PowerCrazy @ PowerCrazy @lemmy.ml

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1,897

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2 yr. ago

It may not need to wear a red shirt, nor a blue shirt... If you hear fascism is on the rise and you think "Maga" you are naive.

Unfortunately your rough math misses a lot of the picture. This is where the gotcha comes in.

https://electrek.co/2022/10/19/the-worlds-largest-single-phase-battery-is-now-up-and-running/

That is a currently realized grid storage facility, the largest and really only one of it's kind. Today's renewables do not do storage at all, they rely on fossil fuels to make up the baseload.

Some numbers. This facility stores 1400MWh, on 2,000 acres or (~8,000,000 sq meters) Much greater then your 40,000sq meter estimate. Plus you said about 33GWh for a day. Well you'd need ~24 of these facilities to cover just Berlin.

So now the big question, how much energy storage will be needed in a >90% renewable grid? It's obviously a difficult question based on a lot of factors, but one such estimate I found here: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/24/us-zero-carbon-future-would-require-6twh-of-energy-storage/ ~6TWhrs for the US or about 4300 of those facilities.

Yes it wouldn't have to be monolithic like that facility is, but regardless of how you distribute it, it's a non-trivial amount of space taken up. Totally ignoring the costs, and sourcing the materials for the batteries of such facilities.

But just for fun that facility was ~$550M So you'd need to spend about $2.3T for the initial building of that storage.

It's just the base-level unit I'm using to demonstrate the scale required. You can use any other number you want, but we need to multiply by the number of people and the amount of stored energy required for them.

Wind and sun will always supply a base level of energy.

That is objectively false. The sun doesn't shine at night, and wind doesn't blow 100% of the time. So logically there is some amount of time that you do not get a base load provided only by sun and wind. Hence the need for storage at all. And yes it is a gotcha question, because it's something that anti-nuclear people hand-wave away as if the significant storage infrastructure to support a 100% renewable is just a rounding error, and not worth thinking about.

That happens literally every night though and wind also doesn't blow 100% of the time. There are significant amounts of time where the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. The current solution to this issue that is used all around the world are fossil fuels. Renewables make up a trivial* amount of power production compared to fossil fuels, and as we phase out fossil fuels, the requirement for energy storage is going up drastically.

*<30% by 2030 is the prediction by the EIA

I'll accept your math. So now in-order to solve america's storage problem to convert to a 100% renewable grid, we just need to build (Population of the US) / (Population of NYC) = 340million / 8million = ~43 Hoover dams. Do you think that is maybe a non-trivial problem to solve?

Don't forget that we also need the ~250sq miles of reservoir space for each dam. (technically it's the volume that is important, but for reservoirs you are often limited by surface area because of the topology required)

It's just an example number. No matter what if you are building a grid that has 0 baseload power generation, you need some amount of storage capacity for each KWh of consumption. We can argue how much you actually need, but the fact remains that when you start storing large amounts of power, which you would need in-order to keep a city running during times of reduced generation, it takes a large amount of space.
In order to demonstrate that, I chose a pretty straight-forward scenario of a city of 1million for just one day. Let's assume that this amount of stored energy would be sufficient for a 100% renewable grid for say New York City.

So how much energy storage would be needed and how much space would such a storage facility take up?

Copyright only works by mutual consent of the countries enforcing it. Much like nuclear secrets in the 50's, once the knowledge of the possible is there, no amount of geo-politicking will keep it limited to a single country.

Yes I know it exists. Now how much would space would such a system require in order to power a city of 1,000,000 for 1day.

How big would a battery need to be to power a single city of 1000000 for 1day?

"gravity battery" BAHAHAHA. You don't know shit about shit. How much power does a "gravity battery" store expressed in KWh/Volume. Given that number, how big would this "gravity battery" have to be to power a single city of ~1000000 for 1 day.

Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn't exist.

The classic capitalist solution "make it bigger, make more of it, there are absolutely zero limits."

Quick question, how big would a battery have to be to power a single city of >1000000 for a single day, show your work.

Answering from a German perspective:

The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a "net-zero" carbon solution. But that's bullshit.

Yea if only magic physics defying substances existed. Surely capitalism would be able to solve our problems.

Perhaps the dems should ask themselves why mandatory purchasing of insurance was the pinnacle of their accomplishment in the last 40 years and attempt to examine that.

But sure fully embracing racial taxonomy and spending as much time as possible classifying people based on skin-tone, facial features, phenotypes, skull shape and literally anything besides class might work too. What would I know, I'm not a PMC employed by the DNC.

It's absolutely this. Let's say that you wanted to make sure this never happened again. You could use the Police playbook, "more training," "better roads," "more awareness," "people centric design,"an unlimited number of buzzwords. But the only solution that would help is fewer cars and fewer roads for them. Non-car infrastructure must be developed, and unfortunately it IS zero-sum as space is finite and valuable.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html/chap4_section_5.html

Methinks you don't know what you are talking about. The FAA operates in feet. All domestic flights in the US are separated by flight levels specified in feet. If you get your pilots license in America, everything about it from runway length, controlled flight altitudes, wing spans, etc, will be in feet.

For another example, just let me know how many metric units are used here: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html/chap3_section_10.html

Hmm 12.5Billion pounds eh? How much would it cost to "keep the lights on" in Birmingham do you reckon?

In Texas maybe.

Dont' forget NYPD https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/the-nypd-megatruck-that-showed-up-at-hamilton-hall/ar-AA1nZJJZ