Hinkley Point C

[Tefal]

use they are Panasonic, as Panasonic are teslas partner and part owner of gigafactor.
not of hand, but Elon himself have said they use their own chemsitry and use a different chemistry for grid storage, due to lower currant needs and longer anticapated life.

no im not saying it can be directly transferred to. however cars are harder on batteries than grid storage, so cars can be used as worse case

nope your wrong

He [Elon Musk]said the battery cell chemistry is the same, but the reconfigured product stored more energy in the same space.

theyre the exact same of the shelf 18650, li-ion panasonic cells but with a differnt packing order and cooling system to make the pack contain more cells for the same volume.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37171455

no im not saying it can be directly transferred to.

yes you are you were talking about using the cars themselves a grid storage.

 

[Glaucus]

nope your wrong




theyre the exact same 18650, li-ion panasonic cells but with a differnt packing order and cooling system to make the pack contain more cells for the same volume.

lol, same as what they currently use.

stop digging holes, lithium ion, again contains many different chemistry subsets. and within those subsets there are different % and different ways of doing it.

just like you knowledge of 18650 cells in general.

 

[Tefal]

lol, same as what they currently use.

stop digging holes, lithium ion, again contains many different chemistry subsets. and within those subsets there are different % and different ways of doing it.

just like you knowledge of 18650 cells in general.

they are the normal off the shelf cells :/


thier "new battery" is the same chemistry but in 2170 format for next year.

so far you've not provided anything to back up your claims of new chemistry or anything.

 

[Glaucus]

they are the normal off the shelf cells :/


thier "new battery" is the same chemistry but in 2170 format for next year.

so far you've not provided anything to back up your claims of new chemistry or anything.

and you haven't backed up your claim they are off the shelf, expect with extremely uniformed opinions.

car batteries are NCA chemistry with unknowen %
whilst their grid will be NMC

The Model S will still use laptop-sized battery cells (and lots of ’em), engineered for automotive use, Musk said.

in contrast, Musk said that Tesla will use a lithium-ion battery with a nickel, manganese, cobalt oxide cathode for its grid battery. Called an NMC battery, it’s meant to be used for daily cycling for a home, business, or certain types of clean power.
Many traditional NMC batteries use one-third equal parts nickel, manganese, and cobalt. Again, it’s unclear what the combination of Panasonic and Tesla’s version is

 

[joeyjojo]

Can someone tweet Musk and ask him? This conversation isn't going anywhere.

 

[PlacidCasual]

In response to criticism of my previous trying provide illustration of the cost associated with battery based solutions. I think as flawed as it is Hinckley C is a better approach than renewables plus storage.

According to the 2013 Fifth Carbon Budget it was expected that 27GW of wind capacity would be on the grid by 2020 (4 years away). We had about 13GW in 2015.

Given that wind power is unreliable and intermittent and studies have shown (such as the John Muir Trust one in 2011) that periods of very low wind generations occur for days at a times several times per winter we can infer that some alternative supply is needed. At present we flog coal and gas stations to flex to meet this intermittency and pay the cost. If we sought to smooth this with batteries we would need a lot. By 2020 if the Committee on Climate Change is correct if you took fossil fuels off the table that would be 27GW, a big number.

I think the plan the Government and others have made for moving to low/zero carbon emissions is poor. When they signed the 2008 Climate Change Act they should have committed to a programme of nuclear research and builds to design efficient passively safe base load nuclear stations , fast burner stations to dispose of high level waste and advanced research into high flexibility nuclear reactors. That way we may have some chance by 2050 of meeting the 80% reduction target. Reliance on wind and solar requires a faster and more difficult transition to an extremely highly distributed storage and highly automated demand side management system that will require a staggering change to the national infrastructure.

Hinckley C will provide 3.6GW at probably 70%+ load factor easily so 22TWh per year solid predictable generation. At £92/MWh (current price).
27GW of wind at 35% load factor produces about 88TWh per year at about £115MWh (based on current figures) and is intermittent requiring back up.

Now I don't like PWR's I'd rather we'd invested in new and better technology and we've had long enough to do so but haven't but it's still a better bet than wind and solar plus batteries.

 

[Qjumper]

Lets face it as a country we just love 'renewables', as long as the conditions below are met of course..

a) Nimby
b) Not in the beautiful countryside and likely to spoil my views when walking the dog.
c) Not if it hurts poor wildlife
d) Not if I can hear it.

Which probably rules out most of the UK for renewables of the extent needed to replace Nuclear power.

 

[Werewolf]

Re battery tech.

