Re: 1GW (sic) Battery Energy Storage Systems

On Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:21:13 -0800, john larkin <JL@gct.com> wrote:

On Sun, 24 Nov 2024 11:40:16 +0000, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>

There is a startup company in the UK called NatPower (no relation to the
real National Power PLC aka NPower) claiming to have over 25 years of
experience in BESS. They are proposing 1GW (sic) BESS in all sorts of
brown and green field UK sites. They have no track record that I can
find. Does anyone here know of any real international project(s) that
they have actually done and more importantly *delivered*?
(their own PR or its uncritical repetition in the press doesn't count)
>
Their website is very slick indeed but I suspect that beauty is only
skin deep. I am interesting in evidence of substance not PR fluff.
>
Can someone provide me with some rough estimates of what a 1GW class
energy storage system ought to look like in terms of layout and the
number of container sized units and space required?
(or at least sanity check my guesstimate below)
>
Assuming that they mean 1GWh I reckon it will be about 2000T of Lithium
batteries. If each module is storage container sized and can contain
20m^2 of batteries I reckon it is about 100 units (twice that if I have
over estimated how much battery you can safely fit in a module). I
haven't been able to find any manufacturers specifications for them.
>
At what point in the scale up from 50MW storage units (which are quite
common in the UK) to these new Gigaparks do things get interesting?
>
It also strikes me that if these storage battery systems have similar
characteristics to the Lithium ion cells in my laptop they will require
complete replacement every 5 or so years if they get cycled daily.
>
And I presume each module needs integrated fire suppression systems to
handle thermal runaway problems. Lithium fires being notoriously
difficult for ordinary fire fighting methods to put out.
>
Also what additional measures will it need to tie into 400kV supergrid?
>
How do you even do that at 1GW using semiconductor components?
>
It can obviously be done since some big interconnectors are DC but how
much does that sort of hefty high voltage infrastructure cost?

>
Maybe they mean 1 gigawatt. It seems to be peaking power.
>
There are already long-distance DC power lines, with AC conversion on
both ends. I think they use a lot of IGBTs.

Yes.  The key is optical triggering via an optical fiber, which is
both precise in time and electrically isolated, so one can stack many
units in series. 

The highest-power stuff is Thyristor based, and is directly optically
triggered.

IGBTs are triggered by an optically-triggered IGBT driver.

Imagine firing up a 12 gigawatt  800 KV converter for the first time!

Done outdoors in staged steps, from a safe distance.

There will be many wires.  12e9/8e5= 1.5e4 amps total.  Icing will not
be a problem.


Joe Gwinn