CHON World

 2021.06.30 – Ian Page We can also look at where in the total system things "should" be done. The following waterfall diagram shows (without scales) what happens to the amount of electricity, and the costs as electricity passes from sources to sinks. A certain amount of electricity is lost in transmission, transforming up and down voltage uses some and there are losses depending on distance. If the electricity is stored e.g., in a pumped storage system in the grid, there are more losses; 20-30% is common. Then there are more losses in transmission, before finally the electricity left does a useful job. Obviously if the source and sink are matched temporally only one set of transmission losses exist but with variable consumption and variable production some element of storage is likely. Financially, although the energy starts at the LCOE, the transmission system has lots of infrastructure to maintain and so charges are added. Storage also adds a lot of capital and maintenance ...

2021.06.30 – Ian Page The grid is normally described as a cloud that delivers electricity as needed to a wide array of sinks/applications/users at an averaged price in control and buys services such as generation and storage from a variety of external suppliers. It has a very difficult job balancing the variable supply and variable demand with congestion on lines and keeping alternative lines to handle outages. Supply and demand are being balanced by market systems such as day ahead bidding for 15-minute periods as well as using inertia and battery systems to balance the system within the 15-minute periods. It's worth comparing this with the internet. The internet also has the need to maintain an instantaneous balance between packets coming onto the system and going out, packets cannot pile up.  Congestion appears as delays to streaming rather than brownouts or overvoltage. The internet also has sources that can deliver huge quantities of packets unpredictably and sinks that can de...

2021.06.30 – Ian Page Musk pointed out that the world would need tens of terawatt hours of battery production by 2030. That would involve hundreds of gigafactories. So, he envisioned the tera factory - a factory the same size as a gigabattery factory that produced 30 times as many batteries from the same production lines. He seems to be close to getting the production line running at the appropriate speed with a number of innovations in the 4680 cell.  We have written about the materials supply chain issues and that most of the problems can be resolved with the LiFP chemistry, but there is still a problem matching the mining industry's speed of change with the battery demand curve. However, in this note I will concentrate on what happens when a cell has been made. If most of us think about it, we would expect some robot to whip the cells off the end of the production line and stuff them into a battery compartment which is then whisked away to be the basis of a car. Obviously, all t...

  2021.06.14 - Ian Page Most of the press is about EV cars, some about vans and lorries. However if you look at the 2020 figures for two/three wheelers and buses, both have around 40%. Obviously these are sales not fleets, however ICE mopeds scooters and motorbikes generally have limited lives, as the engines are typically small and running hot. Meanwhile EV versions last until rust wrecks the frame ( or an accident), so the proportion of EV's in the fleet may rise even faster than the annual sales for some categories.

 2021.06.14 - Ian Page Probably some confusing factor , but a very cheering event anyway.

2021.06.12 – Ian Page There appear to be two good rules of thumb… 1. Everyone underestimates an exponential 2. Models of the future model the past. I've blathered about the first a lot but the second, which is basically an article of faith in technology innovation, hit me really strongly while reading a Joule article on solar. Joule 5 1041-1056 May 2021 (many authors). I shall pick out a lot of points from this excellent paper. I've commented frequently that the IEA every year has to upgrade its 2050 estimates of the amount of renewables- i.e. it fails to model the exponentials and relies too heavily on what is currently known. Even Bloomberg NEF which does get exponentials, raises its estimates each year. The paper shows the 2050 projections of a large number of authoritative models (i.e., those that the IEA the IPCC and the EU use) for the optimum balance of solar and wind and points out that the vast majority of a set reviewed use a solar capital cost of 1 euro per watt ...

 2021.06.02 - Ian Page It was described as follows... Musk and his people are in the engineering shop. His competitors are in PowerPoint. The point being that engineers proceed by making prototypes and breaking them quickly. A prototype is expected to break and hopefully you learn something from it. Planning so there is no risk takes a long time and doesn't find innovative solutions, just safe ones. Musk's space company has a fast production line for spaceships in the expectation that several of them will blow up before they work out how to do things. Since they are going to blow up there's no need to overbuild them. One of his cars went through 5 prototyping cycles in a year. The H1 approach requires that managers avoid risk and forces proposals to conform to structures defined for incremental programs. We are in a time when incredible changes are needed in a very short time. Careful planning to eliminate risk is going to slow us down and probably cost more. It's a tim...