cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17558715
Hell yeah
I can’t wait to see this headline again but about a bigger battery somewhere else
Nice. This seems to be the future that solves a lot of problems. Right now in Australia, we’re seriously entertaining building nuclear power plants for the first time ever, to provide base load power that renewables allegedly can’t. Large sodium batteries could help us avoid that.
The LNP doesn’t have a legitimate interest in transitioning to nuclear power or they would’ve begun over the last decade or so that they were in power.
Instead they’ve proposed - now that they’re in opposition - a technology which is banned at the Federal level and individually at the state level, because they know that gives them years of lead time before they ever have to begin the project.
On top of that, all of the proposed sites are owned by companies who’ve already begun transitioning to renewable generation or renewable storage, and most of them are in states in which the state Premiers have publicly stated that they will not consider overturning their bans on nuclear power.
All this talk about nuclear only does one thing, keeping fossil fuels relevant for longer.
It’s not just base load, turbines also provide grid stability. All the quick fluctuations as people turn things on and off are hard to load balance with solar, wind, or battery. A big spinning turbine has a lot of inertia. That helps keep thr grid at a constant frequency. As solar gets bigger and bigger we might need big solar powdered flywheel generators just to stabilize the grid.
Inverters could also provide “virtual inertia” which help to stabilize the grid frequency. However most of today’s inverters don’t have it, or it’s disabled.
This means we don’t need solar powered flywheels, which are inherently inefficient, we just need software (edit: and batteries of course) more or less.
The other side of that is matching supply to demand is basically instant. You pull power from batteries and they give you more (provided they’re not at their safe limit). There’s always a lag in getting turbines to spin up and down, and so there’s a non-trivial mismatch time.
Sounds like a way to waste loads of money and keep people on fossil fuels.
Must be way cheaper to build more batteries and build out inertia. (Would still need backup power at this point though).
Nuclear power should be expanded, a lot, it is the only realistic way to replace fossil plats for base demand.
And before anyone starts whining about “radiation scary”, nuclear waste is a solved problem.
You dig a hole deep into the bedrock, put the waste in dry casks, put the full drycasks in the hole, and backfill it with clay.
Done, solved!
A bigger radiation hazard is coal ash, from cosl power stations, they produce insane ammounts of ash which is radioactive.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
Storing coal ash is also a big problem:
http://www.southeastcoalash.org/about-coal-ash/coal-ash-storage/
Here is an interesting documentary about our fear of radiation, it is called Nuclear Nightmares, and was made by Horizon on BBC:
Imo “put it in a hole” isn’t exactly a great solution when the alternative is renewables but you’re definitely right about coal that shit is terrible.
Nuclear power should be expanded, a lot, it is the only realistic way to replace fossil plats for base demand.
This 90’s talking point against Greenpeace is no longer valid. The economics have changed.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/no-miracles-needed/8D183E65462B8DC43397C19D7B6518E3
Context is important here. The conversation here was about Australia’s nuclear capacity. A country where nuclear power is banned at both state and federal levels. Where the plan for it’s use is currently uncosted, the planned sites have been selected without environmental protection studies and several of which are supposed to be SMRs.
Would you build a bleeding edge nuclear reactor without a legal framework to govern its construction or operation? Without a workforce trained in its functions? Without considering the environmental factors of its geography? Without considering the cost?
Probably not. But that’s the current plan put forward by the reactionary right in Australia and this from a party who doesn’t believe in climate change, have no emissions targets, and whose whole plan is to continue to run and build coal power until whatever time they work out the details on nuclear.
The draw-back with sodium batteries needs to be known, because they won’t replace lithium anytime soon.
The density is lower, which is a great problem in EVs.
Not trying to be negative, but for an EV, or anything handheld, you get more weight for less power. Which is essential in a car, that uses more power the heavier it is.
What sodium IS the best at, are use cases where weight and size doesn’t matter. Like with battery farms.
In this case they are much better than lithium.
While you’re not wrong, sodium batteries coming on the market have 200 Wh/kg. This is comparable to where LFP batteries were a few years ago. That means the newer sodium batteries are about as good as what’s in lots of EVs right now.
The ceiling is going to be lower than with lithium. Sodium ions themselves weigh about 3 times more than lithium, for the same +1 charge. So it’s not just that sodium is a certain number of years behind lithium. It’s that it’ll likely plateau at a point permanently behind where lithium will likely be.
Price per kw and price per kwh stored. And price per kwh over the expected lifetime of the battery itself (longevity and reliability and safety and disposal will have to be factored into total cost of ownership).
Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it’s probably moreso the auto industry’s fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.
If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won’t bother.
That’s assuming you don’t have issues charging at where you live, which is a pretty big if for a lot of people. A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.
A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.
Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that’s about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don’t go on long drives the vast majority of time and don’t more than fifty or so miles of range.
