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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17558715
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Hell yeah
I can’t wait to see this headline again but about a bigger battery somewhere else
Nice. This seems to be the future that solves a lot of problems. Right now in Australia, we’re seriously entertaining building nuclear power plants for the first time ever, to provide base load power that renewables allegedly can’t. Large sodium batteries could help us avoid that.
The LNP doesn’t have a legitimate interest in transitioning to nuclear power or they would’ve begun over the last decade or so that they were in power.
Instead they’ve proposed - now that they’re in opposition - a technology which is banned at the Federal level and individually at the state level, because they know that gives them years of lead time before they ever have to begin the project.
On top of that, all of the proposed sites are owned by companies who’ve already begun transitioning to renewable generation or renewable storage, and most of them are in states in which the state Premiers have publicly stated that they will not consider overturning their bans on nuclear power.
All this talk about nuclear only does one thing, keeping fossil fuels relevant for longer.
I tend to agree. The right time to build nuclear was like 30 years ago.
The same people who opposed it then are the same people saying it’s the future now. If anybody agrees to build it, the you’ll have 15-20 years of renewable energy being cancelled because the “nuclear is on the way”.
Exactly. They’ve brought up nuclear because they’re desperate to have some kind of energy policy, but one they know they’ll never have to bring to fruition because that allows them to continue with coal and gas for as long as possible.
It’s not just base load, turbines also provide grid stability. All the quick fluctuations as people turn things on and off are hard to load balance with solar, wind, or battery. A big spinning turbine has a lot of inertia. That helps keep thr grid at a constant frequency. As solar gets bigger and bigger we might need big solar powdered flywheel generators just to stabilize the grid.
Inverters could also provide “virtual inertia” which help to stabilize the grid frequency. However most of today’s inverters don’t have it, or it’s disabled.
This means we don’t need solar powered flywheels, which are inherently inefficient, we just need software (edit: and batteries of course) more or less.
Partially. Inverters providing virtual inertia is good but has the problem of still being active and reactive. It helps and is cheaper and more efficient than flywheels.
Flywheels and turbines however provide a very sticky frequency. They help out a lot with stability and give inverters time to respond.
Think balancing a stick on your hand vs anchoring it in clay.
If we take enough turbines off line we are still probably going to need some mechanical power stabilization no matter how inefficient.
But yeah I think we are going to see a blend using as much electrical and as little mechanical as possible.
The other side of that is matching supply to demand is basically instant. You pull power from batteries and they give you more (provided they’re not at their safe limit). There’s always a lag in getting turbines to spin up and down, and so there’s a non-trivial mismatch time.
Actually no. Batteries and thier inverter adapt in the about one second to half a second range. The massive inertia of a turbine adapts in the millisecond range.
To maintain 60 hz you need to be in the very low milliseconds range. Remember at 60 hz you do a full sin wave cycle in 16ms.
Turbines act as a tremendous power smoother in the grid.
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Lol,
Batteries are perfect for load balancing.
Please, know your facts
The main issue with using batteries for load balancing is the massive resource investment required for them at a grid level, BUT that’s more of a concern with lithium based batteries due to a number of factors. Sodium batteries use way more easily accessible and abundant materials.
NGL I’m hella fuckin hyped about sodium batteries vs lithium batteries.
Batteries can’t stabilise frequency. If the frequency changes too much, the grid will go down.
You literally need a giant spinning turbine for this.
It’s pretty basic energy engineering, and is not related to load balancing.
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Sounds like a way to waste loads of money and keep people on fossil fuels.
Must be way cheaper to build more batteries and build out inertia. (Would still need backup power at this point though).
Reminds me of Elon’s Hyperloop. Not intended to actually work, but instead be a distraction to deflate interest in public transportation.
Nuclear power should be expanded, a lot, it is the only realistic way to replace fossil plats for base demand.
And before anyone starts whining about “radiation scary”, nuclear waste is a solved problem.
You dig a hole deep into the bedrock, put the waste in dry casks, put the full drycasks in the hole, and backfill it with clay.
Done, solved!
A bigger radiation hazard is coal ash, from cosl power stations, they produce insane ammounts of ash which is radioactive.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
Storing coal ash is also a big problem:
http://www.southeastcoalash.org/about-coal-ash/coal-ash-storage/
Here is an interesting documentary about our fear of radiation, it is called Nuclear Nightmares, and was made by Horizon on BBC:
Imo “put it in a hole” isn’t exactly a great solution when the alternative is renewables but you’re definitely right about coal that shit is terrible.
