[cptcobalt]

This is rad.

> Alongside the consistent output from its solar panels and wind turbines, an onsite 20GWh/5GW battery facility provide sufficient storage to reliably deliver each and every day

Four hour battery storage for renewables. The way of the future.

> This “first of a kind” project will generate 10.5GW of zero carbon electricity from the sun and wind to deliver 3.6GW of reliable energy for an average of 20+ hours a day.

The classic error, mixing up units: "3.6GW of reliable energy". The writer certainly means power here. [1] I work in energy, and have had teams like legal (and tools like Grammarly) think we're just mixing up words for fun. Regardless, definitely seems like a very sufficient install to supply real power and charge the battery for load shifting at utility scale.

[1]: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_vs_power

[throwaway894345]

Isn’t 4 hours of battery storage much too low? How is that considered “reliable”? What am I missing?

[Retric]

Capacity factor, across 24 hours a 30% capacity factor works out to 7.2 hours at max output. Being able to 4 hours of max output is therefore 55% of the total energy produced in the average day.

Grid demand is also significantly higher in the daytime so that 4h of battery allows you to very closely match users demands over 24 hours or ramp up during peak demand and fall back on other sources at night.

[ncmncm]

Just now, money is overwhelmingly better spent on top-line renewable generating capacity. There is no value in storage you are not generating enough power to keep charged up.

Furthermore, cost of storage is falling even faster than wind or solar ever did. Wait until next year, and you get lots more storage for your money.

Finally, batteries are good for very short-term storage -- their round-trip efficiency and fast response are unbeatable -- but they cost more than alternatives. For storage that you don't need to draw down every night, something you can fill cheap tanks with is better even if round-trip efficiency is low. Something you can also sell when your local tanks are full, and buy if they seem likely to go dry, is better yet.

So, expect to see a lot of anhydrous ammonia long-term storage. Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. And, lots of tropical sites synthesizing for export to higher latitudes in winter, and lots of higher-latitude cities importing it, via ship, in place of LNG and oil.

It is kind of surprising to see the batteries set up in Morocco, not in UK. That might be politics. Typically, storage is best sited near point-of-use. Maybe part of the deal is Morocco gets to use a share of the energy.

[rjmunro]

I suspect the storage batteries are designed to capture solar at peak generation times when it will exceed the HVDC transmission capacity, then deliver it at night when solar is not generating.

[Retric]

It doesn’t matter if prices are falling if you make more money this year than you save by waiting an extra year. That’s the issue with hypothetical alternatives, they can’t make you money until you can actually buy them.

As to location. All the equipment you need for moving solar power around the grid like long distance power lines is exactly the same equipment you need for moving battery power at that location around the grid. Even better batteries charged with solar power get to avoid DC>AC inefficiency selling solar to the grid and AC>DC inefficiency charging the batteries. They get to skip out on equipment like redundant DC>AC inverters etc. You are even moving power through cooler power lines that therefore have less resistance.

[ncmncm]

Money not spent on storage (that you cannot charge anyway) does not evaporate. You can instead spend it on something else more useful, like more panels. Money is always that way.

And, storage adjacent to the point of use is less at risk of being wholly unavailable, e.g. if there is a problem with the cable. So, you need good reasons to put it somewhere else. That is not to say there cannot be such reasons, but what they are is of interest.

[Retric]

It isn’t easy to just dump unlimited money into panels, you need a distribution network to support such instillations and these batteries are leveraging that.

Storage closer to consumers has a huge number of issues being more expensive to manage, harder to scale, less efficient, etc etc. It sounds vastly more useful than it is because you end up increasing failure modes and make failing safe much harder.

[tuatoru]

> expect to see a lot of anhydrous ammonia long-term storage. Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen.

This is wishful thinking. These are very much research projects at present.

> Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen.

Hydrogen makes no sense as energy storage. The energy costs of compression (and liquefaction, if you do that), and the risks, are just silly. Liquifying and regasifiying nitrogen are energy-expensive too.

It'd be better to combine hydrogen with air-captured carbon to make medium-chain hydrocarbons. We can store those at room temperature and pressure safely for season-long periods of time, as demonstrated by hundreds of millions of motor vehicles and tens of thousands of fuel depots.

Leaks of liquid hydrocarbons are much less likely to kill people than leaks of ammonia.

[ncmncm]

A GW ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. Little hint: nobody builds GW-scale anything that is just a "research project".

Hydrogen storage will be mostly underground, at low pressure. So, no compression or liquification needed. But, for transport it will be liquified and shipped just like LNG is today.

Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature technology. A 100MW LN2 storage plant is under construction in Chile. Little hint, again: [ ... ]

"Re-gasifying" liquid nitrogen needs only ambient air, which (little hint) is all well above the boiling point of nitrogen.

If you think liquifying hydrogen takes a lot of energy, wait until you find out how much you need to synthesize hydrocarbons. Little hint: you will need a lot of hydrogen stockpiled. And, a lot of carbon with all the oxygen picked off.

[Retric]

> nobody builds GW-scale anything that is just a "research project".

Plenty of experimental GW scale nuclear reactors have been built, just look at the history of CANDU design for an example. That’s just the scale this stuff operates at, you need real world data to demonstrate it’s actually cost effective at scale and actually building stuff still requires actual R&D. Further, you don’t want to just build one you want multiple examples to see what costs look like when people building the thing have relevant experience.

[imtringued]

Those 4 hours don't mean wall clock time, they mean it takes 4 hours to discharge the battery at its maximum discharge rate.

In other words, the battery would bridge exactly 4 hours of 0% power generation. The moment you have more than 0% power generation but still less than 100%, the battery will last more than 4 hours of wall clock time.

[ncmncm]

The battery will mostly be drawn down at a time of much less than peak demand, so will provide power for longer than 4 hours. But it will be available too for when demand peaks above generating capacity.

It is usually a mistake to overbuild batteries. The money is better spent on PV panels, wind turbines, and grid tie-ins and, eventually, other storage media.

[cptcobalt]

Indeed, if we're assuming that they'll charge during the day to discharge at full power at night, it won't cover all of overnight use, but with the current composition of grids typically it's what you need to cover after sundown until most go to sleep (and energy use reduces). A project like this doesn't need to reduce base load, but there surely needs to be renewable (or nuclear) energy projects to replace base load. (This is an over simplification, but base load supply is built to be more steady state, less real-time reactive to the needs of grid.)

Also, the "time" of the battery is just a function of storage size and inverter sizing at peak discharge. It's often selected based on how the operator expects it to be used. (For example, Tesla sells megapacks in 2hr/4hr variants [1], and I think a lot of other grid-scale storage works this way. A 2hr megapack replaces some battery bays with more inverters.) While the battery is 4 hour capable, the operator could really intend for this to provide a constant overnight supply, and it could certainly provide that.

[1]: https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design

[throwaway894345]

Interesting, but does this assume Morocco won’t have a cloudy week or something (I understand that Morocco’s climate is almost always sunny, but even still)? I always assumed the threshold for “reliable renewable energy” began at a week’s worth of storage.

[cptcobalt]

This project also includes wind, which doesn't require sun.

"A week's worth of storage" feels somewhat like an armchair simplification. It roughly sounds on target if we're moving toward the march of nines for real-time zero-carbon power supply, but...that honestly doesn't need to be the target expectation for today. Long term goal, yes. Today's targets really should be to get to 90-95% renewable, since chasing the last 5% will be the hardest and most expensive—and that's probably where we can acceptably use some dirtier backup sources. With the state of the grid today, there's lots and lots of power sources that can be replaced for cheaper and cleaner before we need to chase the long tail of 100% renewable at all hours during every season.

The reality though, is that all of these requirements are modeled, and the operator surely has their install min/maxed for typical use.

At the risk of being off topic, I personally have what energy-wonks could consider a "three hour" system (10kW solar, 15kW/43.5kWh battery, my typical daily energy use is between 25-50kWh, higher if I need to charge the car) and have done two weeks fully off-grid last summer, which included some cloudy weather. (True off-grid: the utility breaker was open to hard disconnect from the grid). While I could probably live full-time off grid in the summer, I definitely feel its better to have my system help clean up the grid where possible. So there's really a lot of flexibility to be had depending on the system's requirements.

[throwaway894345]

> "A week's worth of storage" feels somewhat like an armchair simplification.

It is. The way I've heard it explained by energy experts (or people who were introduced by the media as such) was that storage needs to be on the order of days/weeks, not hours. I'm sure that's something of a crude oversimplification for a lay audience and certainly not a rugged analysis for this particular project.

> With the state of the grid today, there's lots and lots of power sources that can be replaced for cheaper and cleaner before we need to chase the long tail of 100% renewable at all hours during every season.

I'm of the impression that "clean carbon" peaker-plants are fairly inefficient because there's a fair amount of overhead in starting them and consequently they don't actually end up being that much cleaner. :/ Unfortunately, I wish I had more to offer than "this is what I've heard an alleged energy expert say". :(

[ncmncm]

You might want a week or month of storage, eventually, but first you want to have installed enough spare generating capacity to charge it while still servicing full load. And, you probably want your week's or month's worth to cost way less than that amount of battery.

