Doe Invests Half a Billion to De-Risk Cheaper Energy Storage | Hacker News Reader

Doe Invests Half a Billion to De-Risk Cheaper Energy Storage

solarpaces.org

37 pointscinquemb33 comments

Am I the only person who thinks that half billion dollars at this stage for this initiative is nothing, when trillions of dollars were printed in the name of helping the environment?

Well, Biden's legislative climate agenda has collapsed. They have to scrape together whatever money they can from existing budgets.

Also, the idea is really to give private actors just enough money and support to get them going:

"Funding should not just support technology field testing but also allow developers to better understand the critical commercial side, “helping formulate the market mechanisms that are going to enable long-duration storage to survive and prosper on the grid.”"

Whether it's true or not, economists like to claim that there's a multiplier effect in cases like this, where every $1 if public investment creates >$10 of private investment.

I don’t know if it ever existed really, but in my head it seems like at one point there were national level projects that were taken on by people who might’ve been dedicated to an ideal or a real like commitment to solving problems, and they got stuff done. Like the Hoover dam, interstate highway system, transcontinental railroad, the internet even.

Nowadays it feels like the country is entirely filled to the brim with middlemen ready to make those with yachts able to afford bigger yachts. But a generation of people have lost the basic housing security their parents enjoyed, and basics like food transportation and healthcare that are required are now so unaffordable it traps people in a cycle of poverty.

Maybe it’s always been this way - anyone have any thoughts?

Well Hoover had that dam named after him, but there were also Hoover flags, Hoovervilles, Hoover blankets etc..

Dams are named after whoever opposed them most vigorously, but finally caved.

Did Biden ever have a serious climate agenda? It seemed like a bunch of fluff to help sell a progressive social spending wishlist. The climate provisions I recall were investments in EVs, a citizen’s climate corps, and public transit investment. Apart from accelerating the EV transition, I doubt these things would amount to even a drop in the bucket (investing in public transit is mostly for people who already use public transit—very few people would switch to public transit if it were available because it’s hard to beat the convenience of driving outside of congested big cities). What other climate initiatives did I forget?

I would expect serious climate policy to look like carbon pricing or at least more considerable EV and renewables investments.

Yes, Biden is owned by incumbent corporate interest. Any change will have to be despite them.

What makes this funding different from regular subsidies, so that we get this "[for] every $1 if public investment creates >$10 of private investment"?

> trillions of dollars were printed in the name of helping the environment

Source on this ?

DOE, not Doe.

it's DoE, doe...

Doh!

Make electricity grids be a proper open market, so that I can buy and sell electricity by the watt and by the second, and suddenly a lot of companies will invest in energy storage to earn money by buying low selling high.

Like theoretically I could do it in my own house - I could charge my phone battery at night when power is in low demand and cheap, and then discharge the battery back into the grid when power is in high demand and expensive.

But due to the lack of realtime market pricing, I won't get paid for that. So I won't bother.

This is quite a silly and short sighted take. The electrical grid is not a stock market and it should not ever be.

There is a seriously complex system in place right now to try to balance the generation of energy vs the load. Throwing personal discharging into the grid into the question will cause serious ramifications.

It's really hard to construct an example of a market based electricity grid collapsing (ie. any time where demand != generation), unless a majority of market participants act irrationally to lose money.

In fact I believe it is impossible for collapse to occur, even with irrational market participants, if you add one more requirement: All players must prepay for all electricity they use/generate, and anyone whose prepay balance falls to zero is immediately disconnected from the grid.

Collapse is a natural mode in a power grid, even moreso than in a market. It takes active regulation to prevent frequent collapses, even with best intentions all around.

It is a Very Good Thing that magickal thinkers have no say in how power grids are run. They have too much say on markets.

Let's say you are on a ventilator and require electricity to continue to live. How much would you pay for that electricity?

It's a better model than the current system of 'load shedding', where random districts of a city are switched off if there is a power shortage.

I would certainly like to be able to decide to pay a big premium for scarce power than have that decision entirely out of my hands.

Now you're getting even sillier.

Prepayment doesn't matter.

It's to do with regulation of the energy being produced and exported into the grid.

Is there some kind of report available that attempts to summarise how much money the US and EU have spend on subsidising green energy and technology?

