Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
This is a shitty Texas-based company cutting corners, who also had fires in 2021 and 2022. There are plenty of battery storage facilities operating safely.
As someone living in Texas presently: you could have saved yourself a full sentence:
This is a shitty Texas-based company cutting corners…
to
Texas company
or honestly:
Texas
Would be sufficient. Any Texan that doesn’t own x texas-based-company is tired of that company’s bullshit. It’s one of the few things natives and transplants agree on.
This PSA brought to you by the makers of: y’all, you all, and all y’all.
You’re right, but I think less dense but safer and more sustainable options are the better choice for this
We can all agree on that, Clearly li-ion is a bad choice for static use cases.
But right now it’s the cheapest option, and it looks likely that will stay true for quite a while unfortunately.
It’s the densest option. The cheapest is probably salt/water or iron/water using scrap
LIthium Iron Phosphate is cheapest relatively dense battery type. Sodium ion will be if lithium get expensive.
Weirdly it’s not, except maybe gravity batteries where nice reservoirs happen to exist already. It should be but it’s not right now.
Li-ion has economy of scale right now. I do think molten metal etc will overtake eventually, but they’re currently playing catchup and li-ion has dropped in price so much over time that it’s surprisingly cheap even where it should make no sense.
I didn’t say molten metal, what? No just a standard chemical battery
I know, I just threw out one of the many contenders for grid power.
Iron water does look promising too.
Ahh, that makes more sense. I misunderstood
I don’t think they should be operating at all.
Ever seen what happens when a coal mine catches fire? Link
I guess we should just go back to water mills right?
i think you forgot to attach an image. or you’re a boring person
Nothing boring about a fire that’s been burning for at least 62 years, possibly 86, and has caused the permanent evacuation of two towns.
i wanted cool images
There’s a geyser because of the underground heat.
Not Centralia but Hazlewood in 2014. Thought I’d use a more recent and closer to home image
woah, interesting
They should have updated the road sign to include a fire warning there.
So uh. I guess those coal and natural gas power plants would fare better in a fire. Something seems wrong there but OP clearly wouldn’t possibly post something on the Internet that was utterly detached from reality.
Energy storage is just that. Fire is frequently quite good at releasing said energy.
Lithium? poof.
Oil? yup.
Nat gas? mmhmm.
wood? yup.
Coal? dang.
Guess all we got left is water - I’m sure that doesn’t have any specific regional requirements…
So tell us champ: what energy storage you got all figured out from that armchair?
Nuclear though, never had a problem with excess heat at one of those. /s
Was gonna list it but I figured our energy-tzar OP would just complain about radioactive minerals being like batteries with more steps.
None. Use demand shaping instead. I like electrolysis of water, but desalination might make more sense in some regions. I suppose you could even redirect excess electricity to certain computational work.
I imagine you, like many, just don’t understand the insane engineering feat that is an electrical grid. Everything is realtime - Every time someone’s AC kicks on the grid must adapt and provide more power immediately. Power storage is a godsend to this process and in terms of relative age … is very new. With regard to power storage - there are very few ways to hold it that don’t run some risk of fire or other calamitous failure mode. That includes water - but I was being coy when making my statement implying it wouldn’t burn.
To your comment: you could use salt/sea/undrinkable water for energy storage but it comes with regional requirements (elevation change typically) in addition to the water. It’s not one size fits all and definitely doesn’t work in many regions.
Regarding your two options which you offered to create potable water (not to store energy:) Both are wildly inefficient and have one or more major drawbacks to them. Topically - one of these drawbacks is their massive energy requirement. So you provided a way to burn energy faster - not store it ;)
If we build out our GHG-free power capacity beyond our electricity demand, efficiency isn’t an issue. We need fresh water. We need hydrogen and oxygen. I’m sure there are other convenient things to produce whenever electricity demand falls off. These energy storage and reselling schemes are just destroying value.
We have sufficient generation. It’s a question of cleanliness, efficiency, and consistency. Consistency comes with storage and enables cleaner methods, while inconsistent, to be used.
Using your example: what need do we have for food storage? We have grain right now - and we’re growing more! Who needs water storage - we have wells!
Hydrogen and oxygen? Yeah we have that. What technology, currently available, are you suggesting we all switch over to, again? While I’m at it: last I checked stored hydrogen and oxygen have a tendency to uh… burn… and very “energetically.”
