Commercial battery banks
- Thread starter Orionaut
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Soldato
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Would an old one still be usable for home use, the shed etc
This:
http://property.jll.co.uk/property-search/property-details?t=c&id=JLLATC38408
It's the critical side of a building with 45k Sq ft of office soace, but the non critical stuff is pretty much toilet lights and other non-important stuff.
I'll have to check on the exact UPS output tomorrow but we're running four Piller Uniblock rotary systems with four Cummins diesels powering them, these V16 twin turbo beasts:
http://property.jll.co.uk/property-search/property-details?t=c&id=JLLATC38408
It's the critical side of a building with 45k Sq ft of office soace, but the non critical stuff is pretty much toilet lights and other non-important stuff.
I'll have to check on the exact UPS output tomorrow but we're running four Piller Uniblock rotary systems with four Cummins diesels powering them, these V16 twin turbo beasts:
Similar setup at our place as Diddums shows, Huge battery bank designed to take the hit of a blackout and safely shut down our reactors within a set time. Theyre safe as safe can be, When they become dangerous folks will know long before as theyre inspected a lot visually and yearly electrically. Ones which are bulging or posts have any movement are scrapped.
Was similar when i worked on power stations but on a massive scale talking hundreds of large batteries underground which worked to absorb blackouts for only 15 seconds on gas turbines to get the aux equipment shutdown
As above, all safe if properly maintained. Do not worry. Id feel safer next to a battery bank than some of the local scum of my town :')
Was similar when i worked on power stations but on a massive scale talking hundreds of large batteries underground which worked to absorb blackouts for only 15 seconds on gas turbines to get the aux equipment shutdown
As above, all safe if properly maintained. Do not worry. Id feel safer next to a battery bank than some of the local scum of my town :')
Soldato
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That caused all sort of entertainment at Three UK as the blast badly damaged their data centre next to the depot.
Please continue talking nonsense about me. I find it amusing.
I find it less amusing that your evangelical approach to energy might put people off potentially better energy solutions to those we have now, but I think they'll happen anyway despite all the problems.
What's the storage capacity of that lot? I have this silly image in my head of a phone screen with an app showing an estimated remaining usage time of thousands of years
How much do the batteries cost?
What happens to them after 5 years?
Do you think that monthly, quarterly and annual servicing, inspection and testing is a waste of time and money because there isn't any risk at all?
What's the storage capacity of that lot? I have this silly image in my head of a phone screen with an app showing an estimated remaining usage time of thousands of years
How much do the batteries cost?
What happens to them after 5 years?
Do you think that monthly, quarterly and annual servicing, inspection and testing is a waste of time and money because there isn't any risk at all?
Can help answer bottom two questions.
After 5 years if they dispose of them they will be removed by a contractor and disposed of safely/recycled according to WEE regulations.
There is a risk if they are not maintained? How do you get the no risk bit
Associate
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I would be more interested in what the purpose of the battery bank is.
I've read about them being used for load levelling the grid (essentially charging up when there's little demand from consumers (e.g. overnight), and discharging during peaks of high demand) to reduce the cycling required at power stations.
This usage isn't commonplace though, as the amount of battery storage to make a significant difference is massive, and costs a lot too. My assumption is that it's to help reduce the load on a particular section of the grid which, for whatever reason, isn't rated to the demand, and cannot be upgraded in a financially viable manner.
One example to this, is an EV fast charge station (e.g. Tesla supercharging station). The amount of current required for an EV fast charge is huge, and the grid isn't currently designed to handle this sort of load. In more remote areas of the country, halving (or reducing even further) the peak demand on the grid via battery packs is far more financially viable than upgrading the grid connection itself.
As others have said too, as long as the system is managed correctly, the risk of explosion etc is minimal. After all, do you do any checks on the state of the battery in your phone? What measures have you taken to make sure if that bursts into flames/explodes, it doesn't take your leg with it? The likelihood of this happening is minimal, because the batteries are monitored by the device itself, so pair an even more robust way of automatically monitoring the battery state, and direct inspection & testing of the cells and you've got yourself a very safe system.
I've read about them being used for load levelling the grid (essentially charging up when there's little demand from consumers (e.g. overnight), and discharging during peaks of high demand) to reduce the cycling required at power stations.
