Tag: Battery

Concerns Mount Over Exploding Electric Vehicles

Safety concerns around electric vehicles continue to mount with Australian fire and rescue services in New South Wales stating they might have to make a “tactical disengagement” of a trapped car accident victim if the battery is likely to explode.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Safety concerns around electric vehicles continue to mount with Australian fire and rescue services in New South Wales stating they might have to make a “tactical disengagement” of a trapped car accident victim if the battery is likely to explode. Australian journalist Jo Nova covered the story, which was first mentioned in the EV blog The Driven, and commented: “They say the first responders need more training as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognise when they have to abandon the rescue.”

The Driven, a widely-read blog that seems highly sympathetic to a rollout of EVs, was reporting on recent testimony given to the NSW Government’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Batteries Inquiry. The writer suggested that first responders did not have adequate training to deal with electric vehicle collisions, and in the most serious cases, crews could be forced to abandon rescues. One particular area of concern seemed to revolve around the need to extract a trapped casualty quickly after a crash by dragging the person out in a “very undesirable manner”. Fires are a grave risk in any vehicle accident, but they can be quickly brought under control in an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.

Worries about the potential dangers inherent in EVs is likely to grow as numbers on the roads continue to rise. EV battery explosions can occur very quickly, triggering the release of highly toxic gases. When they roar into thermal overdrive, they create very high temperatures and are very difficult to extinguish. The explosion can occur after almost any collision, or be due to a fault in the initial manufacture. The fire often takes hours to control and it can reignited days after it was thought to be out. With Net Zero fanatics desperate to drive ICE cars off the road in short order, EVs are the only mass private transport solution offered. Many of the issues, including safety, that make them an inferior product compared to petrol-powered combustion cars are often ignored.

Just what can be involved in putting out a fire in an EV was dramatically detailed in a recent press release from the Wakefield Fire Dept in Massachusetts. It was called out to deal with a burning Tesla on a snowy Interstate 95, and reported:

Wakefield Engine 1 and Ladder 1 initiated suppression operations, applying copious amounts of water onto the vehicle. Multiple surrounding mutual aid communities responded as well to support firefighting operations and to create a water shuttle to bring water continually to the scene. Engines from Melrose, Stoneham, Reading, Lynnfield as well as a Middleton water tanker assisted. Firefighters had three 1¾-inch hand lines as well as a ‘blitz gun’ in operation to cool the battery compartment… Lynnfield crews established a continuous 4-inch supply line from Vernon Street up to the highway. The fire was declared under control and fully extinguished after about two and a half hours… The vehicle was removed from the scene after consulting with the Hazmat Unit… The crews did a great job, especially in the middle of storm conditions – on a busy highway.

There is little doubt that EV fires are on the rise. In the U.K., CE Safety runs Freedom of Information checks on local fire brigades and its latest survey shows an alarming rise in conflagrations. In Greater London in the 2017-2022 period, there were a reported 507 battery fires from a number of EV types, but CE Safety found a “gigantic” 219 conflagrations in 2022-23 alone. Lancashire was said to rank second with 15 EV battery fires, but this was 10 more in a single year than recorded in the five years between 2017-2022. Overall “it was concerning” to discover that the number of electric battery fires during 2022-2023 was higher in most areas than the data showed over five years from 2017 to 2022. During that year, 14 buses suffered battery fires.

There was a substantial increase in the number of e-bikes catching fire, with CE Safety noting that lithium is highly flammable and reactive. “Over-charging presents a massive risk to households with lithium-powered vehicles,” the safety organisation observed.

Concern is also rising over the transportation of EVs on car ferries. Recently, Havila Kystruten, which operates a fleet of car ferries around the coast of Norway, has banned the transportation of electric, hybrid and hydrogen vehicles. According to a report in the Maritime Executive, it is the latest step by the shipping industry, “which has become acutely aware of the increasing danger of transporting EV and other alternate fuel vessels”.

