"For use case 2 (grid scale energy storage) we want the most compact way to store energy and we, ideally, want to be able to use it to remove the instability that widespread use of renewables adds to any grid. That means we want the renewables to store whatever power they generate in something that is not necessarily directly connected to the grid."
I agree with some of what you write in this piece but I think you're begging the question in favor of power-to-fuel conversion a bit.
When it comes to grid-scale storage, compactness isn't particularly important at all, and portability can be provided by the grid itself. Power demand is generally very predictable in both time and place, which is why the grid works in the first place. If you need to move a GWh of power from Arizona to LA, the electrical grid is by far the easiest way to do that.
Most of the problems with renewables right now are time-shifting in the domain of 12-48 hours, to handle demand smoothing and cope with normal variations in output. Lithium-ion batteries are becoming cheap enough to be economically compelling here, though other technologies like iron-air may be a lot better in this application.
Also, the more willing you are to accept some fossil fuel use or nuke power, the less power you need to bank to make the math work. This is doubly true the wider your grid can be geographically, so if we get a 12-day storm and freeze in the northeast, we can call on conventional generators in the midwest and southeast.
I have looked at installing a NG genset to handle the occasional (3-24 hour) outages I get 1-2x per year, and for not a lot more money I can get a battery system that could do that *and* store solar output. At current New England electrical rates, such a system reaches break-even in about 12 years, even with our far-from-optimal weather. This is due partly to our very high rates, but also to how much the cost of batteries and panels has fallen, and both continue to fall.
Also, the efficiency of AC:DC conversion has improved quite a bit in recent decades as ultra-high power semiconductors have evolved, and long-distance transmission via DC is in some cases more efficient than AC. This increases the potential for demand smoothing across more of the country, which if done correctly could do a lot to increase reliability and redundancy.
As for vehicles, everyone I know who owns an EV as a second car seems very happy with it. If you're a 1-car household, a plug-in hybrid seems like a better bet unless you don't drive a lot of miles, and I tend to think we are over-promoting EVs relative to hybrids.
Of course if electric:hydrocarbon conversion becomes a LOT more efficient, then sure, it could do a lot, but so far all the processes for fuel synthesis have god-awful efficiency and the economics are much worse than batteries.
We are a 2 car household. I looked at a Nissan Sakura as 2nd car. A ~15 y.o. kei was so much cheaper, even with the tax subsidy on the Sakura, that there was possible way to justify the electric car. I mean even including the inspections every 2 years, the fuel and any other anticipated maintenance I think it would take (in theory) a quarter century for the Sakura to be cheaper.
I'm not quite sure how long you can drive the Sakura before it needs something expensive like new batteries but I doubt it is anywhere near 25 years. I could literally replace the ICE kei twice and have it still be cheaper over a decade of anticipated use.
The ONLY reason we looked hard at the Sakura is to have it act as a battery for power outages but the cost of installing the system to charge/discharge the car made those economics equally poor.
This is a pretty weird comparison--a 15yo car is always going to be a lot cheaper to buy than a brand new anything. Not sure that proves much of anything. Though here in the US, 15 years is starting to get risky for repairability on many cars simply due to parts availability. A friend recently replaced a 20yo Benz that was running like a top simply because basic wear parts were starting to become unavailable.
Realistically in the US, most cars don't last much beyond 10 years or 150-200K. The model S came out in 2012 so we are seeing real world proof that they can last that long. If anything, besides the battery most of the mechanics seem to hold up better than the average ICE car. As battery costs continue to fall, it's going to become more economical to replace/remanufacture the battery packs and probably keep many of those cars on the road another 5-10 years.
FWIW, I'm not talking my book here, my household owns a gas truck, SUV, and sports car, not to mention a diesel tractor and excavator. But I do think it's very likely that my next purchase will be a plug-in hybrid or full EV.
