That's only true until ESS backed by sodium ion batteries gets rolled out at scale. China will get ungodly amounts of energy for free just by utilizing existing solar and wind capacity efficiently.
Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion
- Thread starter FairAndUnbiased
- Start date
Can't they just put the gas on a ship and sell it ASEAN nations? Grabbing away markets from western suppliers.
China still has lower electricity consumption per capita than advanced economies. Penetration of refrigeration for long term food storage and air conditioning equipment is lower than in such countries. Refrigeration will increase food prices, but will lower food wastage, which means China will need less food production overall. Increased use of air conditioning will increase demand for energy but will increase worker productivity as well. Especially in Southern China. The increase in the number of EVs on the road will also vastly increase the demand for electricity from the grid. Construction of high speed railways and subways, all electric, has not stopped yet either.
If you look at the US electric grid historic generation profile, as wind and solar usage grows, the usage of gas grows commensurately, and all of them eat into coal generation. Coal power as well as nuclear power are baseload, cannot be quickly ramped up and down like a gas turbine, are a poor choice for providing backup power for renewables. But the more baseload you have the less money you have to invest in the grid making HVDC connections, pumped storage, and the like. Which are extremely expensive.
coal -> renewables does not work without substantial pumped storage capacity. The only country which did this is Denmark, but they use the huge Norwegian hydropower plants as a pumped storage battery. Claims that the batteries in EVs will provide such backup capacity in the future seem like a mirage to me. For that, the cars need to be connected to the grid and the owner of the EV will have to consider the decreased lifetime of his car batteries from that kind of constant usage pattern. Batteries have a limited number of charge/discharge cycles. For a large part of the day people will also be working and the cars might be at the place of work which might not have electric plugs available. You would also have to consider vastly improving the grid to support something like that. This solution does not come for free either.
Gas consumption will increase further. And even if they built Power of Siberia 2, it wouldn't be enough even just to completely replace current Australian LNG imports.
Renewable expansion will start to slow down after a certain point. Because of lack of energy storage and transmission. Max system power might continue to increase but the actual consumed power will not.
China can resell the LNG they do buy to other countries. Selling the Russian gas like that though, it would require gas liquefaction facilities and might not be cost effective.
Last edited:
Again, you are forgetting Green hydrogen/methanol as energy storage to be used later. They already have hydrogen gas turbine developed. They also have been able to use hydrogen in NG pipelines and power plants.
Battery ESS is really cheap and getting cheaper. They added 32 GW of ESS in the past year and this will only significantly increase over time.
Grid management will continue to get better through increased AI, SiC chips and such.
We will get to a point where China is a net energy exporter.
This is what it's all about for China. China is not doing this for environmental reasons. This is an energy security and energy independence issue. This is about getting the cheapest form of energy.
The cost for solar & wind is minimal once you install it. The capex is really low.
As for selling LNG to other countries. That actually is what they will end up doing. They are locked into long term contracts, so they will have to take shipments, but then they can re-sell it if they don't need it.
The cost for solar, wind & ESS is so low right now and getting lower. There is just no way around this.
Once they get sodium ion batteries, then the main concerns about not having enough lithium will also go away.
All of this supports Chinese jobs
Battery ESS is really cheap and getting cheaper. They added 32 GW of ESS in the past year and this will only significantly increase over time.
Grid management will continue to get better through increased AI, SiC chips and such.
We will get to a point where China is a net energy exporter.
This is what it's all about for China. China is not doing this for environmental reasons. This is an energy security and energy independence issue. This is about getting the cheapest form of energy.
The cost for solar & wind is minimal once you install it. The capex is really low.
As for selling LNG to other countries. That actually is what they will end up doing. They are locked into long term contracts, so they will have to take shipments, but then they can re-sell it if they don't need it.
The cost for solar, wind & ESS is so low right now and getting lower. There is just no way around this.
Once they get sodium ion batteries, then the main concerns about not having enough lithium will also go away.
All of this supports Chinese jobs
Hydrogen like that is a complete non starter. Where will you store the hydrogen you generate? Do you think hydrogen storage can be done cheaply? You aren't storing gasoline. Using a hydrogen gas turbine for backup power is completely idiotic. A gas turbine that does not run at constant speed in baseload mode will be like 35% energy efficient. Ideally you would use fuel cells. Not gas turbines.