Havila’s Managing Director Bent Martini said a risk analysis had shown a fire at sea in a fossil fuel vehicle could be handled by on-board systems. “A possible fire in electric, hybrid or hydrogen cars will require external rescue efforts and could put people on board and the ships at risk,” he said. That of course is the nightmare scenario. If fire breaks out on a ferry making a 20-mile crossing in good weather, the chances of all passengers and crew surviving are good. Less good, perhaps, if fire was to break out and fill the ship with toxic smoke in the middle of a stormy November night while crossing the Bay of Biscay. Chances of survival would be diminished if the high temperatures caused nearby EVs to explode.

Mercifully, we are less and less likely to see such accidents. The list of disadvantages of EVs is lengthening by the day. Environmental concerns about the manufacture and mining of raw materials have been raised, while ‘range anxiety’ is common among drivers. EVs are more expensive than ICE cars, while knackered batteries mean that second-hand values are very poor. For those who would see the back of them, the graph below might provide some comfort.

This shows the recent decline in the share price of the American car hire giant Hertz. Back in 2021, the company pushed ahead with huge purchases of Teslas. In January it dumped 20,000 of them, and last month pushed another 10,000 onto a sagging second-hand market. Out in the real world – the world where people create wealth by providing what other people actually want – fewer drivers seemed willing to hire them. The share price tells its own sorry story. Meanwhile, EV sales across Europe tend to be driven by unsustainable tax breaks, while the cars are mainly popular with wealthy people as a second or third city runabout. An enforced political adoption of EVs is likely to destroy vast swathes of the European car industry, unable to compete with cheap Chinese imports.

If the aim is to take away personal transport for the masses, EVs are an excellent idea. Whether that will ultimately play well at the ballot box is another matter.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

How Much Energy Storage is Enough?

From Watts Up With That?

Kevin Kilty

While reading the article “A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain’s Royal Society” by the Manhattan Contrarian a few days ago, I was reminded by Figure 1 of the variations in flow of the Nile River which was the inspiration for Mandelbrot’s development of fractals.[1] This naturally brought to mind Hurst’s algorithm for determining the required storage of a reservoir.[2]

Hurst’s explanation of the algorithm is very simple.

“For example, if a long-time record of annual total discharges from the stream is available, the storage required to yield the average flow, each year, is obtained by computing the cumulative sums of the departures of the annual totals from the mean annual total discharge. The range from the maximum to the minimum of these cumulative totals is taken as the required stornge(sic).”

If we think of energy conversion as equivalent to river inflow, electrical demand as equivalent to reservoir discharge and water storage behind a dam as the equivalent of chemical energy storage in a battery, then we can make use of this simple algorithm to explore the storage needed to get us through any hypothetical period with only intermittent wind or solar or some combination available to us. Hurst didn’t consider evaporation – we won’t consider inefficiency of charge/discharge.

Rather than base my analysis on seasonal weather from Monte Carlo modeling, I thought to take some of my own advice. I had made a suggestion in a public service commission hearing last January that a regional utility could do no better than to take the most inclement weather period of the last sixty or seventy years, real data in other words, and show us how their hypothetical energy system would fare. Thus, I decided to marry Hurst’s algorithm with data from this past summer gathered from the EIA hourly grid monitor for the Northwest region which is where I live.

I decided on the time period stretching from June 24, 2023 through September 30, 2023. This period includes the season of heavy demand for air conditioning and irrigation and probably the poorest wind resources overall.

Conditions of Analysis

Here are my assumptions for this first cut analysis:

  • Wind energy only
  • I assume wind can be scaled up to meet season demand without degrading capacity factor
  • Storage level ends the season at the same level it began (one of Hurst’s conditions)
  • Storage level is adjusted upward to avoid negative storage
  • I include no losses from internal battery leakage, inefficiency of charge/recharge, no provision for line losses
  • No provision for equipment outages or reserves
  • No inter-balancing area transfers

