Author Topic: the dark side of cobalt  (Read 15681 times)

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Offline Zero999

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #175 on: July 16, 2023, 08:12:05 pm »
Why not just transport electricity?  China has a 3,200km ultra HVDC transmission line (+/-1.1MV) built by ABB, it transmits up to 12GW.  Efficiency is in excess of 90%.  Going up to +/-1.5MV UHVDC could allow transmission beyond 5,000km with similar efficiency. 
The temperature difference between the hot and cold areas is an energy source that could theoretically be exploited. Probably not enough to make the whole system a net generator, but it could make the effective efficiency very high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion?useskin=vector
 

Offline nctnico

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #176 on: July 16, 2023, 08:12:28 pm »
It seems like what would really solve a large part of the energy problem is some sort of heat transportation system interconnecting countries in southern and northern hemispheres. It's technically feasible, but nobody has found a way to make it economically feasible yet.

Why not just transport electricity?  China has a 3,200km ultra HVDC transmission line (+/-1.1MV) built by ABB, it transmits up to 12GW.  Efficiency is in excess of 90%.  Going up to +/-1.5MV UHVDC could allow transmission beyond 5,000km with similar efficiency.
Start including cost per kWh into these calculations and see how it may not be such a good idea! For the umpteenth time: efficiency is low on the list of what is important where it comes to energy transport. Or put differently: price per kWh is the only thing you need to worry about. Things like efficiency and utilisation are just parameters to make the economics of a transport system worth it or not.
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Offline tom66

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #177 on: July 16, 2023, 10:11:50 pm »
It seems like what would really solve a large part of the energy problem is some sort of heat transportation system interconnecting countries in southern and northern hemispheres. It's technically feasible, but nobody has found a way to make it economically feasible yet.

Why not just transport electricity?  China has a 3,200km ultra HVDC transmission line (+/-1.1MV) built by ABB, it transmits up to 12GW.  Efficiency is in excess of 90%.  Going up to +/-1.5MV UHVDC could allow transmission beyond 5,000km with similar efficiency.
Start including cost per kWh into these calculations and see how it may not be such a good idea! For the umpteenth time: efficiency is low on the list of what is important where it comes to energy transport. Or put differently: price per kWh is the only thing you need to worry about. Things like efficiency and utilisation are just parameters to make the economics of a transport system worth it or not.

Not sure why you think a 3,200km line is going to have high cost per kWh.  The cost of such a line is mostly capital expense and maintenance, but the line will easily last 100 years with just normal maintenance.  Chopping the trees back adjacent to the line, if any are present, is probably the biggest single bill.
 
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Offline TimFox

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #178 on: July 16, 2023, 10:25:15 pm »
A government report from 2018 estimated a range of about 1 to 8 million USD per mile for HVDC transmission lines.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmission/pdf/transmission.pdf
 

Online NiHaoMike

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #179 on: July 16, 2023, 10:36:13 pm »
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion?useskin=vector
Big difference between the hot and cold areas being separated by a few miles at most, as opposed to thousands of miles.
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Offline tom66

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #180 on: July 16, 2023, 10:36:22 pm »
A government report from 2018 estimated a range of about 1 to 8 million USD per mile for HVDC transmission lines.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmission/pdf/transmission.pdf

So taking the high side figure of that... $8mn per mile or $5mn per km.  $5 billion to build a 5000km line.

If it transmitted the same power as the Chinese line - 12GW - and had 75% availability - it would move 78.9 TWh per year. 

So over a 100 year lifespan about 15c/kWh.  A bit more than I expected, but if the line costs closer to the low end at larger scales, it makes a lot more sense.
 

Offline nctnico

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #181 on: July 17, 2023, 02:37:41 pm »
100 years is rather optimistic. 50 years maybe but there will need to be maintenance like changing isolators and so on. As a reference: sea cables have a life span around 25 to 30 years. Additionally, the cable alone will not be enough. Storage will need to be added ass well.
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Offline Siwastaja

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #182 on: July 17, 2023, 03:23:43 pm »
Additionally, the cable alone will not be enough. Storage will need to be added ass well.

Storage as in energy storage? The whole point is that better transmission can reduce the need for storage. There are situations in today's Europe some countries run at negative prices with excess generation while others run their fossils full blast and spot prices skyrocket, at the same minute. There are two completely orthogonal mitigations: storage or transmission. Third is, adding more production, and fourth is, accept the amount of fossils being burned.

