Rolls-Royce to supply largest battery in Netherlands

[Finishline42]

Approx 1/3 the size of the one in Hull, UK.

Rolls-Royce has agreed to install a 30 MW/60 MWh storage system based on nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries in the Netherlands. It will be the country’s largest energy storage system upon completion in spring 2023. It will provide grid frequency regulation services to the Dutch grid.

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The mtu EnergyPack QG will provide grid frequency regulation services to the Dutch grid to facilitate the integration of electricity from renewable sources.

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The company's systems are based on NMC battery chemistry. The mtu EnergyPack QG solution consists of 168 battery units, seven inverters, and the mtu EnergetIQ intelligent control platform. It will be commissioned in spring 2023. When it is fully charged, the system will have the capacity to supply 8,000 households with electricity per day.

“With our new large-scale battery storage systems that support the integration of renewable energy sources into the power supply, we are taking another step with our customers towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions,” said Andreas Görtz, president of sustainable power solutions at Rolls-Royce.

The largest battery system in the Netherlands at present is Wartsila's 25 MW/48MWh Buffalo battery, which is based on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry.

The Hull installation stated 300,000 homes for 2 hrs. The equivalent for this one would of course be 8,000 x 12 or 96,000 homes.

[NNadir]

1. The "home," even for trivial junk like this, is still not a unit of energy.

Despite two decades of insipid announcements about useless junk mattering - it doesn't - at the Mauna Loa observatory this morning the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is 3.20 ppm higher than it was a year ago, 25.22 ppm higher than it was 10 years ago.

Week beginning on November 20, 2022: 418.53 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 415.33 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 393.31 ppm
Last updated: November 27, 2022

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Playing sweet (if delusional) music on the violin during a disaster is hardly limited to Nero.

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2. Help from experts on the board

How would this function normally be provided?

The mtu EnergyPack QG will provide grid frequency regulation services to the Dutch grid to facilitate the integration of electricity from renewable sources.

Standby fossil fueled power plants?

There's a functional reason batteries are being used - the responses to imbalances on the grid is much quicker.

[NNadir]

3. Best excuse for this wasteful junk ever!!!

The alternative of course, would be to install reliable energy and not require expensive, wasteful junk that needs endless Rube Goldberg redundant systems that will morph in less than 1/3 of a lifetime into landfill.

It happens that the wind doesn't blow even in the Netherlands for weeks, not two hours.

The Germans have a word for this situation, Dunklefluate.

Good luck with finding an "expert" who will inform us that batteries can power even a small country like the Netherlands for weeks.

The scam is as always, a recipe for doing nothing about climate change and promoting energy poverty.

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4. It's not like they got sold on some new fangled contraption they didn't understand...

Seeing that they already had a smaller battery working. I take it that they have found value where you see junk.

The largest battery system in the Netherlands at present is Wartsila's 25 MW/48MWh Buffalo battery, which is based on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry.

Interesting that in less than 6 months the new one will be installed and operational.

BTW, where do they take the pieces of a nuke plant when it reaches end of life?

[NNadir]

5. Really? Less than six months? To build a plant...

...that will supply 12 MW of maximum average continuous power, power derived by wasting electricity produced earlier, if, and only if it's available?

With carbon dioxide concentrations now pushing 420 ppm, and sure to exceed 422 ppm by May, this trivial bullshit is important.

The so called "renewable energy" wind and solar fantasy had decades and trillions of dollars to reach 30 exajoules of energy per year. Combined they produce 11 Exajoules out of 634 consumed by humanity.

Nuclear plants that come on line in this decade will be operating when today's toddlers have been retired.

The first nuclear plant ever built in the United States, the Shippingport reactor, is now the site of a public park.

It's not worthwhile to discuss nuclear issues with anti-nukes who approve of cobalt slaves providing tiny trivial batteries. How about we turn this around? Are there any anti-nukes on this planet who can identify a single person ever anywhere at anytime who has lost his, her, or their life to the storage of a stored nuclear reactor core? As many people who died this summer from extreme heat because anti-nukes who don't know shit about health physics dream up disasters owing to poor educations.

In the next hour, around 800 people will die from air pollution. Some of them are sure to be in anti-nuke heaven, Germany, where the carbon intensity of this writing is 579 grams of CO2/kWh. They're producing 28 GW of coal sourced electricity as of this writing, dumping the toxic wastes directly into the planetary atmosphere. The country is led by Greenpeace anti-nuke morons. They're killing people right now with air pollution and climate change. I'm supposed to cheer because the European grid is wasting some of this electricity to charge some stupid fucking battery.

