Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> schrieb:
> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:

>>>Simply not on that scale, off by a factor of several orders
>>>of magnitude.
>>
>> Here's Lake Constance compared to some artificial reservoirs:
>>
>> Volume Lake/
>> m^3 Reservoir
>> 48,000M Lake Constance
>> 132,000M Lake Nasser (Aswan Dam)
>
> Last time I looked at a map, that was in Egypt. The have this
> convenient thing called "Nile valley" there. Not sure where
> you want to put this in Europe. Do you have a suggestion?
> Maybe you don't like Innsbruck, we can flood that valley?

Maybe another word of epxlanation is needed here.

The Nile has its supply of water from rain over a very sizable
fraction of Africa. For hydroelectric storage, we cannot count on
that, there is simply not enough rain for that. Lake Constance *
200 m to fill two weeks of gap and uses 1/6th of Germany's annual
rainfall to do it, but of course the overall gap during the winter
is much larger.

So, if rain is not an option, what do we do? Obviously, we need
to fill up the reservoir with excess power during the summer,
then take out the energy during the winter. Two reservoirs
situated close enough to each other that the pressure drops
are not a signifcant loss, but with a sizable difference in
height.

The bottom reservoir could be the sea. Since Slatibartfast
didn't get around to implementing the next version of Earth,
we are pretty much stuck with Norway - create a few artificial
lakes right on the coast.

Alternatively, just drain Lake Constance in summer and drown
Innsbruck, then do the reverse in winter.

The 80 GW pumps will be a sight to see, I don't think anybody
ever built anything that size for that pressure.

(Or, to cut a long story short: Hydroelectic storage is feasible
for a day or so, but not for long-term storage for a winter)

Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

> There have been fantasies of using electric car batteries for that,
> but it is going to need some interesting marketing to pull this off.
> Maybe the kind of marketing Xerox employed to get their copiers into
> the market, i.e., lease batteries rather than selling them with the
> car.

Free parking in exchange for shortstroking the car battery might work in
cities.

--
Mvh./Regards, Niels Jørgen Kruse, Vanløse, Denmark

On 10/14/2021 3:24 PM, Niels Jørgen Kruse wrote:
> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>
>> There have been fantasies of using electric car batteries for that,
>> but it is going to need some interesting marketing to pull this off.
>> Maybe the kind of marketing Xerox employed to get their copiers into
>> the market, i.e., lease batteries rather than selling them with the
>> car.
>
> Free parking in exchange for shortstroking the car battery might work in
> cities.
>

Say something recently where someone was proposing using non-rechargable
primary-cell batteries in cars, because they can have a higher energy
density than LiON.

Idea would be then that one regularly visits a shop which then replaces
the battery pack in the car (premise is that sliding out the old pack
and sliding in a new one is faster than waiting for the batteries to
recharge).

I kinda have doubts that this is such a great idea...

Also assumes that all the car companies could agree on the electrical
and mechanical parameters of the battery packs, which also seems like a
stretch, and if it is manufacturer-specific, the idea is likely DOA.

Though, I guess it could work if, say, the batteries were in the form of
giant coin cells, and a machine would just sorta shove new coin cells
into a slot (which pushes old coin cells out the other side), and
doesn't stop until the ejected coin-cell reaches a cutoff voltage, with
the coin cells basically riding along specialized "contact rails" or
similar.

Then we get people to standardize in terms of physical parameters and
nominal output voltages and similar.

Or, maybe a similar system where the car contains a huge number of
D-Cells or similar on a motorized conveyor system and rails (then they
are loaded in and unloaded via specialized hoppers).

Still seems kinda absurd though.

....

According to BGB <cr88192@gmail.com>:
>Idea would be then that one regularly visits a shop which then replaces
>the battery pack in the car (premise is that sliding out the old pack
>and sliding in a new one is faster than waiting for the batteries to
>recharge).

One of the Chinese car manufacturers has done demos of swapping Li-ion
battery packs, same idea that the swap is quick, then the old battery
can charge on a shelf at the shop and later get swapped into another
car.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On 10/14/2021 7:35 PM, John Levine wrote:
> According to BGB <cr88192@gmail.com>:
>> Idea would be then that one regularly visits a shop which then replaces
>> the battery pack in the car (premise is that sliding out the old pack
>> and sliding in a new one is faster than waiting for the batteries to
>> recharge).
>
> One of the Chinese car manufacturers has done demos of swapping Li-ion
> battery packs, same idea that the swap is quick, then the old battery
> can charge on a shelf at the shop and later get swapped into another
> car.
>

In theory, swapping LiON packs can make sense, assuming there is some
level of standardization with the packs, ...