So far I have not seen any real renewable energy source that can cover base demand, I am sure there will be eventually.
Nuclear is not a replacement for renewable energy, it is a shortcut to getting rid of fossil power generation and buying us time.
Nuclear power plants take a long time to do properly. Starting to build nuclear now would take a decade plus.
They’re also more expensive per watt of energy generated over the lifetime of the plant than renewables.
It would be cheaper and faster to build renewables, batteries, hydro electric, and other storage methods.
Nuclear is a distraction and you fell for it.
Standardisation will bring down the cost and time of building a powerplant.
I don’t think it is fair to compare the cost of nuclear against the cost of renewable power since they will fullfill different roles.
Renewables are great at dynamic demand, nuclear is great at base demand.
Hydro power has been shown to be quite harmful to local fish dammaging the eco system, but yes, some hydro should absolutely be used.
But renewables still can’t cut it for base demand.
I see nuclear powerplants as being a drop-in replacement for coal, oil and gas powerplats, buying us time to develop renewables further while also developing better and more efficient tech.
Oh so the costs will drop in 10…20 years? That’s too late to help.
You are straight up refusing to acknowledge that baseload can be provided by other means and isn’t actually an issue.
Building flywheels is cheap. They last practically forever. They don’t produce toxic waste.
You are wrong. The politicians and corporate interests pushing this are wrong.
Nuclear power should be expanded, a lot, it is the only realistic way to replace fossil plats for base demand.
This 90’s talking point against Greenpeace is no longer valid. The economics have changed.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/no-miracles-needed/8D183E65462B8DC43397C19D7B6518E3
I am not buying a book to prove your point.
At least here in Sweden, the high cost of nuclear power is due to artificial taxes, that are being lowered.
Oh, fuck a book, aahhhhhh
I’d check it out if it was free, but I am not paying to prove someone else on the internet right.
Your response just tells me that you are not interested in a good faith debate.
You don’t have to pay to “prove” I’m right. You just have to accept that experts have looked at this, and nuclear does not need to be part of the conversation. Not beyond keeping whatever we have already, at least.
Context is important here. The conversation here was about Australia’s nuclear capacity. A country where nuclear power is banned at both state and federal levels. Where the plan for it’s use is currently uncosted, the planned sites have been selected without environmental protection studies and several of which are supposed to be SMRs.
Would you build a bleeding edge nuclear reactor without a legal framework to govern its construction or operation? Without a workforce trained in its functions? Without considering the environmental factors of its geography? Without considering the cost?
Probably not. But that’s the current plan put forward by the reactionary right in Australia and this from a party who doesn’t believe in climate change, have no emissions targets, and whose whole plan is to continue to run and build coal power until whatever time they work out the details on nuclear.
This is perfectly fair, I saw several anti nuclear power articles before thls, and I approached it from a more general viewpoint.
But if the alternative is coal, I’d go nuclear.
Well it’s not really an either/or situation. The current Labor government’s plan is a combination of majority renewables with gas and hydrogen. They are also running coal at the moment but have no plans to renew those plants during the transition. They’ve signed on to emissions reductions of 75% by 2035.
So you’ve got one plan which has some reduction targets (probably not steep enough) planned transition, costed and budgeted that doesn’t require more coal, and one plan which will pull funding from renewables, and requires more coal until some time as which they can get nuclear approved, built and commercialised.
The draw-back with sodium batteries needs to be known, because they won’t replace lithium anytime soon.
The density is lower, which is a great problem in EVs.
Not trying to be negative, but for an EV, or anything handheld, you get more weight for less power. Which is essential in a car, that uses more power the heavier it is.
What sodium IS the best at, are use cases where weight and size doesn’t matter. Like with battery farms.
In this case they are much better than lithium.
While you’re not wrong, sodium batteries coming on the market have 200 Wh/kg. This is comparable to where LFP batteries were a few years ago. That means the newer sodium batteries are about as good as what’s in lots of EVs right now.
The ceiling is going to be lower than with lithium. Sodium ions themselves weigh about 3 times more than lithium, for the same +1 charge. So it’s not just that sodium is a certain number of years behind lithium. It’s that it’ll likely plateau at a point permanently behind where lithium will likely be.
But for static storage, only price/kw matters.
Price per kw and price per kwh stored. And price per kwh over the expected lifetime of the battery itself (longevity and reliability and safety and disposal will have to be factored into total cost of ownership).
Still only price and kw. 😤
No, kw (power) is a fundamentally different unit from kwh (energy).
