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"There is no cheap material around" - I wonder if some producers have decided that it makes no sense to lose profit by selling everything they make and have now decided to beat the traders at their own game by stockpiling material.

reteps - the dissipation mechanisms for DC and AC are slightly different - there's the instantaneous I^2xR ohmic heating at point in the wire, which will be the same for both systems, assuming the same conductor configuration and taking into account the RMS average of a time-varying sinusoid . That is the stuff in the wire, however the AC system also produces a time-varying magnetic field in the vicinity of the wire.

This could be reduced if you twist the two conductors together tightly, but I suspect that making a cable with two tightly twisted conductors running at hundreds of kV voltage difference is not something that you really want to consider the insurance on. So just thinking about a simple single phase set up the flow and return wires are going to be separated by a metre or two - and in this configuration they form a rather thin, but very long single turn winding in a transformer that has the rest of the planet as its secondary. The secondary circuit acts as a parasitic load that adds to the overall loss experienced by the AC transmission method.

well well well, looks like the message is starting to get out there now.

By extreme north of england I of course mean scotland, apologies to all.

There is one additional caveat which always impacts on the ability for the grid to use every joule that is thrown in its direction and this is due to the fact that the grid is not a single bucket which can take every joule if there is a supply and consequent demand somewhere else on the system. Wind power in the extreme north of england is limited in its ability to be transmitted to the south east, where it may well be needed because of the significant distance and the limited transmission capacity of the transmission network North to South.

The grid operators are, I understand, increasing the north-south transmission capacity to deal with just this issue, but it is not a simply matter of chunking up the wires. I am told that a whole new transmission line needs to be added, and this necessarily takes up space and large amounts of money in construction. Batteries located at either end of the transmission bottleneck will in time help with the problem but the simple fact is that we are moving to a different geographic distribution of power generation and until sufficient battery infrastructure is in place it is sometimes more cost effective for the grid to say thanks but no thanks to power generated in the extreme north instead of overloading its lines or simply transmitting long distances at peak times. (Remember power dissipation goes as the square of the current so adding 1MWh at peak times might yield only 0.8MWh at the output end, instead of 0.95Mwh under low load conditions.)

SoTRR - we need to drill down to understand what this 80% figure is all about - is it really that the payment rate is 180% per kWh for energy that is curtailed as opposed per kWh that is supplied for use.

Or does the 80% figure, assuming it is accurate mean that instead of being paid to supply 180kWh they are only supplying 100kWh for use whilst 80 kWh is being requested to be thrown away (all kWh's being paid at the same rate). If the grid is only taking some 55% of what is being offered to it then it does beg the question as to why.

One of the answers to this question is 'until 2015 we had no way to store that energy apart from in pumped hydro projects and we've run out of all of them' - the grid battery revolution of course changes that paradigm and allows much more energy from variable renewable projects to be used to offset otherwise polluting sources.

They tried to get some sells below 21p but since 9.30 the excess of buys has grown by another 250K - now over 525,000

I believe that all forms of generation are reimbursed if the grid does not take the power that they are chucking out. The only real difference is that those that consume a fuel can in principle turn the stations down if given sufficient warning, and can thereby save cost on their fuel. Wind farms and PV farms make no such saving should the grid decide that it doesn't want what they are generating so if the grid asks them to turn off the power all that they can do is feed their power into great banks of resistors, called load banks and produce heat which is wasted because it is in a field somewhere.

You decide if it is fair to pay the power stations that consume fuel and generate CO2 the same amount as renewable sources for each MWh of energy that they are told that they cannot sell to the grid. Given that there is no such thing as a carbon tax yet it would seem to me that it is not only fair to pay renewables more than the fossil fueled sources (as they cannot make any fuel saving) but that it is also better to do that so as to encourage people to stop burning the stuff and putting CO2 into the atmosphere.