Namely, it would need to be not like the whole situation with power
tools where one manufacturer's 18V LiON battery is not mechanically
compatible with any other manufacturer's tools. Though, this might be
more of a vendor lock-in trick (can't have someone stick a Dewalt
battery onto a Makita tool, ...).

However, in contrast, using Zinc-Air batteries or similar is just crazy
IMO. You are either in-range of a battery-swap station, or you are SOL
and the car needs to be towed.

Though, thinking about it, it is a mystery if one could have an hybrid
EV with hydrogen as its backup fuel. If using fuel-cells, this could
allow a smaller/cheaper fuel cell (doesn't need to be able to power the
car directly).

Then again, it seems like possibly the hydrogen could also be used to
run a heat engine (could be cheaper than a fuel cell, and have a higher
conversion efficiency than using a combustion engine).

Say, fuel/air mixture is burned inside of a special heat exchanger,
which heats a fluid with a high boiling point (such as oil), which is
then used in another heat exchanger to heat a working fluid with a
somewhat lower boiling point (such as butane or R-134a or similar),
which then drives a reciprocating piston. The "spent" working fluid then
goes into a radiator with a cooling fan, where it cools off and
condenses back down to a liquid, before being pumped back into contact
with the hot side.

It is possible a steam boiler could be used, but due to the comparably
much higher energy requirements required to boil water, it is likely the
conversion efficiency would be a lot lower. Likewise, supercritical
water steam would require somewhat higher operating pressures and
temperatures than supercritical butane, ...

Similar, it seems like a reciprocating piston would be more efficient
for a small scale generator than a turbine (likely something similar to
a uniflow steam engine). This could then be used to drive a generator
(to generate power to recharge the LiON pack).

Could probably build something like this that provides maybe 500W or so.

Though, not sure how such a system would fare under varying conditions
(say, we assume that air temperature could vary between, say, -10C in
the winter, up to say, 50C or so in the summer). This could potentially
have a big impact on how easy it is to boil and recondense the working
fluid.

I mostly skipped over considering a gas turbine, as it is likely to have
a fairly low conversion efficiency in this use-case.

....

BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> schrieb:

> Though, thinking about it, it is a mystery if one could have an hybrid
> EV with hydrogen as its backup fuel. If using fuel-cells, this could
> allow a smaller/cheaper fuel cell (doesn't need to be able to power the
> car directly).

There is at least one story going around of a charging station
being hooked up to a Diesel engine :-)

On 10/15/2021 1:29 AM, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> schrieb:
>
>> Though, thinking about it, it is a mystery if one could have an hybrid
>> EV with hydrogen as its backup fuel. If using fuel-cells, this could
>> allow a smaller/cheaper fuel cell (doesn't need to be able to power the
>> car directly).
>
> There is at least one story going around of a charging station
> being hooked up to a Diesel engine :-)
>

I somehow overlooked the much simpler and more obvious option for
range-extending an EV:
getting a portable gas generator and gas cans, and throw these in the
back of the EV, along with an extension cord connected through a light
switch.

When one needs to range extend, they park the car somewhere, flip the
switch, and have-at-it with the rope pull.

One could argue "why not just leave the generator running while the car
is driving?", but AFAIK, a lot of these EVs have a feature where they
won't let you turn the car on when they are still plugged in (and
otherwise running the generator with it not driving a load is just
wasting fuel).

Actually, there are pictures of people who went and did similar, just to
mount a window-mount air-conditioner into the passenger side window or
similar.

