The Swiss are on the frontline of climate change seeing that it is destroying their mountains which in turn are destroying their villages. Sad times.
What is a size of a soccer field
A soccer field has the size of 63,693 Big Macs
7140m²
Ur mom’s butt
this will be by far the largest vanadium flow battery in the world, especially outside china
Flow batteries eat lithium batteries on paper and they are so scalable too!
Wow its much bigger than Chinas.
Oh wow! Switzerland! How did you get so big!?
The article doesn’t explain the battery, making it a bullshit site if you ask me, here is what they are talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
'The vanadium redox battery (VRB), also known as the vanadium flow battery (VFB) or vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), is a type of rechargeable flow battery which employs vanadium ions as charge carriers.[5] The battery uses vanadium’s ability to exist in a solution in four different oxidation states to make a battery with a single electroactive element instead of two.[6]
For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.[7] ’
I don’t think I understand any better what the battery is then I did before. As per usual Wikipedia sucks at explaining concepts that you don’t actually already understand.
source: wikipedia (link above)
As per usual Wikipedia sucks at explaining concepts that you don’t actually already understand.
but it’s true, i have encountered exactly this phenomenon many times :/
Here’s the short version.
A normal battery is a sealed cell. It has a positive and negative electrode, with an electrolyte between them. Usually many layers of this. When you charge it, a chemical change happens. When you discharge it, that chemical change is undone.
A redox flow battery uses fixed electrodes, but a liquid electrolyte that can be pumped and stored. This means you can increase overall storage capacity simply by adding more electrolyte tanks, without needing more electrodes. Think of it like a generator with a bigger gas tank.
The whole vanadium thing is just one of the metals used in the battery. There’s a few kind of redox flow batteries using different chemistries
Also there are hundreds of chemical combinations that produce electricity that we know about, and only a handful have been worked on for batteries. As reported in Harper’s Magazine many years back, that is not indexed to enshitified search engines, because fuck you (us, google, et al talking.)
Fry: I get it! So if the simplified bucket explanation gets full, you just add more buckets!
Yes exactly. If you need more total capacity you add more tanks, if you need more instantaneous output power you add more electrodes. And thus you can scale either one without messing with the other.
Thank you! That is a smart solution to inrease capacity!
The downside is that does batteries are not be energy dense. Perfect for grid storage but useless for car batteries (where the bulk of battery R&D money goes).
Yeah wikipedia is hit or miss, especially as technical people like to show off their fancy words and explain things in ways only technical people understand.
But it’s Vanadium, and you can look that up elsewhere. The first large industrial vanadium battery (if I recall,) was some years back, I think in WA State.
There is Wikipedia in Simple English, but they don’t cover all topics.
If I really want to feel stupid, I go to the Wikipedia article for some simple maths concept I thought I understood
oh yeah, i read up yesterday what a polynomial is. hah.
Yeah I think people who enjoy math and formulas and proofs also enjoy writing Wikipedia articles in the same way. I usually go to the Simple English Wikipedia for any math topics. And I got as far as calc 2 in college, so I’m no ignoramus.
If I heard this on a different situation I would have thought this is an AI hallucination.
The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn’t.
The article specifies:
- Total capacity: 2.1GWh
- Peak output: 1.2GW
- Ramp up time: a few milliseconds
That’s what the “within milliseconds” in the title refers to.
Every power generator has a ramp up time. Think the time it takes to start the engine in a diesel generator, until it spins up and is able to output peak power.
Nuclear reactors can hare ramp-up times of hours, in some conditions even days.
This thing here can go from zero to peak output within almost no time, which makes it perfect to balance the sometimes erratic and unpredictable generation fluctuations of renewable energy production.
For comparison, coal or gas power generators usually have large flywheels that, once spinning, react almost instantly to power fluctuations in the network by converting their motion to electricity or the other way round. If these coal or gas generators aren’t running, they can’t be used to balance the fluctuations in the network, so battery solutions like the one in OP are required to actively manage the network stability.
Perfect power source for a Death Star! The planet goes from zero to smithereens in milliseconds!
That’s like a huge capacitor on my hobby electronics brain.
That’s pretty much the job, except a billion times as large.
FYI. Hydro power has similar capacity and start up times
Yeah, the downside of hydro though is that you need to have a fitting space to build it. You can’t just excavate a random field somewhere and plonk a hydro dam right there.
In most places all easy spots for hydro are already taken.
Very true. You can build a pool on top of a mountain and pump/discharge water but it is super expensive for limited capacity.
Not quite - only the biggest hydro stations can generate a gigawatt or more, and their startup time is like 10 minutes.
This project is only 500 MW here
And other places say 800 MW
Both of which are comparable to large hydro.
Modern pumped hydro has a ramp up in the 10s of seconds range.
Anyway. Same ballpark in terms of power.
I must have got the 1.2GW from some comment.
It’s in the title so you are not mistaken. The problem is that various statistics have been reported and we don’t know what is correct.
Thanks, I edited the headline to make it clearer, but this community is overrun with confidently incorrect folks.
…this community - oh, you mean social media! Yes, quite true.
Peak output needs to be 1.2 GW not GWh.
Correct, the typo is mine, not from the article.
deleted by creator
I thought that issue was considered solved by smart inverters now?
