schroedingershat

@schroedingershat@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with US interconnection queues?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve often wondered why more people aren’t just gaming the system.

  “Yeah, the near-bankrupt coal plant I just bought is still a coal plant, ignore the wires running into it and that big dark blue surface over the coal pit is my tennis court.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A real world analysis of a near-100% renewable grid in Australia - Year 2.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  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. 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).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A real world analysis of a near-100% renewable grid in Australia - Year 2.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Canberra is running a v2g trial last I heard.

  Even just putting a 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A real world analysis of a near-100% renewable grid in Australia - Year 2.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries | How we can minimize expensive, ecologically damaging battery storage by changing how we think about energy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know if storage is more efficient at point of consumption or point of generation

  Some time in the recent past or very near future, an incremental addition of capacity became more resource intensive than incremental new generation and battery.

  So the ideal is actually have both, because this

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries | How we can minimize expensive, ecologically damaging battery storage by changing how we think about energy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  None of this justifies running the aluminium smelter 24/7 rather than redesigning it slightly and running it 20/6. You’re straw manning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries | How we can minimize expensive, ecologically damaging battery storage by changing how we think about energy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not all or nothing. Running the 200MW industrial drying machind when it’s sunny doesn’t mean you can’t have a battery for your 20W CPAP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries | How we can minimize expensive, ecologically damaging battery storage by changing how we think about energy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Just most places: re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries | How we can minimize expensive, ecologically damaging battery storage by changing how we think about energy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It takes a 260kg flywheel with all its mass at the edge spinning at mach 0.5 to store 1kWh.

  If you want simple, build a carnot battery. It’ll be half as efficient, but far more compact and long lasting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries | How we can minimize expensive, ecologically damaging battery storage by changing how we think about energy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Net meeting is a gift to the upper middle class and wealthy to stop them nimbying and to develop the industry. If they are complaining about not getting it on new installs, it worked.

  What is needed is to stop forcing them to pay $3 to the utility and a salesman for every $0.8 the actual product costs. End any fee for approval, make the sale, install and resale prices publicly available, and the utility has to pay full retail price for any energy that could have been produced by an installed system awaiting approval.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar energy now overlaps in cost with nuclear fuel alone for "cheap" modular reactors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If the alternative to 50c/W solar is paying $20/W, you only need it to run at 2.5% of nameplate to come out ahead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar energy now overlaps in cost with nuclear fuel alone for "cheap" modular reactors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It arrived over the last 5 years

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar energy now overlaps in cost with nuclear fuel alone for "cheap" modular reactors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This comparison is whether you should build current gen solar in a good location instead of running proposed cheap nuclear plants during the day even after building it.

  “let’s do both” is just a delay tactic when only one works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar energy now overlaps in cost with nuclear fuel alone for "cheap" modular reactors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This particular pearl clutch is even stupider than usual when it was already explicitly not apples to apples. For a time-dependent load you have the other 90% of the budget for the nuclear reactor to figure out storage.

  If the marginal cost of the SMR is higher than the all-in cost of solar, then it is always optimal to build the PV array even if you already have surplus nuclear. So the much bigger portion of the SMR cost (the reactor and fixed O&M) has to justify itself just on the loads that solar cannot feed.

  Of course this is not true everywhere yet (and this does not apply to more efficient large reactors), but the niche for SMRs is smaller than traditional reactors and shrinking.

• Solar energy now overlaps in cost with nuclear fuel alone for "cheap" modular reactorsenergy-utilities.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨energy@slrpnk.net⁩ | ⁨18⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeroAvia

  They tested a small aircraft for a few minutes at a time before crashing it and it’s nowhere near production.

  Not unless the batteries have enough capacity to last all day. And hydrogen refuelling stations are being built at bus depots because obviously they are. Do you imagine carbon-fuel busses head to their local filling station when they run low?

  Then you’re adding a redundant $5-10million high capacity filling station to the depot cost on top of the other costs. Also you need more depots because hydrogen busses (at least the ones that don’t get at least half their energy from a battery) have lower range than the top end battery busses.

  As I said before. Op charging and pantographs are being abandoned already because overnight charging is more than sufficient. 0.7-1kWh per km is perfectly doable and 500kWh batteries even without current gen LMFP (which reduces weight by 30% vs lfp in use now) has no impact on payload, any route that isn’t non-stop can run all day with just a single charge during lunch breK. 1000kWh raises the floor or reduces clearance (but still less than hydrogen) and the bus will run for longer than a driver can legally.

  Realistically most batteries are in the 250-350kWh range because more is unnecessary.

  The only people still pushing hydrogen busses are platinum miners or oil and gas shills.

