[alancalverd]

When is the last time you heard that lithium battery caught fire?  Is there no improvement can be made?

It was the reason the Dreamliner fleet was grounded, and the reason why you can't send bare lithium batteries through the mail

[alancalverd]

Given large enough area, when the wind doesn't blow in one place, it would likely blow somewhere else. It can also be complemented with solar panels.

Given the entire North Sea, Irish Sea and English Channel, plus a few mountains, there has been almost no wind electricity generated in the UK for the last 4 days.

[hamdani yusuf]

The $200 million “Big Battery”, installed in South Australia in 2017 by Elon Musk’s Tesla company, ..................

 Neoen announced plans to increase the battery complex’s size by 50% to 150MW, to be competed in the first half of 2020. It remains the largest battery in the world.

So the battery costs about twice as much per kilowatt as a gas generator plant and doesn't actually generate electricity.

There is a fixed cost, and there is a variable cost. Have you put that into calculations?

[Bored chemist]

Given large enough area, when the wind doesn't blow in one place, it would likely blow somewhere else. It can also be complemented with solar panels.

Given the entire North Sea, Irish Sea and English Channel, plus a few mountains, there has been almost no wind electricity generated in the UK for the last 4 days.

So... you don't understand the concept of "large enough".
Or you don't understand what the grid is for.

author=alancalverd
link=topic=81292.msg636165#msg636165 date=1618318937]No, dear. The grid is what distributes the stuff. No matter how many miles of wire, you need to add 5 days' storage for when the wind doesn't blow.

If you have enough wire, it reaches to where the wind is blowing.
That's the whole damned point.

I explained it here

The fact that wind is unreliable is a good reason to install more windmills in more diverse locations.

The people who built he grid knew this (and it applied to coal fires power stations too- they still need to close for maintenance sometimes).

It's a pity that people seem to have forgotten in the mean time.

[hamdani yusuf]

Given the entire North Sea, Irish Sea and English Channel, plus a few mountains, there has been almost no wind electricity generated in the UK for the last 4 days.

Wind is not the only form of renewable energy.

[hamdani yusuf]

It was the reason the Dreamliner fleet was grounded, and the reason why you can't send bare lithium batteries through the mail

The battery technology is improving rapidly, in terms of energy density, safety, lifetime, efficiency, cost, etc. In another thread I've shared an article about massless battery. The battery itself is strong enough to act as structural support for the equipment it supposed to power. Good luck designing similar strategy with gas or coal.

[alancalverd]

A massless battery, eh? Made of nothing, and strong enough to support something - wow. Never mind footling applications like transport, the entire world of civil engineering is your oyster!

Meanwhile I have a 50 liter tank under my car, that weighs about 70 kg when full, takes me 600 miles or so (getting lighter all the way!) and takes about 3 minutes to recharge. 

[alancalverd]

Given the entire North Sea, Irish Sea and English Channel, plus a few mountains, there has been almost no wind electricity generated in the UK for the last 4 days.

Wind is not the only form of renewable energy.

AFAIK no wave or tidal system in the UK has delivered more energy that it took to build, which is a pity as we have huge tides and plenty of waves.

Solar cells are great but don't make much electricity at night, or indeed most days in the UK, because we are a long way north and famously cloudy.

Biomass is surprisingly marginal: the energy density is so low and the energy cost of pre-processing so high, that the net yield can be negative.

Sewer gas is free and combustible, but surprisingly there isn't very much around!

[alancalverd]

There is a fixed cost, and there is a variable cost. Have you put that into calculations?

If you are using a device such as the megabattery only for emergency and spike capacity, the variable cost is fairly irrelevant. You have to amortise the fixed cost over the life of the  device, and the life of a gas or diesel generator can be a hundred years or more with almost no maintenance. 

[alancalverd]

If you have enough wire, it reaches to where the wind is blowing.

Provided that nobody else wants the product. Once you leave UK territorial waters you start meeting other consumers, who have the same problems and aspirations.  You might try putting a windmill in the middle of the Atlantic but you'd need an awful lot of concrete and steel just to reach the surface.