I see tomorrow's energy systems as combining all four as mentioned. Adding more PV and wind is possible and helps, but it has a limit because the price of each produced kWh starts going up when dimensioned multiple times over the peak demand. Thus, transmission helps: when it's windy and sunny in X, but cloudy and still in Y, transfer excess from X to Y, X gets money from Y and Y needs to pay less than when producing using back-up measures. Also, storage helps: store when excess is available, use when needed. Finally, even if you do all of this, there will be situations when it's super cold everywhere in Europe and wind is totally standstill for two weeks straight over the whole continent, and your new fancy HVDC link from Africa can't simply supply enough. Then you apply the Fourth principle above, and happily burn fossil fuels in your storage, because it simply does not matter in the big picture.

It is especially this fourth point which is so difficult to accept for the purists. All-or-nothing approach is devastating.
« Last Edit: July 17, 2023, 03:25:56 pm by Siwastaja »
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #183 on: July 17, 2023, 03:32:07 pm »
All of these approaches have been shown to work.
In a specific application, the cost accountants and engineers must work together to evaluate the choice to include scientific, engineering, and economic considerations (including the interest rate on capital and taxation).
(Politicians would rather wave hands and pontificate than do the math.)
 

Offline Siwastaja

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #184 on: July 17, 2023, 03:54:21 pm »
That 5 billion specifically sounds like a small sum of money, Finland can easily pay for it and much more, and we don't except anything in return.
 

Offline tom66

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #185 on: July 17, 2023, 04:24:31 pm »
You'd probably still need storage for Europe as during winter, there can be long periods of time with little wind and solar generation.  Storage of ca. 1-3 months energy is possible in the form of hydrogen using the existing reservoirs used for natural gas.  Most of these are underground salt caverns, some are disused fossil gas wells.  Hydrogen is not reactive with the rock salt.   Storage in CH4, ie methane/natural gas, is also possible but has two downsides (a) it requires a power-to-gas system with less overall efficiency and (b) it has a greater GWP so any fugitive gas escapes have a higher impact which must be otherwise mitigated.  CH4 storage might make sense as an interim solution as existing power plants and home/commercial gas boilers can use it without any changes.
 

Offline nctnico

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #186 on: July 17, 2023, 04:26:27 pm »
Additionally, the cable alone will not be enough. Storage will need to be added ass well.

Storage as in energy storage? The whole point is that better transmission can reduce the need for storage. There are situations in today's Europe some countries run at negative prices with excess generation while others run their fossils full blast and spot prices skyrocket, at the same minute. There are two completely orthogonal mitigations: storage or transmission. Third is, adding more production, and fourth is, accept the amount of fossils being burned.

I see tomorrow's energy systems as combining all four as mentioned. Adding more PV and wind is possible and helps, but it has a limit because the price of each produced kWh starts going up when dimensioned multiple times over the peak demand. Thus, transmission helps: when it's windy and sunny in X, but cloudy and still in Y, transfer excess from X to Y, X gets money from Y and Y needs to pay less than when producing using back-up measures. Also, storage helps: store when excess is available, use when needed. Finally, even if you do all of this, there will be situations when it's super cold everywhere in Europe and wind is totally standstill for two weeks straight over the whole continent, and your new fancy HVDC link from Africa can't simply supply enough. Then you apply the Fourth principle above, and happily burn fossil fuels in your storage, because it simply does not matter in the big picture.
Run some numbers on it to determine price per kWh. Especially for keeping power plants ready to go once in a few years. I'm 100% sure the economics won't make sense because you'll be wasting massive amounts of money on systems that are severely under-utilised. The current way of generating power and distribution is not built because of the use of fossil fuels, it is built that way because it is most cost effective. Use that cost effectiveness as a template for a solution based on renewables. Anything else will just be more expensive due to under-utilisation.
« Last Edit: July 17, 2023, 04:29:17 pm by nctnico »
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Offline tom66

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #187 on: July 17, 2023, 04:30:39 pm »
Run some numbers on it. Especially for keeping power plants ready to go once in a few years. I'm 100% sure the economics won't make sense because you'll be wasting massive amounts of money on systems that are severely under-utilised.