Coal, oil, and natural gas received $5.9 trillion worldwide in subsidies in 2020.[0]

So whatever you may be thinking is 'spent' on renewable energy it is quite literally a drop in a bucket compared to subsidies and tax rebates for fossil fuels.

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...

For EU the numbers: https://trinomics.eu/energysubsidies/

Renewables: €78bn

Fossil fuels: €56bn

Here is an other source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303891/eu-breakdown-of-...

So no, not literally a drop in a bucket but rather an larger bucket that also is increasing every year.

For US it is a bit more complex, but in in terms of tax rebates we see that renewables get more subsidies than fossil fuels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...

The paper you linked is primarily about air pollution and effects on global warming, or what they describe as "implicit subsidies". Not money from government or tax rebates.

In terms of "implicit subsidies", air pollution account for 42% of that $5.9 trillion, 29% global warming, and 15% are road accidents and traffic congestion.

Something else that would provoke some thought is what kind of returns do these subsidies get in terms of energy delivered? To get the full picture would require the inclusion of grands for r&d, governmental human resources and capital allocation, and perhaps more importantly the cost incurred by large investors both private and public shifting from clearly profitable investment in traditional energy sources to questionable or even outright improbable mageprojects only because of a clear and persistent signal from governments that profitable investments in fossil fuels will be punished in the near future.

People don't seem to get it but we are spending our pension funds and taxes into various scams. This has already started to bite our asses here in europe and there's still no sign of this insanity ending. At least if public dialogue was honest and grounded in reality we could spend all that money in researching a solution that actually works economically.

The biggest energy scam I know about, just now, is Energy Vault.

Until last week, I thought Energy Vault was just cranks, like that Gateway Spaceport youtube-CGI "VERA space station in 6 months" guy. But Energy Vault is a publicly traded company, with $billions valuation! There is simply no chance of that stuff ever being competitive. It's like fusion.

I read over the things DoE is putting money into. Almost all of them amount to obscure ways to ensure heat engines remain massively involved in the energy system.

Fusion can and hopefully will be competitive in the near future, but gravity based storage is just not possible to scale unless we're talking about massive hydroelectric dams. I didn't know about energy vault and yeah the investment amount they managed to get is insane. Centrifugal energy storage can be used as a short term buffer somewhat economically for variations in demand, but not actual storage. Thankfully natural gas and other fossil fuels store just fine as they are, and peaker plants are very cheap as they're usually just the old low efficiency plants, available at essentially zero capital cost.

I am legitimately curious as to why there is such an adverse acceptance to gravity storage? This is already done in the U.S. West in running large density mass trains up hillsides and Gravitricity over the pond has a functioning model using old mine shafts. As an entrepreneurial tech founder I comprehend oh too well that until someone proves "it works" there will always be nonbelievers even though the math and physics agree. Maybe it is inherent human nature to not believe something until it is seen but in this era we also will have countless which do not believe even when it is proven. The planning is the easy part and the math checks out, mhg=pe, execution is what is difficult and all that matters.

Pumped hydro is gravity storage. It works. Running train cars loaded with rock aggregate up and down disused mountain rail tracks could be a good idea, depending on how you get the power out (third rail?), but seems like it would be expensive to keep working. Running a multi-thousand-ton weight up and down a disused mineshaft seems a certain winner, anywhere you happen to have such a shaft at hand. Pumping air into a bag anchored to the ocean floor. Winching an air tank down to a pulley anchored to the ocean floor.

Winners in energy storage will be distinguished from the field of failures along axes of cost, secondary usefulness, compatibility with existing infrastructure, service lifetime, energy capacity, power capacity, environmental impact, simplicity, and efficiency. For example, synthetic chemical and liquified air media excel at secondary usefulness, compatibility with existing gas turbines, and cheap tankage (unlimited capacity), at the expense of cost and efficiency. Their main cost is for synthesis capacity, measured in watts. Low efficiency is tolerable in exchange for other merits.

Energy Vault is a certain failure on the basis of cost alone, even without considering its other low scores. Constructing condominiums for concrete blocks is just extremely expensive, even before counting predictably very high maintenance cost, for minuscule storage capacity.

