Dutton's Folly (nuclear power)

[nomadpete]

Pumped storage is the use of a dam located higher than another. A small hydro generator is built at the lower dam. When there is surplus alectricity, the hydro impellers are run backwards and used to pump water up to the top dam.

When you need the enetgy back again, the top dam runs back down through the impellors and generates electricity.

 

No water is wasted.

 

There are losses in the process, but the energy used would have otherwise been wasted.

 

Wivenhoe Dam is 63mts lower than Splityard Creek dam in SE Qld. Works a treat.

 

I am aware of a smaller one being set up near Toowoomba.

 

[nomadpete]

https://arena.gov.au/renewable-energy/pumped-hydro-energy-storage/

 

https://arena.gov.au/blog/there-are-22000-possible-sites-for-pumped-hydro-storage-in-australia/

 

There are 22,000 possible sites for pumped storage in Australia

[facthunter]

Google it. Pumped hydro.  Gravity  Potential energy. Nev

[nomadpete]

Why are we buying musky batteries?

Pumped storage is a better plan in the long term.

 

Another possible storage media (in spite of % turnaround losses) is HOT AIR.

 

A private company has started building a compressed air storage system for Broken Hill. It uses old mineshafts to hold compressed air and can supply the town for 8 hrs.

[kgwilson]

Community batteries are a good option for a street or suburb of homeowners with solar panels. They can be plonked pretty much anywhere just like sub stations. Homeowners who are part of the scheme feed their power in to the battery during the day when their solar is producing a surplus and draw on the battery at night. The concept is simple, has already been proven but few have been created or are operating. You get paid for the power you feed in and pay for what you draw out, less of course the costs associated with installing, operating and maintaining the system.

 

To me this makes more sense than putting in your own home battery given the exorbitant installed cost of a 13 kWh Tesla Powerwall at $13-15,000. Of course if you have an electric vehicle you have a mobile battery of 40 to 100 kWh & now the government has approved V2H & V2G that will appeal to some though maybe not if your car is parked at your work every day.

[old man emu]

A good system always has a backup just in case something goes wrong. If you were connected to a community battery and for whatever reason it went off line, what would be the backup to supply electricity to the community overnight until the battery was returned to service?

[Marty_d]

What's the backup now if transmission lines go down?

I don't think the community battery is one cell. There's probably the ability to isolate parts of it so the rest can continue to service the connected residences.

[old man emu]

You are correct in saying that there is no backup if the lines are damaged, or a local transformer fails. I was just trying to find out what a competent planner should do to look for ways a system can fail, then make plans to deal with the failure.

[spacesailor]

I still have " gas & kerosene " lanterns.  The TV can be connected by car batteries & inverter. CB radio will take care of communications. ( no microwave cell phones without mains power ) .

spacesailor

 

[facthunter]

These are small systems and don't affect large areas IF a battery fails (Pretty unlikely in the big scheme of things) You'd have interruption to your supply. It's a bit of a "what IF" Question.   The battery is there to back up the wind and solar.  which charges it with the surplus.  Nev

[nomadpete]

1 hour ago, facthunter said:

These are small systems and don't affect large areas IF a battery fails (Pretty unlikely in the big scheme of things) You'd have interruption to your supply. It's a bit of a "what IF" Question.   The battery is there to back up the wind and solar.  which charges it with the surplus.  Nev

It is a valid point. But it could be mitigated at nominal expense.

 

I spent 30 years in the power industry. Everything involved (except street wires) is backed up by redundancy. My career revolved around fixing stuff before anybody noticed.

 

Some folk called it 'Gold plating the system'. But Australia has had less major outages than USA.

 

 

 

 

[facthunter]

The "Battery " is Not a single battery. A grid is never reliable in bad weather etc unless it is circular. (essentially duplicated ) Where do you stop? If It's that Important to you further back it up with diesel and really UP the costs. Hospitals do that. . Nev

[onetrack]

It's called a portable diesel generator, when you want backup. The local electrical suppliers use them now for power backups when transformers fail. It's when the backups fail, that the ordure really hits the rotating blades.

We had an episode like this when the main Muja (Collie, W.A.) to Kalgoorlie HV transmission line suffered severe damage from a major storm in January 2023.

 

Five large HV pylons fell over during the storm - then the two gas turbine backup generators in Kalgoorlie failed to come on-line during the outage.

