NAUKA I KVAZINAUKA (izvorište inspiracije za mnoga SF dela) > TEHNIČKE NAUKE, SAOBRAĆAJ, KOSMONAUTIKA
Energetika juče, danas, sutra
Meho Krljic:
Da ne bismo dalje zagađivali druge topike koji su tangencijalno vezani za temu proizvodnje (tj. konverzije), skladištenja, distribucije i potrošnje (tj. opet konverzije) energije samo zato što je energija vezana i za ekološka pitanja i za teorijsku fiziku itd., evo posebnog topika za energetska pitanja. Inauguracioni post nek bude ovaj:
Tesla’s Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass
--- Quote ---Tesla Motors Inc. is making a huge bet that millions of small batteries can be strung together to help kick fossil fuels off the grid. The idea is a powerful one—one that’s been used to help justify the company’s $5 billion factory near Reno, Nev.—but batteries have so far only appeared in a handful of true, grid-scale pilot projects.
That changes this week.
Three massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.
Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that’s just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. “It’s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at,” he said. “Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.”
A Fossil-Fuel DisasterThe new battery projects were commissioned in response to a fossil-fuel disaster—the natural gas leak at Aliso Canyon, near the Los Angeles neighborhood of Porter Ranch. It released thousands of tons of methane into the air before it was sealed last February.
In its wake, Southern California Edison (SCE) rushed to deploy energy storage deals to alleviate the risk of winter blackouts. There wasn’t any time to waste: All of the projects rolling out this week were completed within 6 months, an unprecedented feat. Tesla moved particularly nimbly, completing in just three months a project that in the past would have taken years.
“There were teams working out there 24 hours a day, living in construction trailers and doing the commissioning work at two in the morning,” Straubel said. “It feels like the kind of pace that we need to change the world.”A Question of PriceThe battery storage industry—a key part of the plan if wind and solar power are to ever dominate the grid—is less than a decade old and still relatively small. Until recently, batteries were many times more expensive than natural gas “peaker” plants that fire up to meet surging demand in the evening and morning hours.
But prices for lithium-ion batteries have fallen fast—by almost half just since 2014. Electric cars are largely responsible, increasing demand and requiring a new scale of manufacturing for the same battery cells used in grid storage. California is mandating that its utilities begin testing batteries by adding more than 1.32 gigawatts by 2020. For context, consider this: In 2016, the global market for storage was less than a gigawatt.
California’s goal is considerable, but it’s dwarfed by Tesla’s ambition to single-handedly deliver 15 gigawatt hours 1 of battery storage a year by the 2020s—enough to provide several nuclear power plants–worth of electricity to the grid during peak hours of demand. Not everyone, however, is that optimistic.
“I’m not convinced,” said Yayoi Sekine, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst who covers battery technology. The market is “moving faster than ever, but it’s not on the gigawatt scale yet.”
Battery costs and profitability for utilities are difficult to evaluate. Companies are reluctant to give up their pricing data, and the expense is highly variable. Nevertheless, battery plants take up a much smaller footprint than gas-powered plants, they don’t pollute, and their instant response can provide valuable services better than any other technology. In a small but increasing number of scenarios, batteries are already the most economical option.
But for the most part, according to a BNEF analysis, the costs of new projects would need to drop by half in order to be profitable on a wider scale in California, and that’s not likely to happen for another decade. The total installed cost of a battery plant would need to fall to about $275 per kilowatt hour. While Tesla declined to provide its pricing data, the similarly sized Altagas project was expected to cost at least $40 million, or $500 per kilowatt hour. It's possible that with the remarkable scope of Tesla's Reno operations, the company will be able to establish new floors for pricing, forcing the industry to follow, BNEF's Sekine said.
It’s still early days, even with this week’s announcements. It will probably be a few years before Tesla’s battery-storage sales are material enough to break out separately from automotive sales on quarterly filings, Straubel said.The End of the Gas PeakerBut the battery’s day is coming, while those of natural gas peaker plants are numbered. That’s the prediction of John Zahurancik, AES’s president of battery storage. Zahurancik is one of the pioneers of energy storage, having cobbled together profitable edge-case storage projects since 2008, when battery prices were 10 times higher than they are today.
AES has completed installation and is doing final testing of a 30 megawatt/120 megawatt hour plant that’s even bigger than Tesla’s 20 MW/80 MWh. AES is also working on a longer-term project that will be five times the size of Tesla’s project when complete by 2021. 2 That’s a scale that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
“This is my fifth time doing the largest project in the world for energy storage, and each time people tell me, ‘well this is the test, this is really the test’” Zahurancik said in an interview Friday. “The next big test is how do we scale this up broadly.”
