[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.

[ncmncm]

Remarkably, all of those assertions are wrong.

[Retric]

Try and back up what your saying. What do you think happens if you build a 100GW solar panel farm without talking with the local electric utility?

[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.

[ncmncm]

We will need hundreds of GW-scale ammonia synthesis plants. Thousands, maybe. Fortunately, there are no impediments to operating them at any required scale. You just add on more units.

Nuclear reactors have very difficult engineering problems unknown in most other technologies. For a nuke, you might actually need to build a GW-scale pilot plant to discover the failure modes that show up there. Not so, most things. A bigger dam just needs more turbines. A bigger wind farm just needs more wind turbines. A bigger solar farm just needs more panels. A bigger ammonia plant just needs more catalyzer units. You can start it running after the first one, and add more at leisure.

That is a thing that makes renewables + storage so much more attractive than nukes: You are guaranteed no unpleasant surprises, and no existential disasters. That it is also radically cheaper, and starts working immediately, is icing on a very nice cake.

[Retric]

Everything you mentioned ran into new issues at scale.

Scale always brings new problems. The difference between hosting a website from your personal internet connection and building TickTock’s infrastructure isn’t simply writing a bigger check to someone.

How many people know how to build X. Where do you get the raw materials or parts etc, all to often the answer is you build a factory or a mine. Many basic assumptions break down with scale. You don’t use even close to the same equipment to connect your houses solar panels to the grid as you would a 1GW solar farm.