In the UK, the National Grid company provides balancing services.  They are known to pay up to £1,500/MWh (normal price is ~£30/MWh) to provide balancing in constrained periods. An auction system is used where customers either agree to cut off their connection or supply power.   For instance the hospital near where I used to live has a 30MWe gas thermal-electricity power plant on site.  In normal times it generates 10MW for the hospital (plus hot water and heating in winter) and the turbines run cooler, but if the Grid calls for it, they can push another 20MW into the grid.  They don't normally do it because it's not cost effective but 20MW can be all the grid needs to maintain frequency margins.  Another common one is larger datacenters will shift over to diesel generators and stop pulling from the grid.  OK that's not ideal in terms of emissions but grid stability is paramount.  As EVs and home energy storage becomes more common this can integrate into the auction via smart energy tariffs, low/negative price = please consume, high price = cut back and use battery. 
 

Offline AVGresponding

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #188 on: July 17, 2023, 04:32:25 pm »
That 5 billion specifically sounds like a small sum of money, Finland can easily pay for it and much more, and we don't except anything in return.

That's because the maths is wrong. 5,000 x 5,000,000 is 25,000,000,000, not 5,000,000,000
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Offline tszaboo

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #189 on: July 17, 2023, 05:18:57 pm »
That 5 billion specifically sounds like a small sum of money, Finland can easily pay for it and much more, and we don't except anything in return.

That's because the maths is wrong. 5,000 x 5,000,000 is 25,000,000,000, not 5,000,000,000
Don't worry, because the price/kwh calculation is also wrong.
 

Offline Siwastaja

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #190 on: July 17, 2023, 05:59:15 pm »
That 5 billion specifically sounds like a small sum of money, Finland can easily pay for it and much more, and we don't except anything in return.

That's because the maths is wrong. 5,000 x 5,000,000 is 25,000,000,000, not 5,000,000,000

Doesn't matter. Finland committed to pay another 20 billion in sanctions to EU by not submitting a simple document before the deadline like Sweden did, because the previous government was too busy cocaine partying, and because we apparently have raped all our forests here (hint: exactly as untrue as ridiculous it sounds, factually Finland has, by far, the most forest per capita and there are no significant changes how it is being used). I hope this money will get at least one 5000km HVDC transmission line built.
 

Offline Siwastaja

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #191 on: July 17, 2023, 06:04:02 pm »
That 5 billion specifically sounds like a small sum of money, Finland can easily pay for it and much more, and we don't except anything in return.

That's because the maths is wrong. 5,000 x 5,000,000 is 25,000,000,000, not 5,000,000,000
Don't worry, because the price/kwh calculation is also wrong.

Let me try, with average price 4.5 million/mile and 40-year lifetime:
4500000/1.6 * 5000 / (12000000*0.75*40*365*24) = 0.00445 USD/kWh
doesn't sound too shabby, yes, or did I miscalculate it too?

This price matches my intuition. Power transfer is absolutely everywhere, even in many of the poorest of countries. It is simple and requires only very common materials and similar construction techniques roads and buildings are built with, everywhere. Transfering power for 500-1000km is nothing special currently. I fail to see the exponentially increasing complexity and cost people are assuming when discussing improving the current transmission systems.
« Last Edit: July 17, 2023, 06:07:23 pm by Siwastaja »
 

Offline Siwastaja

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #192 on: July 17, 2023, 06:11:50 pm »
Run some numbers on it to determine price per kWh. Especially for keeping power plants ready to go once in a few years. I'm 100% sure the economics won't make sense because you'll be wasting massive amounts of money on systems that are severely under-utilised. The current way of generating power and distribution is not built because of the use of fossil fuels, it is built that way because it is most cost effective. Use that cost effectiveness as a template for a solution based on renewables. Anything else will just be more expensive due to under-utilisation.

The cost of standby fossil power generation is absolutely nothing new. Nuclear required a lot of it (for network stability in case of SCRAMs), it was maintained for this use, and nobody counted it as being a cost related to nuclear. It "just was" there.

Yes, it is very costly, but remember to divide that to the kWh used. What matters in the energy bill is the bottom line. And this electricity being expensive for a while works as an incentive to do load optimization, to the extent possible. On the other hand, even if you can't do anything about your consumption, two expensive weeks should not become a dominating factor in your annual bill even if it was 20x more expensive.

And if you don't like this, utilities will be selling you fixed-price contracts and handle the price volatility and risk within themselves, just like it has worked for decades already.
 

Online vad

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #193 on: July 17, 2023, 07:23:30 pm »
A government report from 2018 estimated a range of about 1 to 8 million USD per mile for HVDC transmission lines.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmission/pdf/transmission.pdf

So taking the high side figure of that... $8mn per mile or $5mn per km.  $5 billion to build a 5000km line.