Anton Ertl wrote:
> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>> and you will also have EU-wide calm periods. One or two weeks
>>>> is not uncommon, this is the feared "Dunkelflaute" (dark wind lull).
>>>
>>> Citation needed. Looking at
>>> <https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressekonferenzen/DE/2018/PK_06_03_2018/pressemitteilung_20180306.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4>,
>>> it says that there are 0.2 cases per year with low (<10% rated power)
>>> over 48hours across the whole of EU; but that relates to the PV and
>>> Wind installations of 2018; with better distribution of such
>>> installations, I expect the number of such cases to become smaller.
>>
>> Look at
>>
>> https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&stacking=stacked_absolute_area&interval=month&year=2017&month=01
>>
>> between the 16th and the 25th of 2017, for the energy production
>> in Germany. Existing wind turbines were at around 5% of their
>> nominal capacity.
>
> I see that this is data about Germany, not the EU, and that there was
> much more solar power production in that time span than in the weeks
> before 2017-01-16, and that the time span you picked is more than four
> years ago, which does not speak for a high frequency of such events.
>
>> Statistical bromides like what the DWD presented there
>
> Another word learned. But if you want to counter that with
> statistical alarmism, you need better data than what you presented.
>
>> Wind turbines are not such a safe technology either, look at
>>
>> https://www.halternerzeitung.de/haltern/eingestuerztes-windrad-in-haltern-experte-sieht-zwei-moegliche-ursachen-w1683177-p-3000348499/
>
> This tells that the tower of a wind turbine collapsed (no people were
> harmed), and contains some speculation of possible causes.
>
> It seems that you grasp at all kinds of straws to make wind power look
> bad. Two months ago you blamed the fires in Greece on people wanting
> to build wind turbines, pointing to a tabloid newspaper as source (I
> made a critique of the newspaper article, it's headline and your claim
> in <2021Aug9.122049@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>
> <2021Aug10.094644@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>, but just in short: The
> author of the piece cited one person who made such a claim without
> presenting any evidence; the tabloid made a headline that says 'Greeks
> report: "<claim>"'; and you then wrote: '<claim>, as claimed in
> <link>').
>
>>>> I've run a few calculations a few years back. If you wanted to
>>>> bridge two week's electricity demand in winter of Germany alone,
>>>> you would have to lift Lake Constance by 200 m. Lake Constance
>>>> has around 1/6 of the annual rainfall on Germany, so any reasonable
>>>> amount of hydro storage is going to involve geoengineering on
>>>> a scale that nobody has even dreamt of up to now.
>>>
>>> If you add up the various reserviors of hydro dams, you will find that
>>> we have made a lot of geo-engineering in the last century.
>>
>> Simply not on that scale, off by a factor of several orders
>> of magnitude.
>
> Here's Lake Constance compared to some artificial reservoirs:
>
> Volume Lake/
> m^3 Reservoir
> 48,000M Lake Constance
> 132,000M Lake Nasser (Aswan Dam)
> 32,236M Lake Mead (Hoover Dam)
> 30,001M Lake Powell (Glen Canyon Dam)
> 39,300M Three Gorges Dam
> 29,000M Itaipu Reservoir (Itaipu Dam)
> 74,000M Millenium Reservoir (Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam)
> 48,700M Atatuerk Reservoir (Atatuerk Dam)
> 57,300M Kuybyshev Reservoir (Zhiguli Hydroelectric Station)
> 135,000M Guri Reservoir (Guri Dam)
>
> Unprecedented? Several orders of magnitude?

I thought we were OK here in Norway, due to our huge dams (really large
compared to the number of people), but a month of unexpected drought
over most of southern Norway was enough to give use record-breaking kWh
prices for a few days.

The calculation is actually quite easy to do here: Since we get ~100% of
our power from hydro, and we're currently catching most of the rain
falling. We average 1.4m of rainfall/year, while the total size of all
the reservoirs is a very small fraction of the land area: We would need
to make every such dam much larger in order to actually store enough
water for a full year.

(The total reservoir capacity is still quite substantial though, at 86.5
TWh, compared to an average annual production of 133 TWh: It helps a lot
that so many of them are located nearly a km above sea level!)

Fortunately, we have low enough average mountain temperatures that
reservoir evaporation is a non-issue, but we can have years with
exceptional amounts of direct evaporation of the winter snow cover.

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On 14/10/2021 14:10, Anton Ertl wrote:
> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:
>> The Silurian period - that's when the lizards ruled the earth, right?
>
> Wrong, as can be easily seen on
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fish_evolution.png>
>
> - anton
>

I guess I should have added a smiley, and perhaps a few references. Not
everyone was brought up on the /real/ Doctor Who, and I suppose David
Icke's lizard man theory might not be so well-known.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_(Doctor_Who)>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory>

Sorry if I was too obscure (though I expect the Brits here to have
understood the post).

On 15/10/2021 08:29, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> schrieb:
>
>> Though, thinking about it, it is a mystery if one could have an hybrid
>> EV with hydrogen as its backup fuel. If using fuel-cells, this could
>> allow a smaller/cheaper fuel cell (doesn't need to be able to power the
>> car directly).
>
> There is at least one story going around of a charging station
> being hooked up to a Diesel engine :-)
>

There may be some sense in that. A large stationary engine working at
its optimal speed can be a good deal more efficient than you can
practically achieve in a car engine. If the efficiency increase is
greater than the efficiency loss from charging and discharging car
batteries, you have a win.

