New pumped storage station for Silvermines

Impetus

A new 360 MW pumped storage 'battery' is being planned for Silvermines (T).

The Irish media misleadingly give the impression that this is a new source of power for the grid.

While pumped storage is helpful for balancing the load (eg from wind turbines and solar), the proposed station is nothing more than a big battery.

L

Links for those interested: Irish Times, Sunday Business Post

More pumped hydro storage is great anyhow (lots of side benefits as it's a synchronous tech with rock solid reliability) but the cynical part of me notes this is announced about Alan Kelly's home constituency just before an election. Chances are good given the huge investment cost that it'll never happen.

Impetus

The other issue, in terms of 'doldrums' in the wind generation sector is how long will it continue to deliver power for. You really need substantial amounts of pumped storage to guarantee wind generated electricity as a 'base load' type of solution. At least it is good use for a dirty old mine - which will be hopefully cleaned up properly.

maninasia

It sounds like a good idea especially when paired with abundant wind power.

What would be interesting is comparing the investment in this compared to allocating 650 billion euro into a scheme to subsidise the purchase of electric cars or charging systems. Because the cars can operate as a giant distributed battery too.
10,000 euro subsidy per car would be enough for 65,000 cars. There were 120,000 passenger cars sold in Ireland in 2015.

L

Impetus wrote: »

The other issue, in terms of 'doldrums' in the wind generation sector is how long will it continue to deliver power for. You really need substantial amounts of pumped storage to guarantee wind generated electricity as a 'base load' type of solution. At least it is good use for a dirty old mine - which will be hopefully cleaned up properly.

Typically pumped hydro is about moving power from when there's too much of it to when there's not enough of it - it's incredibly useful even without wind since it lets you use nighttime baseload gen to meet peak power demand.

Trying to treat wind exactly like thermal baseload isn't sensible - the idea of baseload is down to the most fuel efficient designs for thermal gen being slow and expensive to start. That baseload/midmerit/peaker trancheing of the portfolio is to compensate/play to the strengths/weaknesses of thermal gen given relatively predictable power demand. Wind is something different and so needs a different view to deliver max benefit to the grid (you use its energy whenever its available basically since its short run costs are near zero).

maninasia wrote: »

What would be interesting is comparing the investment in this compared to allocating 650 billion euro into a scheme to subsidise the purchase of electric cars or charging systems. Because the cars can operate as a giant distributed battery too.
10,000 euro subsidy per car would be enough for 65,000 cars. There were 120,000 passenger cars sold in Ireland in 2015.

It's not state money though - that 650 million would come from private investors who intend on using energy arbitrage to make profit.

Del.Monte

I heard about this on Newstalk today and you would swear that the atom had just been split. Johnathan Healy had obviously never heard of the ESB Turlough Hill scheme http://www.esb.ie/main/education/Turlough-Hill-40-years.jsp which has been operating since God was a lad. :rolleyes:

Impetus

L wrote: »

It's not state money though - that 650 million would come from private investors who intend on using energy arbitrage to make profit.

There is certainly room for use of pumped storage for arbitrage. Today for example between 16h30 and 18h, the market price jumps from EUR 30-ish to EUR 177 peak per MW/h. One benefit of pumped storage is fast start-up time - eg in the event of a breakdown of a station during peak periods.

Wind is generally very predictable, and highly dispersed, so is unlikely to cause any material surprises in output. The bast balance for wind is European grid interconnection.

http://smartgriddashboard.eirgrid.com/#all/market-pricing

Oldtree

Wonder where the second higher reservoir is going to be?

It is then pumped back up to the higher reservoir during low electricity demand periods.

The brownfield nature of the selected site, with already one reservoir in place in the 70m deep open-cast mine, means the Silvermines hydroelectric powerstation can be developed and constructed with minimum impact.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/business/silvermines-electricity-power-plant-to-generate-360mw-in-tipperary-375716.html

L

Oldtree wrote: »

Wonder where the second higher reservoir is going to be?

Article suggests a hillside reservoir above it:

Irish Examiner Article wrote:

Water will be stored in a massive reservoir on a hillside above the former open cast mine and then released into turbines.

Markcheese

Anyone got any idea how long it can run for .. I presume its just a few hours ....

