What about large quanzities of batteries everywhere around europe?
If prices continue to drop, there will be a powerwall alike in every second house in some years.
What about large quanzities of batteries everywhere around europe?
If prices continue to drop, there will be a powerwall alike in every second house in some years.
This is an insane suggestion if you had a concept for how expensive batteries are and the scale of flexibility issues on the european grid.
It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
> It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
they dont help grid stability via inertia of spinning masses, but PLLs and the like exist, where you can control frequencies and phases without a spinning mass.
you dont need to burn gas to have a flywheel either
Batterie prices are falling constantly and grid sized battery production has not even started. The focus was and is mobile batteries.
So expect prices to drop further.
Also yes, batteries help very much with grid stability as they can give steady power on demand anywhere. Have lots of batteries everywhere == lots of on demand grid stabilizers.
Could pumped-storage batteries help in that case?
Residential energy use is the least interesting thing to think about at a grid scale. The grid actually will get more brittle and/or expensive if everyone wealthy enough to get batteries and solar gets them.
What about the manufacturing and industrial uses? Or the need for natural gas to be a feedstock?
How many batteries does it take to power a giant hyperscaler datacenter for a few days during poor weather conditions? You can’t really rely on backup generators at that usage rate as the expense (and environmental impact) gets to be crazy. Or you end up just building natural gas turbines co-located with such facilities and we are back to where we began.
this is to say, that natural gas isnt the necessary evil to account for intermittent power sources.
its a necessary evil to fully capitalize on other investments. i dont care if the hyperscaler can run their GPUs overnight. perfectly happy for them to delay their training because theyre running in daytime.
the capital owners who bought the GPUs sure care, but why should i accept their pollution in order for them to run a bit faster?
You can't run a factory or data center off of batteries for long. Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
> Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
My experience has been that the vast majority of people, even very technical people, don't really understand the energy mix required to sustain modern industrial technology. Their only experience is with their utility bill which shows them a pie-chart with a big area showing "green" so they can feel better about the state of things.
Electricity production accounts for the minority of energy usage, and residential a minority of the usage of electricity. People don't think about the energy required to send an Amazon package to their door or have fruits from South America stocking their grocery store year round, or even to create the industries that ultimately make up their paychecks each month.
The pandemic was the best view of what real energy usage changes would look like. Early pandemic was a rare moment when global energy usage dipped and that had nothing to do with the demand on the residential grid.
If the batteries are big enough, also that is possible.
Many things are technically possible. Fewer things are economically practical. Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough? How much will that cost and how many years will it take? A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude. Have you actually done the math on this or are you just repeating platitudes?
> A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude.
The UK is forging ahead with large scale battery storage projects. I have not done the math, but I assume there is a sound economic case in order for these projects to receive this level of investment.
Edit: Here's some more data on revenue for battery storage in the UK [3]
[1] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/statera-u...
[2] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/fidra-ene...
[3] https://modoenergy.com/research/gb-research-roundup-january-...
> Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough?
why is this relevant? clearly europe can also buy from outside of europe.
the nice thing about batteries is you dont need a new battery for each watt, compared to needing gas.
the simplest thing is to keep buying russian gas, and also pay ukraine to attack russia. no need to change anything or do any new buildouts whether thats batteries or in US LNG export terminals+european import terminals. those also take time where the russian fuel is readily available. the russian invasion isnt gonna last forever, so a move to US gas is wasted investment when europe can move back to Russian gas eventually anyways
Yes, I have done the math. Thing is, if you ignore the climate, coal and co is still cheaper. That's why it is still used so much. If you factor in climate costs, things are different.
Could you explain what you would use that we can produce in Europe and can generate electricity to fill the batteries with? The batteries cannot be produced in Europe and have very limited lifetime.
Not sure if I understand you right, but you can build batteries without rare elements.