Renewables Chuck

[jazz]

Sask is better off to have a giant biomass boiler where we can sell our worthless grain. Better off as electricity than food.

[chuckChuck]

In 2005 farmers were paying Saskpower 7.76 cents per kwh. In 2018 farmers are paying 12.658 cents per kwh. (just checked my last bill)

That is a 60 % increase in 13 years or about 4.5% increase per year. (Farmers are paying less than residential rates)

At that continued rate of increase farmers will be paying 18.35 cents per kwh in 2028.

So locking in lower rates with solar 30 years into future seems like a pretty good deal.

[chuckChuck]

Donald Sadoway from MIT will be on the CBC National tonight talking about this breakthrough in battery technology.

http://news.mit.edu/2018/metal-mesh-membrane-rechargeable-batteries-renewable-energy-0122

A new approach to rechargeable batteries

New metal-mesh membrane could solve longstanding problems and lead to inexpensive power storage.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office
January 22, 2018
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A type of battery first invented nearly five decades ago could catapult to the forefront of energy storage technologies, thanks to a new finding by researchers at MIT. The battery, based on electrodes made of sodium and nickel chloride and using a new type of metal mesh membrane, could be used for grid-scale installations to make intermittent power sources such as wind and solar capable of delivering reliable baseload electricity.

The findings are being reported today in the journal Nature Energy, by a team led by MIT professor Donald Sadoway, postdocs Huayi Yin and Brice Chung, and four others.

Although the basic battery chemistry the team used, based on a liquid sodium electrode material, was first described in 1968, the concept never caught on as a practical approach because of one significant drawback: It required the use of a thin membrane to separate its molten components, and the only known material with the needed properties for that membrane was a brittle and fragile ceramic. These paper-thin membranes made the batteries too easily damaged in real-world operating conditions, so apart from a few specialized industrial applications, the system has never been widely implemented.

But Sadoway and his team took a different approach, realizing that the functions of that membrane could instead be performed by a specially coated metal mesh, a much stronger and more flexible material that could stand up to the rigors of use in industrial-scale storage systems.

“I consider this a breakthrough,” Sadoway says, because for the first time in five decades, this type of battery — whose advantages include cheap, abundant raw materials, very safe operational characteristics, and an ability to go through many charge-discharge cycles without degradation — could finally become practical.

While some companies have continued to make liquid-sodium batteries for specialized uses, “the cost was kept high because of the fragility of the ceramic membranes,” says Sadoway, the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry. “Nobody’s really been able to make that process work,” including GE, which spent nearly 10 years working on the technology before abandoning the project.

As Sadoway and his team explored various options for the different components in a molten-metal-based battery, they were surprised by the results of one of their tests using lead compounds. “We opened the cell and found droplets” inside the test chamber, which “would have to have been droplets of molten lead,” he says. But instead of acting as a membrane, as expected, the compound material “was acting as an electrode,” actively taking part in the battery’s electrochemical reaction.

“That really opened our eyes to a completely different technology,” he says. The membrane had performed its role — selectively allowing certain molecules to pass through while blocking others — in an entirely different way, using its electrical properties rather than the typical mechanical sorting based on the sizes of pores in the material.

In the end, after experimenting with various compounds, the team found that an ordinary steel mesh coated with a solution of titanium nitride could perform all the functions of the previously used ceramic membranes, but without the brittleness and fragility. The results could make possible a whole family of inexpensive and durable materials practical for large-scale rechargeable batteries.

The use of the new type of membrane can be applied to a wide variety of molten-electrode battery chemistries, he says, and opens up new avenues for battery design. “The fact that you can build a sodium-sulfur type of battery, or a sodium/nickel-chloride type of battery, without resorting to the use of fragile, brittle ceramic — that changes everything,” he says.

The work could lead to inexpensive batteries large enough to make intermittent, renewable power sources practical for grid-scale storage, and the same underlying technology could have other applications as well, such as for some kinds of metal production, Sadoway says.

Sadoway cautions that such batteries would not be suitable for some major uses, such as cars or phones. Their strong point is in large, fixed installations where cost is paramount, but size and weight are not, such as utility-scale load leveling. In those applications, inexpensive battery technology could potentially enable a much greater percentage of intermittent renewable energy sources to take the place of baseload, always-available power sources, which are now dominated by fossil fuels.