[fauigerzigerk]

Not that I know anything about this, but isn't it the job of "the grid" to make sure all sources of energy combined can provide the necessary power at all times? No individual power source is ever completely reliable.

Please forgive my naive question. I have exactly zero relevant expertise.

[cptcobalt]

Yes!

The grid is one of the world's largest real-time reactive machines. Power is generated on the fly as you need it. You could draw a direct path from your home A/C switching on all the way back up the chain to some source needing to push power to meet your demand.

The supply of the grid is a big mix of diverse sources: renewables, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, coal—whatever. Each power source has different pros and cons, and you cannot really over-index on one to have a reliable grid. For example, nuclear is a fantastic and relatively clean source for base load (obviously, when handled responsibly), but not great to provide power that reacts to the shifts of demand through the day. Solar, obviously, doesn't work at night. The grid operator has to build a supply mix that fits the needs of their region. (And that's typically by facilitating energy market with different energy products where generators bid and participate.)

[MrPatan]

It's very reliable compared to 0 hours of battery storage

[sofixa]

> Four hour battery storage for renewables. The way of the future.

Only the beginning of the way i hope. 4 hours isn't even close to being enough for "reliable" electricity generation.

[danans]

4 hours is solidly in the middle of what is needed for the daily peak load management tier of the energy storage problem [1], which is how we experience electricity "reliability" on a day to day basis, and it is the upper end of what is economical for lithium ion batteries.

Beyond that, other technologies (pumped hydro, perhaps hydrogen electrolysis) are more economical.

1. https://storagewiki.epri.com/index.php/Energy_Storage_101/Te...

[ncmncm]

Tankage is much cheaper than batteries.

[danans]

Tankage for what? Tanks for things like compressed air might be cheaper, but round trip energy efficiency is much lower (50%ish) than batteries.

It will be interesting to see how sodium ion batteries will compete since their alkali metal is far more abundant than lithium, especially in stationary applications that don't need high energy/mass or energy/volume.

[ncmncm]

Tankage is for anything: Liquified ammonia (stored at environment temperature under light compression. Liquified hydrogen. Liquified nitrogen. Gaseous hydrogen, underground, where geology favors it. Maybe liquified methane or kerosene, if you can synthesize that.

Perhaps surprisingly, round-trip efficiency matters a lot less than other things, for storage not drawn down often. And, it matters a lot less everywhere than only a short time ago, because top-line generating capacity has got so cheap, you can just build out enough more of that to make up the difference. If your liquified hydrogen is slowly boiling away, you just top up your tanks now and again.

The important difference from batteries I call attention to is that in batteries, you can only store exactly as much energy as you buy expensive batteries to keep it in. But for synthetic chemicals (and liquified nitrogen), the only expensive parts are what you use to synthesize them in, and maybe the way you get the energy back. Those capacities are measured in watts. Saying tankage is cheap is to note that there is no upper limit on the amount of tankage you can have, and the watt-hours you can bank; your bottleneck is only the conversion rate.

This is all aside from the fact that tankage can be shipped, both out, generating revenue from excess generating capacity, and in, if local storage gets drawn down too far.

So, batteries will be used for short-term storage. Iron-air battery factories are under construction, and those will be much cheaper than lithium, and will be used, but however much cheaper they are than other batteries, they cannot match empty tankage.

[danans]

> Saying tankage is cheap is to note that there is no upper limit on the amount of tankage you can have, and the watt-hours you can bank; your bottleneck is only the conversion rate.

I think there are a lot of use cases for those fuels that don't even require a lot of long term storage, my current favorite being hydrogen fuel cell powered semi trucks that already burn a lot of diesel crossing places that have a lot of renewable electricity potential but not enough transmission (i.e. wind in the Great Plains and sun in the desert Southwest). This would get around the issues with batteries eating into truck weight limits.

Also, the idea of freight trucks "sailing" across the country on wind power is just an appealing narrative.

[cptcobalt]

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31144464 — The operator is picking a "bigger" battery, smaller inverters. This means they're intending to use the stored energy over a longer period of time. There are similar sized batteries with bigger inverters, when a greater need for peak power discharge (or charge) is expected.

[BurningFrog]

Adding battery power for v2 should be one of the easier upgrades.

I assume batteries in 10 years will be vastly better/cheaper.

[LightG]

How's that for energy independence! Wohoo