There is a "battery farm" reasonably near me, it is the size of a small supermarket and from what I understand is experimental and intended to cover the local demand above what the incoming transmission lines can cope with for a few hours at a time.
This is for maybe 20k houses.
IIRC it cost around 19 million and most of that was from the green energy fund.

If we went with Wind/solar that farm would need to be something like 10 times the size to allow for the drop in supply (at the worst of times), just for one town.
Even if the price of the batteries halved it would still be something like 100 million just for a town of 50k people, on top of the cost of the solar and wind generating capacity,

I can imagine the size of such a facility to cover a major town, or a City, and the costs involved.
Just buying the land needed in such areas would be a huge expense*, as you'd want to try and get the battery farms close to the areas they supply, preferably where the incoming national grid lines already exist.
They could do it more locally, but then run into issues with things like many properties won't have room for a suitable battery pack, or that the more you spread them out the more expensive it becomes to maintain them.




*Apparently one of the reasons they chose the location they did for the test site was that they already owned a lot of land that was almost worthless for building on (flood plain - they had to build well above the ground level),

 

[Angilion]

they aren't, they are essentialy figures for warranties.

I can buy that to some extent...but you're talking about the real figures being about an entire order of magnitude better. That's a lot of understatement for warranty purposes.

real world figures, which mirror what leaf owners ahve been seeing. even with heavy raid charging.

I see a graph showing a couple of dozen examples. That's much too small a sample size to make definite conclusions from, especially without evidence that it's a representative sample.

 

[Angilion]

Hmm...quoting has failed again. That's becoming annoying. Press quote button, get blank box.

again why are you and others using national energy supply when hinkley c isn't going to supply 100% of our electrical demand.

Because the subject was using batteries as storage for the national grid, not just for Hinckley C.

also where did you get the cost from, seeing as it hasn't been disclose,

Post #226.

Of course, the fact that the cost hasn't been openly disclosed implies that it's much higher. If it was anywhere near as cheap as you claim, they'd be shouting the cost from the rooftops because it would be a massive selling point.

Even at the alleged US$180 per KWh figure, that's 14.4 million dollars for just 80 MWh...and that's the cost for batteries alone using a very low figure for battery cost. For the cost of an actual grid storage facility, you need to add the costs of land, buildings, maintainance and management systems for the batteries. So it's "tens of millions of dollars" for just 80MWh even if you take a low figure for the battery cost.

 

[Mr Jack]

RThere is a "battery farm" reasonably near me, it is the size of a small supermarket and from what I understand is experimental and intended to cover the local demand above what the incoming transmission lines can cope with for a few hours at a time.
This is for maybe 20k houses.

Why would you build a giant centralised system like this? I would think you'd put batteries into homes, or maybe into localised units like substations. The more distributed your power generation - i.e. the more solar and small-scale wind you have - the more you want to distribute your batteries.

 

[silversurfer]

Best battery is natural, pump water up hill when you have excess. Allow it to produce power via turbines when there is large demand, this is fairly instant unlike wind power or any other sustainable source

They should have built a dam across the seven, one of the largest tidal ranges in the world but nope! The counter to nuclear is that it takes time to ramp up during sudden demand, they must pay coal stations to stay online just in case

 

[Werewolf]

Why would you build a giant centralised system like this? I would think you'd put batteries into homes, or maybe into localised units like substations. The more distributed your power generation - i.e. the more solar and small-scale wind you have - the more you want to distribute your batteries.

The farm near me is at a main substation, I think it the only one in the area that was available with the land already purchased for expansion in mind.
They don't as far as I know have the room to expand it enough to actually provide power over a significantly longer period of time.
From memory it was one of the key reasons they chose the site, it needed expansion to cope with demand (new main incoming lines to cope with peak demand several days a month), and they had the space already purchased.

Spreading them out more requires the purchase of more land near existing infrastructure, for example if you put it at the local substations you're going to run into the issue that most local substations are built to service a very specific area with little room on site for expansion, around me most of the more local substations seem to be built with just enough room for maintenance work to be carried out, obviously with the thought that for expansion they'd just build a new substation where it was needed.

Building the batteries into non electrical company properties becomes very problematic in terms of maintenance access, and simply finding room for them in many instances.

If nothing else getting the various planning permissions and buying up the required land for a vast number of battery farms is going to be extremely expensive (I suspect they couldn't do it in many major cities so would have to build away from the demand), and time consuming.

I actually like the theory of the local battery storage, especially combined with renewable generating capacity, but I don't hold many illusions about the practicality if we were to be relying on such systems instead of a consistent baseline generator, at least with current and near future levels of battery technology.

