they are remote and less commercial so disruption would have less impact. The benifits could also be fantastic since there is a huge area that has potential. (Most of Nevada and Western Utah). The biggest challenge is the complexity of underground faulting throughout the region. We can understand the general structure (hence the name “Basin and Range”), but the details are a challenge. At each macro fault you have lots of microfaulting and if you are attempting to scale up an energy production facility over an area you risk disrupting the system with each fracked well.
If we can very accurately map the subsurface, it’ll go a long way towards making this energy source much more viable. (We’ve had years to get better at microfracking so getting an accurate map of what’s down there is most important)
Thanks for this, I didn’t mean to say it was a bad thing, just more that we should take all their data into account. I know there are places in California that might work as well.
There are AFAIK two main risk with using geothermal energy:
risk of inducing (minor) earthquakes during drilling. I think this risk is slightly elevated with these new fracking like techniques the OP text mentions
creating mud geysers, which is very low risk but if it happens can be a major calamity.
Both these risks are during the development of new wells, and once things are completed there is basically no other problems other than that geothermal energy is not infinite and the hot aquifers lower their temperature after some decades. This can make the system too inefficient to be worth continuing operation.
Iceland keeps using geothermal for nearly 1/3 of its energy production. However, Iceland is a really poor benchmark to compare with the rest of the world - in some places, you can cook food on the surface there. :)
So techniques developed to deep drill for oil can be repurposed to drill for geothermal energy? That’s a tiny silver lining. I imagine, as we run out of oil, the drilling companies will start lobbying really aggressively for geothermal in order to keep in business.
And at least geothermal counters all the complaining about “solar panels don’t work at night” and so on. The Earth’s internal temperature doesn’t change much 😆
Geothermal is one of the few technologies that could serve as a drop-in replacement for nuclear, not to mention coal and gas. Hopefully at least one approach succeeds.
Quaise seems the most interesting, as it’s basically a phaser drill.
It is interesting, though I’m dubious about Quaise without an actual full-scale test of it. Lots of things can go wrong between lab and full industrial use.
The most audacious vision for geothermal is to drill six miles or more underground where temperatures exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam. If it works, experts say, “superhot” geothermal could provide cheap, abundant clean energy anywhere.
Folks in Finland recently tried exactly that, drilling 2 holes 6.4 km deep in Otaniemi, Vantaa. Unfortunately their fracking attempts failed and sufficient flow could not be established between the two wells. Also, temperature at the bottom was 120 C, not enough to get supercritical water (374 C is required). They donated the boreholes to scientific use, someone will try again and try better…
Once the “how” can be sorted out, it should be usable anywhere on Earth, not just volcanic regions. :) But it’s not easy.
If mass renewables (excl hydro for obvious reasons) is only gaining traction in the past 20 years and there is a solid goal to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewables, every year should be the fossil fuels’ lowest share in the power mix right?
First of all weather changes and that can have a big impact in the EU as the share of wind and solar is high enough to overshadow that. That can also be true for hydro, if there is too little rainfall. Even nuclear was impacted by too low river waterlevels in France last year. Then you have economic growth or crisis. That can have a massive impact on electricity consumption. If you consume less you shut down the most expensive plants to run and that are fossil fuels due to fuel costs.
So it does not fall every year, but over a longer period of time it does go down.
We are talking about EU fossil fuel electricity here and that is indeed going down, not due to lower electricity consumption, but due to more low carbon electricity. At least long term it is.
That's incredibly misleading. 1990 is 33 years ago and a lot has changed. For one thing, nuclear is still carrying its weight when it comes to power generation. Many outdated power plants were shut down, especially coal being replaced by natural gas. Also, the overall economy had grown significant since then. So power consumption should have grown by a lot, but in reality it plateaued after 2008. And 2008 is telling, because that is about when the EU's economy began to stagnate. Deindustrialization really began about that time too.
Take into account non-electricity fossil fuel consumption and it's easy to explain where the emissions went. People will probably look back at that period and realize it was a major act of greenwashing and careful fudging of the numbers.
The problem is that Belgium finished all, but one reactor within a decade and they provide about half of Belgiums electricity production. So with them aging and becoming less reliable as all old infrastructure does, they need to be shut down. At the time the reactors had a planned lifetime of 40 years and when shut down they are 50 years old. Also only three of the five reactors will be shut down by 2025, the other two will run until 2035, when they hit 50 years of operation.
So basicly a lack of foresight of Belgian governments for a long time, to not work on proper alternatives.
German nuclear plants are laid out to provide electricity. However the push for geothermal is meant for heating homes, which geothermal has many massive advantages in.
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