I’ll use Tesla as the example here only because it’s the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:
A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.
They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.
EV owner here. 50 miles is not practical, beacuse then I need another for the other 2% of trips that are longer than that. This also ignores detours or traffic jams, when google will try to reroute me over a longer, but faster route. Plus, the “50 miles” readout you get is always just an estimate and the real range depends on temperature, driving speed, start-stops and how much elevation you need to cover. Some 30km trips here cost me 50+ EV km because its all uphill in one direction. I usually add 30km to my trip as required charge, because when the battery reaches 25km the car starts to complain with a nervously blinking battery readout and a “Charge now!” message on the dashboard.
“But then you just charge during the trip!” - Well this only work if i go somewhere where i know where to find RELIABLE chargers. I am well aware that there are good apps that show me charging locations, but getting a charging spot I can actually use is a different story:
- charging station can be used by someone else, or there is queue and each car will most likely charge for 30+ mins. Of course, sometimes some inconsiderate pricks will hog a spot untill their car is fully charged, even if it takes his frikkin tesla 2h
- charging stations close for repairs, sometimes for weeks
- some charging stations need an account or RFID-tag before you can use their (but not other) charging network
- other charging stations require you to bring your own cable
- some charging stations dont have the connector you need for your car
- some stations on the map are bogus, for example that one at my local volvo dealership that only exists to charge the showroom and customer cars, but is not accessible to the public.
Not saying EVs are bad, but the charging infrastructure still needs some work to be reliable and accessible. Petrol stations always have some large, obnoxious signs on the side of the road that you cant miss; Charging stations are sometimes just a tiny grey box on a wall and a 5-space parking lot, or behind a building and you never notice it when driving by.
A lot of households, like my own, have multiple cars. We have a commuter (50 miles round trip) and a family car. We use the commuter for most trips around town (only commutes 2x/week), and the family car for longer road trips.
I don’t need a car that can do both, I just need to replace the commuter since that’s where the vast majority of our driving is.
Don’t try to solve the hard problem of putting charging stations in the middle of nowhere, solve the easy problem of replacing that second car. For that, sodium-ion is more than sufficient. Focus infrastructure improvements on apartment complexes, workplaces, and shopping centers so people who don’t have a garage can charge.
I wrote elsewhere about the infrastructure problem, but I’ll sum up a couple things. There’s around 200,000 gas stations in the United States. If there were an equivalent number of chargers around, having a small battery would be fine. Eventually this will be the case, but you highlight an important factor: closed ecosystems. All these chargers should work for any make of EV car.
As it stands with now, the need for a subscription or specific car or unique payment method is ludicrous. All these chargers should be required to have card readers the same way you can pay at the pump in a gas station. Beyond this, they’d all need to adopt the same charging method so people don’t need a bunch of adapters in their trunk.
That said, there could be regulations established to require newly built housing, apartment buildings included, to have electric vehicle charging infrastructure - and more than just a few plugs. Grants could be made available for retrofitting existing buildings. If these things came to fruition, we wouldn’t need two hundred thousand charging stations all over the place. It’s not out of the question to install an overnight charging spot for every person that has an electric car - it just costs money.
Basically every argument I’ve seen against low range electric cars is founded in a charging infrastructure problem. Going to a bigger battery in a larger vehicle has significant and more costly ramifications on other infrastructure. It’s better to aim for smaller, lighter vehicles with infrastructure in mind.
What other benefits do they have? Do they have less wear or are cheaper per Wh to produce?
Or at least, about to be when production ramps up further?
They are dirt cheap, don’t have the fire safety issues as some lithium chemistries (not all lithium chemistries do that), and sodium is abundant.
Well, sounds great for any non mobile storage then. Don’t think anybody cares whether their 10kWh solar battery is twice the size and weight if it’s half the price.
Thank you :)
Lithium batteries are often -30 to 80C, but that’s just saying what’s possible to squeeze some kind of voltage out of them. Basic principle is that the colder it is, the harder it is for chemical reactions to happen, and thus this will affect all chemical batteries to some degree.
Put one of these in every neighborhood please.
Check UK stories.
People leaving next to turbines hate them due to noise pollution.
People live on top of mountains?
Were are these wind turbines being placed? I hiked to a farm once and had one at work.
Now, I’m not saying they are silent but unless you put one in my back garden I never thought of them as loud.
the power station can be charged and discharged more than 300 times a year. A single charge can store up to 100,000 kWh of electricity and release electricity during the peak period of the power grid. It can meet the daily power needs of around 12,000 households and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 13,000 tons annually.
Nice
I love how these look like Lego pieces snapped onto a green base.
Even if all that is painted cement or something it is also just really refreshing to see architecture, especially the sort of necessity eyesore that tech architecture/engineering requires, also being mindfully the environment it will exist in to some degree. Even if it is only visual.