What 15 yo EV or hybrid could he compare it with? We just had to change cars. We had a 13 yo Toyota Rumion, (Scion in the States) that we bought new and loved. Last year it became too expensive to keep on the road, but not due to mechanical issues as it was still sound in that department. The electronics keep failing and cost a fortune to fix. My wife decided upon a 2 yo Honda Step Wagon hybrid because it can be used as a power source for emergencies or while camping. I am not sold on the idea, but am less concerned with hybrids than full EVs. Too many fires that have been known to take out the home it was plugged into and sometimes neighboring homes as well. But a concern for those of us near the sea, ICE powered vehicles can be restored to running condition if flooded. EVs and I believe hybrids are toast if storm surge or floods inundate them. Case in point, the area we just went camping in is getting pounded by a typhoon as I type this. As we were right on the beach and the route home was along the sea shore, both fresh and salt water would be of concern if the storm hit a little earlier. While I am not aware of stories of EVs and hybrids getting written off and difficultly disposing of in such situations here in Japan, I am aware of such in the States.
In the US if your car gets flooded it is totaled, ICE or EV. The only thing I can think of that would be worse to own than a salvaged flood car is a flood car that was in salt water. That stuff eats cars alive and once it's in it's impossible to clear out. There are good arguments against EVs but this has got to be one of the weirdest I've ever heard.
I must have grown up poor. While not in my family, I know people who had their cars flooded and were able to dry them out and get them back on the road. Two years ago, maybe three, we had our Toyota Rumion, known as a Scion in the States get flooded. Very strange case. We do not drive our car daily, nor often even weekly. I noticed that there was often a water puddle underneath our car but could not figure out why. Always in a hurry, if I noticed this, it was only upon returning home and then, only if during daylight hours, which was rare.
Once I finally needed to drive somewhere, the entire interior was soggy. Took it into the dealer and they determined that leaves had blocked the drain for the air intake just below the window and water flowed into the car. We did have some unbelievably heavy downpours a month or so prior. They checked out the electrical system, luckily, it was still functioning properly. I went online and there are many sites in the U.S. instructing what to if your gets flooded. As I suspected, they all instructed drying out immediately after it flooded. So, it is not uncommon in the States to dry out flooded cars. It being weeks or more since our car got filled with water, I ordered a complete new interior for the car. Toyota thought I was nuts, could not understand why I thought it unhealthy to drive in a car that had been soaked inside for weeks and left that way.
A year ago the electronics started giving us fits to the point that it was getting too expensive to keep it on the road. The mechanics were sound, but the sensors and airbag control system, etc, kept going out. So we replaced the car.
Salt water eats up ICE cars but leads to spontaneous fires that cannot be doused in EVs and Hybrids.
The comparison is use case. I don't buy cars because I want a car. I want a cheap, efficient, safe etc. way to go to the places I need to go to with the stuff I need to take. A second car that never goes further than about 50 miles from our house doesn't need to be new
You will note that in the actual article I compared new to new and the EV still loses.
You're arguing against a claim I didn't make. Your article posits a whole bunch of problems (doesn't work in cold, need a generator if they break down, etc.) which imply that they are extravagantly unfit for purpose. I simply replied that I know a ton of people who've bought them over the past decade, some are on their second or third EV by now, and of 20+ I only know one who actually regrets their purchase. All the others say they might never buy an ICE car again. Most of these folks live in the northeast US, where it does in fact get cold part of the year. The problems you're talking about are not the common experience of anybody I know who's bought one of the things.
Battery costs are another issue but we don't need those to come down very much for EVs to reach cost parity, particularly plug-in hybrids. The idea that we're approaching some natural floor in costs seems historically naive to me. Look at how much better ICEs have gotten in just the past 10-15 years, and that is a technology that has been around over a century.
Synthetic hydrocarbons, gasoline, interesting but but but, everybody knows, because everybody's been told over and over and louder and louder that CO₂ is destroying the planet!
If only the market were allowed to make these decisions instead of the bureaucrats.