  Heavy trucking is less absurd, but they can already drive for the maximum 11 hours in a 13 hour shift so there is little benefit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re assuming a monopoly on load-shifting the cheap power.

  Any process with fixed costs lower than the electrolyser will just expand that stage of the supply chain and buffer the inputs and outputs.

  Industrial heat is trivially stored at much higher density per volume in bricks, sand, or graphite.

  Low grade heat is way easier to store in a pond.

  Any variance with more than 100 cycles/yr is better served by batteries.

  So you’re left with electrolysers running at 1-5% capacity factor if you want the “unwanted” electricity. Otherwise you’re paying the same as anyone else not drawing from a battery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure if you want a range of <150km and to need a complete teardown and engineer-certified replacement of the fuelling system every 5 years for safety.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Where is the supposed 12 hour non-stop bus route that can’t be served by a current-gen battery bus?

  Also how is $3-5million per 100km supposed to be trivial, but overhead wire on 5km per 100km route is impossible?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re trying to argue that 10-15 minutes of reliable delay on a road trip over 500km trumps hours over the rest of the year filling (and also a probably 20 minutes of delay because hydrogen filling stations slow way down and only give half a tank during heavy use).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  FCEVs are a scam. The mirai is heavier than BEVs with similar range, bulkier, and has a much smaller internal volume. BEV busses are volume limited not weight limited and are already capable of covering most routes with only overnight charging (so hydrogen is worse there). Fuelling time in real world situations favours the vehicle that is sitting at 80-100% full every morning over the one you have to visit a fuelling station for. Heavy trucking is cost limited, not time limited – so filling the trucj with the cheap electricity directly at 4x efficiency is better even in the low production season.

  It’s also not “the only way” for air travel because there are no planes that use it, volume constraints limit use cases to those that mostly overlap with batteries (and don’t replace liquid fuels) and battery aircraft are much closer to production (albeit limited in niche so far).

  Every single use case of hydrogen has better alternatives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google search is over⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Tool built by narcissist gaslighters is good for bullshit but nothing else? Colour me shocked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EU blindsided by ‘spectacular’ solar rollout⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Better title:

  EU still setting policy based on projections of oil lobbying organisation in spite of 20 straight years of failure in order to try and slow renewables. In spite of best efforts to stop it, targets are exceeded yet again. Set backs and byzantine permitting requirements for wind to increase again next year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Methane + Sunlight + Catalyst = Emissions-Free Hydrogen, Say UCF Researchers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Thermodynamically you start with ~55MJ/kg available if you were to oxidise the methane.

  Then you end with 750g of carbon that would give you ~35MJ/kg were you to oxidise it or 26MJ. And 250g of hydrogen that would give you 120MJ/kg or 30MJ

  If it were 100% efficient and free then for the cost of the input methane you could get the same amount of thermal energy with a solar panel or wind turbine and a resistor.

  As far as ways of greenwashing fossil methane go, it might actually have some potential positive effect, although the hydrogen produced will not be competitive except as backup energy.

  As a thing to do with waste-emission methane it might be better than burning it. You’d still need some way of storing the hydrogen that is competitive with overbuilding solar + 4-12hr batteries (none presently exists).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brighter | Episode 10 - Why we shouldn’t build nuclear power⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s called hydro (pumped or just deferred as it has been used in a diurnal storage role for inflexible nuclear power) or a battery with 12 hours storage. Keeping a small city powered by wind and solar going through the night takes 0-1GWh of storage. There are plenty of commercial facilities of this size (and they are not necessary yet because generation is still the bottleneck). There are plenty of cities or even whole countries that run renewables for days or weeks at a time with minutes of storage – the bottleneck is still generation even in those.

  The scale of the battery industry is about 20x the scale of the nuclear industry (ie. The TWh/yr of batteries being produced can power thousands of small cities overnight were it to be used for that rather than more important things, but annual new nuclear generation can power five to ten – annual net new nuclear generation is negative).

  Moreover, 15 years is a time to build your first nuclear power plant if you are in isolation and you start from fundament recearch. Thankfully the world is interconnected, and the engineering of the regular nuclear plant was perfected decades before you were born, so I strongly suspect the time will be way better.

  Current estimates for hinkley C are around 24 years. From committing first funding to actually functioning at full power is generally at least ten years.

  It’s nothing but a very expensive distraction which produces very little for the resources and cannot scale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European electricity prices tumble into negative territory amid glut of green energy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone with a coal or nuclear plant pays to keep transmitting power so they don’t have to turn it off.

  Some (not great) subsidy schemes for wind also pay out regardless of market prices, but those are less common.