This usage isn't commonplace though, as the amount of battery storage to make a significant difference is massive, and costs a lot too. My assumption is that it's to help reduce the load on a particular section of the grid which, for whatever reason, isn't rated to the demand, and cannot be upgraded in a financially viable manner.
One example to this, is an EV fast charge station (e.g. Tesla supercharging station). The amount of current required for an EV fast charge is huge, and the grid isn't currently designed to handle this sort of load. In more remote areas of the country, halving (or reducing even further) the peak demand on the grid via battery packs is far more financially viable than upgrading the grid connection itself.
As others have said too, as long as the system is managed correctly, the risk of explosion etc is minimal. After all, do you do any checks on the state of the battery in your phone? What measures have you taken to make sure if that bursts into flames/explodes, it doesn't take your leg with it? The likelihood of this happening is minimal, because the batteries are monitored by the device itself, so pair an even more robust way of automatically monitoring the battery state, and direct inspection & testing of the cells and you've got yourself a very safe system.
Is that because the risk of them becoming unsafe is deemed too high after 5 years or because the storage capacity decreases too much after that time? Or a combination of both?
I don't. I did (and do) think there's some risk and therefore some need for suitable risk assessment and steps to counter the risk. I was asking in case I was wrong and there was no risk.
Somebody is proposing to site a commercial battery bank just up the road from where I live (half a mile or so).
The planning application published on the local council website provides no technical details what-so-ever. (Just loads of waffle on how "Green" it is all going to be)
It is however, clearly a modular system based on shipping containers, 18 in all. This is going to be a substantial installation
There is no detail as to what the battery tech actually is but a quick googling suggests that systems like this might well use Lion or even Sodium/Sulphur.
Fires in such installations are not unheard of.
I must say, the idea of having an industrial site containing "many" tons of highly toxic and reactive (explosive even) chemicals just up the road from me bothers me somewhat!
"Batteries" are not a benign technology. They really are a controlled chemical explosion. a large capacity battery bank has the potential to release a very large amount of energy in a very short time if it all goes horribly wrong.
Sodium and Lithium fires are extremely difficult to extinguish and if you are down wind of a major sulphur fire you will die (And very very unpleasantly)
I really would be happier living next to a nuke!
How would you feel?
The gas main running under your house is also at huge risk of destroying your street..
Batteries don't store energy, they merley excite electrons. I wouldn't worry.
What's the storage capacity of that lot? I have this silly image in my head of a phone screen with an app showing an estimated remaining usage time of thousands of years
How much do the batteries cost?
What happens to them after 5 years?
Do you think that monthly, quarterly and annual servicing, inspection and testing is a waste of time and money because there isn't any risk at all?
As above, I'll have to get back to you on the capacity because I don't know.
The batteries cost £55k per change, this is including removal fees and labour.
After 5 years they get disposed of by a professional company who recycle them.
As for maintenance, we check the bolts are tight between them (with special spanners and gloves), and also use thermal imaging to look for any hot spots which are then dealt with accordingly (either replacing the battery/ies or fastening the conductors).
If you're interested in this I can get you all the specs and stuff, let me know. I love this because I'm currently doing an engineering degree as well. It's properly interesting. I recently learned the difference between an automatic transfer switch and a static switch. The TLDR version is response times to swap supplies in the event of power loss, but as always with engineering there's a lot more to it than that, that's just a basic idea.
Batteries aren't really a hazard if installed and maintained properly. In the 15 years I've been in this environment I've never heard if a battery starting a fire or going bang, but then these are generally high spec bits of kit which cost quite a bit (so if they were to go pop the supplier would be responsible which alleviates us from claims due to loss of power).
Our generators are air start, they use compressed air. I love doing the monthly run up as they're just so impressive to hear starting. Think of a small air wrench at a car mechanic's place x1000, proper noisy stuff
We have enough diesel on site to keep the building running for 3 weeks.
//useless story time. At one of my previous jobs I was maintaining a building for JP Morgan which was, as you can imagine, extremely critical stuff. These guys turned over billions a day in deals and trades so even an hour of power loss cost them millions in lost revenue. One day a bus bar goes down (massive copper plates which run the length of the building, and the smaller power supplies branch off of them) and now we're all on point trying to get to the bottom of it and get it restored. The bank's consultant (a Nigerian know it all chap who very definitely blagged his way in to the job) turned up and met us in the switch room and starts barking orders as if he knows everything. At one point he grabs a set of Castell keys (you know those keys in the movies which require several people to turn them at the same time to launch a nuke or whatever? Castell keys) and starts fiddling about, telling us to get out of his way and whatnot, when no less than 30 seconds later he's successfully killed the remaining 3 bus bars and all the UPS backup with it. The whole building (125 London Wall, you've seen it if you've been in the square mile) just went dead, lifts, escalators, lighting, dealer floors, the lot. He left the room, banged his head on the wall and walked off. That was the last time we saw him. We had the power back on about 3 minutes later but that was one of the most stressful days I've ever had in this line of work.
