General > General Technical Chat
the dark side of cobalt
nctnico:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on July 16, 2023, 01:42:21 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 11:14:21 pm ---You are not counting for leakage which you'll also have in storage underground. A much better solution is to add insulation to a home so you need less energy to begin with.
--- End quote ---
It's apparently small enough that the accumulation can be seen over a period of a few years.
--- End quote ---
You can't determine that without having numbers on energy in versus energy out.
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 06:39:57 pm ---The next big problem to solve is storage since renewable sources are both erratic and seasonal where it comes to supply. And don't start with heat storage using water or batteris. It won't work for seasonal storage because the volume of water needed is too big, batteries will be too big & expensive and the leakage is too high.
--- End quote ---
For seasonal, batteries are obviously no-go, and while water (or soil/bedrock) thermal storage has been demonstrated even at seasonal scale, and possibly workable, I agree it won't be a silver bullet because suitable sites are limited and building is expensive. However, as I have stated before, there is nothing wrong burning fossil fuels, which are super trivial to store, to support during harsh winter conditions, Dunkelflaute periods etc. Cost is higher than it is now because NRE and maintenance costs of facilities spread to significantly smaller number of kWh produced, but this is then compensated by cheaper prices when plenty of energy is available. This is BTW exactly what Germany is already doing and the direction seems just fine. Shutting down nuclear early gave a small setback* but that's something which needs to happen anyway so in bigger picture it doesn't matter.
*) in other words, in Germany, renewables had to take over both fossils and nuclear at the same time
Batteries and smart load management (specifically EV ("I need 80% by morning", where UI/UX is actually the biggest challenge!) and implicit distributed thermal masses) storage work very well within 24 hrs or so, and this is already huge since PV production varies within said period for the obvious reason.
Hydrogen is part of the solution too because it can be used in industrial processes e.g. steel, and of course as last resort medium for thermal heat generation despite poor efficiency, but even that it better than wasting excess generation completely.
AVGresponding:
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 09:25:35 pm ---But you can't turn heat into electricity
--- End quote ---
I'm confused, because almost every means of generating electricity that I know of, has a differential of heat at its heart. The two exceptions I can immediately think of are tidal power generation and hydrogen fuel cells.
tom66:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on July 16, 2023, 05:42:10 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 06:39:57 pm ---The next big problem to solve is storage since renewable sources are both erratic and seasonal where it comes to supply. And don't start with heat storage using water or batteris. It won't work for seasonal storage because the volume of water needed is too big, batteries will be too big & expensive and the leakage is too high.
--- End quote ---
For seasonal, batteries are obviously no-go, and while water (or soil/bedrock) thermal storage has been demonstrated even at seasonal scale, and possibly workable, I agree it won't be a silver bullet because suitable sites are limited and building is expensive. However, as I have stated before, there is nothing wrong burning fossil fuels, which are super trivial to store, to support during harsh winter conditions, Dunkelflaute periods etc. Cost is higher than it is now because NRE and maintenance costs of facilities spread to significantly smaller number of kWh produced, but this is then compensated by cheaper prices when plenty of energy is available. This is BTW exactly what Germany is already doing and the direction seems just fine. Shutting down nuclear early gave a small setback* but that's something which needs to happen anyway so in bigger picture it doesn't matter.
--- End quote ---
Yes, burning fossils in limited circumstances is OK, provided a few factors are accounted for;
- It is all offset in some way, e.g. by carbon capture at source or direct air capture solution
- The extraction process is relatively clean with minimal environmental contamination
- The country isn't dependent upon the fossil fuels from unfriendly nations
- There's limited local air pollution, so ICE vehicles still can't exist on this except for very specific applications where there is no alternative (I'm thinking construction equipment for instance, has to operate for long periods of time without access to electricity)
The great thing about renewables is that once they can cover 90% of all demands you can probably supply any fossil fuel requirements from local reservoirs, or at least for Europe it can almost certainly all come from within the EU/UK.
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: AVGresponding on July 16, 2023, 08:51:14 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 09:25:35 pm ---But you can't turn heat into electricity
--- End quote ---
I'm confused, because almost every means of generating electricity that I know of, has a differential of heat at its heart. The two exceptions I can immediately think of are tidal power generation and hydrogen fuel cells.
--- End quote ---
This, of course heat can be turned into electricity, with the exact same limitations as turning hydrogen into electricity, namely poor efficiency and cost and space requirements of equipment. Heat-to-electricity is not much being researched/advocated because it's way more impractical than heat-to-heat, and since 1/3 or so (more than 2/3 in cold countries) of our total energy needs are in form of heat, supplying that directly from stored renewable heat offsets having to produce that same heat by burning fossil fuels.
Ground source heatpumping is a big deal because it combines annual storage with renewable energy source (sunlight) harvesting in one simple package. Classic, simple installations just drill a hole in bedrock/soil and utilize thermal energy stored into the first 100-200 meters of the planet, the energy originates from sunlight; earth's crust itself has enough mass to average out the annual temperature so that energy is stored passively without any human intervention in the summer and then used in the winter, latter requiring relatively small input of power. It is also possible to actively store energy into the crust during summer, enabling the system to work with less collection area (i.e., larger hole density), and it isn't even expensive to do so; a circulation pump and large fan coil is all that is needed for compressor-less heat transfer. This is not any kind of pipe dream or "idea" or even a prototype, this is all commonplace existing technology.
Even air source heatpumping utilizes the inherent annual thermal storage of the earth's crust + atmosphere (mostly the latter)! People often miss this fact.
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