 

[PlacidCasual]

If we are aiming for a low/zero CO2 future advanced nuclear plus some peak/emergency loading gas is a better solution than distributed renewables. This is because load control and grid stability are much easier propositions from centralised generation. Even at the levels of wind and solar we now have the grid is having trouble guaranteeing system control hence the recent (last few weeks) huge generation prices. Now whilst it is technically possible to achieve this through wind and solar plus mass decentralised batteries the amount of battery storage to cope with peak demands during extended periods of intermittency is huge. In addition demand side control becomes and expensive and infrastructure heavy burden the consumer must pay for.

New generations of advanced nuclear designs should have been fast tracked years ago so that more flexible nuclear energy could be used. This would provide a far more robust, reliable and controllable grid and if load ramping still couldn't phase with demand the requirement for batteries becomes far lower with little or no demand side management needed.

As a technical problem, smoothing nuclear output in a 24 hour cycle using batteries is a far easier task than providing guaranteed supply where 50%+ of installed capacity is renewable and known levels of intermittency mean you could go days with only a small fraction of that output being available. This would require huge levels of battery storage and significant demandside control, an altogether inherently less stable or controllable outcome. Although I will admit it is technically feasible, just nothing like the optimal solution.

 

[Liquidfox]

The counter to nuclear is that it takes time to ramp up during sudden demand, they must pay coal stations to stay online just in case

I thought they ran nuclear at 100% all of the time and just sold off the excess as it's so cheap to produce?

 

[Werewolf]

I thought they ran nuclear at 100% all of the time and just sold off the excess as it's so cheap to produce?

Yup, nuclear plants are pretty much run at the same level all the time, except during planned downtime for maintenance as it takes time for them to bring it up to speed and they cost nearly as much to operate at idle as at full output.

From memory there are several classes of power generation, apologies if these aren't the right terms.

Baseline - run at a set level pretty much all the time for most efficient use of them, Nuclear is the ideal for this, I think they also use some coal and oil.
Hydroelectric dams are the other ideal for this (unfortunately I don't think we've got many suitable valleys we can flood).

general capacity - where you know in advance you're going to want power for a period of time, oil gas and some coal are good for this (they might take hours to get up to speed).
The most efficient fossil fuel plants tend to be used for this and baseline.

Peak - where you need a relatively short burst of capacity within minutes, I think gas and oil are the common ones for this (either dedicated plants, or the ability to increase output on existing ones).

Surge - where you need it now, I think some gas plants can increase output in a very short time, but things like pumped hydro is also good for this as it can be almost instantly outputting power (and then use a lull in demand to refill).

Again apologies I'm no doubt getting the names/definitions wrong.

The key differences are how fast you can get each type of plant generating power, how economical they are to run (it's a trade off with most technology between fast start up and efficiency), and how reliable they are when you need them.

Wind and solar are unfortunately unpredictable which is not good for baseline capacity, and require either massive over capacity (and some luck) or huge amounts of storage capacity.

 

[PlacidCasual]

Close but not quite.

Baseload, this is the plant which it is economic to run all the time. Nuclear always falls into this category. Over the years it has swapped between gas and coal depending on fuel cost but that paradigm has broken down with renewables having a privileged place on the grid.

Two-shifting or marginal demand, this is the plant that is flexing either in load from low load to high load or turning on and off. It is the plant that is used to balance the load against demand. Gas has generally been preferable to coal of late but both fill this role.

Fast response, historically oil plant was available at 4-6 hours notice to sync (connection to grid) and could be used to meet short term demand whilst slower plant was brought back. Inefficient gas plant which cannot generate commercially now fills this market as gas stations can be brought on quite quickly, generally the oldest gas stations fill this role picking up scraps of high value short duration generation until it becomes uneconomic to do so.

Short term operating reserve historically open cycle gas turbines (OCGTs) and hydroelectric. These plants can be running at full load within 2 minutes and will kick in for frequency response (if the frequency drops you need more generation). Diesel generators are muscling in on this market. OCGTs also were required to provided black start capability for coal stations. Dinorwig hydroelectric plant was built for this purpose to back up the grid in the event of a nuke trip providing rapid high load for several hours.

Frequency Response historically coal stations with a large amount of stored energy could second by second increase or decrease output a small amount to help balance load and frequency. Gas stations do this now too.