Pattern of Demand

Figure 1 shows the pattern of demand in the Northwest. The EIA uses units of MWhr of demand during each previous hour. One might think of this more simply as the hourly average power in MW required from all sources to meet demand. There is a single daily peak that may rise above 60,000 MWhr each hour of the day when there is great demand for air conditioning and irrigation (these two sources of demand are highly correlated). The full daily swing in demand is typically around 20,000 MWhr per hour. On any given day this swing might have to be met with a combination of coal, natural gas, hydro, and solar – natural gas generally balances the swing in solar that occurs early and late in the day and has a rapid slew rate. Only gas turbines can follow it easily and it would wear a typical thermal plant to tatters to try to follow solar and wind each day. A combination of hydro, coal, and natural gas is needed to balance the fluctuation in wind generation.  The seasonal average demand is 42,661 MWhr each hour.

Figure 1.

Wind Generation

Our analysis assumes wind generation alone. Figure 2 shows actual wind generation during our test period. The generation is highly variable.  It rises above 12,000 MW on some days but drops well below 1,000MW on others.The swing in output can take place in a matter of hours. Extended wind droughts lasted as long as 36 hours during the season.

The seasonal average wind generation is about 5,140 MW. Thus, in order to provide all demand in the Northwest, and not leave storage in any worse condition when the season is over, wind has to supply at a minimum the seasonal average demand (the actual figure turns out to be 42,735). Thus, current wind energy capacity has to be scaled up by a factor of about 8.32 to accomplish this. It is not very likely that this can be done without having to place wind farms in less than optimal locations. The best locations for wind production are very likely taken, or at least planned to be taken, already. So, this is a minimum figure.

An interesting calculation at this point is to estimate how much land area is required for this much wind generation and what the first cost, the cost of capital expenditure, is likely to be. Assuming an annual average capacity factor of one-third means we will have to install three times our 42,735 MW of actual capacity to reach a minimum needed nameplate rating. This is 128,205 MW of nameplate wind. A couple of the most recent applications for wind plants in Wyoming propose to use 125 acres per MW of nameplate rating. Thus the required wind would need something like a minimum of 16 million plus acres. For comparison this is a bit greater than one-fourth the State of Wyoming itself. The cost of constructing and equipping a wind farm I would have estimated at $1,200 per kW, but after the inflation reduction act (IRA) has raised costs this might be as high as $1,500 per kW. Total is then maybe between $150-192 billion dollars.

Figure 2.

The Resulting Required Storage

With a few iterations of guess, assess and modify, I arrived at the following solution to the problem posed here. Average wind energy generation is 42,735 MW. By starting the season (on 6-24-2023) with 4,600 GWhr in storage, we will end the season at midnight on 9-30-2023 with  4,600 GWhr of storage. The maximum energy in storage over the season is 5,221 GWhr. This is 122 hours of average demand. The minimum is only 71,000 MWhr, which considering this has occurred during a lull in the wind and in mid-summer with air conditioning and irrigation demands is little more than an hour of reserve. During 172 hours of the season there is less than 24 hours of reserve. In other words, this is not a robust solution by any means. There is a lot more work to do. Figure 3 shows what goes on in this particular season. Storage rises a bit at first only to be whittled away as the wind dies and the season becomes hot and dry. As summer recedes, storage rises again to finish the period with the same storage it began.

Figure 3. The storage level time-series.

What about cost? The last time I checked on lithium battery storage in the form of a Telsa Megapack it was $600 per kilowatt hour. This would put the cost of the maximum storage energy of 5,221 GWhr at around $3.13 Trillion (yes capital ‘T’ dollars).

Before any battery storage proponent tries to tell me that I am over-estimating because such batteries are only $200 per kWhr, let me state something about estimating industrial facilities. One does not just purchase batteries and wire them together. One needs a facility with all sorts of services in order to house said batteries – land, grading and foundations, roads and parking, a building, environmental control, safety systems, switching, transformers, AC/DC conversion, lines, labor and so on. The same is true of chemical plants or power plants or any major facility. Take the functional part of a facility and multiply its cost by around 1.5 for all this ancillary stuff. Take a GE quotation for a 300MW ultrasupercritical boiler and turbine of $240M (probably a bit too low after all the inflation reduction of the IRA); multiply by 1.5 and the rest of the power plant is probably $360M – $600M in total. Under-estimating costs is common – let’s not do it.