You seem fond of the tin foil - you are apparently worried about “big lithium” or some such… wait until you hear about “big energy.”
If you are genuinely posting and not acting in bad faith I imagine you need to broaden your view a bit.
I’m not sure what you mean. Natural fresh water supplies are stressed in many regions. We need hydrogen to fuel vehicles and for the production GHG-free steel and fertilizer. Oxygen of course is necessary for medical and industrial applications. Safely handling hydrogen and oxygen is a solved problem and these gases are not polluting if you have to vent to atmosphere. It only makes sense from a wasteful, financially extractive perspective to store extra electricity by environmentally questionable means instead of actually using that energy right away.
Hydrogen electrolysis is great, but its something to do with “too much” renewables, and also supports having too much batteries, which are more convenient for daily electricity needs from renewables, but also using up high battery storage capacity every day.
We’ve been talking about energy and energy storage up till now. You’ve been mostly ‘on track’ with said responses up till this point - albeit overly generic and somewhat disconnected from reality… In the last couple responses you’ve jumped from water care to what I can only imagine was the first two Google results when looking up hydrogen / oxygen paired with energy.
Is the other guy okay or did his shift end?
Look. Here’s a sobering bottom line: if it were technologically feasible to “replace batteries” we would have already. Hydrogen powered x isn’t functionally acceptable because:
a) It stores like shit.
b) boom (pressure or rapid combustion - take your pick)
c) It is shockingly (hah) hard to get oxygen and hydrogen to split efficiently. Very few sources of hydrogen are actually energy positive or more efficient than what we already have in more convenient, safer, higher density forms.
I’m all for progress… but armchair warriors that claim the “moral high ground” by shitting on what works currently - while not being able to provide a single other suggestion beyond what they got drip fed from their feed and distilled by their echo
groupchamber need to sit the fuck down. Want to “stick it to big battery?” Go back to landlines. Put a crank back on your car. The list goes on.I digress. Back to energy storage: if you’ve got some brilliant solution - get to it. We’re waiting.
Back to energy storage: if you’ve got some brilliant solution - get to it. We’re waiting.
No to storing joules in environmentally questionable batteries. Use the energy immediately to produce useful, necessary stuff like fresh water and hydrogen.
This is why you don’t use battery chemistries that can
thermally run awayautoignite in grid storage. The plant was using LG JH4 batteries, which use an NMC chemistry. I don’t think that LiFePO4 cells were as ubiquitous when this plant was first constructed, so the designers opted for something spicy instead.This shit is why you use LiFePO4. It can’t
thermally run awayautoignite, it lasts longer, and the reduced energy density doesn’t really matter for grid storage. Plus, it doesn’t use nickel or cobalt so the only conflict resource is lithium.EDIT: LiFePO4 batteries can enter thermal runaway, but they can’t autoignite.
I don’t think we should be storing and reselling electricity at all.
Feelings based or data driven opinion?
Read that and was like… fuck me why am I debating the guy when I coulda just asked that. Cheers.
There’s no IRL data for the specific model I’ve described, but I’m not sure what you mean by “feelings based”. Using otherwise excess energy instead of storing it is a considered, rational strategy.
There’s no IRL data for the specific model I’ve described,
This is feelings based. Thanks for clarifying.
The document linked doesn’t go into detail for good reason. It’s a bunch of half cooked ideas distilled to make a good read… but misses a lot of key points. Most notably: it hand waves through storage.
The electrical grid is a lot like a pressure system in a sense: we have a lot of equipment that is designed to work at a very specific pressure. Outside of those ranges things break. The article mentions feeding back into the grid which is fine and well… but fails to mention how that needs to be managed so as to not blow the whole thing up. Also that solar system you have isn’t going to be feeding shit back into the grid without a buffer… which is storage… for the same reason that you likely will struggle to have a solar home without batteries. The sun is variable and your “stuff” needs a very specific range of power. Too much? zap. Too little? brownout. Either way: rip electronics.
The very things you are suggesting as solutions to power storage literally require it to work.
What are the alternatives?
A really strong elastic band.
Lifting your mom with a pulley.
Build a tower, use excess power to lift heavy weights. Drop them when you need electricity to spin generators
Video on weight storage. Pumped hydro is proven and efficient, but it’s location specific.
Adam Something is awesome. I genuinely wish I could see his face as he reads through the next tech bro’s idea for pods.
Practical Engineering is a great one for anyone curious about how things work.
