I’ve heard of issues with contactors failing in cold temperatures and dust or dirt (it is the desert, sand gets everywhere) causing fibre connections to stop working, ruin fans, cause overheating, outages, millions of dollars lost.
I am responsible for maintaining eight 150 Ah 120v dc battery banks. The sites also have diesel generators so the batteries really only get used for the 10 seconds it take the diesel to start, maybe 4 or 5 times a year. The batteries are indoors. So far cells start to go after 5-7 years and then I have to replace the whole bank.
Even 1 decade is optimistic life from current technology batteries that I am being sold from industrial battery sales channels.
And yet how many people do that and ditch their grid connections? The reality is having as much electricity as you can use whenever you want for 10 cents a kWh is not something solar/battery provides.
Do you have a source hydro turbines “turning fish in to mulch”? I’ve been around lots of hydro projects and the main hazards for fish seemed to be either dewatering of habitat due to turbines reducing flows too quickly or I heard it is bad for them if the dam uses the spill way and makes the water all aerated
AI is not even required, it would be quite easy to filter out the frequency of the noise from the rotors using technology that has existed for decades if not almost 100 years, indeed Butterworth was designing his filters in the 1930’s
You can, but I wonder do the operating conditions of the river actually allow it for a great number of plants? Or are they hemmed in by needing to always have a certain flow in the river plus/minus 10%.
While dams certainly store energy I wonder how many actually have flexibility to change their output by 80% of rated capacity or more on the same timescales that wind and solar output can vary.
I imagine there are a lot of environmental restrictions to keep the river flowing, avoid dewatering habitat for fish and otherwise impacting the ecosystem, and also supplying water to downstream users like farms and cities. Can’t stop the river completely!
The pricing is sometimes based on negotiations which consider the cost of alternative sources of power, the operating cost of the plants, and refurbishments and maintenance it will need over the course of the contract term.