Prices Yuan/kW
onshore with tower: 1894
onshore without tower: 1513
offshore with tower: 3307
offshore without tower: 2698
(7.355 Yuan/US$)
19% of the turbine capacity is above 10 MW
At 2500 full-load hours, this will generate around 570TWh of electricity. The wind turbine manufacturers will only generate around 62.5 billion dollars.
Competition is even more important than size. Only when there are a large number of suppliers at all processing stages will there be a boom in innovation. In China, this applies to both the PV industry and the wind industry.
In the case of PV, a large proportion of the primary products are traded via commodity exchanges. In the case of wind power, 12 manufacturers now offer systems larger than 16 MW.
Wind power has also become really cheap in China. Tenders are around 1100-1800 CNY/kW onshore and around 3000 CNY/kW offshore.
At the China Windpower 2024 trade fair held in October, 12 manufacturers presented wind turbines larger than 16MW, and 5 manufacturers are pushing into the 25MW range.
After wind and PV became cheaper than coal in China, subsidies for onshore wind and PV were largely canceled. Subsidies in the offshore sector serve to build up an export industry.
As a result, 2/3 of new PV and wind farms built worldwide are subsidy-free, most of them in China.
The problem in Europe with the construction of electricity grids is the lack of competition. An oligopoly of producers supply monopolies on the buyer side.
The price-driving monopoly/oligopoly problem also affects the US electricity market.
It depends where, in France we had only one state controled company that gave use the lowest prices in Europe and became an international leader in the domain, until under pressure from activists and Germany we introduced competition and cut EDF in small pieces.
I would say that competition is good for energy only if you depend on importation.
The very high experience rate of renewables is just as important as current low cost. It means anything trying to compete with them is facing a rapidly moving target, and has to aim at where renewables will be, not just where they are.
The problem is labor productivity. Nuclear power plants require huge amounts of manpower for construction, suppliers and state supervisory authorities. Nuclear power is cheap where it can be built with very cheap labor (China until 2015), but quickly exceeds the budget when wages rise, as can currently be seen in China.
PV modules have long been manufactured in fully automated factories, and even 131m rotor blades are now produced with the help of industrial robots. Small units allow for a large number of innovative competitors, resulting in astonishing scaling effects.
In contrast, the nuclear industry suffers from monopoly-like structures which, coupled with regulatory requirements, extremely delay innovation. This makes it difficult or even impossible for the nuclear industry to regain the ground it has lost.
I'm so glad to see the idea of labor productivity being applied to technology.
I think this is where the nuclear field should look too. Can they make robots to weld and inspect and drive down costs? Can construction be automated and inspected more cheaply? Can robots be used to put steel in place before concrete pours? Can advanced IT reduce delays in logistics? I don't know. Sounds hard yet feasible. But I never hear nuclear folks dive into the nuts and bolts this way. In the renewable space, such innovation is the only thing people talk about.
Adding to this, a reminder that lithium ion batteries contain very little lithium, and it's not elemental - an extremely common misconception leading to people thinking that they can't use water to stop a pack undergoing thermal runaway / on fire - something that can only be stopped via the cooling effect of water.
Training materials for firefighters use the phrase "copious quantities of water".[1] That's just for scooter and e-bike sized fires. FDNY recommends knocking down the fire with water to a level where a shovel can be used to dump the battery into a bathtub or bucket filled with water. That prevents re-ignition. FDNY has a huge problem with cheap scooters and e-bikes catching fire in residential structures.
Current thinking for electric vehicle fires is to let them burn out unless there's a threat to something nearby. If there is, 8 hours of spraying water on the vehicle
usually works. But then the mess may re-ignite.
> FDNY has a huge problem with cheap scooters and e-bikes catching fire in residential structures.
For those interested, it's shitty imported cheap products, and/or (and I believe this is more common) cheap shitty third party chargers that overload the BMS/don't shut off correctly when they are supposed to.
Buy reputable brands (lots and lots of the scooters and e-bikes you see are just re-branded stuff from the same Chinese OEM) and don't get a third party charger, stick to first-party ones.
The one can look suspiciously close to the other, to the point that when I look at the individual cells I still have a hard time. Usually weighing them will give you some way to discriminate the cells, BMS's are totally opaque. If I have a hard time telling the knock offs from the real deal how do you expect someone that is only interested in the use, and not in the tech, to tell the difference?
Have you ever played around with putting water on a burning lipo pack?
I’ve damaged a number of lipo cell pouches (my hobby uses a lot of them) and water does make them burn more aggressively in the short term. It’ll go from smoldering to shooting a foot of fire with a splash of water.
The electrolyte is very flammable and a short circuit provides the temperature to ignite it. Some lithium battery chemistries (LFP is probably the most common, but LTO as well) are much less likely to burn when they fail catastrophically.
Yes and no. Lithium metal is the highly reactive element in batteries.
Similar to Hydrogen and Sodium, elements in the first column of the periodic table are highly reactive (flammable) because they readily give away their single electron in the outermost orbital.
Some Lithium battery variants might have marginally safer properties, but they are fundamentally volatile at full charge.
Commercial lithium ion batteries do not contain metallic lithium in the charged or uncharged state. They have lithium ions intercalated into the anode material in the charged state.
Primary (disposable) lithium batteries do contain metallic lithium in the charged state, and there are efforts to develop rechargeable batteries using pure lithium metal at the anode. Rechargeable batteries that contain metallic lithium anodes would be able to store more energy, but they are also more hazardous and currently have low cycle life.
>In conclusion, this paper aims to demonstrate the first principal calculations of coupling a thermochemical carbon dioxide splitting cycle with a steel production facility for cost-effective steel decarbonisation.
It's an interesting idea. But let's be clear: it's an idea. The scientific literature contains a lot of good ideas.
By contrast the OP paper is actually an experimental demonstration of reduction with ammonia. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
So the UK, with about 4.7% the population of China, produces 0.7% as much steel, i.e. the ratios are within an order of magnitude. And presumably what works in the UK will work in China too.
Since batteries are recyclable, raw material costs are of secondary importance in the long term. What is important is a long lifetime and high round cycle efficiency. High power density is desirable for vehicles.
Prices Yuan/kW onshore with tower: 1894 onshore without tower: 1513 offshore with tower: 3307 offshore without tower: 2698 (7.355 Yuan/US$)
19% of the turbine capacity is above 10 MW
At 2500 full-load hours, this will generate around 570TWh of electricity. The wind turbine manufacturers will only generate around 62.5 billion dollars.