Again, how many batteries, how many cobalt slaves, how much steel for wind turbines and other junk that that will be landfill in 20 years, would it take to reduce the rate of carbon dioxide from the 2.45 ppm/yr now observed back to 1.50 ppm/year that was observed before badly educated scientifically illiterate marketeers convinced the world to squander trillions of dollars on solar and wind energy.

Anti-nukes not only lack a sense of ethics, they completely lack a sense of scale. That's not surprising. Their poor educations ring out loudly every time they open their mouths.

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6. Thanks to your link

On Electricity Maps

When I select 5yr on the electricity production of the Netherlands it show gas @ 45%, coal at 13% and wind @ 12%. Solar @ 6%

When 12 months is selected I see gas @ 32%, coal @ 9% and wind @ 24%. Solar @ 10%

Isn't this what we want? Wind and solar to a lesser degree displacing coal and gas?

BTW the last 30 days wind has produced 39% of the Netherlands electricity.

Also, the graph shows 2020 so I don't know if the data it shows is actually from the last 5 yrs.

And this from March...

AMSTERDAM, March 18 (Reuters) - The Netherlands will significantly ramp up the building of offshore wind farms in coming years, doubling the planned capacity by 2030, in a bid to meet climate goals and reduce its dependence on Russian gas.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/netherlands-ramps-up-plan-doubling-offshore-wind-capacity-by-2030-2022-03-18/#:~:text=Netherlands%20ramps%20up%20plan%20for%20doubling%20offshore%20wind%20capacity%20by%202030,-Reuters&text=AMSTERDAM%2C%20March%2018%20(Reuters),its%20dependence%20on%20Russian%20gas.

Looks like they are going to need some more batteries...

[NNadir]

7. And your point is what?

Last edited Mon Nov 28, 2022, 03:42 PM - Edit history (2)

What I see is another antinuke comfortable with killing people by burning coal.

To make my ethical position perfectly clear, if I have to explain this using the otherwise intellectually dishonest "percent talk" that characterizes antinuke rhetoric, the only amount of coal burning that should be acceptable to decent people should be zero percent.

People who shut nuclear plants to kill people by substituting coal are not decent people. They're morally deficient thugs in my view, the moral equivalent of antivaxxers, who kill people via the application of ignorance.

By the way, I'm still waiting to hear if the storage of decommissioned nuclear reactor cores has killed anyone, say as many people as dangerous fossil fuel waste will kill in the next hour, 800 people.

Is the storage of reactor cores an issue on the level of climate change, or is it just more pablum and gaslighting?

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8. Agree that burning coal should only be read about in history books.

I had to leave so I was unable to add that the Netherlands has committed to building 2 more reactors (adding to their one reactor that is currently in operation) which should eliminate their coal use and significantly reduce their use of gas.

Wind and solar will continue to increase in the overall use by the Netherlands mainly because they will continue to do what little else does these days - get better and cheaper.

BTW, you know for a fact the core isn't the only part of a reactor that has operated for 40+ years that has been irradiated and therefore doesn't end up in a landfill. Another example of your consistent dishonest debate techniques.

[NNadir]

10. Again, the question is, do any anti-nukes have any evidence that a reactor core storage has...

...killed as many people who will die in the next hour from air pollution, 800 people? The nuclear industry has operated for slightly less than 70 years. Surely someone should have been killed by it, if it's so fucking dangerous.

To satisfy the preternatural need to gaslight, I will extend it to any component of a nuclear reactor.

I'd like to hear an honest response to this question, but know I won't get one. What I'll get is more Trumpian gaslighting.

Trump says that the election was fraudulent but offers no evidence. I would suggest that offering no evidence that the storage of any component of a decommissioned nuclear reactor has killed 800 people - again the hourly death toll from air pollution every hour, deaths egged on my antinuke selective attention - in the 70 year history of commercial nuclear energy.

Well?

As for the "cheaper" bullshit, another Trumpian bit of misinformation, I have yet to hear from an anti-nuke who can explain why Germany and Denmark have the highest consumer electricity rates in the world.

Trump calls lots of people liars, by the way. No one respectable takes him seriously. The people who do take him seriously are generally beneath the contempt of rational people.

I look forward to an account of deaths caused by nuclear components.

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9. Interesting this shows up on Bloomberg today...

