great scott
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:
- 2.1 GWh total storage capacity
- 1.2 GW peak output
- can ramp up to that peak output within milliseconds
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.
Goddammit, they are 0.01 Gigawatt short of time travel. 😋
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] ’
If I heard this on a different situation I would have thought this is an AI hallucination.
1.21 Jiggowatts?! Is there a GIF?
No, only a GIF.
Great Scott!
You pronounce the G the same way as in gigawatt.
But what about the F? Is it pronounced like phhhh, or like ffffff?
ffffff which can be written fff and is pronounced white
This meme is so appropriate in that scene, it tickles me 😀
What the hell is a jiggawatt?!
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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.
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!
That’s like a huge capacitor on my hobby electronics brain.
That’s pretty much the job, except a billion times as large.
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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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.
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.
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.
Don’t stick your thing in it!!
Remember Wally? Ooof. I mean, kind of a jerk and all but. What a way to go.
