US Dept of Interior denies canceling largest solar project after axing review

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/department-interior-cancels-review-nevada-solar-project-trump/802704/

96•toomuchtodo•3mo ago

Comments

mrdoops•3mo ago

Solar is great but the bottleneck is on battery capacity to carry those noon hours into evening for peak usage. Last I checked we had plenty of lithium and are mostly held back on refinement.

_factor•3mo ago

Discarded EV batteries with 70% life remaining seem like a viable path to energy storage for households.

vlan0•3mo ago

I hope we see this more at the municipal level. Just thinking about dense neighborhoods with sizable lithium storage solutions raises eyebrows. One house fire could spread so quickly.

nradov•3mo ago

It's tough to turn that into a scalable, sustainable business. There are so many different types of EV battery packs and you can't just pull one out of an old car and hang it on someone's garage wall. You would typically have to break the old pack down, test the individual cells, and use them to construct a new pack. This is such a labor intensive process that it might not really be cost effective.

specialist•3mo ago

Ya, I'm unclear how old EV battery packs are being repurposed, at scale.

Maybe someone's gathering up identical packs, eg a specific generations of Tesla Model 3 packs, and turning just those into power walls or grid storage.

That said, methinks since battery recycling tech has scaled up ahead of demand, it's cheaper and faster to extract the misc minerals and make new, much much better, batteries (for grid storage).

I'm noob, so really wouldn't know. I guess we'll see.

polski-g•3mo ago

New sodium battery tech just came out, allegedly 1/10 the price.

ddxv•3mo ago

"Compared to lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries have somewhat lower cost, better safety characteristics (for the aqueous versions), and similar power delivery characteristics, but also a lower energy density (especially the aqueous versions)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#cite_note-:...

Also, recent CATL PR releases about sodium ion only mention 'future cost savings' rather than anything about a 90% reduction in prices.

gessha•3mo ago

Yeah, let’s wait for that tech to mature just like we waited on building high speed rail because hyperloop was around the corner… \s

dmix•3mo ago

Hyperloop was more of an after-the-fact reaction to California's high speed rail project, which started 17yrs ago (2008). Five years before the Hyperloop white paper was published. Hyperloop came out 2013, not long after the 2012 announcement that the rail project's cost would double from $8B to $16B and it was already facing delays. Elon explicitly said he didn't like the project and it inspired him to look into alternatives.

loeg•3mo ago

Battery tech research claims are always outlandish. As usual, the proof is what can be brought to market.

myvoiceismypass•3mo ago

Battery capacity is not what this article is about.

tokioyoyo•3mo ago

You know, this gets brought up every time, and I scratch my head as China and some other countries are just mass implementing any possible energy source. There's no one solution to the problem that will keep being the best solution. You just build, maintain, then build more and more and more and more and more to generate more energy. We shouldn't be debating "what is the most efficient" and only build that, because with that attitude, we just end up building nothing.

nocoiner•3mo ago

I really cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience. I guess because it has something for someone of any political stripe to dislike (fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables and storage - take your pick!) but in a few years when we’re all paying twice the electrical rates we’re paying today, we will probably wish we hadn’t been so doctrinaire.

JumpCrisscross•3mo ago

> cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience

Anger is incredibly viral. In a country on social media, that means cutting opposition spreads faster than support. (Most elements of support, for this reason, scaffold themselves along opposition to something else. Even if that something is a manufactured totem.)

All of the above has a slight advantage, policywise. But it has, by sharing all its components’ weaknesses, a larger cross section than any one alone. Thus you’ll see all-the-above picked apart by the anti-renewable lobby at the same time as the anti-nuke and anti-gas greenies.

(Comprehensive energy policy articles on HN typically have a top-voted commentating the stupidity of a random component.)

tokioyoyo•3mo ago

Everyone wants to be "right", and prove others "wrong". It feels like building things have gotten very expensive, and margins are not that high, so it would only pay for itself in decades. Everyone is scared for committing to those numbers, and just keep running in circles until some magical thing is invented. Crazy stuff.

ianburrell•3mo ago

Yeah, it is dumb to require battery storage for new solar. We can use gas peaker plants like we always have. China is using coal peaker plants.

We will need to retire them in future where renewables are everywhere. Maybe wind is good enough to fill the hole at night. Maybe new battery chemistry is cheap. Maybe some other storage tech works out. Maybe they can be converted to hydrogen for long term storage.

bee_rider•3mo ago

Yes, both. Sure, build batteries, but also over-provision to avoid dipping into batteries. As a society we’ll find ways to waste excess energy!

specialist•3mo ago

Yes and:

Transition clients usage to variable and intermittent energy. Much of our current industrial stack assumes continuous energy. Like smelting. So develop techniques for quick starting and ramping up processes when energy is cheapest.

Time shift usage. Like HVAC pre-cooling buildings, pre-heat water, etc.

One benefit is increased resiliency.

Another is reducing peak usage.

Our current stack (generation, distribution, etc) is over built in order to accommodate the worst case scenario. IIRC, that's < 1% of the time. Adding batteries (strategically) to handle those peaks, instead of peaker gas generators, will be hugely impactful. And open up a lot of our currently built capacity to handle more demand.

I know you know these things. I'm just compelled to reiterate, for our viewing audience.

tremon•3mo ago

For non-mobile energy storage, I have my hopes on sodium or even saltwater batteries. They are less energy-dense than lithium-based batteries, but they have a longer lifetime, require less maintenance and you avoid the risk of a lithium fire.

thelastgallon•3mo ago

Yes! And more importantly solar/wind are such an eyesore, ruining America's landscape! Coal is big and beautiful. We must have Coal plants in every city and American coal jobs. Solar and Wind are unhealthy! Wonder why the administration didn't outright make it a federal crime to use solar panels. /s

breadwinner•3mo ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45553487

noitpmeder•3mo ago

So did they cancel it or didn't they?

If they deny doing it, what blocks the project from continuing?

renewiltord•3mo ago

What blocks the project from continuing is the local environmental lobby and the national environmental lobby that has pushed for laws like NEPA that the group of projects was exempted from requiring individual approvals for.

Effectively the project required the exemption that allows them to group things together because regulation that some environmentalists lobbied for that is supported by the majority of environmentalists in America is used by some environmentalists to block all projects. Consequently, the cost for the projects is high and the certainty of their completion is low.

These make the projects risky. The federal government revoked this exemption so that the projects have to go through the same environmental review as every other project, because that is what many environmentalists have argued for and the most powerful environmentalists have won.

Therefore many things are simultaneously true:

* the dept of the interior did not cancel the projects

* they returned them to normal conditions

* normal conditions make the projects hard to do

* they de-facto canceled them by making them hard to do

more_corn•3mo ago

No silly. They just canceled the PERMIT for the project. The developers are welcome to resubmit seven separate applications in the future which will all be processed at snail’s pace and the arbitrarily canceled again.

remarkEon•3mo ago

Why can't we just build reactors. Solar requires a ton of physical acreage (sorry, it's just true), plus all the battery storage and transmission and so on. Of course this requires some byzantine "environmental review" (ironic). I just want us to build reactors. We are going to look back on the 20th century anti-nuclear crusade with such disdain, it's really really sad.

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