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@Paekakboyz I guess the drum I keep banging is we are one good battery away from cracking the energy crisis. Good means cheap, scalable and by inference not incredibly high tech.
Hell, if we had simple machines to convert air into hydrocarbons (suck out C from CO2 and H and O from water), we'd start incentivising solar/wind at any time. Not sure what the efficiency numbers are ( @NTA ) will have an opinion I'm sure, but shifts the problem from 'generating power when we need it' to 'just generate power'.
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That article led me to this one about organic flow batteries. Just think of the problems we could solve if some of the people studying generic soft arts and sciences would focus on stuff like this instead.
https://www.science.org/content/article/rhubarb-battery-could-store-energy-future
Flow batteries are another option. Unlike conventional batteries, which pack the chemical reactants and electrodes together, flow batteries keep their reactants in separate tanks. Energy can be extracted, or fed into the reactants, simply by flowing the materials past two electrodes separated by a membrane. A full-scale pilot project of the leading flow battery contender, based on vanadium ions dissolved in water, is due to be completed next year in Japan for grid storage. But vanadium is expensive. The vanadium alone in a flow battery with the storage capacity to provide a kilowatt-hour of electricity now costs $81. Adding the other components raises the price to between $350 and $700 per kilowatt-hour. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the cost target for a viable grid storage technology is about $100 per kilowatt-hour.
Hoping to get closer to that mark, a team led by Michael Aziz, a physicist at Harvard University, decided to explore organic molecules called quinones. The compounds have long been known for being adept at grabbing and releasing electrons, a key requirement for a battery material. And they are plentiful in plants and even crude oil, making them potentially cheap. So Aziz says he and his students started testing a few different types of quinones in a flow battery and got fair results. That prompted them to team up with theoretical chemists led by Alán Aspuru-Guzik of Harvard to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules. That's where they hit upon the rhubarblike compound.
Aziz and his team incorporated it into their flow battery setup. In one tank they place the quinone, abbreviated AQDSH2, dissolved in water. In a separate tank they place Br2, or bromine liquid. To get electricity out, they pump the two liquids past adjoining electrodes separated by a thin proton-conducting membrane. At one electrode, each quinone molecule gives up two electrons and two protons. The electrons zip through an outside circuit to the opposite electrode, where they meet up with the protons that passed through the membrane. The partners then combine with a bromine atom to make molecules of HBr. To store energy, the researchers simply run the pumps in reverse and provide energetic electrons. That coaxes the hydrogens to break away from bromine atoms and reattach themselves to the quinone at the opposite electrode. In a paper published online today in Nature, Aziz and his colleagues show that the quinone flow battery not only works, but also appears stable in early testing and provides considerable power. And perhaps best of all, Aziz notes that the cost of the quinones and bromine is about one-third the cost of vanadium, making it potentially a far cheaper option.
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@nzzp said in Climate Change:
we'd start incentivising solar/wind at any time. Not sure what the efficiency numbers are ( @NTA ) will have an opinion I'm sure, but shifts the problem from 'generating power when we need it' to 'just generate power'.
Electricity networks: Overbuild wind and solar for less than coal, gas, and nuclear.
Store in whatever you can to even out the network; pumped hydro, chemical storage (lithium, vanadium, bromide, sodium, heat, etc), flywheels, thermal, whatever. Use the excess to create green hydrogen for other applications
Putting money into transmission and a few syncons is the real issue because you can't just centralise generation in a modern network. Resources are distributed which has the added benefit of making the network more robust. Just that we haven't invested in transmission properly so it isn't in great condition.
Everyone* likes to think it is super difficult and needs tons of storage, but it really isn't, and you really don't. Here's an expert who runs regular modelling on this sort of thing against live demand data.
*idiots who listen to talkback radio
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@nzzp said in Climate Change:
@NTA 5 hours storage is still a heck of a lot right
Agreed. 120GWh is not a small amount of energy to store, but that is the figure they're using as the absolute peak storage required at the absolute peak power demand on the NEM ~24GW = 24,000MW. That usually happens in high summer when the heat waves are on. Typically low wind conditions and solar efficiency goes down above 25C.
To put that in perspective, current network battery output is maximum 260MW with storage of a bit over an hour, but another 18GW is planned - no figure on energy for that power output I might add. https://aemo.com.au/en/learn/energy-explained/energy-101/energy-explained-big-batteries
Now, to need that storage running full whack at 5 hours you would have to need it to be night time without much wind at all over this entire area:
None of the above takes any future hydro into account, or future changes in the NEM like adding the storage capacity of hundreds and thousands of EVs with appropriate integration.
Energy efficiency would be a lot cheaper in the long term as well. If our housing standards were increased, we'd use less. And the cheapest kWh is the one you never buy.
Lot to do on the demand side, even for heavy industry.
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While we wait for the first ball
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@MiketheSnow My lord! I just about stood up and clapped him at 12:15. Spot on Piersy!
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The main topic was climate change so put it here.
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@NTA said in Climate Change:
Scary shit. But then I'm wary of any body of water you can't step across.
That looked more like undercutting than river rise
Poor defences?
Built too close to the edge?
The Taff in Wales rises regularly half way down at Pontypridd and the walls banking the river stay intact
The water rises above the walls and floods the ground floor of the houses beside the river
Home contents damaged but not homeless
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@TeWaio said in Climate Change:
Don't get sucked in by the propaganda, we have fewer fires than ever (the person tweeting linking it it climate, not you @NTA )
Pretty good season for fires here as well in terms of a lack of them.
The issue I've got is not the number of fires or the area covered - our last fire season saw areas burn that hadn't burned before in living memory e.g. certain areas of rainforest that should not ordinarily burn.
The data is interesting but also: deforestation directly and via previous fires mean you're always likely to trend downard. Recovery cycles vary, but the area that burned 3 years ago isn't likely to burn again in a hurry.
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@reprobate said in Climate Change:
you need a bigger graph to show anything significant really. doesn't over 2% seem like quite a bit?
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I decided to stay away from this topic. But when farm land is turned into carbon sinks and cows are blamed for warming the planet (is this missing ) and the other madness that's being done due to climate change.
So anyway, here's 2 links to an interesting discussion on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
These idiots promoting climate change don't know. Including Transportation Secretary Buttigieg. Unbelievable. He instead rambled on like an idiot. And threw in but what about my children.
At least they had a guess on the Facebook video. 2 were 5%. One was 7%. One 8%
Will the West survive?
Anyway, back to work. (Maybe they are fake video. I hope so but fear they aren't)
Climate Change