I often think of a line from a Larry Niven story: ,'Any chemical reaction can be reversed with sufficient energy' If it is cheap enough (hint: lots of nukes) then making hydrocarbons makes more sense than charging batteries. If you pull the CO2 directly from the air then its carbon neutral too, if that is what the politician's prioritise. Aviation would also benefit a lot from these synthetic fuels, a battery powered airliner wouldn't get very far!
Batteries is the subject of another possible post on technological revenge I have been contemplating. I have never been enthralled with rechargeable devices, preferring dry cell batteries instead. The reason is that as long as you have spare batteries, operation of the device con continues virtually uninterrupted. With rechargeable devices, when the battery runs out, the devise is just something heavy to carry until you can plug it in. Not as universal a problem now as it was in the past, but many rechargeable devices cannot be used while charging or can only under reduced capabilities. I have this problem with a portable, rechargeable fan I sometimes bring in to work. Fully charged, it l lasts less than an hour at full power. Settings below full power are so weak that the only thing they do is run the battery out without pushing enough air to have any cooling effect. Yes, these would be heavier if powered by dry cell batts, but which is heavier burden, the heavier item that that still functions or the light one that doesn’t?
Another area to compare hybrid/EVs against ICE is carrying capacity. The batteries being as heavy as they are, this can drastically reduce the weight of cargo Hybrids and EVs can carry compared to ICE of the same model.
Terraform Industries is working to do exactly what you are proposing - turn increasingly cheap solar energy into synthetic natural gas (CH4) including direct air capture of CO2 so it is carbon neutral. They have complete proof of concept and have a roadmap to drive this to cost-competitiveness with extracted gas.
Heavy sigh... Yes, the renewable energy industry would be all over a solution like that, if it existed and was cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries. It doesn't (yet) and it isn't (yet). The idea of using hydrogen for energy storage is similar, except that making hydrogen is much more energy efficient and cheaper than making hydrocarbons (and the engineering is better understood, too). Of course, hydrocarbons are much easier to store than hydrogen, and everyone in the industry knows that too - and still they're trying to get hydrogen to work because it pencils out better.
So, this whole article is a call to action that "assumes the existence of unobtainium." That assumption might need a little work.
Well it's not total unobtainium given the Haru Oni plant. I get that it isn't yet cost competitive, yet. But renewables in general aren't cost competitive AND suffer from the intermittency problem. If someone figures out how to store hydrogen that would be great. My feel is that the best way is to attach it to some carbon atoms
And relative longevity - lithium-ion batteries last longer than their nickel- and lead-based ancestors, in terms of both calendar life and charge-discharge cycles. This is a big reason why the military has embraced lithium-ion for man-portable applications, and is embracing the technology now for vehicle starting/lighting/ignition (SLI) batteries ... increased life means a less-burdensome logistical "tail" to support these uses.
The problem with battery-based grid storage, is in that term "relative" - even the best batteries gradually experience significant degradation in storage capacity over time and must be replaced.
When they go out with a whimper, instead of the (rare) bang, it doesn't attract headlines, but significantly impacts the economics of grid storage vs. fossil/coal/nuke generation because of the continuous numbers of batteries that require replacement.
Studies done under the aegis of Project Independence in the 1970s by Stanford Research Institute established that the major energy advantage of EVs is not the vehicle itself, but rather that it could be charged at night. Because electrical generating capacity is built for peak demand, and normally there is less usage at night, night electricity is practically free. All the other claimed energy advantages of EVs fail to take into account the energy system as a whole. That hasn't stopped promoters from making EVs into a virtue-signaling status symbol for the latte crowd. Never mind that African children mine cobalt for EV batteries under appalling conditions. EV owners have their own precious selves to consider, suffering from a new malady -- range anxiety.
"For use case 2 (grid scale energy storage) we want the most compact way to store energy and we, ideally, want to be able to use it to remove the instability that widespread use of renewables adds to any grid. That means we want the renewables to store whatever power they generate in something that is not necessarily directly connected to the grid."
