1.4 GW: battery storage at former Grohnde nuclear power plant
heise.deBatteries are deployed quickly, but high-capacity grid connections can take a decade in the planning phase alone. Everyone wants one, and NIMBYs are quick to oppose them. Locating at a decommissioned nuclear plant is a great solution avoiding this issue
Yup. Another good option is co-locating with renewables. In Scotland, there's several BESS projects that are being built on the north/renewable side of a big grid bottleneck between Scotland and England, because the grid upgrades take a long time.
(maps https://www.spenergynetworks.co.uk/pages/cross_border_projec... - it's an odd area, mostly beautiful in that stark empty way a lot of Scotland is, but there's really not a lot of human use already there apart from marginal sheep farming because the land is too steep to till.)
This installation is actually also co-located with renewables:
> It cooperates with a 53-hectare ground-mounted PV system operated by Solizer in direct proximity, which is supposed to deliver a peak output of 72 MW (MWp). Due to changes in tender conditions, large solar power projects and battery storage systems are increasingly being planned together.
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As obliquely referenced with the "changes in tender conditions", solar overproduction now causes negative midday electricity prices on a near daily basis in Germany from April through to October so long as it's not super cloudy.
Therefore, anyone with a solar installation that doesn't get a special constant feed-in rate for their electricity (no longer available for commercial entities) would actually pay money to feed their solar into the grid.
Therefore it's absolutely vital for new solar in Germany to have batteries on-site so they can sell later in the day, otherwise they're simply unprofitable.
Part of the reason why its good is that the HV link is already there.
For solar as well, the time you need the battery is usually when the solar ain't solarin
NIMBYs are the reason why large parts of the mentioned new 700 km Südlink connection are being built as below ground cables, adding enomous costs.
Turning the nuclear plant back on would have been even better. And then putting a battery next to it would have been even better then that.
With batteries one could argue building them in a more distributed way might make more sense for overall resiliancy.
A fleet of like 70 nuclear plants at maybe 50 location could likely power all of Germany. For batteries you would likely go to 100 to 1000s of locations.
But that said, using the existing connections in some places does make sense.
Why do you think it would be better or even possible to turn on an old nuclear power plant that is 4 years out of service and decommissioned (10 years left until the decommission is finished)?
Even if it is possible I have no confidence that Germany is able to come up with a solution to nuclear waste. The federal states that are proponents of nuclear energy like Bavaria refuse to even examine whether a nuclear waste repository could be located in their territory.
Not that far away from the former nuclear plant in the article the "Schacht Asse" [1] is located where the problem of nuclear waste im Germany becomes painfully obvious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
Edit: Grammar
The plant was not broken and it could absolutly be turned back on. They would just need to catch up on some delayed maintance.
Nuclear 'waste' has plenty of solution and all these 'but the repositoy' is just what anti-nuclear people use to scare people that don't know any better. Nuclear 'waste' doesn't need a repository, its perfectly fine to just store it above ground for as long as needed.
The Asse mine is completely irrelevant to the discussion as this is not how anything is done anymore for a long time and many countries have proven capable of managing waste fine, including Germany since then. The fact is, basically nobody has died from waste managment.
Asse risk is overplayed, even if nothing was done, the likelyhood is that in the next few 100 years nobody would die because of it it. They are removing it because maybe in a few 100 years there could be a slight impact on ground water. Even the is if you make some worst case assumtions. Spend the billions it would cost to empty the mine on gold and put it into the ground. People in few 100 years can dig up and spend on what they think is their most important problem. In the incredibly unlikely case that its radiation, they can use their technology to do what they think is best.
Again: How can it be turned on, when it is actively decommissioned ("Rückbau") since 2024?
What are the costs (without omitting storing radiactive waste securely[1] above ground for some thousand years ? Are they less than batteries + solar + wind?
[1] think terrorism, drone strikes, ...
No. the battery storage will deliver more power than the plant.
But, there are other issues: Atomic power keeps rising in cost. The plant was decomissioned and to turn it back on, you would basically have to rebuild it from the ground up - with people and knowledge that does not exist. Also, you would need the fuel from some place - as with oil and gas, you are depended on that place, since you can't easily switch uranium.
We would need about 55 power plants in Germany. At its height, Germany had 38 plants, all of that trash is still not solved. And we are not even thinking about the lawsuits that the reactivation or building of new plants would entail. People are suing against solar farms, what do you think a Nimby would be triggered by a nuclear plant?
