Apple To Build Battery-Based Solar Energy Storage Project in Monterey County (mercurynews.com) 51
Apple said Wednesday that it will build a battery-based renewable energy storage facility in Central California near a solar energy installation that already provides energy for all of its facilities in the state. From a report: Apple said the project will store 240 megawatt-hours of energy, or enough to power more than 7,000 homes for one day. It is located next to the California Flats solar installation in southeastern Monterey County, about 100 miles southeast of Apple's Cupertino, California headquarters. The site sends 130-megawatts of electricity directly to Apple's California facilities during daylight hours but does not provide power during dark hours. Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, told Reuters in an interview the company intends to develop what it believes will be one of the largest battery-based storage systems in the United States.
"The challenge with clean energy -- solar and wind -- is that it's by definition intermittent," Jackson told Reuters. "If we can do it, and we can show that it works for us, it takes away the concerns about intermittency and it helps the grid in terms of stabilization. It's something that can be imitated or built upon by other companies."
"The challenge with clean energy -- solar and wind -- is that it's by definition intermittent," Jackson told Reuters. "If we can do it, and we can show that it works for us, it takes away the concerns about intermittency and it helps the grid in terms of stabilization. It's something that can be imitated or built upon by other companies."
Effectively taking 4000 EVs off the road. (Score:1, Troll)
The subject line says it all. Is stationary storage the best use of batteries right now?
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The subject line says it all. Is stationary storage the best use of batteries right now?
What makes you think the battery supply is so limited that 4000 cars won't be manufactured, as a result? I don't see that in the title.
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Re:Effectively taking 4000 EVs off the road. (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on what kind of battery
Batteries for vehicles are optimized for energy per kilogram ("specific energy") as well as for fast charging.
Batteries for stationary storage don't much care about weight, and the charging cycle is about 6 hours.
So it's very possible that they might be using a completely different technology-- sodium sulfur, for example. So, building the battery for stationary storage may or may not deplete the amount of batteries available for EV use.
Here's some sources that don't require you to sign in, by the way (but no details on what technology battery): https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
https://thehill.com/changing-a... [thehill.com]
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tec... [gadgetsnow.com]
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EV batteries are optimized for power per kilogram, actually - it's why Tesla's making a big deal about their "tabless" cells - it lets you draw on battery much easier if the current doesn't have to travel through the meters of cell electrode. (Remember, power is energ
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But from an environmental point of view, who cares?
Storage of green energy is always limiting the need for fossil fuel, regardless of the type of use.
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Storage of green energy is always limiting the need for fossil fuel, regardless of the type of use.
Not in this case.
California is still burning FFs. So the solar energy can be fed directly into the grid to eliminate some of that use.
Or, the solar energy can be fed into an expensive battery system at less than ideal efficiency, then later taken out of those batteries, again at less than ideal efficiency, and then fed into the grid, offsetting less FF use than if it had been used directly.
In other words, this is purely a marketing expense to enhance Apple's Green credentials and makes no sense outside of
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That is the foundation of rational markets theory. A number of independent actors, each acting on its own best interests and profit motives, will deploy the capital in the most efficient way.
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Running to Stand Still (Score:3)
7000 homes is roughly the population growth of CA per year. The state would need to build one of these every year (along with maintaining the existing systems) just to provide for the new housing required.
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Most of these giant batteries are meant for balancing the load while the grids are switching.
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The state would need to build one of these every year
Not really. Backup power needs to be sized for "worst-case". But if worst-case scenarios occur randomly, the size need beyond baseload will scale as the square root of N. Of course, problems don't occur perfectly randomly, but they aren't perfectly correlated either and are less correlated with wider geographical spread. So the scaling factor will be somewhere between N and sqrt(N).
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Seriously, where does the lithium go (Score:2)
Each home uses 1,428.5 average watts per hour? (Score:4, Interesting)
240,000,000/7,000 = 34,285 watt-hours
34,285/24 hours = 1,428.5 average watts for each hour of the day.
1,428.5 watts/120 volts = 11.9 average amps, every second of the entire day.
Is that with air conditioning during the summer?
Re:Each home uses 1,428.5 average watts per hour? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what I came here to talk about. I'm in a fairly new, cheap home in Melbourne, AU, which means that it is incredibly inefficient to heat and cool, and has a fairly similar climate to parts of California. During the pandemic, when everyone was home, in the worst part of the year, my electricity use is about 15kWh per day, and in the better parts it's about 5kWh. How can the average house use over 34kWh per day?!
Re:Each home uses 1,428.5 average watts per hour? (Score:4, Informative)
Americans use more energy.
Your house is serviced with a 240V panel, probably with 64A service, maybe 100A but not likely. North American houses from the 70s and 80s were typically serviced with 240V (split-phase) at 100A, and the standard for most new builds today is 200A. So while you have a 15kVA service, that was standard in maybe the 60s or 50s in North America, where it grew to 24kVA, 36kVA (150A) and now 48kVA (200A).
Where I am it's a 125A panel, though it's likely a 200A service from the power company and likely 200A to the panel given how they're usually wired, but it was given a 125A main breaker, so it's 30kVA. (This is in contrast with panels ("Consumer Units") in Europe and many other places, where the main switch is just ... a switch (the isolator) and has no overcurrent protection - in North America, the Code has made it so the main isolator has overcurrent detection as well - big double-ganged breaker).
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What does the energy actually get used for though? Aircon is usually the big one.