This estimate for an all-wind/storage system is not likely to be an order of magnitude in error. You see, 3.3 or so trillion dollars is probably an under-estimate considering my liberal assumptions. Storage needs equal to 122 hours of average network demand, or more, is something one should expect. It’s like 5 years worth of national savings just to supply energy for the Northwest with its roughly twenty million people (7% of the U.S.). In order to make a fantasy modern energy system work, a person needs a fantasy modern energy storage system too; and to pay for that a person needs modern monetary theory.

Making Better Estimates

Keep in mind that what I have done here is a first cut. I’d have to begin adding the complications that I assumed away early-on to do better. Maybe I could get a lower cost by adding solar energy and reducing wind. Maybe not. But keep in mind the big plan is to rely on wind/solar and storage only in the future. No coal. No gas. Even hydro is a target. Nuclear? What a horror. No way!

Also, this is just one realization of something that is a stochastic process. I’d get a bit more robust estimate by not only adding the losses of a real system, but by looking similarly at multiple seasons back in time. It takes about 25 years to gain another standard deviation of uncertainty. Thus, those 60 years worth of seasons I suggested to the PSC would reach around 2.5 standard deviations which translates to 99% certainty. Except, weather and climate don’t follow a gaussian distribution, but rather something like that of a fractal – a hyperbolic or power-law distribution. There have been weather events in the past which in their extremes of magnitude and persistence we have never observed before.

Beware. Expect surprises. Expensive ones.

References:

  1. Benoit Mandelbrot, The fractal geometry of nature. 1982, ISBN: 0-7167-1186-9
  2. Hurst, H.E., Long-Term Storage Capacity of Reservoirs, Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers Archive, Vol. 116, No. 1, January 1951.

The Unbearable Lightness of Renewables – In Time

Texas solar therefore works about as hard as a hardworking Frenchman, about 31 hours a week.  German solar clocks an average of 18 hours a week, takes lots of vacation days, sick days and strikes occasionally.

From Watts Up With That?

By: Leen Weijers, VP Engineering, Liberty Energy

Wind and solar don’t work most of the time. You may think intermittency is acceptable because the sun shines for free and the wind blows for free.  Capturing these diluted energy sources, however, is anything but free.  If you require electricity to be available at the flip of a switch from renewables, their temporal lightness requires massive overbuilding, making wind and solar the most expensive sources of primary energy.

Solar and wind’s capacity factor, the actual energy output vs the maximum energy output over time, is only 14% for worldwide solar and only 26% for worldwide wind.  If this strikes you as low, that is true, as this number is weighted toward installations by Europeans, for example Germans, who are ahead in installations in some areas most unsuitable for solar. But there are other reasons solar and wind work even less than you think.

The map below shows that the sun shines a lot more in the United States than in Germany, as it lies further to the south. In both places, sunshine duration is significantly higher than hours of electricity generation at maximum capacity, because the sun’s angle is seldom perfectly perpendicularly to a solar panel. While the German sun shines about 1,600 hours a year, generation at capacity is only 940 hours.  Texas has 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, but generation at max capacity is only 1,600 hours a year.

Texas solar therefore works about as hard as a hardworking Frenchman, about 31 hours a week.  German solar clocks an average of 18 hours a week, takes lots of vacation days, sick days and strikes occasionally.  Both workers are highly unreliable, only show up when they want and count on other colleagues to pick up their slack at any given time.  Would you hire them?

No.  And that’s the resounding answer for the capital of world solar, where collecting solar power supposedly makes the most sense.  As discussed by Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright on CNBC Last Call, together with the Northern European capital of wind, these two places represent the low-hanging fruit for solar and wind, where they are backed by massive subsidies.  Population centers like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, etc., have much poorer wind and solar resources, making their rollout in these countries much more challenging.