Loads of people think that a maintenance man in their building just replaces light bulbs and unblocks toilets, but make no mistake, they only think that because we keep everything else running.
Sorry for the long post, if you guys are more interested in what goes on behind the scenes of a high profile building, let me know and I'll start a separate thread.
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I'd be surprised if it isn't grid balancing. There's a lot of money knocking about in that area at the moment as it's seen as essential.
Firstly, balancing makes renewables viable. Without it, wind turbines spend a lot of time switched off. Solar energy gets wasted.
Secondly (and more significantly), electric vehicle sales are projected to keep rising year on year. Without getting in to the debate on their viability, if they start shifting in big numbers and we don't have a solution to cope with the increased peak power demand, we're in trouble. People get home from work. Plug in. 7kWh+ per household before the front door has been unlocked. The industry has been quite clear on this; it cannot cope with such demand.
Rather than looking to dramatically increase capacity to cope with forecasted demand, the favoured solution is to use the power we have in a smarter way. Centralised power storage. Decentralised power storage. Smart charging solutions. If we can harness the capacity that we already have in a more effective way, then we won't need a dramatic rise in capacity to cope with increased demand.
The new BMW i3 stores enough electricity to power the average UK home for almost three days. The top-end Tesla Model S P100DL stores enough for over a week. There's considerable research happening in to how the vehicles themselves can be used to balance the grid, effectively turning them in to a boon rather than a burden. As battery capacities grow, there's increasing potential to use the vehicles for balancing or localised power storage, without causing range issues. Charge up when electricity is cheap and plentiful. Feed back in to the grid (or power your home or workplace) when costs rise.
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Preserving their quality of life, or acting in an entitled manner? They are largely one and the same. My need is greater than yours, etc. I believe what Glaucus was advocating is a planning system where the needs of society are placed ahead of the desires of the individual. We build where it makes sense to build, rather than where the existing residents complain the least.
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exactly, building regs in uk are extremely tight anyway, without the not in my back yard mob, should only be able to block on valid reasons and not because I think its unsafe because I'm clueless or it'll block my view isn't valid reasoning .
national grid can handle and actually improve efficiency with 1 million EVs after that you need to start upgrading infrastructure, as it actually feels in the slump over night when we have to much generation and not enough usage. Which they are doing as well as researching new ways.
one simple way is delaying the charging till after peak demand in the evening. However one thing they need to do is remove the government restrictions on pricing. If they did that people could save a huge amount of money with variable pricing, but government stopped that ages ago for consumers as they thought people would find It to confusing, now with smart meters and smart phones for apps, it should be unrestricted. There's actually a test starting now where they will test this with around 700 EV drivers, when the charging is controlled by the grid through smart chargers. They don't expect to see any issues for 99% of the participants.
another is paying customer to use their ev batteries. So come home with like 40% battery, get paid in the 6-10pm range to use 10% of the battery capacity to help with peak demand, then recharge after that again at much cheaper rates if they could change government laws. Using an app to say how much they ca use and when you want it fully charged by etc.
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In a previous job it was down to me to risk assess things like gas storage plant failures. Half a mile is nothing.
You've watched the latest Fully Charged, haven't you
For anyone interested:
Interesting episode if you want to get some understanding of where the industry is at right now in terms of their thinking on EVs and power distribution.
Not sure about that Electric Nation trial TBH. Sounded good, then I read up on the details. If you've already claimed the OLEV charger grant, you have to pay for the charger. That'll severely limit who takes part in the trial. Then they want £150 upfront, which they'll give back if you follow all of the rules during the trial. The charger itself sounds good, but from the customer side, the extra functionality is already covered by the cars themselves. I can see them winding up with a bunch of BMWs and hybrids that have no alternative (almost) free route for a home charger. Can't see the appeal to Nissan, Renault, Tesla customers at all.
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