Energy is conserved, so that’s how we use it and pay for it, but power capacity is very important for infrastructure. A battery that can hold 1 GWh worth of energy, but can only output it at a rate of 10 MW, might have a ton of limitations to its usefulness.
Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it’s probably moreso the auto industry’s fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.
If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won’t bother.
That’s assuming you don’t have issues charging at where you live, which is a pretty big if for a lot of people. A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.
A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.
Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that’s about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don’t go on long drives the vast majority of time and don’t more than fifty or so miles of range.
I’ll use Tesla as the example here only because it’s the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:
A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.
They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.
I live about 5 miles from work. I usually drive about 20 miles a day, so about 140 a week. I also rent an apt where there are no options for a charger. I considered a mini Cooper se and even a fiat 500e for a bit (it’s really cheap when you can find it), but once I looked my driving, I was only going to be comfortable with a 200 mile range for the occasional (once or twice a month) trips that are 100 miles one way. While chargers along the trip might be available, most times I’ve seen them they are clearly broken (provided it isn’t tesla, which seems to repair them). I do live in a city, but even then the 100 miles range would be tough to accommodate. Not saying impossible (I’ve seen electric mustangs and electric Chevrolets in my apartment), but a range of 100 miles is a lot less feasible for most than I think the data suggests, although that might also be fine if charging was faster.
Don’t get me wrong, obviously people like yourself make these long ish trips regularly and you’d benefit either from more range or better infrastructure. If, like gas stations, there were two hundred thousand charging stations sprinkled through the country, less range in the car would be less of a concern.
I know someone from my college days that hung a 100’ cord out her third story window to plug in her little EV. Nissan Leaf or something of that class. Worked like a charm for puttering around town.
I’m sure the data isn’t perfect, but as far as the averages go, it’s accurate for my driving patterns. Those trips you’re taking nearly double your yearly mileage, so that would certainly change your average. Without them though, you wouldn’t be too far off based on what you’ve described. I’m fortunate that I live near a train line for my regular trips out of town. Not an option for the vast majority unfortunately.
Another option a couple I know took was a hybrid. Most of the time they don’t use the engine, but when they go see family or what have you, they’ve got the range they need without having to find a charger. Pretty convenient if you ask me.
Eventually we’ll have charging stations all over, or maybe light rail, and going hundreds of miles in a day without a thought to battery depletion, but I doubt I’ll be around to see it.
Oh, I don’t doubt it’s possible, but getting the avg person there is the issue. At my milage, if I really absolutely wanted to go electric, an ebike would frankly be a better option (admittedly, much harder to haul stuff, much less safe, and annoying during the summer which is very hot in my area) for low range stuff. Phev Hybrids are a decent option, but again, if you don’t have a place to charge at night a lot of the benefits are neglected. Not gonna lie, I do actually suspect that that will change in the next 10 years, as tesla have finally hit critical mass I my area, and they are much cheaper to fuel, something that isn’t highlighted enough in my opinion. And I suspect that sodium batteries will more than likely cause it. Having something incredibly cheap to drive is more than likely what will turn the tide of evs, and it is why I am very annoyed that Chinese evs aren’t being imported into the US without insane tarriffs. Once cheap evs are common, the need for charging might actually get some real notice. That being said, I think my considerations aren’t very far off from the concerns of many buying cars right now, and at the current moment those without a range of at least 200 miles are a much harder sell (and why lower range vehicles don’t seem to sell on the used market).
The used market is different for EVs than a combustion vehicle. I looked for a BMW i3 a while back and was only finding them halfway across the continent. Maybe that’s because people keep them for longer? Not sure that market has developed enough to know one way or another.
I understand what you mean about the average person getting it, and while that is important, I think the primary issue is the limited selection of small EVs on the market. As you point out, if foreign vehicles could be acquired without the steep cost, more people would drive them. As it stands, domestic automakers don’t want to make anything but twenty foot long SUVs because of the huge profit margins on them.
As far as ebikes go, I am definitely on that boat. Don’t have one myself - call me a traditionalist - but I wish more people would consider them. I agree that in higher temperatures, or humidity which I find worse, it’s uncomfortable. Though the benefit of (maybe idealistically) not having a car payment and associated insurance go a long way to making that discomfort palatable.
Personally, I’ve got a trailer for my bike that I’ve been using to ride 10-15 minutes to the grocery stores and do errands. A time or two I have even gotten some lumber with it from the hardware store. I thought about a specific cargo bike a while back but decided not to have an entire bicycle for that sort of thing. The trailer is smaller anyway.