In addition, none of these plants can be insured, all the risk is with the tax payer. As russia currently shows, you are also creating about 50 targets that to destroy a country. You don't even have to send a rocket, a few drones with grenades will make sure the plant has to shut down.
Personally, I do not want them. I remember Tchernobyl and the fallout afterwards. We have alternatives, like these battery storages, and can use water, wind, solar and hydrogen to not create potential nuclear issues, i am fine with that.
< For batteries you would likely go to 100 to 1000s of locations.
Yes, ideally de-centralized and build where power is generated. A battery park can be set up almost anywhere, a power plant not so much.
Nevertheless, I like the idea of using these old plant sites for storage, they have pretty good connections to the grid, so it makes a lot of sense. Can't use that space for anything else, really.
Batteries are not magic. Or new. Check emissions in producing them and cost of recycling them at end of life. Those cost multiply as you scale up to handle grid level load.
> No. the battery storage will deliver more power than the plant.
I mean it wont. it only stores power. The problem for germany is that they still have shitty coal plants. If they'd kept the nuclear and yeeted the coal, they'd have a much cleaner grid. they could have been able to turn off half thier gas and entirely oil free
> No. the battery storage will deliver more power than the plant.
Which it can only do if it consumes more power than the plant was going to deliver. They don't supply power, they can only displace time of use against generation.
> Atomic power keeps rising in cost.
Why? And why won't those same factors increase all energy generation and delivery costs?
> You don't even have to send a rocket, a few drones with grenades will make sure the plant has to shut down.
Batteries are immune to grenades?
> A battery park can be set up almost anywhere
You know, the thing you want next to a battery, or any energy generation and storage system, is going to be a Fire Department.
>all of that trash is still not solved.
How did UK and France solve it? Just ask them and do what they did?
> People are suing against solar farms, what do you think a Nimby would be triggered by a nuclear plant?
Simple. You make it against the law to sue a giant energy projects because energy is a national/existential issue like defense. There, problem solved.
Why do we act like there isn't a switch we can flip when needed to make our problems go away, and instead need to succumb to the whims of a few anti-intellectual nimbys who got brainwashed by anti nuclear propaganda, because "they can sue"?
>Personally, I do not want them. I remember Tchernobyl and the fallout afterwards
Do you also remember the other power plants in the world that didn't blow up?
Imagine if prehistoric humans stopped using fire because someone burned his house down once and "they remember the fire".
> "they can sue"
That's one of the features of a free country. What you propose is close to tyranny.
Ah yes a "free country" is where some (at best) annoying person or (at worse) a fifth column annoyance can disrupt projects that would benefit most people
Living under the whims of a handful of stupid NIMBYs is also close to tyranny.
Why would it have been better to turn back on the nuclear plant? What would be the specific advantages of nuclear plant back in operation versus battery project realisation? Or would battery + reactivated plant be the best overall solution?
> Or would battery + reactivated plant be the best overall solution?
Given how much renewable is already deployed, battery makes sense.
So I think both would be best.
> Turning the nuclear plant back on would have been even better
Sure if it's the same price.
> And then putting a battery next to it would have been even better then that.
An NPP doesn't benefit that much from a battery. They're generally used to provide base load which fits their constant supply profile. Peaks and quick variations can be supplied by more flexible renewables together with a battery to buffer it.
Pumped hydro has been built to work with Nuclear in the past precisely because the flat output of nuclear doesn't actually fit the shape of demand.
Of course these days, you can feed the pumped hydro or batteries with much cheaper renewables.
France is proving every day that load-following is a thing for nuclear reactors.
I don’t understand why people keep spreading this nonsense.
Just stop it, it’s simply untrue!
If your NPP output is lower than the base load (I think this is almost always the case) then the NPP will always feed all its constant production to the grid to satisfy the constant base load. If you have a battery and what to put it somewhere with the most impact, it should go next to the variable power supply, where it makes sense to store and supply later. That's what batteries do, store what you can't use now to supply it when you can't produce.
Look at this picture [0] of the German grid. Same for France [1]. Why would you store any of the nuclear output when all of it is guaranteed to be absorbed by the grid real time, day or night? You can, but it doesn't make economic sense. Batteries shine where they can smoothen peaks, like solar and wind.