I agree with some of what you write in this piece but I think you're begging the question in favor of power-to-fuel conversion a bit.
When it comes to grid-scale storage, compactness isn't particularly important at all, and portability can be provided by the grid itself. Power demand is generally very predictable in both time and place, which is why the grid works in the first place. If you need to move a GWh of power from Arizona to LA, the electrical grid is by far the easiest way to do that.
Most of the problems with renewables right now are time-shifting in the domain of 12-48 hours, to handle demand smoothing and cope with normal variations in output. Lithium-ion batteries are becoming cheap enough to be economically compelling here, though other technologies like iron-air may be a lot better in this application.
Also, the more willing you are to accept some fossil fuel use or nuke power, the less power you need to bank to make the math work. This is doubly true the wider your grid can be geographically, so if we get a 12-day storm and freeze in the northeast, we can call on conventional generators in the midwest and southeast.
I have looked at installing a NG genset to handle the occasional (3-24 hour) outages I get 1-2x per year, and for not a lot more money I can get a battery system that could do that *and* store solar output. At current New England electrical rates, such a system reaches break-even in about 12 years, even with our far-from-optimal weather. This is due partly to our very high rates, but also to how much the cost of batteries and panels has fallen, and both continue to fall.
Also, the efficiency of AC:DC conversion has improved quite a bit in recent decades as ultra-high power semiconductors have evolved, and long-distance transmission via DC is in some cases more efficient than AC. This increases the potential for demand smoothing across more of the country, which if done correctly could do a lot to increase reliability and redundancy.
As for vehicles, everyone I know who owns an EV as a second car seems very happy with it. If you're a 1-car household, a plug-in hybrid seems like a better bet unless you don't drive a lot of miles, and I tend to think we are over-promoting EVs relative to hybrids.
Of course if electric:hydrocarbon conversion becomes a LOT more efficient, then sure, it could do a lot, but so far all the processes for fuel synthesis have god-awful efficiency and the economics are much worse than batteries.
We are a 2 car household. I looked at a Nissan Sakura as 2nd car. A ~15 y.o. kei was so much cheaper, even with the tax subsidy on the Sakura, that there was possible way to justify the electric car. I mean even including the inspections every 2 years, the fuel and any other anticipated maintenance I think it would take (in theory) a quarter century for the Sakura to be cheaper.
I'm not quite sure how long you can drive the Sakura before it needs something expensive like new batteries but I doubt it is anywhere near 25 years. I could literally replace the ICE kei twice and have it still be cheaper over a decade of anticipated use.
The ONLY reason we looked hard at the Sakura is to have it act as a battery for power outages but the cost of installing the system to charge/discharge the car made those economics equally poor.
This is a pretty weird comparison--a 15yo car is always going to be a lot cheaper to buy than a brand new anything. Not sure that proves much of anything. Though here in the US, 15 years is starting to get risky for repairability on many cars simply due to parts availability. A friend recently replaced a 20yo Benz that was running like a top simply because basic wear parts were starting to become unavailable.
Realistically in the US, most cars don't last much beyond 10 years or 150-200K. The model S came out in 2012 so we are seeing real world proof that they can last that long. If anything, besides the battery most of the mechanics seem to hold up better than the average ICE car. As battery costs continue to fall, it's going to become more economical to replace/remanufacture the battery packs and probably keep many of those cars on the road another 5-10 years.
FWIW, I'm not talking my book here, my household owns a gas truck, SUV, and sports car, not to mention a diesel tractor and excavator. But I do think it's very likely that my next purchase will be a plug-in hybrid or full EV.