The safety factor of riding opposed to driving is the most important factor in my mind. It’s dangerous to ride along the side of a multi lane road. Paint doesn’t stop drivers from crossing into a ‘bike lane’. Even a curb or those plastic bollards are insufficient in my mind. I ride nearly primarily on trails or the type of streets that are small enough not to have any painted lines. For busier routes I use the sidewalk or even the boulevard if there is one.
The more people getting on the ebike wagon could cause better riding options to be developed in the area. That’s political though. Even if it doesn’t, it’s one more person taking a trip not in a car, making it a tiny bit safer.
Why is a problem adding an electronical sock on your parking space?
Because I rent an apartment, thus can’t add a socket. I had a coworker trying to get them added our work parking lot, but to no avail.
I guess is done then. Nobody should use EVs with small batteries because you can’t charge them.
That obviously isn’t their position. They don’t own the building they live in nor the business they work for.
EV owner here. 50 miles is not practical, beacuse then I need another for the other 2% of trips that are longer than that. This also ignores detours or traffic jams, when google will try to reroute me over a longer, but faster route. Plus, the “50 miles” readout you get is always just an estimate and the real range depends on temperature, driving speed, start-stops and how much elevation you need to cover. Some 30km trips here cost me 50+ EV km because its all uphill in one direction. I usually add 30km to my trip as required charge, because when the battery reaches 25km the car starts to complain with a nervously blinking battery readout and a “Charge now!” message on the dashboard.
“But then you just charge during the trip!” - Well this only work if i go somewhere where i know where to find RELIABLE chargers. I am well aware that there are good apps that show me charging locations, but getting a charging spot I can actually use is a different story:
- charging station can be used by someone else, or there is queue and each car will most likely charge for 30+ mins. Of course, sometimes some inconsiderate pricks will hog a spot untill their car is fully charged, even if it takes his frikkin tesla 2h
- charging stations close for repairs, sometimes for weeks
- some charging stations need an account or RFID-tag before you can use their (but not other) charging network
- other charging stations require you to bring your own cable
- some charging stations dont have the connector you need for your car
- some stations on the map are bogus, for example that one at my local volvo dealership that only exists to charge the showroom and customer cars, but is not accessible to the public.
Not saying EVs are bad, but the charging infrastructure still needs some work to be reliable and accessible. Petrol stations always have some large, obnoxious signs on the side of the road that you cant miss; Charging stations are sometimes just a tiny grey box on a wall and a 5-space parking lot, or behind a building and you never notice it when driving by.
A lot of households, like my own, have multiple cars. We have a commuter (50 miles round trip) and a family car. We use the commuter for most trips around town (only commutes 2x/week), and the family car for longer road trips.
I don’t need a car that can do both, I just need to replace the commuter since that’s where the vast majority of our driving is.
Don’t try to solve the hard problem of putting charging stations in the middle of nowhere, solve the easy problem of replacing that second car. For that, sodium-ion is more than sufficient. Focus infrastructure improvements on apartment complexes, workplaces, and shopping centers so people who don’t have a garage can charge.
I wrote elsewhere about the infrastructure problem, but I’ll sum up a couple things. There’s around 200,000 gas stations in the United States. If there were an equivalent number of chargers around, having a small battery would be fine. Eventually this will be the case, but you highlight an important factor: closed ecosystems. All these chargers should work for any make of EV car.
As it stands with now, the need for a subscription or specific car or unique payment method is ludicrous. All these chargers should be required to have card readers the same way you can pay at the pump in a gas station. Beyond this, they’d all need to adopt the same charging method so people don’t need a bunch of adapters in their trunk.
That said, there could be regulations established to require newly built housing, apartment buildings included, to have electric vehicle charging infrastructure - and more than just a few plugs. Grants could be made available for retrofitting existing buildings. If these things came to fruition, we wouldn’t need two hundred thousand charging stations all over the place. It’s not out of the question to install an overnight charging spot for every person that has an electric car - it just costs money.
Basically every argument I’ve seen against low range electric cars is founded in a charging infrastructure problem. Going to a bigger battery in a larger vehicle has significant and more costly ramifications on other infrastructure. It’s better to aim for smaller, lighter vehicles with infrastructure in mind.
2015 Leaf owner here. I will agree with everything you said! If you know you know…and you my friend are spot phucking on
Yeah I see these as the answer to the people who think solar energy is bad because the sun goes down.
What other benefits do they have? Do they have less wear or are cheaper per Wh to produce?
Or at least, about to be when production ramps up further?
They are dirt cheap, don’t have the fire safety issues as some lithium chemistries (not all lithium chemistries do that), and sodium is abundant.