The big reason to put batteries next to NPPs is the existing grid infrastructure. You can't supply GW-level power from just anywhere. It's like building a large warehouse next to a major transportation route.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load#/media/File:Renewabl...
[1] https://www.rte-france.com/en/data-publications/eco2mix/powe...
There are lots of times and places where renewable production is higher than demand. When that's the case "the NPP will always feed all its constant production to the grid to satisfy the constant base load." increases costs.
> increases costs
“Increases costs” for who, the producer, the consumer, the distributor? If you have data on that I’d love to read about it.
I think the article mentions that recently batteries are always together with renewables. The reason this battery was built there has nothing to do with the NPP but with the proximity to the already developed power distribution infrastructure. You can assume they’ve all done the math when choosing to not build batteries next to working NPPs.
> and NIMBYs are quick to oppose them
I have a solution: higher energy prices for those opposing NIMBYs and cheaper for YIMBYs .
So many issues in politics would be solved if the voters of certain policies were the only ones affected by them instead of writing cheques everyone else has to cash.
In Denmark, wind mills were initially quite popular, because locals owned them and benefited. The iconic wind farm Middelgrunden on the waters outside of Copenhagen is 50% owned by a co-op.
Wow this is a massive arbitrage play. Big proponent of BESS but 5 GW of batteries to buy cheap wind and sell at a higher price is a wild bet.
Must have a lot of grants and government money for this one to pencil out.
Why wild bet? It seems to be a safe bet that intermittent solar and wind availability will continue to create huge price swings, which storage can exploit and reduce to almost everyone's everyone's benefit. The investment just takes a while to break even, that's all. And with LFP or other long life battery technology, it will pay off for quite a while after break-even.
Not at all a wild bet. German electricity prices *routinely* swing by over 150€/MWh on a daily basis year round. That's a massive spread to make money off of.
For a good chunk of the year (April through to October), the prices even go negative at mid-day most days of the week. This will pay itself off very quickly
So it can store 6 hours of output of the previous existing nuclear power station.
Nice to see it’s being put to good use. I used to fly the rodeo thermals with a glider… Missing the cloud machine :’)
1.4 GW power, 6 GWh capacity
6 GWh is approximately 5 kilotons of TNT equivalent.
Would make a big bang should it go off.
The nearby nuclear power plant produced these 6 GWh every four and a half hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and more than 8000 days of the year.
Would you like to run the same calculations for the (now decomissioned) nuclear power plant on the same site?
Or for that matter the average petrol or natural gas storage facility? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire ("Europe's largest peacetime explosion")
A nuclear power plant cannot free all of its energy at once as the fuel enrichment is too low for an exponential excursion of power, i.e. an explosion.
Batteries tend to burn instead of explode. Same energy, but released over much more time. And while an uncontained battery fire is a huge issue in a private home or in a car park because of how difficult they are to control, in a dedicated battery storage plant you can just let it burn down
It's not without risk, but as far as power plants go it's pretty low risk
its about 21600 gigajoules or about 1500 tonnes of wheat.
Recently had a battery storage facility nixed near where I live because the loudest local residents were panicked about possibilities of leaks of heavy chemicals into the groundwater (which is somewhat fair) and a bunch of less reasonable nonsense. Still, assuming the legit risks can be handled, facilities like these are crucial to future growth in electricity demand.
We are in the age of anti-intellectualism.
https://www.propublica.org/article/michigan-solar-farms-heal...
We have been pumping oil out of the ground for lifetimes and still have little concern for all the leaky dead wells across the country but these solar panels, that’s the real problem.
We have also been breathing fine coal, diesel, brake-pad and tire dust for almost 100 years with no riots from gen-pop, but clean nuclear and batteries will kill us.
About 15 years ago there was some interest in putting in some wind towers in the township I lived in. People were talking about stray electricity killing their livestock. Never mind the several dozen towers already installed 3 miles away.
>People were talking about stray electricity killing their livestock.
That's why I think voting shouldn't be a universal right to everyone, but a privilege you gain after clearing certain bars, one of them being basic education and an IQ test.
Giving every dumbass the same voting power as an academic, to grind national development to a halt and make life shit for everyone else just because they don't understand 5th grade physics, is a recipe for disaster and we're living proof of it.
If you ever worked in public rations and interacted with the gen-pop off the street on a regular basis, you'd see my point eye-to-eye. The masses are too stupid to be entrusted with national decisions, and the only reason they are allowed to, is because they are easily manipulated into voting the way the elites want them to, because they're stupid.