L

Markcheese wrote: »

Anyone got any idea how long it can run for .. I presume its just a few hours ....

5 hours according to Alan Kelly. From memory, that seems about the same as Turlough Hill's run time so I wonder if he's just assuming equivalence.

Markcheese

I assume theres a limit to how many pumped storage plants we need on the grid, especially as we get more combined cycle gas instead of coal or oil plants ...

L

Markcheese wrote: »

I assume theres a limit to how many pumped storage plants we need on the grid, especially as we get more combined cycle gas instead of coal or oil plants ...

Hard to say - it's hugely useful but massively expensive to build. I'd hazard a guess that the grid could easily benefit from another GW of it at least (enough on a first pass to chop the daily peak down close to flat). That'd probably also be the point where they stop being able to make anything from energy arbitrage (roundtrip efficiency is probably somewhere between 70% and 50% depending on their setup).

Aside from energy arbitrage, there's a heap of ancillary benefits like avoiding thermal unit start costs, great ramping and reserve characteristics etc. Depends how/if they manage to turn that into revenue I guess and how much revenue they need to break even.

Capt'n Midnight

maninasia wrote: »

What would be interesting is comparing the investment in this compared to allocating 650 billion euro into a scheme to subsidise the purchase of electric cars or charging systems. Because the cars can operate as a giant distributed battery too.
10,000 euro subsidy per car would be enough for 65,000 cars. There were 120,000 passenger cars sold in Ireland in 2015.

Using electric car batteries fails at the first hurdle. Peak demand is early evening. So only really useful for cars that still have a lot of charge after driving home from work and the owners aren't planning to use them that evening.

Also it's not cost effective either given that each car battery would cost thousands and deep cycling them would reduce their lives.

A Nissan Leaf battery can hold 24KWh so in theory 120,000 of them could supply just over 586MW for 5 hours. That's only if you deep discharge. And peak demand is when people arrive home after rush hour so those batteries won't be full and a lot of people will be wanting to charge them. So I'd reckon this plant would offer a lot more storage.

maninasia

Some of this is possibly true.
But once you start having 100,000s of electric cars on the road you create the infrastructure for charging and over-time the costs of electric cars should decrease fairly rapidly.
So it's not a static situation, by introducing an incentive now you'd speed up the rate of introduction of this distributed battery.
The cars could be set to charge at night , most of them would not need to charge at peak times just after work. Who drives at night?
This car incentive also has a strong environmental impact on cities, reducing urban pollution. Two birds with one stone.
I don't know if there would really be a problem with 'deep cycling' as claimed.
A distributed network like tesla powerwalls really ramps up the possibilities.

Here's a decent video.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/video-breakdown-how-electric-vehicles-could-make-or-break-the-power-grid

Anyway, I'm in favour of both solutions in an ideal world. The silvermines is a static solution with fixed capacity but reliable and proven solution. The distributed battery network would be a lot more flexible but maybe hard to predict the changes over time.

Capt'n Midnight

maninasia wrote: »

Some of this is possibly true.
But once you start having 100,000s of electric cars on the road you create the infrastructure for charging and over-time the costs of electric cars should decrease fairly rapidly.

The batteries hold 24 units max. But they will be partially discharged when they are needed for peak demand and you can't deep discharge because it wears the battery and because people might want to use the car that evening.

And that's before you consider the losses of transmission and conversion and charge/discharge, never mind the economics.

They might be useful for demand shedding all right. As in you stop charging for a short while.

Or they might prove useful for people who think they can save by using night rate electricity during the day. But the economics don't work out for that either even at retail rates. For wholesale rates not even close.

ted1

Impetus wrote: »

A new 360 MW pumped storage 'battery' is being planned for Silvermines (T).

The Irish media misleadingly give the impression that this is a new source of power for the grid.

In a way it is , sure we have turlough hill but using the silver mines in a very new idea that will add hydro to the grid which hadn't been done in decades and it'll have a good head height which Ireland he really lacks with regards hydro

ted1

Impetus wrote: »

There is certainly room for use of pumped storage for arbitrage. Today for example between 16h30 and 18h, the market price jumps from EUR 30-ish to EUR 177 peak per MW/h. One benefit of pumped storage is fast start-up time - eg in the event of a breakdown of a station during peak periods.