(And it's a lot easier to filter pollutants from the exhaust of a
stationary engine.)

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>>>and you will also have EU-wide calm periods. One or two weeks
>>>>>is not uncommon, this is the feared "Dunkelflaute" (dark wind lull).
>>>>
>>>> Citation needed. Looking at
>>>><https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressekonferenzen/DE/2018/PK_06_03_2018/pressemitteilung_20180306.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4>,
>>>> it says that there are 0.2 cases per year with low (<10% rated power)
>>>> over 48hours across the whole of EU; but that relates to the PV and
>>>> Wind installations of 2018; with better distribution of such
>>>> installations, I expect the number of such cases to become smaller.
>>>
>>>Look at
>>>
>>>https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&stacking=stacked_absolute_area&interval=month&year=2017&month=01
>>>
>>>between the 16th and the 25th of 2017, for the energy production
>>>in Germany. Existing wind turbines were at around 5% of their
>>>nominal capacity.
>>
>> I see that this is data about Germany, not the EU, and that there was
>> much more solar power production in that time span than in the weeks
>> before 2017-01-16, and that the time span you picked is more than four
>> years ago, which does not speak for a high frequency of such events.
>
>Not sure if you would minda total crash of the electricity supply
>every five years or so, with industry going down. No heating,
>because modern heaters depend on electricity. Water pipes freezing,
>all that sort of stuff. And for a looong time, because there will
>not be much power before or after, either.

Nice alarmist scenario. Total crash? You want to turn off
run-of-the-river hydro power, biomass power, waste incineration, and
the significantly less than usual, but still existing amount that the
wind and solar power sources deliver, without taking any
countermeasures, in order to make your scenario come true?

>>>>>I've run a few calculations a few years back. If you wanted to
>>>>>bridge two week's electricity demand in winter of Germany alone,
>>>>>you would have to lift Lake Constance by 200 m. Lake Constance
>>>>>has around 1/6 of the annual rainfall on Germany, so any reasonable
>>>>>amount of hydro storage is going to involve geoengineering on
>>>>>a scale that nobody has even dreamt of up to now.
>>>>
>>>> If you add up the various reserviors of hydro dams, you will find that
>>>> we have made a lot of geo-engineering in the last century.
>>>
>>>Simply not on that scale, off by a factor of several orders
>>>of magnitude.
>>
>> Here's Lake Constance compared to some artificial reservoirs:
>>
>> Volume Lake/
>> m^3 Reservoir
>> 48,000M Lake Constance
>> 132,000M Lake Nasser (Aswan Dam)
>
>Last time I looked at a map, that was in Egypt. The have this
>convenient thing called "Nile valley" there. Not sure where
>you want to put this in Europe. Do you have a suggestion?
>Maybe you don't like Innsbruck, we can flood that valley?

You are apparently intent on suggesting a variant that produces
maximum damage with minimal benefit. The usual enginieering approach
is to produce the maximum benefit at minimum cost. E.g., not far from
Innsbruck there is the Sellrain-Silz group of dams and power stations.
It consists (will consist) of three reservoirs with a total of 94M m^3
of water. If you empty them all for such an emergency situation and
they are full at the start, their water goes into the Inn river at the
643m level. The reservoirs have the following heads (computed from
the low level of the reservoirs):

water head reservoir
60M m^3 1577m Finstertal
3M m^3 1228m Laengental
31M m^3 1384m Kuehtai (under construction)

This results in a total potential energy of 1385TJ. If you deliver
that in 14 days, you get 1145MW (the current power stations in this
installation have a lower rating (it takes 22 days to empty the
reservoirs if they are all full, if you run the generators at 48m^3/s
(which is what the final power station in the chain is rated for)), so
they would need to be upgraded). You need about 61 such installations
to power all of Germany for 14 days, if you turn off all other sources
of electricity. Currently you don't have that much and we don't have
that much.