It's exactly why Plato opposed democracy arguing the same faults.
Indisputable fact.>Plato argued that democracy gives power to the masses (the demos), who are often ignorant, emotional, and easily manipulated by skilled speakers (rhetoricians and demagogues).
Indisputable fact.>Plato believed that ruling is a skill that requires deep knowledge, wisdom, and training in philosophy — not something that should be decided by majority vote or popularity.
Indisputable fact.>He famously compared democracy to a ship where the sailors (citizens) vote on navigation, instead of letting the trained captain (philosopher) steer. The result, according to him, is chaos."Democracy is the worst kind of government except for all the others" - Churchill.
Indisputable fact. ;-)
it's a nice idea but you know they used to have this, and the test was basically just a list of things white people were more likely to know
IDK, I'm not from a country that did stuff like that, so don't try to pin some original sin from the US history on me. I'm from a pretty homogenous country with no racial issues.
Now are you saying only whites will be able to understand 5th grade physics and nobody else? Or that whites can't be stupid too?
Personally I don't care about your skin color, or other factors, if you're THAT stupid, I don't want you deciding the future of our country, period, since you're putting everyone in danger.
If you can't pass 5th grade physics, you're not fit to be voting on the country's nuclear energy policy, simple.
You could replace skin color with any attribute and it will probably happen. You can see it play out across the world time and time again, in any type of downturn or bad luck people on average find it easier to blame another group than themself. Take this a step forward and you get momentum to carve requirements that would exclude that group. Oh you want to participate in voting? You need to be able to list the Qur’anic commandments to be able to vote or whatever your flavor of restriction is.
No, they are saying that your so-called idea has already been tried, but what actually happened was that <insert majority> who already had control set it up so <insert majority> could vote easily while <insert minority> could not. Could be race, could be something else. There is no such thing as an "objective test" for your case, because someone somewhere would need to determine it is objective. Who verifies that person, and who verifies the people who verify them?
>No, they are saying that your so-called idea has already been tried, but what actually happened was that <insert majority> who already had control set it up so <insert majority> could vote easily while <insert minority> could not.
That already exists in our current system. Whoever's parents reproduced the most, now has majority of votes. Home owners are majority and decide housing policies for those who don't owe property.
Are these more fair, or just another form of mob rule we got accustomed to out of centuries of inertia, like fish in the water? When did we decided that rules from 300 years ago shouldn't be touched to be updated to reflect current challenges?
>There is no such thing as an "objective test" for your case, because someone somewhere would need to determine it is objective.
Currently it's our legal system that decides what is fair and objective, that's how it works today in most countries. And that's not set in stone, but can always be changed on a dime if the majority of the population decides to, or in case of national catastrophes like war, since all laws are made up and only enforceable as long as the majority of the society with support of the military agree with them.
>Who verifies that person, and who verifies the people who verify them?
Who verifies the judge is fair? Who verifies that person who verifies the judge? And so on. Same principles here.
> IDK, I'm not from a country that did stuff like that, so don't try to pin some original sin from the US history on me. I'm from a pretty homogenous country with no racial issues.
Also going back on this comment. What country are you from? I have always found that the US gets the short stick when in reality these problems have happened everywhere. Usually the countries that think they have no problems are because they are homogenous.
The concern isn't that only whites will be smart enough.
The concern is that the current power structure will use this as a convenient way to bias the voter pool in its favor through strategic selection of questions.
It’s like communism or anarchocapitlism, it works on paper but hard in practice. Preventing voting is a nice idea but really hard to get right because humans are messy animals.
The world is messy and one of the reasons I am such a believer in markets on average is because they help align outcomes in the world we live in.
I agree with the complaint but have yet to see a mechanism that is free of abuse and disenfranchisement.
People are stupid and vote with their emotions or what the pastor told them to. It would be lovely to ensure that votes came from well informed voters.
It’s a weird time. You would think folks would be excited about technology but we have this weird even in America where everything is scary. Facebook brainrot is no issue but F those EVs.
Did they even have a material listing to base their fear on?
I do think there should be localized referendums where we offer people the choice of taking energy infrastructure out of local approval altogether in exchange for 10% off their bills. It would save so much time and effort. I suspect the silent majority would happily take it leaving a few people yelling at pylons.
The UK implements something similar, though without the choice.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylon...
not great, not terrible