Car charging is 7kW, power shower 7kW, electric cooker 7kW, all stuff that that is not uncommon in the UK on a 240V/100A supply.
Re:Each home uses 1,428.5 average watts per hour? (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in the American south. ~2600 sq feet (250m2 give or take)
I have solar panels that offset around 75% of my electrical usage and an entire house consumption meter.
My day of single greatest energy usage was 98.4 kWh. That's two air conditioning units running almost the entire day (temperatures were just shy of 100F / 37C), multiple loads of laundry (6 people in the house) and electric clothes dryer, electric oven running for dinner, 7 computers running for much of the day, all LED lighting, a refrigerator and a freezer. That's an outlier, but still a crapload of electricty.
Over ~2 years, my lowest electrical consumption in a 24-hour period was about 7-8kWh (computers, refrigerator, freezer, LED lighting only usage).
For 2020, which I expect was a good bit higher than average due to being at home all year, my yearly consumption was 12.90 mWh.
35.3 kWh as the daily average. Pretty darn close!
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Is it worth using a dryer if it is 37C outside? I'd want to air my clothes out a bit anyway even after the dryer has done most of its work.
Maybe it depends where you live, the downside of putting clothes outside here is that they get contaminated with pollution.
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Good point. I don't think I could survive 37C in the dry, let alone if it was humid.
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Eh, you get used to it. I remember the first time coming home after living in Chicago for a few years (where locals talked about the humidity and I just laughed), I stepped off the airplane to just get utterly enveloped by this warm, cloying, mass of moist air. It felt like home!
I would actually bet most of my neighbors have higher energy usage than we do. We try to keep windows open as much as possible in the spring and fall instead of relying on heating or cooling. The humidity (and pollen) makes it diffi
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I really wish we didn't use a dryer -- it's the single appliance that I would most like to get rid of replace due to its electrical consumption. Unfortunately, it's so darn convenient, especially when doing laundry for multiple people...
But yeah, like someone else said, the humidity in the middle of the summer is insane. I looked up the weather records for that particular day and humidity peaked out at 94% with a dew point around 71-72F. Bleh!
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My electric bill varies between 700 kWh/month to 1100 kWh/month. Averaging 900 kWh/month or about 30 kWh/day. Tesla model 3 battery can run the home for about 2.5 days.
When the A/C is on the draw would be around 4 kW. It is typically on a 30 amp double breaker on the panel.
That's a lot of minerals. (Score:2)
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"These batteries are so damned expensive it is not commercially viable, they are all going after govt subsidies!" was the sentiment just five years back. It has been falling at a 13% per year rate for three decades now. There does not seem to be end in sight yet. And the pace is accelerating now to 15% pa.
Now the argument is we are going to run out of raw materials! When oil was found in Pottsville PA in 1860, did anyone know they will find Ghawar file
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Most people think the battery tech needs to hit a certain price point, say 100 $kWh to become viable. That is not really true. Cell phone users are willing to pay 2000 $/kWh for batteries whose capacity is measured in milli-ampre-hours. Laptop users were willing to pay 4000 $/kWh back in 1998. Look at
Apple doesn't make batteries (Score:2)
Makes me wonder where the batteries come from. Tesla? Panasonic? Are they lithium-based or some other chemistry? The article is big on PR but very light on details. Clearly Apple is trying to attach their brand name to alternative energy, but it's not like selling a phone, the technical details, sources and materials, count.
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The biggest suppliers at the moment are in South Korea and China, so likely from there.
Tesla doesn't supply other companies, and even if they did their prices would not be very competitive. Panasonic could do it but again are not the cheapest. I was reading that for Panasonic to remain competitive in the market they really need to get their solid state battery technology working.
Anyway, it would most likely be SK or Chinese batteries.
Vanadium flow battery? (Score:2)
Mass energy storage is always an interesting project because there are many different ways to accomplish it. Currently it looks like a vanadium flow batteries [wikipedia.org] is your best bet. They can store a HUGE amount of energy (there is a 60 MW one in Japan) and they last 12000+ cycles.
If this is anything more than just a PR stunt then they won't even bother with lithium batteries.
90's called (Score:1)
Apple, 1991: Microsoft copies everything we do!
Apple, 2021: Let's copy everything Tesla does!
Wont work (Score:1)
California Flats solar installation (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure this is the correct location [goo.gl] for the FirstSolar California Flats [firstsolar.com] project.
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Searching Google Maps for "California Flats solar installation" seems to return the wrong location [goo.gl]. I'm pretty sure this is the correct location [goo.gl] for the FirstSolar California Flats [firstsolar.com] project.
That wrong location is less than 10 minutes from my home town
By what definition? (Score:1)
"The challenge with clean energy -- solar and wind -- is that it's by definition intermittent," Jackson told Reuters
By definition? Hydroelectric power is clean and is not intermittent. What kind of woke definition of clean energy is she talking about? Another person/woman promoted beyond her competence level, for wokeness reasons?
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You could - at least for the sake of argument - find issues with hydroelectric (that's why new large hydroelectric plants are no longer done in Europe).
Also, hydroelectric power is limited by rainfall for the power plants that get their water from lakes, and by actual water flow for dams on large rivers (like Danube).
It's easy to plan around these kind of issues, and the "intermittence" is basically on a seasonal rather than hourly level.
Haha. No such luck (Score:2)
Sorry, Apple, it is not so easy to get god to absolve you of your climate crimes. You will roast in hell, a place where glow ball warming has finally run its course.