But once you look at the whole of EU, such events become much less
frequent. The fixed costs of such installations are quite high, so I
doubt that it is economical to build such installations to cover all
of the demand for such rare cases. I expect that there are
installations with lower fixed cost (and higher marginal cost), maybe
gas turbines using methanol from biomass as fuel. Electricity from
such installations will still be very expensive (the installations
have to be amortized over the relatively few days of their operation).
At some price, some consumers (e.g., Aluminium smelters) may decide
that it is indeed more economical to consume less electricity in such
situations, which will also help to alleviate it.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> schrieb:
>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>
>>>>Simply not on that scale, off by a factor of several orders
>>>>of magnitude.
>>>
>>> Here's Lake Constance compared to some artificial reservoirs:
>>>
>>> Volume Lake/
>>> m^3 Reservoir
>>> 48,000M Lake Constance
>>> 132,000M Lake Nasser (Aswan Dam)
>>
>> Last time I looked at a map, that was in Egypt. The have this
>> convenient thing called "Nile valley" there. Not sure where
>> you want to put this in Europe. Do you have a suggestion?
>> Maybe you don't like Innsbruck, we can flood that valley?
>
>Maybe another word of epxlanation is needed here.
>
>The Nile has its supply of water from rain over a very sizable
>fraction of Africa. For hydroelectric storage, we cannot count on
>that, there is simply not enough rain for that. Lake Constance *
>200 m to fill two weeks of gap and uses 1/6th of Germany's annual
>rainfall to do it,

Lake Constance is filled mostly with rainfall from Switzerland, a
little bit from Austria, and even less from Germany.

>but of course the overall gap during the winter
>is much larger.

The overall gap between what and what? It looks to me like you are
trying to change goalposts, from bridging a two-week "Dunkelflaute" to
something else.

>So, if rain is not an option, what do we do? Obviously, we need
>to fill up the reservoir with excess power during the summer,
>then take out the energy during the winter. Two reservoirs
>situated close enough to each other that the pressure drops
>are not a signifcant loss, but with a sizable difference in
>height.
>
>The bottom reservoir could be the sea. Since Slatibartfast
>didn't get around to implementing the next version of Earth,
>we are pretty much stuck with Norway - create a few artificial
>lakes right on the coast.

You probably don't want sea water in the reservoirs, so I doubt that
this is done, but maybe the Norwegians here can confirm or refute
this.

Many pumped-storage installations work with two (or more reservoirs);
e.g., the Sellrain-Silz installation has three reservoirs and uses
them for pumped-storage hydro (as well as for covering a larger
drainage area).

Another way is to use a river as a source for the pumped water. The
Koralpe power station pumps up water from the Drau river. Of course
that requires the river to carry enough water.

>Alternatively, just drain Lake Constance in summer and drown
>Innsbruck, then do the reverse in winter.

Yes, one of those maximum-cost, maximum-damage, minimum-benefit
schemes that you apparently prefer.

>(Or, to cut a long story short: Hydroelectic storage is feasible
>for a day or so, but not for long-term storage for a winter)

Up to relatively recently pumped-storage has been dimensioned for
pumping at night and generating during day (day storage), now we are
seeing them being built for longer time spans. E.g., at the rated
capacity of the pumps (70 m^3/s) it will take 5 days to empty the
Kuethai reservoir (under construction) by pumping the water to the
Finstertal reservoir.

Long-term storage for a winter has been the goal of hydro
installations in earlier times, to compensate for lower power from
run-of-the-river hydro, but at that time the electricity consumption
was not as large. This will still make it's contribution, but I think
that it's probably not economical to dimension solar and wind (and
other sources) for the average consumption, and do all of the rest
with pumped or non-pumped storage.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> writes:

> Anton Ertl wrote:
>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:

[..]

> The calculation is actually quite easy to do here: Since we get ~100%
> of our power from hydro, and we're currently catching most of the rain
> falling. We average 1.4m of rainfall/year, while the total size of all
> the reservoirs is a very small fraction of the land area: We would
> need to make every such dam much larger in order to actually store
> enough water for a full year.
>

[..]

To me it looks like Norwegians are a bit hypocritical, the
stability/prosperity/etc is bought by petrocurrencies de jour:
https://fossilfuel.com/the-oil-curse-lessons-from-norway/ I still
remember constant barrage of StatOil advertisments on TV2 (circa 2001)

I may be way off but to me it feels like the hydro/electro nirvana has
fossil foundation. The forbearance, foresight, fortitude and all that is
commendable... but... still...

anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:

> This will still make it's contribution, but I think that it's probably
> not economical to dimension solar and wind (and other sources) for the
> average consumption, and do all of the rest with pumped or non-pumped
> storage.

More likely to dimension solar and wind for twice the average, because
that overbuild is cheaper than storage. The resulting "superpower"
overflow will surely find some use at least some of the time.

If not, solar and wind power have no problem shutting generation down.

