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Robert Hargraves's avatar

Good thinking, leading to "How should we evaluate our energy sources?"

1. Sufficiently ample?

2. Cost per unit of energy?

3. Power available when needed?

4. Observed harm to human life and health?

5. Pollution of the environment?

6. CO2 emissions?

7. Consumption of finite natural resources?

8. Security of supply and supply chain?

9. Support to national security?

Answer: a thoughtful combination of above, no single issue.

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New Thinks's avatar

In each case you are discussing things where we have decades of experience and tens of thousands of hours of safe operation. Nuclear reactors have millions of hours of safe operation under their belt. Oil tankers have millions of miles of safe voyages. Utility scale batteries are all of 5 years old. We have already seen devastating fires - At Moss landing there have been THREE previous fires.

I agree that there is a problem, but what is it? It's actually easy to explain, if I may.

In the case of oil tankers, there are a grand total of 810 in the world. Nuclear reactors? 94 in the U.S. The batteries, as a whole are not failing. It is the individual cells that are failing. When a single cell fails catastrophically, it sets off a chain reaction. Hence a correct comparison is not between the number of installations, but in the number of individual batteries, just like individual ships, and individual reactors.

The battery installations consist of millions of cells. A single manufacturing defect, in a single cell, can cause a loss of the whole facility. Such a defect is almost impossible to detect.

If we had 10 million nuclear reactors, or 10 million oil tankers, I'd expect our failure rate to be more significant. The real problem is what I like to call the tyranny of large numbers. With a big enough pile of cells, you are going to have fires - you can't stop it from happening. Even small failure rates translate into a large number of fires.

The solution is to ditch lithium-ion cells for this purpose. You need batteries that are inherently safe - likely flow cell batteries, or solid-state batteries. Or set up an energy system where you are not trying to store so much energy - it's a pretty stupid starting point for running a utility. energy doesn't want to be stored. It's why, for the last 120 years, we have not stored very much of it. Power systems learned this back in the days of Edison. Look up flywheel storage accidents sometime. Extremely reliable energy storage, and very dangerous when it fails.

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