Simplicity is the most frequently neglected, but often most valuable quality. The best storage systems will have just one moving part used for both storing and extracting energy. Next best, two.

Thanks for your time in the succinct reply.

They all work, you just need mass and height given a surplus of renewable power from any source. Last I checked we have junkyards filled with oxidizing metal that could be put to "potential" work as mass, not to mention all the other precious metals which could be reclaimed as people seem to forget we pulled them from the ground to begin with. Height is accomplished using the same materials salvaged from the junkyards to be used as structure in a different remanufactured form. Hopefully gravity doesn't change because then all of this is meaningless anyway. Efficiency doesn't really matter because nothing I am aware of is 100% efficient in energy and if the source is renewable then the loss is always made up in time, something people have no patience for today it seems. The CAPEX cost may be high but with correct design the OPEX cost will be low and functional unit lifetime correlates to the specific lift/generation device and that is where your simplicity reference is key.

It always comes back around to cost but when the power goes out what are people willing to pay? I have contacts that lived through the Winter Texas outage and the stories impact deeply and it of course will not happen again. Oh wait, last week 6 plants totaling 2.6 GW went offline from the spike based on May heat and certainly June, July and August will be cooler. And what about all of those devices that require electricity to keep various mammals alive, humans included?

My experiences reflect that few people on this planet are proactive, I can only hope those with crazy ideas working toward the energy problem find the needed traction in proving solutions that work to our global energy issues. If we do not solve the energy issue in a clean manner we are certain to be unable to solve the carbon issue which will need that very energy to return all the carbon we have already released and more.

Your assertion of simplicity is correct and this is the best outcome I can hope for. I'll shoot for one, maybe two but whatever the outcome, simplicity will always be top of mind. I am no expert by any means yet thanks again for the motivating feedback.

The choice is never between this storage or no storage. It is always between this storage and all the other storage choices. Whichever is cheapest while matching local requirements best wins. Over time, the winner changes, so each time you add more storage, you choose over again, and may end up with several different kinds, which can be an advantage if they have different characteristics.

There will be a hell of a lot of money made in meeting people's storage needs. I will be betting on producers of factories to synthesize ammonia.

There is no possibility of fusion becoming competitive. A fusion plant would cost at least 10x fission, and fission is itself very far from competitive. As costs for renewables continue falling, that target gets always further out of reach.

Centrifugal storage could be useful for a few seconds, perhaps to smooth over sudden spikes. But it has been well-understood for over a century, and not used yet, so that is unlikely to change.

Natural gas and other fossil fuels are the problem we are trying to solve, so they cannot count as part of a solution. For the present, NG must be used when renewables fall short, because any storage we built out now would have to be charged up from fossil fuels anyway, as renewables do not exceed demand yet.

Practical storage will turn out to be based on an eclectic mix of air pressure (underground or undersea), liquified nitrogen, chemical synthesis (hydrogen, ammonia), hydro (conventional pumped surface, and underground and undersea variations), plus some small amount of batteries (liquid metal, iron). The first few are attractive because they are compatible with existing gas furnaces. Hydro is attractive because it is very mature. Chemical synthesis is attractive because once local tankage is full, any surplus power generated can be turned into revenue, and any shortfall in storage can be made up by importing more.

One more possibility is subsea buoyancy; an air bladder or rigid air tank is drawn toward a pulley anchored to the sea floor, yielding power when it is allowed to rise again.

I think you don't see the full picture.

Without mostly free, accessible energy, we will mostly go back to the 18th/early 19th century, except we will have a better comprehension of how the world work and will be able to cut down risks and inefficiencies from back then. Fossil fuels will peak this decade (except for coal). Fossil fuel in the northern sea already peaked in 2005 for the gaz and 2007 for oil. Fossil fuel production in Africa already peaked, and last year, Russia warned that they probably reached their peak production in 2019. The war isn't helping, but we already were grasping at straws.

We have no economy without mostly free energy.

Energy was never free. Oil and coal are quite expensive to extract and handle, just less than other alternatives at the time. Fortunately, renewables are now cheaper than those ever were.

Looking over their announcements, it appears they are trying to ensure that heat engines -- i.e., steam turbines -- remain an essential part of the grid. The most promising storage approaches don't take a round-trip through heat, and they appear to have no interest in them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com