What 15 yo EV or hybrid could he compare it with? We just had to change cars. We had a 13 yo Toyota Rumion, (Scion in the States) that we bought new and loved. Last year it became too expensive to keep on the road, but not due to mechanical issues as it was still sound in that department. The electronics keep failing and cost a fortune to fix. My wife decided upon a 2 yo Honda Step Wagon hybrid because it can be used as a power source for emergencies or while camping. I am not sold on the idea, but am less concerned with hybrids than full EVs. Too many fires that have been known to take out the home it was plugged into and sometimes neighboring homes as well. But a concern for those of us near the sea, ICE powered vehicles can be restored to running condition if flooded. EVs and I believe hybrids are toast if storm surge or floods inundate them. Case in point, the area we just went camping in is getting pounded by a typhoon as I type this. As we were right on the beach and the route home was along the sea shore, both fresh and salt water would be of concern if the storm hit a little earlier. While I am not aware of stories of EVs and hybrids getting written off and difficultly disposing of in such situations here in Japan, I am aware of such in the States.
In the US if your car gets flooded it is totaled, ICE or EV. The only thing I can think of that would be worse to own than a salvaged flood car is a flood car that was in salt water. That stuff eats cars alive and once it's in it's impossible to clear out. There are good arguments against EVs but this has got to be one of the weirdest I've ever heard.
I must have grown up poor. While not in my family, I know people who had their cars flooded and were able to dry them out and get them back on the road. Two years ago, maybe three, we had our Toyota Rumion, known as a Scion in the States get flooded. Very strange case. We do not drive our car daily, nor often even weekly. I noticed that there was often a water puddle underneath our car but could not figure out why. Always in a hurry, if I noticed this, it was only upon returning home and then, only if during daylight hours, which was rare.
Once I finally needed to drive somewhere, the entire interior was soggy. Took it into the dealer and they determined that leaves had blocked the drain for the air intake just below the window and water flowed into the car. We did have some unbelievably heavy downpours a month or so prior. They checked out the electrical system, luckily, it was still functioning properly. I went online and there are many sites in the U.S. instructing what to if your gets flooded. As I suspected, they all instructed drying out immediately after it flooded. So, it is not uncommon in the States to dry out flooded cars. It being weeks or more since our car got filled with water, I ordered a complete new interior for the car. Toyota thought I was nuts, could not understand why I thought it unhealthy to drive in a car that had been soaked inside for weeks and left that way.
A year ago the electronics started giving us fits to the point that it was getting too expensive to keep it on the road. The mechanics were sound, but the sensors and airbag control system, etc, kept going out. So we replaced the car.
Salt water eats up ICE cars but leads to spontaneous fires that cannot be doused in EVs and Hybrids.
The comparison is use case. I don't buy cars because I want a car. I want a cheap, efficient, safe etc. way to go to the places I need to go to with the stuff I need to take. A second car that never goes further than about 50 miles from our house doesn't need to be new
You will note that in the actual article I compared new to new and the EV still loses.
You're arguing against a claim I didn't make. Your article posits a whole bunch of problems (doesn't work in cold, need a generator if they break down, etc.) which imply that they are extravagantly unfit for purpose. I simply replied that I know a ton of people who've bought them over the past decade, some are on their second or third EV by now, and of 20+ I only know one who actually regrets their purchase. All the others say they might never buy an ICE car again. Most of these folks live in the northeast US, where it does in fact get cold part of the year. The problems you're talking about are not the common experience of anybody I know who's bought one of the things.
Battery costs are another issue but we don't need those to come down very much for EVs to reach cost parity, particularly plug-in hybrids. The idea that we're approaching some natural floor in costs seems historically naive to me. Look at how much better ICEs have gotten in just the past 10-15 years, and that is a technology that has been around over a century.
Synthetic hydrocarbons, gasoline, interesting but but but, everybody knows, because everybody's been told over and over and louder and louder that CO₂ is destroying the planet!
If only the market were allowed to make these decisions instead of the bureaucrats.
I often think of a line from a Larry Niven story: ,'Any chemical reaction can be reversed with sufficient energy' If it is cheap enough (hint: lots of nukes) then making hydrocarbons makes more sense than charging batteries. If you pull the CO2 directly from the air then its carbon neutral too, if that is what the politician's prioritise. Aviation would also benefit a lot from these synthetic fuels, a battery powered airliner wouldn't get very far!
