Hafnium usage is maybe 500 tonnes a year. -ish, -ish. Scandium, mebbe 10 tonnes a year.
They’re gonna sell 3 million tonnes over a 31 year life of mine, are they?
Snigger.
Hafnium usage is maybe 500 tonnes a year. -ish, -ish. Scandium, mebbe 10 tonnes a year.
They’re gonna sell 3 million tonnes over a 31 year life of mine, are they?
Snigger.
Maybe if Smith & Wesson took The Lock off their revolvers, they could use a lot of scandium.
Only thought would be that if there was significant production and the prices DID fall enough, are there potential uses for those metals that are not currently viable on economic grounds ? Of course that means that their returns on investment need to take into account the lower prices, which I bet they don’t.
Sure. Of course. Sc would have a lovely boom in use if the price was $20 to $40 a kg for the oxide. Currently it’s $800 (and these miners are likely assuming $3,000 or something stupid).
Recent research is showing that adding a little scandium to solid state lithium batteries fixes the ionic conductivity problem. Demand “could” go up substantially.
Yes, I’ve seen that. Going to be interesting. Metallic scandium oxidises as you watch – goes a lovely pink colour in fact. Gonna be fun in solid state, no?
So does Lithium, and a host of other metals. No doubt they’ve solved the production end.
And let’s be fair… Large batteries are a damn fire hazard to begin with.
Had a whole and…. animated… discussion with some other techies about why I wanted two smallish packs at specific places *away* from Stuff, because it meant More Cable ( = money…) .
My answer: “Have you ever seen a Tesla burn?”
And the Gods willed several deluges on us, with things conking out, and one of those packs tripping hard…
Fortunately just tripping out to the point of servicing and not actually catching fire. Just the electronics that blew out spectacularly.
My other answer: “And that is why I want them well back, extra cable/yellowjackets be damned…”
If that thing had gone up in its original position, the heat alone would have melted most of an entire catering line, including their field kitchen…
And flame-retarding treatment of tents, wooden (floor)panels, and verious bits of deco does not help against those levels of heat.. So that’d be a secondary issue… Even when things are as sodding wet as they were…
The things are a god-given in solving capacity problems, but if you don’t treat them with the respect they deserve…..
Their effective contribution to capacity (their Effective Load-Carrying Capacity – ELCC) needs falls off pretty rapidly as the penetration increases. The first 200MW can contribute ~180MW to the resource stack; the next 200MW contributes ~140MW, then 100MW, and so on (numbers out of the air, but not too far off). Obviously, they become less and less cost-effective as this occurs.
The problem is that the first XXMW (and YYMWh) of storage is intended to serve the “100 highest-load hours” – so that shaves off the needle-peak on the left-hand side of the load duration curve – the energy (the area under the curve) gets redistributed somewhere to the right (and increases, due to energy losses on coversion). The residual L-D curve in now a little flatter, and the left-side peak is less of a needle – it is lower and slightly broader. The next XXMW (and YYMWh) of storage is more energy-limited than the first (there is more energy in the “100 highest-load hours”), and so will contribute less capacity relative to name-plate, and so on. This applies to all energy storage systems – CAES, flywheels, pumped storage, or batteries. We see and hear of ideas for seasonal storage, rather than diurnal or weekly duty-cycles, which strike me as slightly mad – but I don’t think we have really looked at them.
They will contribute to capacity needs, but they are no panacea. We will still need big spinning turbines, driven by water, gas, or steam, and subject to control and dispatch.
Pumped Storage isn’t a fire hazard. There are enough sites in the UK for potential pumped storage to a bit more than double, possibly treble current capacity, and lots of sites for smaller (much smaller) hydroelectric plants that could be used as intermittent supply to avoid grid crashes when the wind stops blowing.
Stupidly (I use the word deliberately) expensive, of course to build dozens of hydroelectric plants just to cope with intermittency of the Unreliables, but what do you expect?
More importantly, there is no way under heaven to cope with the Greenies demand for electricity storage from autumn until spring to cope with seasonal demand being inversely correlated with seasonal supply of solar power. If God bent down and patted the atheistic Ed Miliband on the head, giving him 100 terrawatts of battery storage, what would be the losses between Michaelmas and Lady Day?
There may be places (Switzerland? Norway?) where pumped storage could be a major contributor to keeping the lights on during a lengthy dunkelflaute, but the UK isn’t one. Dinorwig can (at best) produce 1.75GW for 5 hours or so, we’d need hundreds of plants that size to keep the UK grid powered for a fortnight, and there aren’t the locations to put them, even if we could afford to build them.
Chris, Dinorwig isn’t intended to power the UK for a whole day – it was intended to cope with the surge when “Coronation Street” ended and millions of housewives switched on the electric kettle to make a cup of tea. A dozen smaller copies will help when the wind stops blowing to give National Grid time to power-up its remaining fossil-fuel plants (or to drain the batteries of the umpteen million Teslas that Ed Millionaireband thinks that we will all be driving).
FYI Seventy years ago I walked past (and sometimes cycled past) a hydro-electric generator that was switched on and off to match demand when my family went on holiday