Black start, in the unlikely event of a total grid collapse stations that can start independently of external electric supplies. Typically coal stations which have batteries to keep the control systems working and OCGTs to provide the energy to restart all the pumps and fans necessary to get a coal station running. Gas stations are beginning to provide this role. The most demanding piece of this requirement is the unknown demand on the local grid when the station is re-connected. Typically anything from 0 to 50MW may be the instant demand on connection and it takes a lot of inertia and stored energy to absorb that as a shock load which is why historically only coal and oil stations have provided this facility.

Other factors include MVAR capacity and system inertia which are complex and difficult to explain. It should simply be accepted that it is not technically possible for renewable sources to provide this, gas stations can to a degree and coal and oil stations were designed by the CEGB to do this well. Some specialist grid equipment can do this but less exists than 20 years ago.

 

[Werewolf]

Cheers PlaidCasual, it's been a long time since I looked into it properly

 

[Mr Jack]

Spreading them out more requires the purchase of more land near existing infrastructure, for example if you put it at the local substations you're going to run into the issue that most local substations are built to service a very specific area with little room on site for expansion, around me most of the more local substations seem to be built with just enough room for maintenance work to be carried out, obviously with the thought that for expansion they'd just build a new substation where it was needed.

They are small, yeah, but the more you spread out the infrastructure the less space you need to build each storage point. There are small substations already on land all over every city, town and village in the land. I don't see any reason you couldn't utilise this land to install battery space.

Building the batteries into non electrical company properties becomes very problematic in terms of maintenance access, and simply finding room for them in many instances.

Have you seen Tesla's power wall? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. They could be easily installed in attic space on external wall space on most properties. Access is only a problem if they're owned by the electrical companies, I see them becoming part of home infrastructure in the same way that people currently own solar panels and boilers.

 

[Angilion]

Best battery is natural, pump water up hill when you have excess. Allow it to produce power via turbines when there is large demand, this is fairly instant unlike wind power or any other sustainable source

I disagree for 3 reasons:

1) Pumped storage hydroelectric is inefficient. Wasting 30% of the power generated is a big disadvantage and not something that's likely to be part of a "best battery".

2) Building reservoirs, dams, lots of piping and a power station is very obviously not "natural". It's no more "natural" than a chemical battery - chemical reactions are "natural". The "natural" argument is a false appeal to authority fallacy anyway, but it's not even internally consistent in this case.

3) On a related note, ruining ecosystems on a large scale is hardly "natural". More importantly, it's not necessarily the best way to do something.

Pumped storage hydro can be useful in smoothing out highs and lows and may be increasingly necessary as increased use of "renewables" destablises the national grid and reduces control over generation, but they're far from perfect.

They should have built a dam across the seven, one of the largest tidal ranges in the world but nope!

Well that's natural, obviously.

A dam across the Severn would flood a large area of Britain, ruin the economy of areas even outside of the flood zone and obviously ruin ecosystems too. Not a good idea, really. I'm not sure if it's even possible - it's quite flat land so the water would flow around the sides to a large extent. You might need an unfeasibly large U-shaped dam.

A barrage has been proposed for ~150 years, though. Initially to create a new port, more recently as a power station.

The latest proposal for such a thing cost about as much as Hinkley C and the electricity generated would be much more expensive than the price paid for electricity from Hinkley C. Which, as I'm sure you're aware, has been strongly criticised for being too expensive. £160 per MWh was the cost from the latest Severn barrage proposal and that was a lot cheaper than previous proposals. Compare that with the £92.50 per MWh from Hinkley C, which has been widely criticised for being too high a price. Bear in mind that gas power stations (currently the cheapest) are around the £60 mark. Tidal is the most expensive method at the moment, even more expensive than solar in the UK (which, obviously, is relatively inefficient and expensive due to the UK not being very sunny - it's actually a lot more efficient to build solar in Africa and transport the electricity here).

Then there's the epic economic and environmental costs of a barrage across the Severn. Not as bad as a dam, of course, but still very major. Trade would be greatly reduced as the navigability of the Severn would be greatly reduced. Flooding would be severely increased in some areas, although it would offer flood protection in some other areas.

You could reduce the problems by building the barrage further inland...which would greatly reduce the amount of power generated.

Using the Severn for power generation is not a simple or clearly superior solution.

The counter to nuclear is that it takes time to ramp up during sudden demand, they must pay coal stations to stay online just in case

Yes, but less so than for renewables and with more control than renewables and, crucially, with far more reliability than renewables.

Unless some radically different technology is developed that has none of the drawbacks, we're going to need a mix of sources because each one has different strengths and weaknesses. At the very least, we'll need some that can efficiently chug along for reliable and controllable base load and some that can be quickly varied in order to continuously match supply to demand. That would only change if very large scale efficient electricity storage existed. That would be a game changer. If it existed.