Comanche Peak looks like it may be taken out of the grid in the very near future. The plant itself I don't think is in any danger but the transmission lines there might get caught up in that Chalk Mountain fire. That's not going to do any favors to an already tight grid.
Yeah. I don't know why people think it's a conspiracy theory or anything. You guys are going to Garrett Gilbert the battery industry. It has potential to change energy forever. It's just not ready for the spotlight. You start implementing this stuff too early and you'll put us in the dark ages like Texas football
Yeesh. They are good man. The stock holders and the share holders tell you they are great. What else will they tell you. Talk to the battery man and ask him I trust battery with my life. Let him explain
Ok. Here's my thing on batteries. You cite 6.5Gs. you know where most of that was purchased by? Yeah. The data centers. Guess what I work for? Yes the data centers. You know what load bank testing is? It's basically where they hook up a bunch of heaters to your battery. They do that with generators too. And just try to power it. Guess what fails miserably at load bank testing or especially confidence testing where you are running at full load + x amount of time. Battery discharge characteristics get wonky after 12 hours and they start to get really fucking hot. And this is at a steady discharge rate. Oscillating discharge rates would be even crazier. So yeah there is lots more storage. But right now it's the back up to the backup if the backups mom isn't available. Not ready for prime time.
But just a quick math to math it. How do we do it? The landscape would be insane. Ok let's choose an easy number. Let's go with 10. So 10 GW-H during day light hours. 60-70 percent from renewables. 6-7 GW-H. And I'm throwing stored hydro out of the mix. Our water problem isn't getting any better. So 30 percent supplement by fossils. Let's say wind works 100 days out of the year and that's what is charging our batteries. So it can take over as a source instead of a load. So on days wind isn't there. Who makes up for the battery charge? On the days sun isn't there who makes up for the battery charge? What if on days we don't have either?
I've said that shit since before the freeze. You go into any outage and you have a wish list of things you want to fix. That 600 line item gets struck down to 200. The 50 days you have gets knocked down to 30. The first thing that gets knocked off the list is freeze protection.
They are weird. When prices are weak they can't afford to fix anything because they don't have the budget. When shit is expensive, they can't afford to shutdown because they need to make money. So when does things get fixed? When they have a catastrophic failure. I walked away after the freeze when they wanted us to patch things up and get the unit going. The business group called every day asking how much longer when we told them prior to the freeze it'd be a good idea to shutdown and drain the systems. They said nah, we can keep running.
Is the entire thing not about it being economics? Because if it isn't then every neighborhood gets a small solar farm and all shingles for houses are made of solar panels and each house has a generator as backup. Every commerical building has solar panel windows and backup by mag bearing generators.
The countries you cite have the luxury of hydropower and a very concentrated population. I think like 90 percent of Uraguay lives in or around Montevideo. Sweden and Norway has almost a year round wind. And once again population density and land mass matters. Germany well, let's see how Germany is doing. Brazil went deep and hard on biomass. I am still waiting to see how that turns out. And I am not saying renewables don't work. I am all for it. I'm just not all in at the moment.
Ummm, how about a reliable grid using natural gas until we can figure out how to fully implement renewables. You want to connect the grid. Connect the grid. That doesn't mean shit to me. But if you think connecting to the grid is the answer. I would beg to differ. I just think everyone who is abandoning fossils are jumping off the ship too early. You can't have a replacement with something that doesn't work yet with something that does. We are pulling a Germany by doing that. That's all I'm saying.
And that's why I said partly. We were raised to believe our politicians were out there looking for our best interests. Lobbyists who are nothing more than legal bagmen are the only people they care about.
Yeah. I agree with that. Lithium is just going to get more expensive and rare. We are a heat dissapating gel or a new polymer away from achieving battery breakthrough but with that lithium consumption is going to skyrocket.
Yeah. That was the problem with deregulation. And that's partly the consumers fault. They wanted the cheapest electric bill as possible. Well with that you gotta start taking out the bells and whistles. Part of the bells and whistles is a guarantee that the lights won't go out.
Guess what battery technology and cold fusion have in common? That's right we haven't solved it yet. I'm not saying not to keep trying to solve the issue. I'm saying right now we haven't solved the issue and until we do our energy grid isn't getting any better. We can blame Texas all we want but other states run into the same shit too. Rolling blackouts isn't a Texas only thing.
Yes. You can get more capacity going on the non spinning turbines in that time. But the rest of the plant has to be online to achieve that. That's the long part of it. Being on hot standby with nowhere to go is expensive.