People get nervous around nuclear power plants, which means that demolishing one has to be done very, very carefully. The Vermont Yankee power plant sits on the bank of a scenic river in Vernon, Vermont, and for more than 40 years, the atoms split in its reactor generated as much as 70% of the state’s electricity. But then natural gas prices undercut the plant’s electricity and local anti-nuclear protesters worried about safety marched with signs that read “Hell no, we won’t glow.” Entergy Corp., the big Louisiana-based power company that owned Vermont Yankee, shut the plant down in 2014. It then sold the site to NorthStar Group Services Inc., which is now responsible for the decommissioning.

Now the entire plant is being knocked down and cut apart, including the cooling towers that looked exactly like the ones where Homer Simpson works. Most of the demolished plant is headed south to Texas and possible plans for the site include a solar farm or sports fields. Decommissioning the plant, which NorthStar estimates will cost about $600 million, is being paid for by a massive trust fund that the plant’s customers contributed to when the plant was generating electricity.

The radiation that permeates the buildings and equipment on the grounds of a nuclear power plant make tearing one down especially tricky. Spent nuclear fuel remain dangerous for thousands of years, emitting radiation that interferes with bodily functions like creating new cells. Even brief exposure to an unshielded fuel rod would destroy a person’s central nervous system. If you tried to walk across a room towards a fuel rod fresh out of a nuclear reactor, “You'd be dead before you got there,” said Chris Gadomski, a nuclear industry analyst at clean-energy research group BloombergNEF.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-28/how-to-decommission-a-nuclear-power-plant?leadSource=uverify%20wall

Behind a paywall

[NNadir]

11. I am well aware of public stupidity. Is there any evidence that anyone was ever killed by...

...tritium from Vermont Yankee or is this the equivalent of storming the capitol to overthrow the election?

Closing Vermont Yankee killed people in my view, and a mob calling for closing it certainly doesn't represent the first time an ignorant mob killed people.

I would be pleased to learn if the tritium released during the entire operational history of Vermont Yankee killed as many people as pollution from wood stoves in the State.

This presentation is from the Vermont Department of Health, issued in 2022: Wood heating & health impacts

According to the slides, air pollution in Vermont driven by renewable wood burning cost Vermont, a small state, between $120 million and $260 million in health costs, and led to between 10 and 25 deaths.

I look forward to some evidence, not written by some dumb journalist who legitimizes inciting the mob, in a reputable scientific evidence that tritium leaks from Vermont Yankee killed 25 people during its entire operational life.

I'm not some moron who thinks if someone shouts "radiation" the world is about to end. Since I am educated, I understand that human beings would die if they did not contain the 3500 Beq of radioactive potassium every 70 kg human being contains.

I understand radiobiology, and I've had lots of dental x-rays, CT scans, and other X-rays and lived to be an old man. I worked three years early in my career on preparing radioimmunoassay kits with labeled I-125; taking responsibility for handling the waste. Every single workday I walked into a room - with a radiation badge - and was exposed to 35 keV gamma rays.

The tests these kits for which these kits were used saved human lives, and I have lived a long life - often confronting paranoid assholes - in spite of this work, work of which I am proud.

I consider people who think the word "radiation" should cause hysteria the intellectual equivalents of people who think that RNA in a Covid vaccine will kill them. They are exactly the same to my mind, no difference other than the words.

Anti-nuke protesters, including those here, people who make statements like "I'm not an anti-nuke" and then drag out every fucking bit of anti-nuke ignorance out with picayune paranoia - in short, liars - are the moral and intellectual equivalents of antivaxxers, again, people who apply their ignorance to kill people.

Nuclear energy [isaves lives. ] In fact, electric heaters in Vermont were powered by the nuclear plant that was shut by an ignorant mob, would have saved lives. The choice however was not to save lives in this way; it is the equivalent of the German decision to kill people by shutting nuclear plants by burning coal.

Have a wonderful evening.

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12. Cheap Natural Gas

and a for profit utility killed Vermont Yankee. They just used the protesters as an excuse.

Looking into the future they didn't see natgas tripling in price so they just threw in the towel, used the loss to shield profits elsewhere on their balance sheet.

[NNadir]

13. Really? No kidding? I just had the distinct impression, from a gleeful link to a journalist's...

...article that the protesters were the reason the plant shut, a mob of ignoramuses shouting the word "radiation" rather like antivaxxers shout about the "dangers" of RNA.