If we followed the polluter pays principal properly then each tonne of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere should cost the producers an additional $500+ per tonne ( https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/if-carbon-tech-follows-batterys-path-co2-capture-could-be-super-cheap-by-20#gs.Aa8Fe3s for cost of Direct Air Capture). Alternatively they can capture the CO2 at the output of their smokestack and find some way themselves to bury their own waste.

Cheers, thanks colt, welcome back on board.

no not the noise an ex-python makes if you inflate him too much but the nature of todays date.

I wonder if this is what has caused the double reporting of a number of trades earlier this morning. LSE have confirmed to me that this was a reporting error and not genuine trades.

Taking these duplicates off and you get an excess of Buys of more than 300K already - that could explain the sudden price jump. Unless of course we are being kept in the dark again and there is a large Buy that has just gone through but which we, the great unwashed, are not permitted to know about.

ludeck - the JSE listing is primarily intended to reinforce the South African nature of the Bushveld mines-to-batteries integrated energy business.

It also allows SA investors to buy shares in the company and may also be crucial to permit the Industrial Development Corporation to release funding for further battery manufacturing developments. As an aside I note that the satellite images show that there is evidence that work has started at the East London electrolyte site.

Bella - that is an interesting find. As far as I am aware from the presentations of Dr Peter Fischer at a number of the Vanitec Energy Storage Committee meetings Copper has up to this point been considered as a problematic impurity when found inside the electrolyte of a VRFB. ( see https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vanitec-3rd-energy-storage-meeting-part-2-174 )

Now it could be that copper in solution in the electrolyte deposits itself in places where you don't want it but that copper nanoparticles already in position 'decorating' the carbon felt electrodes may already be where it is most useful. The question that naturally arises is 'why don't the nanoparticles dissolve into the acidic solution and then redeposit elsewhere, and perhaps where you least want them (eg shorting out parts of the battery.)

It may be that the nanoparticles benefit from some kind of mesoscopic surface effect or surface preparation which prevents them from dissolving in the electrolyte solution. I will read that paper some time. However the amounts of copper are really rather low and would be a drop in the worldwide ocean of Copper production (currently some 200x the amount of Vanadium)

Bella if you consult the Mokopane PFS you will see that there is no mention of any copper in the drill results.

http://www.bushveldminerals.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/201602040458050.pdf

Bella - usually copper is found alongside Zinc and maybe gold. The Platinum and Platinum group metals like Palladium and Rhodium tend to go together.

Interestingly Ivanplats mine is just next door to Mokopane town about 30km from our Mokopane project sites. Our sites are almost next door to Anglo American Platinum's mine at Mogalakwena so maybe our application was originally made with the possibility of platinum and anything else that one might think of, on the off chance.

That's Robert Friedlands outfit, when gambit and I met him in London a couple of years ago he was most enthusiastic about their copper and cobalt deposits in the DRC. I would probably have sat bolt upright if he had mentioned copper in SA. I would guess that it is the platinum that they want there, but I will have to do a bit more digging, so to speak.

... this is quite a revealing map:- https://www.univie.ac.at/Mineralogie/gif/Bushveld_Complex.gif

Bella I know of no copper mine in the Bushveld complex. The only Copper mine I can find in South Africa is at Palabora, near the Kruger Park, which is some way outside of the Bushveld complex and indeed is part of its own complex called the Palabora complex.

indeed ca rpfisher - he is appearing in three sessions

In addition to the lack of ongoing maintenance by the plants previous owners there is also the small issue of them topping up the in ground ore at Vametco with much richer Vanadium sl-a-g from the highveld processing plant. Whether this was made clear to BMN when they bought the mine, or not, is not clear to me. But it may explain why Evraz were so keen to give us such a good price on the Vametco plant. A year ago, whilst visiting Vametco I was told that the previous owners did not think that Vametco could be profitable just using the in-ground Vanadium.

With the addition of a few very smart geologists and much more careful plant maintenance and operation I think that point has already been proven to be incorrect.

2 years ago.