I wanted to research it myself since I didn’t know how Redbox flow batteries operate. It is two giant tanks of liquid energy. When there’s extra electricity from wind or solar, pumps move special vanadium-based liquids through a stack of cells, storing that energy as a chemical change. When electricity is needed later, the process runs in reverse and the liquids generate power for the grid. Unlike lithium batteries, the energy is stored in the liquid tanks, so making the battery bigger is mostly a matter of building larger tanks. The Swiss project will store about 2.1 GWh of energy—enough to help balance renewable power on a massive scale—and was chosen partly because redox-flow batteries are non-flammable, long-lasting, and can be cycled tens of thousands of times with little degradation
I think that’s the same kind of battery technology as explained in this video. Most certainly not the same chemistry used, but same in principle
Cheers for putting the legwork in, they’re even cooler than I thought
I read some years back about I think the first big heavy industrial vanadium battery being built for some washington state company if I recall.
great scott
We don’t know soccer fields around these parts…
Anything but the Imperial System huh?
It’s 1,435 US rods square, or 1,333.6 imperial rods, simple.
How much is that in chicken?
US Leghorns or British broilers? Just multiply by 3.21 and add 27. Simple.
*3.14159
Sure, if you assume a spherical chicken.
So that is like 1,435 dick lengths end to end? /s
Fuck these incompetent headline writers who cant use units correctly. At this point they are doing this shit on purpose to ragebait people into reading the article. And they dont even explain what that headline is supposed to mean in the article. Does the output power ramp up that fast or do they mean that it can actually just output a lot of energy really fast?
Actually, the headline isn’t wrong, you just read it wrong.
The article specifies:
- 2.1 GWh total storage capacity
- 1.2 GW peak output
- can ramp up to that peak output within milliseconds
Every power source has a ramp up time. Ramping up e.g. a nuclear reactor can take hours, so if demand fluctuates it takes long for it to spin up.
This one here can ramp up almost instantly to cover for fluctuations in the network, especially those caused by the unpredictable nature of renewable power generators.
I am also fascinated by the measurement “two soccer fields.” Americans largely play soccer on American football fields, so any American would just say “two football fields.” But everyone else hates calling it “soccer” and prefer to use metric rather than comparisons? This just seems like they chose all their measurements to be maximally irritating.
Calling it two football field would still work. Americans would think brown oblong ball field, everyone else would think black and white orb game. In in all cases they’d be thinking of essentially the same measurement.
Right?! It’s just so puzzling a choice.
That’s exactly what the original comment said?
I think it was alluding to it, but stopped short of explicitly saying it. I felt it was worth explicitly saying.
Yeah, nobody play soccer in Switzerland, they play football, how would they know how big is soccer field?
Aren’t soccer fields like 20% larger usually?
Because main concern when using soccer/football fields as measurement is accuracy
Its as precise as a banana
Yeah. A lot of USLW games are played in gridiron stadiums, and the touchline is way further out than the sideline. They’re not required to be strictly uniform like gridiron, though, it’s more like a baseball diamond in that regard, so I’m not sure if they’re strictly wider, or just usually wider.
My interpretation is that it can go from no output up to 1.2GW in milliseconds. Do most big batteries take more time to ramp up to high output?
These systems support a latent load so it’s not all at once. Something like this but at a massive scale.
https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slva670a/slva670a.pdf
Very cool engineering.
Yep! In just 86500000 milliseconds. 🫡
Goddammit, they are 0.01 Gigawatt short of time travel. 😋
It says “over 1.2” which means you know what some engineer gave the spec as.
Wow, that’s almost 10% of a single datacenter
How big is a soccer field?
About half of this hole
Correct!
That’d be 691077 regular sized hamburgers laid next to each other in a rigid grid pattern, 797502 if laid in a hexagonal pattern, 891720 if squished.
How many gallons per football field is that?
And when I say football I men real one
Well…How big are regular sized hamburgers?
1/3 to half the size of your appetite.
hmm… that’s more like a variable than a cpnstant
actually, it’s a parameter
fair…
“2 atom bombs, 6 elephants, and 74 gallons Farenheit. Just, anything but that alien metric system.”
because we metric users are eeeeevil
They are not standard sized.
This makes the comparison even more stupid xD
Between 4000 and 11000 square meters
That’s an estimate, I guess? Well, it’s still a better definition
FIFA standard
Aaaah corrupt ones.
And how deep is a soccer field?
Do you really mean to learn?
Cause we’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down. When they all should let us be.
We belong to you and me.
Strictly speaking zero depth, but to build one you need at least some amount of surface to stand on. A good one has grass, which needs a few inches of soil, but a really good one also has crushed stone and other layers before that.
1.21 Jiggowatts?! Is there a GIF?
This meme is so appropriate in that scene, it tickles me 😀
No, only a GIF.
Great Scott!
You pronounce the G the same way as in gigawatt.
Yes, jiggawatt. Duh.
Now where’s the Jif?
Boromir didn’t grow up in the kingdom of Jondor.
But what about the F? Is it pronounced like phhhh, or like ffffff?
ffffff which can be written fff and is pronounced white
What the hell is a jiggawatt?!