[alancalverd]

If the grid is large enough to cover solar panels on the Sahara, Europe can rely on renewable energy.

During the day, perhaps.

[Bored chemist]

Provided that nobody else wants the product. Once you leave UK territorial waters you start meeting other consumers,

Like the French- from whom we buy electricity and , to whom we sometimes sell it.
This is the point of a grid it let's you get round local shortages,

[Bored chemist]

If the grid is large enough to cover solar panels on the Sahara, Europe can rely on renewable energy.

During the day, perhaps.

And, according to you the night can be five days long.

To go fully renewable you need to install 5 days total, not short-term peak, storage capacity,

If the grid is big enough... the Sun never sets on the British Empire.

[alancalverd]

The UK grid last year was 30% renewables and over 50% if you include nuclear.

I don't think nuclear power counts as renewable. Fast breeder reactors were supposed to squeeze a bit more out of the fuel but AFAIK only two are operating commercially these days.

[alancalverd]

If the grid is large enough to cover solar panels on the Sahara, Europe can rely on renewable energy.

During the day, perhaps.

And, according to you the night can be five days long.

To go fully renewable you need to install 5 days total, not short-term peak, storage capacity,

If the grid is big enough... the Sun never sets on the British Empire.

The wind frequently doesn't blow for 5 days at a time, so you need at least that amount of storage for a UK-based renewable energy supply. If you use solar, you need 12 hours' backup  storage and a generating capacity of at least twice peak demand at all times when the sun is above the horizon.

At midwinter the Sahara receives less than 10% of the midsummer solar input, so that determines your installed capacity requirement (unless you are proposing 6 months' storage!) and the generator is going to be operating well below capacity for a fair bit of the time, which rather takes the edge off the investment.

And that still only replaces your present electricity supply, which accounts for about 30% of actual energy use. The other 70% comes almost entirely from fossil fuel.

[wolfekeeper]

Why would I need to charge it tonight, when I charged it last thursday when the grid was swimming in green electricity?

  possibly because you drove somewhere on Friday. And remember even with the grid running at full capacity, you can only do 30 miles on one night's charge because everyone else is charging theirs too.

That would be quite a trip. Most cars would still be full from several days earlier, when the grid was even greener.

And there already are far more than 35 million charge points, every 13 amp socket in the UK is a charging point.

Very few of which are by the roadside, which is where most of the cars are parked at night. and if everyone else is charging their cars, you can only get 5 amps from your socket.

So you don't think that diversity applies to cars? Only every other type of electric appliance, just not electric cars? Uh huh. So everyone in the ENTIRE COUNTRY made a several hundred mile trip, on Friday? You're being super ridiculous.

The UK grid last year was 30% renewables and over 50% if you include nuclear.

I don't think nuclear power counts as renewable. Fast breeder reactors were supposed to squeeze a bit more out of the fuel but AFAIK only two are operating commercially these days.

According to you, the grid was supposed to have exploded when it hit 20%. It's currently on 30%. Other grids are on 98+% renewable. Denmark is on 50% wind. Ireland is more disconnected grid, and is on 36.3% wind power as of 2020. Nothing went bang or got ridiculously expensive. All of these numbers are growing rapidly.

[alancalverd]

If the grid is big enough... the Sun never sets on the British Empire.

Set, please. Past tense. And all those happy colonial subjects of our dear Queen Victoria seem to think that they can use a bit of electricity too. Send an electric gunboat!

[alancalverd]

So everyone in the ENTIRE COUNTRY made a several hundred mile trip, on Friday?

No, just 30 miles per day, like they do. Bastards.

[wolfekeeper]

So ~6 kWh? You think six lousy kilowatt hours predominately taken over many hours in the early mornings is going to blow up the grid? LOL

[Bored chemist]

The wind frequently doesn't blow for 5 days at a time,

When?
When did the wind stop for 5 days over the whole of the Earth's surface?

Or are you still refusing to understand what a grid is for?