The research team included Fei Chen, a visiting scientist from Wuhan University of Technology; Nobuyuki Tanaka, a visiting scientist from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency; MIT research scientist Takanari Ouchi; and postdocs Huayi Yin, Brice Chung, and Ji Zhao. The work was supported by the French oil company Total S.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Chuck, You didn't answer my question whatsoever. Instead you provided the evidence that electricity prices are rising much higher than inflation rates, Concurrent with the expansion of cheaper renewable energy sources. Now I know that correlation does not prove causation(In spite of what the warmunists might think ). But how do you account for this phenomenon occurring everywhere renewable energy is being increased?

[AlbertaFarmer5]

When the price I pay for electricity starts dropping due to all of the increased cheap renewable supplies, Then I will happily admit that your math skills were obviously better than mine. All of us on a agriville will be exceedingly grateful, and you will no longer need to troll agriville all day, convincing us of the merits of renewable power, since we will see it ourselves in the size of our power bills.

But for some reason, I think that will occur about the same time as the catastrophe you keep promising due to warming. Always be just around the corner.

Do you not see the hypocrisy in this issue?

[chuckChuck]

Saskatchewan has not added much renewable electricity since 2005 and prices increased 60%. Maybe you should ask the utilities to justify their price increases.

Every province has a different mix of supply and different factors that will affect prices. All I know is that prices have increased on average 4.5% per year for the last 13 years in Saskatchewan.

During that time the cost of solar and wind have come down significantly.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Saskatchewan has not added much renewable electricity since 2005 and prices increased 60%. Maybe you should ask the utilities to justify their price increases.

Every province has a different mix of supply and different factors that will affect prices. All I know is that prices have increased on average 4.5% per year for the last 13 years in Saskatchewan.

During that time the cost of solar and wind have come down significantly.

So it is worse than we thought. They haven't even added much yet and it has already had such a drastic effect on prices. What will happen to prices as more projects come on on line?

I have better things to do than to reread all of your drivel, but I do seem to recall you proclaiming how much renewable energy Saskatchewan has been building in recent years. Guess that is only true when it fits the agenda. Can you find an example of a jurisdiction which has seen lower electricity prices after install renewables? If your numbers are correct, there should be multitudinous examples.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Chuck I addressed China's advantages with solar power over Canada in an earlier post, you didn't respond. Then I went through what it costs for solar in Alberta and again you didn't respond. All you seem to want to do cut and paste and tell us how we are living in the past. I have priced it out and consider it a questionable investment at today's prices in our climate.

I'm sure you must have noticed by now, the troll won't respond to any post that is reasonable, factual, well researched, and asks questions to which the answer would cause him to question his ideology or to which he has no good answer. The troll only responds when he can attempt to paint the poster as an extremist and insult his intelligence, you didn't give him that opportunity, hence he has no comeback. This is the same as arguing with any ideologue, when they can't attack the message, they attack the messenger.

[jazz]

If solar was such a winner, the power companies would be doing it themselves and not getting the public to do it for them. Saskpower or any company would never invest in something with a 20 yr payback so got to get the dumbass public to do it.

[oneoff]

In Ontario; the approx 80 cent per KWH rate that was paid and is still being paid for some 10 Kw rated solar capacity was rationalized as basically being a show home for the new technology that would be highly visible to every Ontario resident.


Now I don't live in Ontario...but maybe its fair to say that the experiment did not turn out exactly as planned.


What I do know is that even the mention of 10 KW capacity sounds a way more significant than the average 1.5 Kw output that can ever be expected over any reasonable period of time. All that spin behind the boiler plate rating has to be divided by a factor of 6 or 7 to bring reality into the advertised propaganda.


The truth is that there's not much you can do with 1500 watts for heating; running a couple of toasters or a single pretty small motor on an aeration fan for example. When people get the bills for the recent power outages and repairs to Sask recent grid problems it will be an example of "you can make anything fly if you put enough horse power behind it"

You want to do something significant for a reduced carbon footprint; then produce one less kid; stay on the ground; stay home; get the major population onside too;....but don't delude yourself about your insignificant effort.

And your 2 % inflation increase (for those who have signed on for selling their solar output) will diminish over the contract period as cost of electricity escalates. And no one is still going to have emergency power from a basic solar system when the grid goes down. Hope no one got caught thinking otherwise.

And I again predict that the basic monthly meter charge of about $34/mo. will be supplemented with a "transportation" and upgrade surcharge that obviously should someday apply fairly to all producers and consumers who use the utility grid.