John Petersen Article Slamming Grid Battery Storage

[woof]

It's status quo thinking. Because we have a just-in-time grid, we must always have a just-in-time grid.

If you can focus on 99% and make it cheap, people are going to be a lot more comfortable with restrictions and higher cost for the 1%.

A very similar thing happened in the land-line phone biz. MA Bell's goal for dial tone uptime was 99.999% (5 nines), and that included power outages (thus central offices powered by huge lead acid battery banks). And when dialing 911 the call was routed to the local emergency service center and they were provided with a complete address. Then cell phones hit, and their reliability and voice quality was way less than land line, but much more convenient . 911 didn't work at all (now kinda does). Many cell sites are not battery backed up. Then VoIP came along...and with it we lost all uptime guarantees and much of the voice quality (okay, it's a lot better now than in the beginning), and 911.

But it showed that as long as the price was cheap, and/or convenience is high, people will put up with a lot that we used to consider sacrosanct.

 

[JohnRatsey]

Actually, this is just what pumped-hydro does best. Basins can be created that store days worth of power and when the situation reverses and wind power is at a maximum, all that water can be pumped back up to be used again...

I concur with the concept but finding space for the reservoirs is challenging. Here's one proposal but while the total installed capacity of the proposed development would be up to 1500 megawatts (MW), the energy storage capacity is up to 30 Gigawatt Hours (GWh) so it would, at best, manage 20 hours at full output.

 

[NinjaVece]

I concur with the concept but finding space for the reservoirs is challenging. Here's one proposal but while the total installed capacity of the proposed development would be up to 1500 megawatts (MW), the energy storage capacity is up to 30 Gigawatt Hours (GWh) so it would, at best, manage 20 hours at full output.

AREMI

Here's the world-wide map of possible pumped-hydro opportunities. You can check out the UK within it. Again, any location where there isn't elevation (or space) for pumped-hydro would be prime for H2 generation, storage and electricity production. Simply replace current coal or nat gas facilities with an H2 production facility and you'd have an energy sink (H2 generation) along with centralized storage (likely underground in tanks as compressed or liquefied) and an electrical generation facility to take up the slack of wind and solar beyond what short-term battery storage can smooth.

I personally think the pumped-hydro solutions are less complicated with fewer moving parts but H2 gen/store/electricity is an option for flat-lands. Likely there will be others over time. The key is a facility that can store potential (water with gravity, H2) AND produce electricity in the same spot.

 

[Electroman]

I urge you to hold your nose, read the article carefully and fairly, and help find a way to move those with John Petersen’s reservations about renewables.

You should be new here. I have read almost every Petersen's article since 2011, and he has been wrong *every single time*. Even I was fooled in the the initial days, then I noticed a pattern in his writings:

He takes a complicated subject, and notices one weak - seemingly weak - point and blows it up out of proportions. The failure point he is highlighting, may not have a fool proof solution at the time of writing, but you have to understand no large scale change in status quo has all the i's and t's crossed before even it gets off the starting block. There will also be a few a unanswered questions, but people who are deeply entrenched and understand the issues well, are generally confident that we can cross that bridge when we get there. But the naive and ignorant get carried away by his authentic style of writing.

Lets take this article. In a nutshell, JP's protestation is about the fact that:

For R+S to take care of short term periodic intermittency (days and nights) and also multi-day intermittency (blizzards), the amount of storage required is so large, that it is impossible to build that much battery capacity. It is too expensive to build that much spare capacity and it is also wasteful as much of that capacity will be underutilized for the most part.

He is not wrong on that statement, but that takes away from many other possibilities to solve this, like having fossil fuel gas plants as standby to fireup and start pumping electrons during those periods. So yes, we may not get rid of all fossil fuel plants, but can reduce them to less than 1% of current usage. That is using current battery tech.

 

[NinjaVece]

You should be new here. I have read almost every Petersen's article since 2011, and he has been wrong *every single time*. Even I was fooled in the the initial days, then I noticed a pattern in his writings:

He takes a complicated subject, and notices one weak - seemingly weak - point and blows it up out of proportions. The failure point he is highlighting, may not have a fool proof solution at the time of writing, but you have to understand no large scale change in status quo has all the i's and t's crossed before even it gets off the starting block. There will also be a few a unanswered questions, but people who are deeply entrenched and understand the issues well, are generally confident that we can cross that bridge when we get there. But the naive and ignorant get carried away by his authentic style of writing.

Lets take this article. In a nutshell, JP's protestation is about the fact that:

For R+S to take care of short term periodic intermittency (days and nights) and also multi-day intermittency (blizzards), the amount of storage required is so large, that it is impossible to build that much battery capacity. It is too expensive to build that much spare capacity and it is also wasteful as much of that capacity will be underutilized for the most part.

He is not wrong on that statement, but that takes away from many other possibilities to solve this, like having fossil fuel gas plants as standby to fireup and start pumping electrons during those periods. So yes, we may not get rid of all fossil fuel plants, but can reduce them to less than 1% of current usage. That is using current battery tech.

And it ignores pumped-hydro that has half a million possible locations in the world to provide the long-term storage necessary to shore up a wind & solar + battery storage solution. Building those solutions are much less expensive than nuclear and, of course, do not pollute in an ongoing way like coal and nat gas. Wind & solar along with battery storage for short-term smoothing combined with pumped-hydro is all we'll ever need.