The extra capacity makes it a lot easier to get through "dunkelflaute",
because while generation from solar and wind is lower at that time, it
is not zero.

/Benny

Benny Lyne Amorsen <benny+usenet@amorsen.dk> writes:
>anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
>
>> This will still make it's contribution, but I think that it's probably
>> not economical to dimension solar and wind (and other sources) for the
>> average consumption, and do all of the rest with pumped or non-pumped
>> storage.
>
>More likely to dimension solar and wind for twice the average, because
>that overbuild is cheaper than storage.

Yes, although I expect that the optimum is at some level between a
factor of 1 and 2.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

On 10/15/2021 4:59 AM, David Brown wrote:
> On 15/10/2021 08:29, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> schrieb:
>>
>>> Though, thinking about it, it is a mystery if one could have an hybrid
>>> EV with hydrogen as its backup fuel. If using fuel-cells, this could
>>> allow a smaller/cheaper fuel cell (doesn't need to be able to power the
>>> car directly).
>>
>> There is at least one story going around of a charging station
>> being hooked up to a Diesel engine :-)
>>
>
> There may be some sense in that. A large stationary engine working at
> its optimal speed can be a good deal more efficient than you can
> practically achieve in a car engine. If the efficiency increase is
> greater than the efficiency loss from charging and discharging car
> batteries, you have a win.
>
> (And it's a lot easier to filter pollutants from the exhaust of a
> stationary engine.)
>

Well, also technically it is easier I guess to "go green" with a diesel
engine than with a gasoline engine, since it is possible to run it on
biodiesel.

Granted, one can run gasoline engines on ethanol, but it is usually
"blended" rather than pure ethanol.

Unlike hydrogen, neither of these can be synthesized purely from
electricity.

Either way, hydrocarbons fuels are better for use in an ICE than H2 gas
would be:
When a hydrocarbon burns, it releases lots of CO2 molecules, the total
number of molecules may significantly increase, in addition to these
molecules staying in a gaseous phase;
When H2 gas burns, the total number of molecules deceases (2 H2 + O2 =>
2 H2O), and these molecules will readily condense to a liquid phase once
they cool (namely, water).

So, it seems like the only mechanical advantage one is getting from the
H2 is due to it being "really hot", and more of the "work" from the gas
would go into heating the ICE than actually driving the pistons (or,
likely to have a fairly low conversion efficiency).

But, this is partly why I was suggesting using it (in effect) to run a
boiler, since a boiler can make more effective use of the heat energy.

Well, also something like butane or similar could be better suited to
small / low power operation than water steam (though butane could be
better, as it would not decompose at high temperatures, and would have a
critical point higher than ambient daytime temperatures; but much lower
than water, *).

*: Assumption being that it is easier to manage a supercritical fluid at
150C..200C than one at 400C..600C, ...

One of these is within the safe operating ranges for copper tubing and
aluminum parts with silicone O-rings and similar... The other is not...

All this talk about batteries for EVs brings us to the Mercedes model AA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AlndKQSs6Q

Anton Ertl wrote:
> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> schrieb:
>>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>
>>>>> Simply not on that scale, off by a factor of several orders
>>>>> of magnitude.
>>>>
>>>> Here's Lake Constance compared to some artificial reservoirs:
>>>>
>>>> Volume Lake/
>>>> m^3 Reservoir
>>>> 48,000M Lake Constance
>>>> 132,000M Lake Nasser (Aswan Dam)
>>>
>>> Last time I looked at a map, that was in Egypt. The have this
>>> convenient thing called "Nile valley" there. Not sure where
>>> you want to put this in Europe. Do you have a suggestion?
>>> Maybe you don't like Innsbruck, we can flood that valley?
>>
>> Maybe another word of epxlanation is needed here.
>>
>> The Nile has its supply of water from rain over a very sizable
>> fraction of Africa. For hydroelectric storage, we cannot count on
>> that, there is simply not enough rain for that. Lake Constance *
>> 200 m to fill two weeks of gap and uses 1/6th of Germany's annual
>> rainfall to do it,
>
> Lake Constance is filled mostly with rainfall from Switzerland, a
> little bit from Austria, and even less from Germany.
>
>> but of course the overall gap during the winter
>> is much larger.
>
> The overall gap between what and what? It looks to me like you are
> trying to change goalposts, from bridging a two-week "Dunkelflaute" to
> something else.
>
>> So, if rain is not an option, what do we do? Obviously, we need
>> to fill up the reservoir with excess power during the summer,
>> then take out the energy during the winter. Two reservoirs
>> situated close enough to each other that the pressure drops
>> are not a signifcant loss, but with a sizable difference in
>> height.
>>
>> The bottom reservoir could be the sea. Since Slatibartfast
>> didn't get around to implementing the next version of Earth,
>> we are pretty much stuck with Norway - create a few artificial
>> lakes right on the coast.
>
> You probably don't want sea water in the reservoirs, so I doubt that
> this is done, but maybe the Norwegians here can confirm or refute
> this.

