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] ’
I don’t think I understand any better what the battery is then I did before. As per usual Wikipedia sucks at explaining concepts that you don’t actually already understand.
Here’s the short version.
A normal battery is a sealed cell. It has a positive and negative electrode, with an electrolyte between them. Usually many layers of this. When you charge it, a chemical change happens. When you discharge it, that chemical change is undone.
A redox flow battery uses fixed electrodes, but a liquid electrolyte that can be pumped and stored. This means you can increase overall storage capacity simply by adding more electrolyte tanks, without needing more electrodes. Think of it like a generator with a bigger gas tank.
The whole vanadium thing is just one of the metals used in the battery. There’s a few kind of redox flow batteries using different chemistries
Also there are hundreds of chemical combinations that produce electricity that we know about, and only a handful have been worked on for batteries. As reported in Harper’s Magazine many years back, that is not indexed to enshitified search engines, because fuck you (us, google, et al talking.)
Thank you! That is a smart solution to inrease capacity!
The downside is that does batteries are not be energy dense. Perfect for grid storage but useless for car batteries (where the bulk of battery R&D money goes).
Fry: I get it! So if the simplified bucket explanation gets full, you just add more buckets!
Yes exactly. If you need more total capacity you add more tanks, if you need more instantaneous output power you add more electrodes. And thus you can scale either one without messing with the other.
Yeah wikipedia is hit or miss, especially as technical people like to show off their fancy words and explain things in ways only technical people understand.
But it’s Vanadium, and you can look that up elsewhere. The first large industrial vanadium battery (if I recall,) was some years back, I think in WA State.
If I really want to feel stupid, I go to the Wikipedia article for some simple maths concept I thought I understood
oh yeah, i read up yesterday what a polynomial is. hah.
Yeah I think people who enjoy math and formulas and proofs also enjoy writing Wikipedia articles in the same way. I usually go to the Simple English Wikipedia for any math topics. And I got as far as calc 2 in college, so I’m no ignoramus.
There is Wikipedia in Simple English, but they don’t cover all topics.
source: wikipedia (link above)
As per usual Wikipedia sucks at explaining concepts that you don’t actually already understand.
but it’s true, i have encountered exactly this phenomenon many times :/
If I heard this on a different situation I would have thought this is an AI hallucination.
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Cheers for putting the legwork in, they’re even cooler than I thought
I think that’s the same kind of battery technology as explained in this video. Most certainly not the same chemistry used, but same in principle
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.
The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn’t.
The article specifies:
- Total capacity: 2.1GWh
- Peak output: 1.2GW
- Ramp up time: a few milliseconds
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.
That’s like a huge capacitor on my hobby electronics brain.
That’s pretty much the job, except a billion times as large.
Thanks, I edited the headline to make it clearer, but this community is overrun with confidently incorrect folks.
…this community - oh, you mean social media! Yes, quite true.
Perfect power source for a Death Star! The planet goes from zero to smithereens in milliseconds!
FYI. Hydro power has similar capacity and start up times
Not quite - only the biggest hydro stations can generate a gigawatt or more, and their startup time is like 10 minutes.
This project is only 500 MW here
And other places say 800 MW
Both of which are comparable to large hydro.
Modern pumped hydro has a ramp up in the 10s of seconds range.
Anyway. Same ballpark in terms of power.
I must have got the 1.2GW from some comment.
It’s in the title so you are not mistaken. The problem is that various statistics have been reported and we don’t know what is correct.
Yeah, the downside of hydro though is that you need to have a fitting space to build it. You can’t just excavate a random field somewhere and plonk a hydro dam right there.
In most places all easy spots for hydro are already taken.
Very true. You can build a pool on top of a mountain and pump/discharge water but it is super expensive for limited capacity.
Peak output needs to be 1.2 GW not GWh.
Correct, the typo is mine, not from the article.
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I thought that issue was considered solved by smart inverters now?
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.
How much is that in chicken?
US Leghorns or British broilers? Just multiply by 3.21 and add 27. Simple.
*3.14159
Sure, if you assume a spherical chicken.
So that is like 1,435 dick lengths end to end? /s
Wow, that’s almost 10% of a single datacenter
this will be by far the largest vanadium flow battery in the world, especially outside china
Flow batteries eat lithium batteries on paper and they are so scalable too!
Wow its much bigger than Chinas.
Oh wow! Switzerland! How did you get so big!?
The Swiss are on the frontline of climate change seeing that it is destroying their mountains which in turn are destroying their villages. Sad times.
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.
How big is a soccer field?
About half of this hole
Correct!
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.
How many gallons per football field is that?
And when I say football I men real one
Well…How big are regular sized hamburgers?
1/3 to half the size of your appetite.
hmm… that’s more like a variable than a cpnstant
actually, it’s a parameter
fair…
Between 4000 and 11000 square meters
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.
We belong to you and me.
Strictly speaking zero depth, but to build one you need at least some amount of surface to stand on. A good one has grass, which needs a few inches of soil, but a really good one also has crushed stone and other layers before that.
That’s an estimate, I guess? Well, it’s still a better definition
FIFA standard
Aaaah corrupt ones.
“2 atom bombs, 6 elephants, and 74 gallons Farenheit. Just, anything but that alien metric system.”
because we metric users are eeeeevil
They are not standard sized.
This makes the comparison even more stupid xD
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.
What is a size of a soccer field
A soccer field has the size of 63,693 Big Macs
7140m²
Ur mom’s butt
Asked for comments, they kept saying “Rest assured there is no death ray plans”
(/j)
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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.
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.
