This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Let's do some math:
2.1GWh
And
Multi billion dollar price (let's assume 3 billion)
2.1GWh - > 3billion
2.1MWh - > 3 millon
2.1kWh - > 3000 Usd /2.1
1KWh - > ~1430 USD
Considering that 1kWh in lithium ion batteries is like 150 USD they aren't getting a good value out of it.
The article doesn't explain the battery, making it a bullshit site if you ask me, here is what they are talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
'The vanadium redox battery (VRB), also known as the vanadium flow battery (VFB) or vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), is a type of rechargeable flow battery which employs vanadium ions as charge carriers.[5] The battery uses vanadium's ability to exist in a solution in four different oxidation states to make a battery with a single electroactive element instead of two.[6]
For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.[7] '
The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn't.
The article specifies:
That's what the "within milliseconds" in the title refers to.
Every power generator has a ramp up time. Think the time it takes to start the engine in a diesel generator, until it spins up and is able to output peak power.
Nuclear reactors can hare ramp-up times of hours, in some conditions even days.
This thing here can go from zero to peak output within almost no time, which makes it perfect to balance the sometimes erratic and unpredictable generation fluctuations of renewable energy production.
For comparison, coal or gas power generators usually have large flywheels that, once spinning, react almost instantly to power fluctuations in the network by converting their motion to electricity or the other way round. If these coal or gas generators aren't running, they can't be used to balance the fluctuations in the network, so battery solutions like the one in OP are required to actively manage the network stability.
Yeah, no, it's not going to output 1.2 gW in milliseconds.
The headline is most likely a misunderstanding, but "Output X Watt in Y time" isn't all that wrong, since it would be talking about how quickly the power supply can respond to demand.
Every power supply has a ramp-up time, and the way the headline is worded hints to a very short ramp-up time, which would be very helpful for network stabilization.
But yeah, it's likely the headline writer just misunderstood something.
We don't know soccer fields around these parts...
Anything but the Imperial System huh?
It's 1,435 US rods square, or 1,333.6 imperial rods, simple.
So that is like 1,435 dick lengths end to end? /s
How big is a soccer field?
That'd be 691077 regular sized hamburgers laid next to each other in a rigid grid pattern, 797502 if laid in a hexagonal pattern, 891720 if squished.
Well…How big are regular sized hamburgers?
1/3 to half the size of your appetite.
About half of this hole
Correct!
Between 4000 and 11000 square meters
That's an estimate, I guess? Well, it's still a better definition
And how deep is a soccer field?
Do you really mean to learn?
Cause we're living in a world of fools, breaking us down. When they all should let us be.
I wanted to research it myself since I didn't know how Redbox flow batteries operate. It is two giant tanks of liquid energy. When there's extra electricity from wind or solar, pumps move special vanadium-based liquids through a stack of cells, storing that energy as a chemical change. When electricity is needed later, the process runs in reverse and the liquids generate power for the grid. Unlike lithium batteries, the energy is stored in the liquid tanks, so making the battery bigger is mostly a matter of building larger tanks. The Swiss project will store about 2.1 GWh of energy—enough to help balance renewable power on a massive scale—and was chosen partly because redox-flow batteries are non-flammable, long-lasting, and can be cycled tens of thousands of times with little degradation
I read some years back about I think the first big heavy industrial vanadium battery being built for some washington state company if I recall.
Cheers for putting the legwork in, they're even cooler than I thought
Asked for comments, they kept saying "Rest assured there is no death ray plans"
(/j)
Yeah that's what the large hadron collider is for, everyone knows that.
They already destroyed the world by distorting out timeline when that weasel got into the collider when it was running, just a week before harambe.
able to output 1.2 GW within milliseconds
By exploding?
When I flip the light switch in my room, I drain 6 nuclear reactors.
Yeah, that's a bit too much a bit too fast, isn't it?
1.2GWh within milliseconds would be exploding.
Read the headline again, it only talks about GW not GWh. That means it can output 1.2GWh per hour, but it can ramp up to 1.2GW within milliseconds. And it likely can only keep that output for a very short time, which is exactly what you need to balance the fluctuations of renewable energy production.
Wow, that's almost 10% of a single datacenter
They just had the first stone laying ceremony so that explains the new wave of publications on the project.
They are using a Vanadium flow battery by the company Invinity Energy Systems which is British-Canadian.
I'm a little unsure whether it's a good idea to combine this with a datacenter, I hope the datacenter bubble popping won't jeopardize the whole project.
Fuck these incompetent headline writers who cant use units correctly. At this point they are doing this shit on purpose to ragebait people into reading the article. And they dont even explain what that headline is supposed to mean in the article. Does the output power ramp up that fast or do they mean that it can actually just output a lot of energy really fast?
Actually, the headline isn't wrong, you just read it wrong.
The article specifies:
Every power source has a ramp up time. Ramping up e.g. a nuclear reactor can take hours, so if demand fluctuates it takes long for it to spin up.
This one here can ramp up almost instantly to cover for fluctuations in the network, especially those caused by the unpredictable nature of renewable power generators.
I am also fascinated by the measurement “two soccer fields.” Americans largely play soccer on American football fields, so any American would just say “two football fields.” But everyone else hates calling it “soccer” and prefer to use metric rather than comparisons? This just seems like they chose all their measurements to be maximally irritating.
Yeah, nobody play soccer in Switzerland, they play football, how would they know how big is soccer field?
My interpretation is that it can go from no output up to 1.2GW in milliseconds. Do most big batteries take more time to ramp up to high output?
Goddammit, they are 0.01 Gigawatt short of time travel. 😋
It says "over 1.2" which means you know what some engineer gave the spec as.