The water at the bottom intake comes from lakes/rivers near sea level.

Norway has a few of the larger (in MWh) pumped storage installations,
but the last time I checked, it didn't get that much usage: As long as
there is any buffer capacity at all in the normal production chains, it
is 100% efficient to adjust these instead of using excess production to
pumb water back up in another region.

This is of course partly driven by the very short-term tunability of
hydro vs any heat-driven generator, but with more DC interconnects to
areas with green (wind/solar) or darker (coal/nuclear) generation, it is
likely that Norway once again can come out on top by being able to sell
power during peak usage on the continent and then buy back very cheap
excess power when the load is less. Alu melters and other process
industry provides enough baseline load that there is a way to use that
excess solar/wind power without having to startup the pump storage.

We currently have 11 pumped storage facilites able to handle a total of
about 1GW, 10 years ago German scientists suggested that this should be
increased to 60 GW, while Statkraft here in Norway calculated that we
had a theoretical capacity in the 10-25 GW range.

The main limiter is the DC interconnect cables which can only handle a
few GW, but the early september experience of a week with very high
local power bills have made it politically difficult to develop new
cables, in fact the new Labor/Farmers party coalition cabinet which
started yesterday promised to stop any new interconnect plans, even if
any engineer can see that it would obviously benefit Norway as a country.

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

clamky@hotmail.com wrote:
> Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> writes:
>
>> Anton Ertl wrote:
>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>
> [..]
>
>> The calculation is actually quite easy to do here: Since we get ~100%
>> of our power from hydro, and we're currently catching most of the rain
>> falling. We average 1.4m of rainfall/year, while the total size of all
>> the reservoirs is a very small fraction of the land area: We would
>> need to make every such dam much larger in order to actually store
>> enough water for a full year.
>>
>
> [..]
>
> To me it looks like Norwegians are a bit hypocritical, the
> stability/prosperity/etc is bought by petrocurrencies de jour:
> https://fossilfuel.com/the-oil-curse-lessons-from-norway/ I still
> remember constant barrage of StatOil advertisments on TV2 (circa 2001)
>
> I may be way off but to me it feels like the hydro/electro nirvana has
> fossil foundation. The forbearance, foresight, fortitude and all that is
> commendable... but... still...

No need to apologize, you are more or less completely right.

The one thing we have done right and which we can be proud of as a
country is the way we managed to absorb all that oil money without
letting it leak out of the country or gather in a few hands, driven by
corruption and theft: Norway still has one of the highest levels of
trust, and that makes everything run much more smoothly.

BTW, Norway was _not_ a poor country which struck it rich, we were
pretty close to our Scandinavian brothers even before the oil started,
with a rapidly growing economy and lots of industrialization driven by
that 100% cheap hydro power given by our geography.

Add more than a trillion dollar/euro, all invested outside Norway to
avoid driving domestic inflation, with a "handlingsregelen" regulation
stating that only a part of inflation-adjusted growth in the fund can be
used to balance the budgets, and we end up with a _very_ long-term
benefit to society.

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> schrieb:

> Well, also technically it is easier I guess to "go green" with a diesel
> engine than with a gasoline engine, since it is possible to run it on
> biodiesel.
>
> Granted, one can run gasoline engines on ethanol, but it is usually
> "blended" rather than pure ethanol.

> Unlike hydrogen, neither of these can be synthesized purely from
> electricity.