Batteries is the subject of another possible post on technological revenge I have been contemplating. I have never been enthralled with rechargeable devices, preferring dry cell batteries instead. The reason is that as long as you have spare batteries, operation of the device con continues virtually uninterrupted. With rechargeable devices, when the battery runs out, the devise is just something heavy to carry until you can plug it in. Not as universal a problem now as it was in the past, but many rechargeable devices cannot be used while charging or can only under reduced capabilities. I have this problem with a portable, rechargeable fan I sometimes bring in to work. Fully charged, it l lasts less than an hour at full power. Settings below full power are so weak that the only thing they do is run the battery out without pushing enough air to have any cooling effect. Yes, these would be heavier if powered by dry cell batts, but which is heavier burden, the heavier item that that still functions or the light one that doesn’t?
Another area to compare hybrid/EVs against ICE is carrying capacity. The batteries being as heavy as they are, this can drastically reduce the weight of cargo Hybrids and EVs can carry compared to ICE of the same model.
Right as I note in the post, EVs weigh 30% more than equivalent ICEs
True, but this also means less cargo carrying capacity.
Terraform Industries is working to do exactly what you are proposing - turn increasingly cheap solar energy into synthetic natural gas (CH4) including direct air capture of CO2 so it is carbon neutral. They have complete proof of concept and have a roadmap to drive this to cost-competitiveness with extracted gas.
Heavy sigh... Yes, the renewable energy industry would be all over a solution like that, if it existed and was cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries. It doesn't (yet) and it isn't (yet). The idea of using hydrogen for energy storage is similar, except that making hydrogen is much more energy efficient and cheaper than making hydrocarbons (and the engineering is better understood, too). Of course, hydrocarbons are much easier to store than hydrogen, and everyone in the industry knows that too - and still they're trying to get hydrogen to work because it pencils out better.
So, this whole article is a call to action that "assumes the existence of unobtainium." That assumption might need a little work.
Well it's not total unobtainium given the Haru Oni plant. I get that it isn't yet cost competitive, yet. But renewables in general aren't cost competitive AND suffer from the intermittency problem. If someone figures out how to store hydrogen that would be great. My feel is that the best way is to attach it to some carbon atoms
Hydrogen burns great -- remember the Hindenburg. Explosively, you might say.
And it leaks from everything and burns with an invisible flame and...
Hydrogen is bad
"The answer is simply energy density."
And relative longevity - lithium-ion batteries last longer than their nickel- and lead-based ancestors, in terms of both calendar life and charge-discharge cycles. This is a big reason why the military has embraced lithium-ion for man-portable applications, and is embracing the technology now for vehicle starting/lighting/ignition (SLI) batteries ... increased life means a less-burdensome logistical "tail" to support these uses.
The problem with battery-based grid storage, is in that term "relative" - even the best batteries gradually experience significant degradation in storage capacity over time and must be replaced.
When they go out with a whimper, instead of the (rare) bang, it doesn't attract headlines, but significantly impacts the economics of grid storage vs. fossil/coal/nuke generation because of the continuous numbers of batteries that require replacement.
Studies done under the aegis of Project Independence in the 1970s by Stanford Research Institute established that the major energy advantage of EVs is not the vehicle itself, but rather that it could be charged at night. Because electrical generating capacity is built for peak demand, and normally there is less usage at night, night electricity is practically free. All the other claimed energy advantages of EVs fail to take into account the energy system as a whole. That hasn't stopped promoters from making EVs into a virtue-signaling status symbol for the latte crowd. Never mind that African children mine cobalt for EV batteries under appalling conditions. EV owners have their own precious selves to consider, suffering from a new malady -- range anxiety.
https://youtu.be/vKBOrkk1FZE?si=jaz3ekOAcPunUIJx