US Electricity Supply by Source in MWh/day

As is evident from the above graph, US wind and solar take long vacations.  The US solar capacity factor is 12% during its winter vacation and 21% during summer.  Wind works a bit harder – a 27% capacity factor during the summer/fall vacation and a 45% capacity factor the rest of the year.  The seasonal variations result in significant shortages that are backfilled by coal and natural gas. If you want to get your average electricity without fossil fuel backup, the average summer/fall electricity gap from current wind (137 GW) & solar (100 GW) capacity is about 3.7x that capacity. 

However, it does not stop there.  Just overbuilding wind & solar by 3.7x over what is currently available will not be sufficient.  The problem with renewable replacements is that just matching daily average electricity generation does not work.  We are used to reliability in electricity every second. Eliminating intermittency and blackouts is the top requirement of our modern electricity system because not having power available at the flip of a switch can simply be deadly.

If you want renewable power without fossil fuel backup you need to account for situations where wind and solar take their regular “sick day”, i.e. when they work at less than 10% of their maximum capacity for the day.  Below is a Texas example in late January – early February 2023.  In this example of the lack of power generated by wind & solar, TX electricity council ERCOT was about 12x short in wind & solar of what natural gas and coal backup provided for three full days. There were 14 sick days for TX wind and 62 sick days for TX solar in 2022. 

But it gets worse.  Weather variability occasionally causes the wind to stop blowing for many more days in a row.  The same applies to subsequent days when the sun does not shine.  An evaluation of the frequency and duration of low-power wind (LPW) in Germany found that almost every year there will be 5 consecutive LPW days; every ten years, however, there will be an 8-consecutive day LPW event. 

If ERCOT decides this needs to be avoided for the occasional week without flexible and reliable backup from fossil fuels, there are two solutions, both highly impractical and very costly: (1) overbuild the current wind & solar power generation by at least a factor of twelve, or (2) rely on massive battery power backup.

Currently, TX wind and solar capacity totals 64 GW.  Overbuilding wind & solar for the sake of reliability would require ERCOT to match current fossil fuel backup capacity of 50 GW by about 12x based on my simple graphic math. ERCOT would need 770 GW in wind & solar.  Rough installation costs would be about $770 billion (or $30,000 per ERCOT rate payer). 

ERCOTs current battery power of about 5 GWh is enough to power its grid for about 6 minutes.  Enough battery power to cover demand for a week requires about 8 TWh, which requires ~20,000 battery farms each with 100 MW capacity/400 MWh power, at a cost of about $3 trillion (or $120,000 per ERCOT rate payer). This number is so outrageous I decided not to pursue possible supply chain and building area constraints.

Despite the physical and economic constraints of the real world, there is a desire to overbuild wind, solar and batteries in many places.  A recent study in Minnesota by Isaac Orr showed that existing 1 MW coal power plants are being replaced by 1 MW natural gas, 0.62 MW solar and 1.6 MW wind.  100% backup thus requires a 3.2x power replacement rate, with a disproportionate share going to low-energy renewables.  Another plan, for 100% solar, wind and battery backup in Wisconsin, shows that state would need to build 7.7x its current reliable power capacity in wind, solar and batteries. 

ERCOTs power building additions show a similar trend – it yearly adds to solar & wind power and battery backup, but peak load remains at about the level of reliable fossil fuel and nuclear power.  Do you feel you need hundreds of extra bikes if you have one car to drive the distance?

Last month, a US DOE Director took pride in the fact that renewable power capacity additions massively dominate general power capacity additions in the US.  However, this is a direct result of renewable’s intermittency and government favoritism.

Coping with intermittency will require massive overbuilding of our power generation needs.  This overbuilding massively adds to renewable’s CO2 footprint, which comes from mining, manufacturing and building them.  The same applies to their building cost and true levelized cost per MWh generated. 

The sad truth is that the poorer renewables work the more will have to be build. Could it be that progressive politicians love the fact that wind and solar have such a low capacity factor?  Why? Overbuilding is a green gift that keeps on giving to progressive politicians, utilities and renewable companies. Let’s hope I am wrong.