Commercial battery banks
- Thread starter Orionaut
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Soldato
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Vote OP name change to NIMBY. 
they will be stainless steel.for Corrosion purposes and keeping clean.
Tower? Won't work. Water is too heavy and voluminous - it would need to be one hell of a tower!
If we take the efficiency of the Dinorwig plant, for example:
Capacity: 6,700,000,000 Litres
Weight: 6,700,000,000kg, or 6.7 million tonnes.
Energy storage capacity: 9.3GWh.
1.39GWh per million tonnes of water.
1.39kWh per tonne of water.
The battery pack in the current Nissan Leaf is equivalent to 21.5m^3 and 21.5 tonnes of water in Dinorwig. The Leaf's battery pack is only 0.49m^3 and weighs 294kg. To put it another way, that's 0.00319kWh per kg vs 2.5kWh per kg. By size and weight, the battery is vastly more efficient.
Stored water is a decent system. But we don't have enough suitable natural sites, and building a man-made structure would be challenging and inefficient. Plus, you've still got to move all that power over long distances. It's part of the solution, but not the solution itself.
If we take the efficiency of the Dinorwig plant, for example:
Capacity: 6,700,000,000 Litres
Weight: 6,700,000,000kg, or 6.7 million tonnes.
Energy storage capacity: 9.3GWh.
1.39GWh per million tonnes of water.
1.39kWh per tonne of water.
The battery pack in the current Nissan Leaf is equivalent to 21.5m^3 and 21.5 tonnes of water in Dinorwig. The Leaf's battery pack is only 0.49m^3 and weighs 294kg. To put it another way, that's 0.00319kWh per kg vs 2.5kWh per kg. By size and weight, the battery is vastly more efficient.
Stored water is a decent system. But we don't have enough suitable natural sites, and building a man-made structure would be challenging and inefficient. Plus, you've still got to move all that power over long distances. It's part of the solution, but not the solution itself.
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On top of that, pumped water storage wastes far more electricity than batteries. Wasting 25% per "recharge" is pretty good for pumped water storage.
It's currently the least bad solution to very large scale electricity storage (as long as you have the right geography), but it's not all that good.
It's currently the least bad solution to very large scale electricity storage (as long as you have the right geography), but it's not all that good.
Preserving quality of life. If we turn into that society, we've lost our democracy and turned into a dictatorship. Too many times the opinions of those that have to live in an area are ignored, it shouldn't be made worse.
when you say efficient though how long does a leaft battery last and how much does it cost?
Dinorwig has been open nearly 30 years iirc.
obviously a battery is better interms of energy density per weight but efficency i doubt.
water scales better.
OP I don't think you need to worry as after abit of research they will be using Samsung batteries
thank god, because samsung has had loads of problems with 3rd party battaries thier own are ok though
I meant efficient in terms of size and weight, thinking specifically about the idea of building a pumped water tower. Such a structure would have to be huge and capable of supporting an incredible weight in order to provide a meaningful amount of power. The comparison to batteries was merely to illustrate the relative energy densities.
The problem with pumped water in the UK is we simply don't have enough suitable natural sites. Combine with 25%+ waste energy and it is far from ideal. If the aim is to source all of our energy from renewables, that 25% overhead is enough to make it an impossible task - without Nuclear we'll struggle as it is.
On the subject of Leaf batteries, current projections are 8-10 years to 80%, then a second life of unknown duration as home storage. The current price for a 30kWh Leaf battery is about $4000 (a rather depressing £3,250 at the current exchange rate). Not as cost efficient over the long-term as pumped storage, but not crazy expensive either. If distributed storage is the plan, then new car sales and battery refurbishment/replacement/upgrade should maintain (or hopefully increase) storage capacity over time.
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Here's the thing; democracy isn't about putting your needs above everyone else's. It is literally about serving the majority, not the few dozen hostile residents that don't want to see their view spoilt by new housing. Also, it's worth remembering that just because people don't do what you want them to do, it doesn't mean they're ignoring you. Planning opposition is rarely ignored. It just isn't always deemed worthy of action.
You don't have an automatic right to be obeyed just because you perceive that a development will affect your quality of life. I suspect most NIMBYs realise this, which is why so many of them go in search of Great Crested Newts (which, contrary to all scientific evidence, appear to be far from endangered - they're plentiful in the green belts around many towns and villages...).
Planning opposition can be a good thing. It can highlight flaws in proposed plans, save billions of pounds in development mistakes, and go some way toward protecting our natural environment. But it is currently heavily abused by people who don't like development for irrational and selfish reasons. It wastes time. It wastes money. It's pointless.
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lithium ion batteries are down to $150 per kwh and dropping(and dropping fast the predictions where we wouldn't even see $200 per kwh before 2020, Gm is now predicting $100 per kwh by 2021 http://www.hybridcars.com/gm-ev-battery-cells-down-to-145kwh-and-still-falling/), both nissan leafs and tesla models S are seeing around 95% capacity after 100,000km and are stabilised and that's with heavy rapid charging as well. batteries tend to drop capacity fairly fast, then they stabilise for an extremely long time, before a sharp and rapid decline.
a study of available tesla Ss in Europe iirc. As the years continue to go past we will get more and more data.
the scaremongering from a few years ago about batteries not lasting long, have been well proved wrong by real world usage, now we are seeing cars with such mileages.
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