Batteries To Store Wind Energy 275
Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientific American reports that Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility company, has started to test a new technology to store wind energy in batteries. The company is currently trying it in a 1,100 megawatt facility of wind turbines in Southern Minnesota. The company started this effort because 'the wind doesn't always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren't using much electricity, like late at night.' It has received a $1 million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development Fund and the energy plant should be operational (PDF) in the first quarter of 2009. If this project is successful, the utility expects to deploy many more energy plants before 2020 to avoid more polluting energy sources."
Wow! (Score:0, Insightful)
Look out Xcel Energy, the committee to award the Noble Prize in Obviousness is looking your way.
Seems silly to use this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are more utilitys not using something like what beacon power is doing.
Storing energy in flywheels. Spin it up when the wind blows. Draw it off when you need it. They last for a very long time when compared to batterys.
Batterys are kind of high priced for a low lifetime. Require all kinds of nasty chemicals to make and need to be disposed of someday. And take HUGE banks to store what a large flywheel would store.
Seems silly...
a dam sounds like a pretty good battery to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just do the math (Score:3, Insightful)
Why concrete? Cement is ridiculously energy intensive to produce. Why not stick with water, or if you really want something more complicated to handle but heavier, go with good ol' rock. We'll need to conserver all the cement and steel that we can in the coming years.
Re:a dam sounds like a pretty good battery to me (Score:3, Insightful)
"A few hundred feet" is almost impossible to come by in the most ideal wind-power locations such as the I-states (Indiana, Iowa, Illinois) and west Texas. You can see the curvature of the earth in central Indiana over the corn. But as I said, there are some exceptions.
There is, I believe, one small hydro plant in Illinois, for example. One. But there are something like 40,000+ square miles of good windpower territory in Illinois. Unless you use the existing grid somehow (don't know if you can), building transmission lines to the single hydro plant would be cost-prohibitive.
Re:Seems silly to use this. (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember that flywheels were considered for electric cars as well.
Some of the issues I remember off hand were:
1. Specialized materials needed to build flywheels that are small, yet heavy enough to keep spinning for a long enough time after being "charged"
2. Getting the energy IN the flywheels in the first place - it takes more energy to get them spinning than what you draw from them.
3. Given the high velocities - what will happen when they fly apart? Also, the gyroscopic effects they generate while spinning.
4. The heavy mounts needed to safely position them negated any advantages through increased weight.
I don't know if any of these apply to stationary flywheels built into power plants though...
They don't apply for a power plant:
Re:How about Hydrogen (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen is a PAIN.
Hydrogen embrittlement makes storage and transportation a problem as does it's low density.
If you are going to make hydrogen you might as well take the next step and convert it to NH4 and use it for fertilizer or CH4 and use it for fuel. NH4 will also work as a fuel if you want. Both would work in a fuel cell or a gas turbine.
Of course Nuclear doesn't have these problems and if they would allow fuel reprocessing the storage problem would go away as well. As to safty modern western reactors have a great record. And any one that brings up the C word is just spreading FUD since it that disaster would never have been allowed to have been built in the US.
Re:Seems silly to use this. (Score:4, Insightful)
In a stationary mount, you don't have to worry about gyroscopic affect
Not completely accurate [ion.org]. The rotation of the Earth will cause a stationary gyro to put some torque on its bearings, depending on your latitude, just as a Foucault pendulum veers over time. It's not a big effect, but there are no "small effects" when we're talking about gigawatts of kinetic energy :)
Re:Store the energy in a massive weight (Score:3, Insightful)
Who's objecting? There's a difference between naysaying and simply pointing out the downsides, as well as the upsides, of some potential solutions.
Ignorance is what got us into this predicament in the first place, sheesh.
Re:Store the energy in a massive weight (Score:5, Insightful)
How did I know that environmentalists already had an objection? It's like I didn't even have to read the response... The usual thing to do in these circumstances is pump water uphill, but I'm sure there's an immediate objection to that, too.
Hills have an enormous carbon footprint :)
Seriously, right now you're having a problem with reality, not "environmentalists". For some reason many otherwise rational Americans have developed a persecution complex--- if something doesn't make sense (scientifically, or engineering-wise) they get pissy and blame the evil environmentalists. But in reality it's just life getting in the way, and life does that. We engineer around it.
In other words, if concrete has a huge CO2 cost (more than is acceptable for the application described by the parent poster) then that's just bad luck. If the application itself doesn't make sense, then that's even worse luck. But move on and try something else, don't shoot the messenger.
Re:Old idea waiting for a viable implementation (Score:2, Insightful)
Pumped storage is cost effective. We currently do it with excess load on the power grid where turning off a coal plant would be too inefficient. We take extra power on the grid during non-peak times and run the hydro plants backward to store up potential energy behind the dams.
The problem seems to be routing that excess power from the source to the plants. Since HVDC lines are far more efficient, I was proposing building dedicated lines from fluctuating power sources (wind/solar/tidal) and storage (dams). Plus, with HVDC, you don't need to worry about varying voltage and frequencies like you would with AC.
By local setup, one option I can think of, if you have 2 lakes, you can pump water from a lower lake to a higher one. Another much smaller scale would be water towers. It just seems batteries are not the way to go for large scale storage.