Methanol would at least be easier to store. But it remains to be seen if it would be cost effective for such applications.
You cannot use hydrogen in NG pipelines long term. It leads to embrittlement. Hydrogen molecules are smaller than natural gas ones, they permeate the pipe, and weaken it structurally. The density of both is also totally different, so you want different thicknesses of pipes, and probably different alloys and coatings on the pipe as well. It is a cool experiment, until the pipes break up.
As for the power plants I already explained the problem.
Without new battery technology, like flow batteries, it won't be possible to do grid scale in a country like China. Some people claim sodium-ion batteries could do this but even with that I am kind of skeptical.
What would really help would be cheaper HVDC connections. Either cheap superconductors or ballistic conductors. But those are pie in the sky ideas still. Well, that and cheap storage. It is not like China does not have the grid management software, but without the connections and storage, there is just so much you can do to juggle the resources anyways.
All true. But it isn't reliable. And it isn't a solution for the whole country.
Historically nuclear power plants used to be cheaper than they are today by like half. There is also a roadmap to increase the energy efficiency of nuclear power. Fast reactors could burn up fuel 20x more efficiently. Higher temperature reactors would be more thermodynamically efficient. In theory solar efficiency could also be improved with quantum dots, but as for wind they get extra performance from scaling up the size of wind turbines. Eventually that will become impractical.
I am still not that convinced that sodium ion batteries will be cheap enough for grid scale in China. But I hope I am wrong.
they already have hydrogen power plant, there are quite few different technology right now being drawn up in terms of storage and transportation. I've posted some on this thread. Feel free to read it.
I did not say purely hydrogen, but you can also mix in hydrogen with NG. They've already been doing it for 24% H2 mix and it's been fine
They are also building dedicated hydrogen pipeline and more will get built
you have no clue on this subject
You are wrong. You don't seem to follow either the production ramp up or the cost declines in ESS at all.
If you think flow battery technology is more economical than LFP or SIB, you are clearly not following things. It's just annoying because I've posted so much on ESS procurement on NEV thread and on my twitter account
LFP px is already down to $60/kwh and could drop to $50/kwh in the next few months
SIB will be even cheaper than this
This is the path that China is taking.
right, nobody is saying this will be at the same level of efficiency as steadily operating combined cycle gas turbine plants, but that's why you invest money into developing technology so they get more efficient over time.
And you have 10-20 years to develop this tech. Until then, coal plant can continue to be the ultimate backup power
And they are only needed to operate for a fraction of the time. battery ESS will handle most of the daily peak usage/low solar scenarios. It's more just the seasonal variations or large droughts that you read need this variable power
China's new ESS installation in 2023 amounted to 22.6GW/48.7GWh, 97% of which are Lithium ESS
so huge jump over 2022 (260% increase)
but more importantly, the pace of these bids are picking up
BYD is a huge part of this, they are #1 in winning bids
And they have a full lineup of ESS products
so huge jump over 2022 (260% increase)
but more importantly, the pace of these bids are picking up
BYD is a huge part of this, they are #1 in winning bids
And they have a full lineup of ESS products
That is still 2x-5x more expensive than some flow battery technologies. And that is before you consider the issues with recycling those batteries and long term sustainment.
There is no way of getting peaking power plant gas turbine efficiency up by a significant amount. You can just ignore combined cycle gas turbine plant efficiency since you can only get that by operating the power plant in baseload mode. But you want to use the gas power plants to cover wind and solar generation shortfalls. Because you want a high amount of intermittent renewable power in the grid. So they will seldom operate in baseload mode.
Last edited:
show the math. Byd believes it can get sib ess cost down close to pumped hydro cost.
Where do you think flow battery costs are at?
there is just no way flow battery can compete on cost vs lithium and sodium battery when the latter have already been industrialized with fully supply chain. All of which is supported by larger demand from ev industry
ess is a fraction of the battery demand vs auto. Whatever they come up with for automotive for recycling will also be used for ess
You start of with gas or coal plant and then sub in more hydrogen or methanol or ammonia over time as tech improves.
Long term, China does not need to import more natural gas or coal.
I also don’t see why you would run these plants intermittently like you are stating here. You operate these plants for the months when renewable production are low and demands are high. That could be 6 months of the year. Any excessive energy can be stored in ess.