Weight lifting is slightly less efficient due to friction and heat generated by pully system, and the vast amount of weight and space needed may limit available storage possibility and scalability. But its simple, and safer.
We lack the materials and engineering necessary to make lifted weight storage systems enter the order of magnitude of energy storage needed to compete with batteries, let alone pumped hydro. It’s just really, really hard to compete with literal megatons of water pumped up a 500 meter slope.
I believe that the plant in question was using something besides Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. This press release mentions LG JH4 which are deffo not LiFePO4. LiFePO4 batteries are far, far safer than other Lithium chemistries, and are now the norm for BESS (not cars tho, since they have lower energy density but better a better lifetime than NMC/NCA). This fire would not have happened with a BESS using LiFePO4 batteries.
Now that batteries with aqueous sodium-ion chemistries are becoming available, we should begin transitioning pre-LiFePO4 sites to those wholesale. Aqueous sodium-ion batteries should be even safer than LiFePO4, and while they have kinda shit energy density, they’re still fine for grid storage.
EDIT: correction, LiFePO4 batteries can run away, but they are incapable of autoignition.
It’s important to remember that engineers and scientists are having to fight with 3-4 competing forces: efficiency, density, safety, cost. Even if we have a promising idea it just may not yet be technologically feasible to make the switch over yet. LiFePO4 definitely hits the Goldilocks zone where it gives up some density / weight / charge speed (if I recall) for longevity and overall safety. I think they’ve found a solid niche in home storage for sure. I personally prefer those cells over lithium ion for that reason… and honestly was using lead acid prior to that simply because lithium ion came with too many risks.
LiFePO4 batteries are safer and harder to ignite, but they can still go into thermal runaway and can burn. If a fire started in a battery that big, it would still spread and it wouldn’t be practical to extinguish it.
You’re correct that they can enter thermal runaway, they just can’t autoignite. I really suspect that if this site has been using LiFePO4 cells instead of NMC, it wouldn’t have gone up like it did. 3000 MWh of NMC cells sounds absolutely bugnuts crazy to me.
Pumped hydro
No, it’s not, at least not at scale, because you need specific geography and plenty of water. Why do you think we are not massively using it?
Can prob dig a whole system the same as they did to get all the materials for this mess.
The water would also not be useless like all the water used to process the battery materials.
Abandon the model of buying and storing electricity when demand is low and reselling power back to the grid when demand is high. Instead, electricity should almost always be generated in excess of demand with the difference going to hydrogen and oxygen production for various medical, industrial, agricultural, and transport applications. If we ever run out of storage, they can be safely vented to atmosphere.
Electrolisis is relatively inefficient and wears down the electrodes. While not as bad on an industrial scale, those are still problems. And then you have to convert it back, that is even less efficient.
Good in theory, barely passable in practice. Growing sugar cane and making ethanol would be better, like brazil does it.
What do you mean by “convert it back”? Convert it back to electricity for the grid? No. We need the hydrogen for important things, like making steel and fertilizer.
You’re hard pushing hydrogen / oxygen pretty blindly. Do you happen to know what the best efficiency of it is? It’s not great. And it gets worse when you have to harvest it (typically electrolysis which is brutally energy intensive.) Worse still when you need to compress it - and don’t even start me on energy density. Oh and that compressed gas needs to be kept cold. More energy.
Hydrogen cells have been around for ages and are still functionally worthless until the storage and generation problems are solved.
As I’ve already explained, we need hydrogen. We need it not for energy storage, but as a useful, important product. Electrolysis of water is pretty much the only way to get it without emitting greenhouse gases. Therefore, the efficiency of it doesn’t really matter, especially if the energy to do it would otherwise go to some dangerous, battery based buy low/sell high scheme.
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Before you can can do that, you need enough renewable generation capacity to exceed peak demand. And of course that will never happen because of the bottomless appetite of AI and bitcoin mining for electric power.
We need an authoritarian figure to nationalize the energy supply, shut down these wasteful expressions of late stage capitalism, mandate rooftop solar, and build out our nuclear fleet.
I believe there is battery tech that is newer but being deployed into production that is iron based. It is heavier and less energy dense than lithium. But for power grid level deployment that should be fine and iron is a bit harder to catch on fire.
Enlighten us with better approach. Also there are battery types that are less flammable.
Edit: is -> us
Here’s another article from AP: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/17/g-s1-43268/fire-battery-storage-plant-california-moss-landing
