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Comment by passwordoops | Hacker News Reader

Awesome. With increasing capacity they'll keep on breaking records. Now can we start sharing links to storage projects too? Because not every day is windy

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On 9 August 2019 there was a significant power cut due to lack of inertia. This duration was significantly reduced because of batteries [1]. Since then, gas turbines have been repurposed to provide inertia without generation [2]. Check out the documentary series "Guy Martin's Great British Power Trip" [3] for more national grid facts.

[1] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/08/09/9-august-2019... [2] https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/deeside-power-station-b... [3] https://www.channel4.com/programmes/guy-martins-great-britis...

For everyone who doesn't know Guy Martin, I initially know him as a superbiker and first heard of him in the context of the Isle of Man TT[0][1], so I was a bit surprised to see he's now doing docuseries about power grids :D

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmNXCJt7K3Q

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man_TT

I would like to think the best way for Storage isn't a a giant battery somewhere ( although we could certainly do that with Hydro Dam ), may be something like a Tesla Powerwall that could work 20-30 years minimum, minimal to zero fire risk. All the homes could then install their own and take advantage of the cheap electricity price at night or in other hours. It would ultimately serve as the biggest buffer to any surge in energy usage.

A buried flywheel storage system would accomplish this, they're just prohibitively expensive at the moment. Vehicle-to-grid will be big once it catches on and consumers get over the idea of adding cycles to their vehicle batteries.

Why? You lose the diversification effect. You would have to size the battery to each house's max consumption.

Here's the storage solution project I'm working on: https://vortical.io

Flywheel storage (which is not new), but we sacrifice some efficiency and energy density so we can do it for cheap.

Unfortunately the linked page has zero info on how their flywheels differ from current tech.

Waiting for patents to file before public disclosure of the tech, but I can give you a basic overview. We use mass instead of speed to store energy. This is slightly less efficient but way less expensive; speed requires magnetic bearings and operating in a vacuum and many other expensive design constraints. Other flywheels operate in the 7500 - 100k RPM range, and we spin at 2000.

If you forego magnetic bearings and vacuum, the energy drains within hours, no?

Bearing and windage losses scale down drastically with lower speeds, so only slightly worse than other flywheel systems. They are best for daily cycles or multiple-daily cycles. Things like load shifting, peak shaving, frequency regulation, etc. They are not well suited for storage beyond a few days.

The grid is still a big bottleneck across the board, from production (can't connect wind or solar farms) to deliver (can't connect charging stations, etc).

Easy: get an EV and allow bidirectional charging; done.

My ev has 100kWh, just the bi directional is not yet working

Which EV is that? I know Tesla doesn't support bidirectional and most other EVs top off at 75-80kWh.

i have a ford mustang mach-e with 100kWh. But i did wrote in my original comment, that mine can't do the bi directional yet, but its not a phsyical issue.

How many cycles is the battery good for? Do you want to use up half of them running your house loads to save $2?

yes of course. With one discarge cycle for a day or two, i still have 998 left.

Only if you actually believe my Batterie has only 1000 cycles.

You can easily charge and discharge EV Batteries a lot more times if you do it slow and controlled. 1000 also only means reduction of load to 80% (in theory/worst case).

And no i'm not doing this for $2, i would assume that i would consume 50kWh per day for heating, which is already nearly $20 and its about grid stability.

I am not even aware that any are planned at scale. I think their plan is to keep using LNG to offset.

There is an absolutely enormous amount of battery storage in the pipeline. There's been major problems with transmission capacity though which National Grid is seemingly finally getting on top of - https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/07/uk-grid-operator-stre....

This link and the other websites where I tried to find the numbers quote the capacity in GW, which is very curious because that's not a battery capacity unit. I have the feeling that when they quote 10GW, they mean 10GWh. If it is the case those batteries are peanuts. On a typical year you often have episodes of several days if not a couple of weeks with low to no wind.

It's not about the capacity of the batteries themselves, it's about the _grid_ capacity they can cover. GW isn't a mistake, they care that it can deliver 10GW of instantaneous power, not 10GWh.

National Grid don't want these storage projects to allow us to tide over for days of no wind / no solar, but to add grid balancing.

At the moment if a large power supplier disconnects (e.g. a 1.2GW Nuclear plant) then to handle the drop in supplied power over a period of seconds/minutes before a standby gas turbine generator can fire up they currently rely on the "spinning" mass within the system - literally the intertia of the spinning steel within all the remaining nuclear, gas, coal, biomass power plants. As the grid is being decarbonised this spinning mass is being reduced (Unfortunately wind turbines don't have enough mass for this) and they need to add more responsive balancing.

ok but then we are back to my point that there is no large battery capacity to deal with the volatility of wind. From what I can tell from gridwatch, LNG is what they fire up when there is no wind.

Yes, there's no plan to resolve that as far as I know. The interconnects are meant to mitigate it a bit (i.e. import cheap green power from other countries when the winds not blowing, export it when it is blowing), but most of the plan is that there needs to be enough gas electricity generation for when there's zero solar and zero wind.

Grid scale storage on the order of days isn't really viable yet.

My personal guess is something like hydrogen will take this place eventually.

In the not so distant future I think we will see a lot of sharply negative pricing on windy days, given that we will probably have ~70GW of wind capacity installed for perhaps 50GW of demand by 2030.

Then on non windy days (especially at night with no solar), somewhat higher prices - not sure how high but there is going to be a big delta between the two.

That means there will be a lot of aribitrage to be had and money to be made to store and shift that power.

My guess is H2 will work quite well for this, as even if it's really quite inefficient the fact your input power is free/negative negates a lot of that. It really will come down to how cheap hydrogen electrolyzers can get.

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