If it transmitted the same power as the Chinese line - 12GW - and had 75% availability - it would move 78.9 TWh per year. 

So over a 100 year lifespan about 15c/kWh.  A bit more than I expected, but if the line costs closer to the low end at larger scales, it makes a lot more sense.
Three issues:

1) The correct investment amount is $25 billion, not $5 billion.
2) Interest on the 100-year loan is missing.
3) Math errors.

Assuming a 100-year fixed-rate loan at 7.5% with $0 down:

- Estimated monthly payments for principal + interest: $156 million/month.

- Energy delivered every month: 12 GW * 0.75 * 1,000,000 kW/GW * 30 days/month * 24 h/day = 6,480,000,000 kWh/month = 6,480 million kWh/month.

- Therefore, the average cost of delivering 1 kWh: $156 million/month / 6,480 million kWh/month = 0.024 $/kWh = 2.4 cents per kWh.

Given Dave’s advice that no project should be started unless revenue is at least 2.5 times the cost, and assuming grid owners are not too greedy, it would mean that about 6 US cents per kWh would be added to the wholesale delivery price. This would result in a delivery charge price hike on the order of magnitude of US 10 cents per kWh for consumers.
« Last Edit: July 17, 2023, 07:25:57 pm by vad »
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #194 on: July 17, 2023, 08:42:28 pm »
An interesting recent monograph about project planning, from home improvement up to large-scale projects:  Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner How Big Things Get Done, Currency 2023.
Besides important recommendations about planning, especially getting the errors made and corrected on paper rather than during construction, is a list of project types ranked from historically worst results to best results.
"Bad" means over budget; with statistics for mean overrun, % of projects in tail of distribution, and mean overrun of projects in tail.
Going from worst to best in his list, with major omissions:
Nuclear waste storage, Olympic Games, Nuclear Power, Hydroelectric dams, IT, ... , Bus transit, Rail, Airports, ... , Fossil thermal power, Roads, Pipelines, Wind power, Energy transmission, Solar power.
See his discussion of the list:  "solar power" is incredibly good, with a mean cost overrun of only 1%.
In his discussion, he points out that the worst stuff is always a one-off unique design (nuclear reactors are not in mass production, although future projects could change that);  Olympic Games are the poster child for this.
The best stuff is inherently modular, such as solar panels made in factories and installed on site.
Even fossil thermal power is just bolting together catalog items from the boiler factories.
The transport projects are somewhere in the middle of the list, with distribution tails falling between his "fat tails" (Olympic Games) and "thin tails" (power plants and transmission).
 

Offline tszaboo

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #195 on: July 17, 2023, 08:48:47 pm »
That 5 billion specifically sounds like a small sum of money, Finland can easily pay for it and much more, and we don't except anything in return.

That's because the maths is wrong. 5,000 x 5,000,000 is 25,000,000,000, not 5,000,000,000
Don't worry, because the price/kwh calculation is also wrong.

Let me try, with average price 4.5 million/mile and 40-year lifetime:
4500000/1.6 * 5000 / (12000000*0.75*40*365*24) = 0.00445 USD/kWh
doesn't sound too shabby, yes, or did I miscalculate it too?

This price matches my intuition. Power transfer is absolutely everywhere, even in many of the poorest of countries. It is simple and requires only very common materials and similar construction techniques roads and buildings are built with, everywhere. Transfering power for 500-1000km is nothing special currently. I fail to see the exponentially increasing complexity and cost people are assuming when discussing improving the current transmission systems.
That makes more sense, isn't it? They were building 750kVAC transmission lines in the 70s all over East Europe, to connect countries to nuclear plants (and to make them dependent on the power delivery from abroad). It's really not rocket science, and these lines still work, even if they are not used for one reason or another. And nuclear costs somewhere at 1-2c/kwh, that's how much existing nuclear plants are bidding for generation. Meanwhile the clueless greens are telling us that nuclear is cost prohibitive while they are gluing themselves to Rembrandt paintings.
 

Offline tom66

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Re: the dark side of cobalt
« Reply #196 on: July 17, 2023, 09:47:39 pm »
That 5 billion specifically sounds like a small sum of money, Finland can easily pay for it and much more, and we don't except anything in return.

That's because the maths is wrong. 5,000 x 5,000,000 is 25,000,000,000, not 5,000,000,000
Ah, damn.  I did the maths at $1 billion and forgot to square it all.  Anyway, I promise I can math.  Maybe.
 


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