It took them several days to track down the backup generator problem - and it was simply a problem that no electrical designer had envisaged - zero voltage in the Muja-Kalgoorlie line.

 

The backup generators were designed to actuate with residual voltage in the grid - but there was no residual voltage, so they couldn't crank up. It took about 4 days to track down the problem and bring the gas turbines online, and it took nine days to restore the Muja-Kalgoorlie line.

 

https://www.westernpower.com.au/news/storm-destroyed-transmission-line-rebuilt-and-re-energised/#:~:text=Five towers were destroyed by,owned generator during the rebuild.

[facthunter]

They have to be synchronised to whatever grid they are connecting to . The exact shape  and frequency or it will blow everything. Otherwise kept separate.  Nev

[kgwilson]

Community batteries are still connected to the grid. If the battery fails or when it runs flat you draw from the grid. All managed by software like everything else these days.

[spacesailor]

 here in Toongabbie we had a truck take down one power pole And then darkness descended. 

Short circuit shut down a large area . Or suburb. 

It doesn't take a major storm to knock-out our power supply

So , a bbq & gas bottle  with a light attachment,  it gives off heat for the winter months,  Cooks dinner. With light to see , what your eating  .

Just like a picnic. 

spacesailor

[Jerry_Atrick]

 

[facthunter]

Batteries are Naturally DC Volts The clever inverters match it to the Heartbeat of the grid. . Alternators go synch by RPM but locking them is  difficult.. The B 727 has a synchronous system with 3 engines Ground Power and  the APU involved at various times. It has a Flight engineer to attend to that.  Nev

[nomadpete]

15 hours ago, facthunter said:

The "Battery " is Not a single battery.

Ask OME - "battery" is a curious word meaning a singular containing a multiple.

 

Anyway, the concept of a single lithium battery on each city block is fine as long as there is an alternate source available.

 

Outages may be due to battery repair / replacement. Or a control system/ charging system/inverter/ battery monitoring failure. Any of these complex, expensive items represent a single point of failure.

 

Have you tried to get an electrician out to quickly fix something in the home?

 

In the above examples, one fault has the potential (pun) to leave multiple homes without power (no fridge, no cooking, no lights, no tv) until a repair is completed.

 

Your example of a dead cell in a battery does not address these risks.

 

Maybe not a problem if you use the Boeing system of 3 systems with an engineer to watch over it.

Edited December 22, 2024 by nomadpete

[nomadpete]

12 hours ago, kgwilson said:

Community batteries are still connected to the grid. If the battery fails or when it runs flat you draw from the grid. All managed by software like everything else these days.

I think the suggested longer term idea was to have islanded distributed power.

 

Nev doesn't like the grid.

He has a point - it is an expensive overhead. Approx 40% of your power bill is just covering grid infrastructure.

 

Further to that expense, the Dutton Nuclear costings fail (I think) to include the cost of upgrading the existing grid over the period of waiting for a nuclear plant to come online. (Over that time the demand is expected to increase ~40% so HV grid will need upgrading anyway). This would not be necessary if there is a plan to implement distributed community battery storage.

[nomadpete]

14 hours ago, onetrack said:

It's called a portable diesel generator, when you want backup.

Yes, every state has a couple of these truck mounted gensets now. Mainly used to supply communities during planned maintenance of poles and wires.

[old man emu]

Originally, battery comes from the Latin battuere , via Old French baterie "beating, thrashing, assault" with an alternative meaning referring to bashing fortress walls to an term for a unit of artillery. In 1748 Benjamin Franklin was experimenting with electricity added the meaning of "electric cell" perhaps from the artillery sense via notion of "discharges" of electricity.

 

In the military sense, an artillery battery is composed of a number of canon, so the idea of "a singular containing a multiple" is reasonable. However, a collection of individuals is often now called and array since "array" can mean an ordered series or arrangement, as in "an array of photovoltaic cells constituting a solar panel".

[facthunter]

Why does everything have to get so complex ?  Redundancy costs MONEY . You double up "Just  in Case". There's few things more  reliable than these batteries and they can be self monitoring, Instant switching.,  Nev

[old man emu]

15 minutes ago, facthunter said:

You double up "Just  in Case".

When you are dealing with an essential service such as electricity supply, it's a good idea to consider Murphy's law in planning. I'd bet the cost/benefit analysis of redundancy comes out strongly on the "benefit" side. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

[facthunter]

Just motherhood words. People have tight pockets. Hospitals have their OWN because of their unique situation they are in. Nev