Wind is generally very predictable, and highly dispersed, so is unlikely to cause any material surprises in output. The bast balance for wind is European grid interconnection.

http://smartgriddashboard.eirgrid.com/#all/market-pricing

Pumped hydro will really help to increase the SNSP to the grid as its dispatchable, wind is often curtailed or may experience high speed shut down which causes huge problems. Hydro dies what it says in the tin

ted1

Oldtree wrote: »

Wonder where the second higher reservoir is going to be?



http://www.irishexaminer.com/business/silvermines-electricity-power-plant-to-generate-360mw-in-tipperary-375716.html

They could dredge the tailings pond.

ted1

Markcheese wrote: »

I assume theres a limit to how many pumped storage plants we need on the grid, especially as we get more combined cycle gas instead of coal or oil plants ...

There's not really any plans for any CCGT/ OCGT or Coal at the moment.

with regards capacity for pumped hydro it really depends on inertia , wind doesn't offer inertia nor does the EWIC. So that is where the bottle neck is, when we increased the SNSP from 50 to 55 it was on the cindition that there was 8 conventional units on and the inertia was higher than 20,000.

ted1

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Using electric car batteries fails at the first hurdle. Peak demand is early evening. So only really useful for cars that still have a lot of charge after driving home from work and the owners aren't planning to use them that evening.

Also it's not cost effective either given that each car battery would cost thousands and deep cycling them would reduce their lives.

A Nissan Leaf battery can hold 24KWh so in theory 120,000 of them could supply just over 586MW for 5 hours. That's only if you deep discharge. And peak demand is when people arrive home after rush hour so those batteries won't be full and a lot of people will be wanting to charge them. So I'd reckon this plant would offer a lot more storage.

For each charging point you need to install an grid code complaint inverter at a cost if roughly €1000.

Oldtree

ted1 wrote: »

They could dredge the tailings pond.

Would that give enough head height?

ted1

Oldtree wrote: »

Would that give enough head height?

Depends how deep the mine is. But is would give them the required reservoir

merryberry

I'm familiar with the site but if both reservoirs are either side of the geological fault line then could this be a problem for the project when one is empty and the other is full, and visa versa.

recedite

L wrote: »

Hard to say - it's hugely useful but massively expensive to build. I'd hazard a guess that the grid could easily benefit from another GW of it at least (enough on a first pass to chop the daily peak down close to flat). That'd probably also be the point where they stop being able to make anything from energy arbitrage (roundtrip efficiency is probably somewhere between 70% and 50% depending on their setup).

Aside from energy arbitrage, there's a heap of ancillary benefits like avoiding thermal unit start costs, great ramping and reserve characteristics etc. Depends how/if they manage to turn that into revenue I guess and how much revenue they need to break even.

Its a good idea, but I wonder how the cost of this project would compare to better managing the demand side of things.
Suppose every house was fitted with a smartmeter capable of charging for electricity according to live pricing. And those live prices were showing on a control panel in the house, or even just available via a smartphone app.

Then there would be some incentive to charge the Nissan Leaf mostly at the cheapest times. Or even just the washing machine and the dishwasher.
Electronic switching gadgets could easily be made that switched on the power to energy guzzling appliances when the price fell below a certain preset level.
Even for people who have night rate meters, the idea of a simple day/night tariff is ridiculous in this day and age when there are so many variables; 10pm on a windy night should be priced a lot cheaper than 6pm on a calm evening. Variable pricing would do a lot to even things out and reduce the very predictable spikes in demand.

Jim Martin

It would be far more effective spending the money on improving house insulation thereby reducing unneccesary demand!

Markcheese

Jim Martin wrote:

It would be far more effective spending the money on improving house insulation thereby reducing unneccesary demand!

But will increasing house insulation(good idea as it is ), reduce my electricity consumption / sync it to supply if my home is heated with oil/ gas / solid fuel.

climbhigh

Jim Martin wrote: »

It would be far more effective spending the money on improving house insulation thereby reducing unneccesary demand!

New CSO survey shows household's use of energy saving products (Table 2): http://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/q-env/qnhsenvironmentmoduleq22014/