News and information from Europe ๐ช๐บ
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This is good. Europe is becoming more independent from Russian uranium.
What is also important is decentralization. Russia has massively attacked infrastructure like power plants in Ukraine. For this reason, it is far better to have decentral storage, too.
Most European uranium comes from Canada and Kazakhstan. Russia is still third on the list though, with Australia shooting up for obvious reasons. That was 2024, I hope in 2025 they swapped places.
The uranium itself is sourced from various places, but the necessary uranium processing is largely still done in Russia.
What would also be great: Solar power produces a surplus of energy on summer days, and summers are becoming hotter. One can use seasonal heat storage and bidirectinal heat pumps to cool buildings and store that heat, and use it to heat homes in the winter. Seasonal storage turned out to work well.
How would you store the heat/convert to electricity?
Molten salt can also be used for heat storage. I'm not sure what the advantages are of molten salt vs water vs sand and what is most realistic.
I don't think any of those alternatives are used in large scale.
As a side note, some ski resorts are saving snow during the summer to be able to open earlier in the season.
Hot sand stores a huge amount of heat, and the bigger the storage, the less heat it loses. With modern insulation, even the cheap options, it lasts months. Circulate water or some other fluid through pipes embedded in the sand, and you can introduce or extract the heat.
Just a large water tank with a thick layer of insulation. Could also be sand or even the ground which is used for some heat pumps.
Interesting, thank you for sharing
Personally, for long term storage, I'm more a fan of simple solutions because they scale better, such as using the excess electricity to pump water up a hill, then using generators in the winter to convert it back to electricity (pumped storage).
I think the pumped storage is more used when there is an excess of electricty, for example when wind power plants produces large amount of electricity and the prices goes toward zero, or sometime negative.
Heat storage is much simpler and cheaper than electricity storage.
Both are needed, but storing electricity when all you need is heat is overkill, and unnecessary expensive.
Unfortunately, the potential for pumped hydro storage is very small in Germany :/
Not sure if that's a problem though, the German power grid is connected to many European countries including France, Switzerland and Austria.
Grond! Grond! Grond!
Markt regelt! The market regulates itself. Please touch more of that you oh so mighty invisible Hand of the market!
You wish... I recently heard in Germany there was more than a full day worth of electricity usage applied for in battery storage but doesn't get permitted. All the while the federal government pushes subsidised gas plants.
Regulation is killing the country. Not so much the regulation itself (as there's a lot of good and necessary regulation), but the aquiration and approval processes can take forever - slowing down projects to a crawl.
Its a toxic mix of complexity and slowness, which costs a lot of money and repels investment.
Can the reuse the nuclear cooling towers to optimise those batteries?
No those are dismantled first because they are the most visible iconic thing that also outputs scary big white smoke! /s Nice idea but i really think those are gone first because they are the biggest virtue signal. Humans are weird.
Yeah people always seem to get hung up on pictures of coal fired plants with no smoke coming out of the stacks but heaps of steam coming out of the cooling towers. Not that coal generation should be defended in any way.
For these they totally wouldnt be wasting a huge amount of energy knocking down and hauling away two massive concrete towers. I wonder if anyone did the math on how long the batteries would need to be in operation to offset the carbon from that demolition.
That said, I have no idea if there's even any way to utilise them, it's a nice thought though.
They can quickly and easily be torn down by explosives (video). In fact, they are huge but not that massive.
And concrete can be re-used which saves carbon. With new technology (combination with ~~electric blast furnaces~~ steel recycling), the cement can even be recycled, saving even more carbon. Which is huge, since it is a very important but extremely carbon-intensive material.