[ExI] not that rare earth (part 2 of at least 2)

[spike at rainier66.com]

### Absolutely, solar and wind without batteries are at least 70% useless. With batteries however, it's a different story. Once we start installing multiple gigawatt scale batteries every year all competing energy technologies will have absolutely no chance of survival on purely economic grounds … Rafal

 

 

 

 

 

Rafal, I agree with regard to renewables and battery energy storage.  It was quite the setback here when our Moss Landing facility burned.

 

I think we will still end up with nuke plants to supplement the renewables however, and we will still have natural gas peaker plants.  They built a gas peaker near here, and it runs a coupla weeks a year.  Now that carbon dioxide is no longer a pollutant, they might crank it up more often.

 

I got to thinking: it should be easy enough to design a battery storage facility with a few hundred scaled down railroad cars, where a few dozen tons of batteries could be stored on each one.  The facility could be in a steel building on a ridge, with the rails going down hill from the facility.  Imagine a row of a few hundred railcars, with rails going down at about half a degree on either side.  A rail car with a few dozen tons of lithium batteries gets hot, that rail car is shoved out the door and rolls down passively dpwnhill to burn up where it won’t ignite the other several hundred similar rail cars.

 

Alternative: just use standard railroad cars.  We already have those, and they don’t need to be in great shape, since they likely will never be used.  They can use retired railroad flatbeds.  Those things hold about 100 tons each.  A ton of lithium iron batteries can store about 2 megawatt hours.  So a rail car with 100 tons would cost about 160 thousand bucks per ton, so a loaded railcar would be about 16 million bucks per car.  Somebody get numbers independently and check my work please, to one significant digit is good enough.  

 

Imagine about 500 such cars, cost about 8 billion, storage capacity about 1000 megawatt hours, your gigawatt storage facility Rafal: 500 rail cars with 100 tons of lithium batteries on each.

 

A megawatt hour in California costs about 400 bucks, so that facility would store…400,000 bucks of electric power.  I am doing these numbers in my head, so someone check me on order of magnitude one sig dig please.

 

Make all the railcars in parallel, so kicking out one hot car doesn’t cause any interruption in operations.  It only reduces the storage capacity by less than quarter of a percent.

 

That would be a fun project to design.

 

That Moss Landing facility was a modern design.  I am surprised they didn’t have a failsafe like I am imagining.  A thermal runaway shouldn’ta wrecked the whole place.

 

I would buy stock in such a notion.

 

Rafal, John, other math jockeys, please check my work.  Sometimes I suck.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat



 

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