The cost of Lithium-ion batteries is still dropping and sodium-ion batteries use even lower cost materials, so it’s likely that the long duration energy storage – LDES – will not catch up for some time. One LDES is green hydrogen, and hydrogen LDES systems seem to have stagnated, partly due to the falling prices of
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That’s great to see! There needs to be more BESS – battery energy storage systems – on the grid to replace all the gas turbine peaker plants that have to supply the grid when the sun sets. Once the grid gets 3 or more times the amount of renewables onto the grid and a lot
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Article about recycling EV batteries versus using EV batteries for stationary storage. At this time, recycling is not very efficient. Quote: ““Today we are not very good at recovering metals, loosing almost all the lithium, silicon, phosphorus, aluminum, and graphite, while recovering only copper, cobalt, and nickel which are more expensive,” he says.”” This suggests
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The US has a huge amount of land with a very good supply of wind, and this has been developed with a large amount of WTs – wind turbines. Iowa has a lot of WTs, but Texas is the WT leader by far, with over 30 Gigawatts of installed WTs. Installing WTs is relatively easy
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Quote: “”Renewables are nearly 30% of utility scale generating capacity. The latest capacity additions have brought solar’s share of total available installed utility-scale (i.e., >1 MW) generating capacity up to 8.25%, surpassing that of hydropower (7.88%). Wind is currently at 11.77%. Solar and wind combined now account for more than a fifth (20.02%) of the US’s
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This link to the article is supposed to be free, and *not* behind a paywall. This well-researched article is a good article, with some statements that are disputable. One example is that they state that lithium batteries are flammable. The LFP cells now used in battery storage systems are low to not flammable. There are
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Quote: “”The global wind industry installed 117 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2023, making it the best year ever for new wind energy – here’s what happened and where.”” 2023 was a record year for wind power growth – in numbers
That’s great news! One thing I just remembered is that the nuclear power plants (Diablo Canyon, Palo Verde) usually shut down for maintenance in the spring when demand is lowest. Otherwise they normally run 24/7 and there wouldn’t be any time during the day when it would be 100% renewables. https://electrek.co/2024/04/15/renewables-met-100-percent-california-energy-demand-30-days/
The transmission pylons are a few million dollars a mile, and the undersea cables are even more expensive. And the undersea cables are more difficult to maintain, as is anything in a marine environment. So the cheap SOBs in the utilities typically choose the lower cost towers. As for the US West Coast, rooftop solar
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The city of Esbjerg, Denmark is replacing its coal fired city heating system with an amazing giant heat pump, biomass boilers and waste burning boilers. The refrigerant is CO2. Read the description. This is a long 43 minutes but is very comprehensive and interesting. The cost is about 40 million Euros.