Of course, I have very little use for journalists, claiming that one can't be one if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better, but nevertheless, there are, incredibly, people who take them very seriously. I don't, but people do.

"But her emails..."

As for providing an "excuse," that is the only thing at which anti-nuke "renewables will save us" types are successful, giving the companies selling dangerous fossil fuels an excuse to exist.

Case in point:

Germany which has engaged in a buffoon exercise in shutting nuclear plants, has the second highest carbon intensity in Europe as of this writing, 744 g CO2/kwh.



Electricity Map Germany (Accessed 23:23 German time.)

What's the "excuse" for this? Coal is "cheap?"

Antinukes are very Trumpian people; they deny responsibility for their actions. There is little difference between Trump announcing that a virulent anti-Semitic white supremacist at his lunch table only happened because "he didn't know" and anti-nukes saying that the closure of nuclear plants had nothing to do with their idiotic mobs screaming about subjects about which they know nothing at all, their generic swear word that is only a swear word for the ignorant: "Radiation!"

As for "cheap..."

I have zero respect for the "economic" reasoning of anti-nukes. I ask the question that they never ask - possibly because they just don't give a shit about the future and only care about their own fucking bourgeois accounts - cheap for whom? Dangerous natural gas isn't cheap for future generations. They will have to live with the external costs. There whole fucking planet lies at the precipice of becoming unlivable because there were people who cared more about the parts of decommissioned nuclear reactors than they did about climate change.

If you ask one of these types of people to demonstrate a death toll from reactor parts from decommissioned reactors over the 70 year history of commercial nuclear reactors that exceeds the death toll that will take in the next hour from air pollution, about 800 human lives, they change the subject to big bad gas companies, the companies whose products they have worked tirelessly to remain in use.

Let me give an example: I've heard anti-nukes who whine and whine and whine and whine about the cost of the Vogtle nuclear plants, which came in at 30 billion dollars owing to the long term activities of anti-nukes to destroy the nuclear manufacturing infrastructure in this country.

On the other hand, when Texas spends 30 billion dollars to build a wall to seal off Houston from storm surges because all the bullshit rhetoric about the solar and wind miracle and the expenditure of trillions of dollars did nothing to address climate change, the same people have nothing to say.

A plan to wall off Houston & industry from hurricane flooding will cost tens of billions of dollars. As the news article in the prominent scientific journal Science linked therein makes clear, most people don't even think the thing will work.

By contrast, Vogtle is likely to work until the end of the 21st century, a gift to future generations about whon bean counting anti-nukes couldn't give a shit.

Of course, the cost of climate change, the cost about which our dumb shit anti-nukes couldn't care less, is much higher:

Of course, I know that antinukes couldn't care less about the scientific literature, holding people who read "scientific screeds" in contempt. From what I hear, they'd rather talk about what Thomas Edison said about when he engaged in the sort of soothsaying that they love so much.

Understanding, as I do, this situation, I cannot help, nonetheless, referencing an open sourced scientific paper on the cost of climate change: Christopher W. Callahan and Justin S. Mankin , Globally unequal effect of extreme heat on economic growth, Science Advances, 8, 43, eadd3726, 2022.

One doesn't have to even go beyond the papers abstract, assuming one is not so lazy as to even go that far.

I quote:

Cumulative 1992–2013 losses from anthropogenic extreme heat likely fall between $5 trillion and $29.3 trillion globally. Losses amount to 6.7% of Gross Domestic Product per capita per year for regions in the bottom income decile, but only 1.5% for regions in the top income decile. Our results have the potential to inform adaptation investments and demonstrate how global inequality is both a cause and consequence of the unequal burden of climate change.

I added the bold, in the perhaps futile hope this might cause an anti-nuke to read the words therein.

Of course, as the article points out, these costs fall disproportionately on the poor. I suspect the chief concern of our head in the ass braying bourgeois battery ballyhoo boosters is that the poor people remain available enough to function as cobalt slaves so they can dig cobalt for batteries so rich people can tell everyone they know how "green" they are.

By the way, no matter what the Germans think, coal isn't "cheap." It kills people. The cost is measured in the cost of human flesh:

Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.

Table 2 therein:

I do understand that it comes from a "scientific screed" that some people read all day and will thus not move a single anti-nuke, but I couldn't care less.

I know how anti-nukes think. To my great shame, there was a time in my youth I walked among them. I was, of course, abysmally ignorant then, but having recognized that ignorance kills, I worked to disenthrall myself.

I fully recognize that there are people who will never do as much.