Switzerland dug a hole the size of two soccer fields to install the world’s most powerful underground battery, able to output 1.2 GW within milliseconds.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/switzerland-dug-a-hole-the-size-of-two-soccer-fields-to-install-the-worlds-most-powerful-underground-battery-able-to-release-1-2-gw-in-milliseconds-and-store-2-1-gwh-at-a-multibillion-dollar/32795/Open linkView original on mander.xyz491
Comments133
great scott
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?
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. 🫡
Actually, the headline isn't wrong, you just read it wrong.
The article specifies:
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
There is Wikipedia in Simple English, but they don't cover all topics.
source: wikipedia (link above)
but it's true, i have encountered exactly this phenomenon many times :/
If I heard this on a different situation I would have thought this is an AI hallucination.
1.21 Jiggowatts?! Is there a GIF?
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
This meme is so appropriate in that scene, it tickles me 😀
What the hell is a jiggawatt?!
Cheers for putting the legwork in, they're even cooler than I thought
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
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.
The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn't.
The article specifies:
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.
That's like a huge capacitor on my hobby electronics brain.
That's pretty much the job, except a billion times as large.
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.
Perfect power source for a Death Star! The planet goes from zero to smithereens in milliseconds!
FYI. Hydro power has similar capacity and start up times
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
https://www.pv-magazine.de/2024/09/20/flexbase-plant-500-megawatt-redox-flow-speicher-in-der-schweiz/
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.
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.
Peak output needs to be 1.2 GW not GWh.
Correct, the typo is mine, not from the article.
I thought that issue was considered solved by smart inverters now?
Wow, that's almost 10% of a single datacenter
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
One point twenty one gigawatts?!
By exploding?
Yeah, that's a bit too much a bit too fast, isn't it?
1.2GWh within milliseconds would be exploding.
Read the headline again, it only talks about GW not GWh. That means it can output 1.2GWh per hour, but it can ramp up to 1.2GW within milliseconds. And it likely can only keep that output for a very short time, which is exactly what you need to balance the fluctuations of renewable energy production.
When I flip the light switch in my room, I drain 6 nuclear reactors.
They just had the first stone laying ceremony so that explains the new wave of publications on the project.
They are using a Vanadium flow battery by the company Invinity Energy Systems which is British-Canadian.
I'm a little unsure whether it's a good idea to combine this with a datacenter, I hope the datacenter bubble popping won't jeopardize the whole project.
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!?
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.
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…
How many gallons per football field is that?
And when I say football I men real one
Between 4000 and 11000 square meters
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.
That's an estimate, I guess? Well, it's still a better definition
FIFA standard
Aaaah corrupt ones.
because we metric users are eeeeevil
They are not standard sized.
This makes the comparison even more stupid xD
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.
Asked for comments, they kept saying "Rest assured there is no death ray plans"
(/j)
They already destroyed the world by distorting out timeline when that weasel got into the collider when it was running, just a week before harambe.
What is a size of a soccer field
A soccer field has the size of 63,693 Big Macs
https://joshclarkcalculates.com/
7140m²
Ur mom's butt
Yeah, no, it's not going to output 1.2 gW in milliseconds.
The headline is most likely a misunderstanding, but "Output X Watt in Y time" isn't all that wrong, since it would be talking about how quickly the power supply can respond to demand.
Every power supply has a ramp-up time, and the way the headline is worded hints to a very short ramp-up time, which would be very helpful for network stabilization.
But yeah, it's likely the headline writer just misunderstood something.
Don’t stick your thing in it!!
Remember Wally? Ooof. I mean, kind of a jerk and all but. What a way to go.
$1 per WH or almost that is pretty terrible. You can get battery systems for 1/4 of that $/WH at Home Depot.
And how much would you have to pay people to take those thousands of Home Depot systems, string them all together, build a facility to hold all this, then hook it to the grid?
And how long are those systems expected to last compared to those in the article?
When you build bigger stuff, costs per KWH are lower than you pay at Home Depot, higher.
https://vipenergyservice.com/energy-storage/cost-of-battery-storage-per-kwh/
People girls just use them in their homes and businesses.
it's a flow battery, so it keeps charge basically indefinitely (when not in use energy-bearing parts are separated). you can run it as hard as you need and it will not degrade in use-dependent way, at least not as hard as lead or lithium batteries
to elaborate on durability, there's no capacity loss with these batteries. so if design intention is to run these batteries from full to empty and back every day, and maybe a bit more* they can handle it no problem, because everything that happens, happens in liquid phase that can't degrade. lithium battery will degrade fast with such usage, but this one won't. on balance, there's need for pump and electrolyser maintenance, but at least you won't need to rip apart everything and replace all batteries every 3 years. per kwh per year of use it might be cheaper this way
* they might want this battery to provide energy in the morning, before solar panels kick in, soak up excess energy from noon peak, then discharge it in the evening. that might be 500ish cycles per year, and they can run it at full tilt
Grid connected storage in the US goes for some 220 USD/kWh at scale. It's some 100 USD/kWh in China.
Yeah, I agree that decentralization of the grid and self-consumption is better than these mass baseload solutions...but they will only get cheaper.
Let's do some math:
2.1GWh
And
Multi billion dollar price (let's assume 3 billion)
2.1GWh - > 3billion
2.1MWh - > 3 millon
2.1kWh - > 3000 Usd /2.1
1KWh - > ~1430 USD
Considering that 1kWh in lithium ion batteries is like 150 USD they aren't getting a good value out of it.
Short sighted math, you've completely ignored the battery chemistry. These batteries last longer & don't degrade
Also im sure that the team of engineers who worked on the decision to go with this battery know what they're doing and have a better grasp of what makes economical sense than you do
You misspelled politicians. In case of the large scale project the decisions are made by politicians. And their goal isn't exactly to spend money in optimal way. It's to spend money on big flashy projects that win them votes.
I'm sorry you think a politician would think 1kwh billed at 1500 is a good idea because it involves a "big flashy" project?
This isn't Trump we're talking about
I don't think the multibillion price tag is about the physical battery itself.
It's probably the cost of the entire project. Which includes:
The list goes on. Notice how I didn't even mention the battery itself.
Not everything scales linearly.
Larger startup cost, but over the one power plant's lifetime the Li batteries would wear out and have to be replaced many times.