The biggest thing that sets Tesla and AES apart is that Tesla is building the components of its storage units itself at the company’s Gigafactory in Reno, including battery cells with partner Panasonic, modules, and inverters. Tesla says this vertical integration will help reduce costs and make a seamless system. AES says that dealing with a diverse supply chain allows it to seek the cheapest price and the best technology on the market. It's the same debate going on in the electric-car business, where Tesla is manufacturing an unprecedented percentage of its own parts in-house.
For now, gas peaker plants still win out on price for projects that aren’t constrained by space, emissions, or urgency, said Ron Nichols, President of SCE, the California utility responsible for most of the biggest battery storage contracts. 3 But that may change in the next five years, he said.
“Long term, will large amounts of batteries be able to take over?” Nichols asked. “We’ll need to get some hours under our belts to know for sure.”
—With assistance from Dana Hull.
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Meho Krljic:
Pa onda:
Researcher Develops Completely Explosion-Proof Lithium Metal Battery With 2X Power Of Lithium Ion
--- Quote --- It seems that we're constantly hearing about promising new battery technologies and eventually one of them will stick. Mike Zimmerman, a professor at Tufts University and founder of Ionic Materials, hopes that his remarkably resilient ionic battery technology will be the one that does. At a glance, his ionic battery technology appears to a legitimate shot at finally pushing the category forward in a significant way.
The reason scientists and researchers pay so much attention to battery design is because today's lithium-ion units have several downsides. As we saw recently with Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 recall, they can overheat and catch fire. Even when they work correctly, lithium-ion batteries degrade over a relatively short time as they go through recharge cycles, and they don't last all that long to begin with.
If you were to take apart a lithium-ion battery, you'd find a positive electrode called the anode and a negatively charged electrode called the cathode. There's a thin sheet with microscopic pores called a separator that sits between the anode and cathode. Everything else is filled up with liquid, or electrolyte.
Charging the battery causes positively charged ions to flow through the liquid from the negative side to the positive side. As you use the battery, the ions flow in the opposite direction. It's a serviceable solution, but the electrolyte is extremely flammable and sensitive to being poked—they can explode when pierced. This is called thermal runaway, which is what the Galaxy Note 7's batteries experienced.
Zimmerman's ionic battery trades the flammable liquid for a piece of plastic film to serve as the electrolyte. It isn't prone to overheating and catching fire. You can even take a lighter to it and it still won't catch fire. The same goes for piercing it, cutting it, or otherwise destroying the battery in some other physical manner.
This is something Zimmerman has demonstrated by connecting an LED panel to his ionic battery. Even as he bends and cuts the battery, the LEDs remain lit. He's also done this while powering an iPad with his battery, as shown above.
That's not the only benefit. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, Zimmerman's ionic batteries use actual lithium-metal, which can store twice as much power. Lithium-ion batteries don't contain lithium-metal because they're even more prone to overheating and exploding than lithium-ion, but that risk is removed by Zimmerman swapping out the liquid electrolyte for a solid.
Will this be the next big thing in batteries? We don't know, though Zimmerman says that electronic companies have paid him a visit at his Ionic Materials facility in Woburn, MA. Zimmerman admits there is still a lot of reliability testing to be done and it will be difficult to scale his operations, but he's confident it can and will be accomplished.
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Meho Krljic:
China is now the world’s largest solar power producer
--- Quote ---While China's solar energy capacity isn't that impressive when compared to the size of its population, it's showing a renewed dedication to renewable energy.
Not only is it the world’s most populous country, it’s now also the world’s biggest producer of solar energy. On Saturday, the National Energy Administration (NEA) noted that the nation officially claimed the title after doubling its installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity last year. By the end of 2016, China’s capacity hit 77.42 gigawatts, and while this is great in terms of raw numbers, it’s a lot less impressive relative to the country’s massive population.
As it stands, solar energy represents only one percent of the country’s energy output. But this may soon change as China devotes more and more of its attention towards clean energy. The NEA says that China will seek to add more than 110 gigawatts within the next three years, which could help the nation up the proportion of its renewable energy use to 20 percent by 2030. Today, it stands at 11 percent.
China’s geography certainly lends itself to large solar energy farms. Last year, Shandong, Xinjiang, and Henan provinces enjoyed the greatest increase in their solar capacity, whereas Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia ended up with the most overall capacity at the end of 2016.
Weaning itself off of fossil fuels will require quite a hefty investment; one that China appears ready to make. As per a Reuters report, the nation will be pouring some 2.5 trillion yuan ($364 billion) into renewable power generation by the end of the decade. This dedication to environmentally friendly energy sources could put pressure on other nations around the world to do the same. Already, Ireland has passed a bill that would make it the first country to divest from fossil fuels. And some countries are finding increasingly creative ways of moving away from fossil fuels — Iceland, for example, is drilling the world’s largest well for geothermal energy.
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Meho Krljic:
Pa, lepo:
Almost 90% of new power in Europe from renewable sources in 2016
Labudan:
Eto, ne kukajte zbog Trampa, sve će biti u redu!
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