Not directly, but if you have hydrogen and CO2, you can
generate carbon monoxide via the water shift reaction

CO + H2O <-> CO2 + H2

and you can generate Methane in a similar way (with different
reaction conditions and catalysts)

CO2 + 4 H2 <-> CH4 + 2 H2O

If you have CO and methane, the next step can then be to make
liquid hydrocarbons via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis:

n CO + 2n H2 -> (CH2)n + n H2O

Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> writes:

> clamky@hotmail.com wrote:
>> Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> writes:
>>
>>> Anton Ertl wrote:
>>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>>> Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>>>>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>> [..]
>>
>>> The calculation is actually quite easy to do here: Since we get ~100%
>>> of our power from hydro, and we're currently catching most of the rain
>>> falling. We average 1.4m of rainfall/year, while the total size of all
>>> the reservoirs is a very small fraction of the land area: We would
>>> need to make every such dam much larger in order to actually store
>>> enough water for a full year.
>>>
>> [..]
>> To me it looks like Norwegians are a bit hypocritical, the
>> stability/prosperity/etc is bought by petrocurrencies de jour:
>> https://fossilfuel.com/the-oil-curse-lessons-from-norway/ I still
>> remember constant barrage of StatOil advertisments on TV2 (circa 2001)
>> I may be way off but to me it feels like the hydro/electro nirvana
>> has
>> fossil foundation. The forbearance, foresight, fortitude and all that is
>> commendable... but... still...
>
> No need to apologize, you are more or less completely right.
>
> The one thing we have done right and which we can be proud of as a
> country is the way we managed to absorb all that oil money without
> letting it leak out of the country or gather in a few hands, driven by
> corruption and theft: Norway still has one of the highest levels of
> trust, and that makes everything run much more smoothly.

It is indeed truly aweinspiring, unbelievable even to be perfectly
honest.

>
> BTW, Norway was _not_ a poor country which struck it rich, we were
> pretty close to our Scandinavian brothers even before the oil started,
> with a rapidly growing economy and lots of industrialization driven by
> that 100% cheap hydro power given by our geography.
>

I did not know that, takk! My knowledge of .no history was/is limited to
Allemannsretten and the fact that immigration was allowed/encouraged
after the second World War.

> Add more than a trillion dollar/euro, all invested outside Norway to
> avoid driving domestic inflation, with a "handlingsregelen" regulation
> stating that only a part of inflation-adjusted growth in the fund can
> be used to balance the budgets, and we end up with a _very_ long-term
> benefit to society.

Benny Lyne Amorsen <benny+usenet@amorsen.dk> schrieb:
> anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
>
>> This will still make it's contribution, but I think that it's probably
>> not economical to dimension solar and wind (and other sources) for the
>> average consumption, and do all of the rest with pumped or non-pumped
>> storage.
>
> More likely to dimension solar and wind for twice the average, because
> that overbuild is cheaper than storage. The resulting "superpower"
> overflow will surely find some use at least some of the time.

Twenty times - generated power drops down to ~5% fairly regularly.

According to BGB <cr88192@gmail.com>:
>However, in contrast, using Zinc-Air batteries or similar is just crazy
>IMO. You are either in-range of a battery-swap station, or you are SOL
>and the car needs to be towed.

This is why I would never use a gasoline powered car. You are either in
range of a gas station, or you are SOL.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On Friday, October 15, 2021 at 3:17:08 PM UTC-5, John Levine wrote:
> According to BGB <cr8...@gmail.com>:
> >However, in contrast, using Zinc-Air batteries or similar is just crazy
> >IMO. You are either in-range of a battery-swap station, or you are SOL
> >and the car needs to be towed.
> This is why I would never use a gasoline powered car. You are either in
> range of a gas station, or you are SOL.
<
I remember when we used to worry that there was going to be a gas station on
(literally) every corner! If there were a battery-pack swap station on every corner
much of the EV recharge problem would vanish!
<
The only fallacy of this arrangement is what do you do when there is no corner ?
{"Turn right onto HW xyx and drive for 763 miles"}
> --
> Regards,
> John Levine, jo...@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On 10/15/2021 3:17 PM, John Levine wrote:
> According to BGB <cr88192@gmail.com>:
>> However, in contrast, using Zinc-Air batteries or similar is just crazy
>> IMO. You are either in-range of a battery-swap station, or you are SOL
>> and the car needs to be towed.
>
> This is why I would never use a gasoline powered car. You are either in
> range of a gas station, or you are SOL.
>

The advantage of gasoline, however, is that the gas stations are
widespread, gasoline can be transported via or siphoned from other
vehicles, and the gas pump hose mechanism can fit into pretty much any
type of vehicle (or, one can just sorta pour it in via a gas can), ...

The same can't really be said of large zinc-air battery packs or similar.

It would be at least a little more plausible seeming if there were
standardized, say, 20cm x 6cm, coin-cell batteries with an internal
conveyor system and "coin slot" system for the car or similar.

Though, EVs with LiON packs or similar, have the feature that one can
recharge them by plugging into utility power or similar, and thus would
not be entirely dependent on rare and highly specialized facilities.