Well, sounds great for any non mobile storage then. Don’t think anybody cares whether their 10kWh solar battery is twice the size and weight if it’s half the price.
Thank you :)
It’s also great for grocery getter cars where total range isn’t super important. Current EVs are ~250 miles range and top out around 300-400, which is insufficient as a gas replacement for road trips but overkill for a commute or around-town car.
There are a lot of use cases for something inexpensive but technically inferior.
Article says operating temperature range. -20 to 60 C
Lithium batteries are often -30 to 80C, but that’s just saying what’s possible to squeeze some kind of voltage out of them. Basic principle is that the colder it is, the harder it is for chemical reactions to happen, and thus this will affect all chemical batteries to some degree.
Put one of these in every neighborhood please.
Check UK stories.
People leaving next to turbines hate them due to noise pollution.
I’m talking about putting a sodium ion backup battery in every neighborhood. They don’t make loud noises. And they are great for storing energy produced by rooftop solar panels, easing grid stress, and backing up power when the lines go down.
Well, shit. Better not build sodium ion batteries then.
People live on top of mountains?
Were are these wind turbines being placed? I hiked to a farm once and had one at work.
Now, I’m not saying they are silent but unless you put one in my back garden I never thought of them as loud.
We have them at the mouths of canyons, and canyons are beautiful and desirable to live near.
What’s that got to do with the price of fish?
the power station can be charged and discharged more than 300 times a year. A single charge can store up to 100,000 kWh of electricity and release electricity during the peak period of the power grid. It can meet the daily power needs of around 12,000 households and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 13,000 tons annually.
Nice
I love how these look like Lego pieces snapped onto a green base.
Even if all that is painted cement or something it is also just really refreshing to see architecture, especially the sort of necessity eyesore that tech architecture/engineering requires, also being mindfully the environment it will exist in to some degree. Even if it is only visual.
Doesn’t California have some insane battery too?
Yes, but that is Lithium-ion. These batteries are Sodium-ion which are better for the environment and can potentially be made a lot cheaper… It’s still pretty new technology so it’s not really in any consumer products yet.
Sodium batteries are already in electric cars many months ago
Also you could buy individual cells on AliExpress
Yes, but you pretty much have to do a full battery test and pen test like the great Scott video because it is really a 60/40 of getting fake sodium ion batteries from Aliexpress 😅
Sodium batteries will not replace lithium in cars, as the density is too low.
It means the battery weighs more but contains less power.
For an EV, that wouldn’t work, as the heavier the car is, the more power it uses.
With sodium you will probably half the range of the EV, which is already low.
The newer sodium batteries are comparable to LFP batteries from a few years ago.
For medium distance commuter cars and inner city travel those things dont matter and will probably be outweighed by the cost savings, safety and reliability of sodium batteries. The main issue right now with getting EVs into more peoples hands is cost.
probably half the range of an EV
Many EVs have ~250 miles range. I need a quarter of that in usable winter range for my commute. If I could get an EV with 125 miles of advertised range (about half that in winter) for a third the price, I’d do it.
It’s not going to replace my road tripping car, but it could replace my commuter, which needs very little range.
There are some electric vehicles so far, which is promising.
Economy of scale matters, so does practicality. Which one is generally lasting longer per number of charges and what’s the long term viability of both given the time they were build and the available tech at that time? I totally understand the greater availability of sodium vs lithium. However, will it last? Last time I read much about it, reliability was weak, charge capacity over time dropped drastically, and failures were high. (It has been a couple of years, so things may be changing. )
Something new and shiney can be nifty, but past that, what is this? It seems like an expensive hood ornament that will rust in the rain. Lithium is expensive and toxic to mine, but so are all metals to some extent, and this has plenty.
It seems like it’s buying something 25% off on a $100 thing that won’t last well. Sure, you saved $25 once, but you’re buying 3 of them in the same time frame.
Nah. Time to reread, sodium is absolutely a viable tech now.
Yes. Last I saw they lasted for more charges and had similar capacity to lithium. It’s been invested into so much because it is viable.
Nice
That’s pretty neat.
According to Datang Group, the power station can be charged and discharged more than 300 times a year.
Well, nice, but “more than 300 times a year” is definitely a weird goal to define or a weird metric to brag about, right?
I mean, what in it’s desig could be so critical that they wouldn’t just say ‘once daily’ or something.
Does it require maintenance days when no cells are operational?
Maybe competitors are only up to 200 per year and these guys finally achieved 300 per year?
Hopefully we can soon get one as home batteries to extend the use of solar panels. Because I don’t feel great about having a lithium battery that large in my house
