Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town 301
separsons writes "The largest sodium sulfur battery in America, nicknamed 'BOB,' can provide enough electricity to power all of Presidio, Texas. Until now, the small town relied on a single 60-year-old transmission line to connect it to the grid, so the community frequently experienced power outages. BOB, which stands for 'Big-Old Battery,' began charging earlier this week. The house-sized battery can deliver four megawatts of power for up to eight hours. Utilities are looking into similar batteries to store power from solar and wind so that renewables can come online before the country implements a smart grid system."
WTF? (Score:1, Interesting)
I realize your kids may think it's funny to say that your whole town's on acid, but is this really the best solution, or was it just the cheapest. And I assume there was no need for an environmental assessment, as this is Texas...
Re:from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
the battery would cost 25M, while a second transmission line would cost 60M. o_O
But they are building both!. The second transmission line will be done by 2012.
Haven't heard about these in years (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been a long time since I last heard about Sodium/Sulphur batteries. Twenty-plus years ago Ford Aerospace in Newport Beach, CA had a small research facility looking at this technology. The smell of sulphur was pretty strong around that building which was cleverly situated both downhill and downwind from the rest of the campus. The idea of being anywhere in the neighborhood of a bunch of hot,liquid sodium and a bunch of hot,liquid sulphur somehow never seemed like a good idea to me.
Re:from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
BUB (Score:4, Interesting)
BUB might be a better nickname. Big Unexploded Battery.
I'm sure it's safely enclosed and all the safety aspects have been taken into account, but it will be an impressive boom when it does go off, assuming the size of the boom goes up proportionally with the size of the battery (I had a tiny watch battery blow my little remote control car apart...)
Re:from the article (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you have a reference to the fact that the battery needs to run at 350C? It seems a bit impractical to heat a house-sized building that much, especially when you have lost power.
The main advantage of a battery over a generator is that you can switch power over to it in a matter of seconds. I'm guessing a 4MW generator would take a couple of minutes, maybe 10s of minutes, to spin up to capacity.
That's a great price! (Score:3, Interesting)
This thing cost 25 million to make and apparently stores 192000 KWHr of energy. That is $130/KWHr. On average my home uses 17 KWHr/day so I can store my average needs for only $2210.00.
Thats a small additional cost on the 6 KW of Peak Power worth of PV's I need to provide the 17 KWHr for my house.
Does this thing scale down?
Prison-city? (Score:1, Interesting)
Nice place to live.
Re:from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
The pilot studies in South Africa show that pebble bed reactors acn abe built for $800 to $1000 per kilowatt. A 4mW reactor could be built for around $4 million and they could completely disconnect themselves from the grid.
What happened to Vanadium Redox? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious as to why they used Sodium Sulfur rather than Vanadium Redox.
I'm unaware of any advantages to S.S. except maybe size (which wouldn't particularly matter in a stationary installation. And the Vanadium Redox is already productized for exactly this service.
Maybe too much patent encumberment and the guys with the V.R. patent don't have enough production capacity or are charging too much?
Re:from the article (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder what a diesel generator would cost them? Reportedly many communities in Alaska are serviced by power generated by massive diesel generators. 4mw is what a data center consumes, right?
Re:BUB (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me a bit of a story I heard once from one of my teachers.
There are some small power control stations around, and this was about one of those. This particular one was high up in a mountain, and a capacitor was in need of change. Size a bit smaller than a garage.
So a person put the new capacitor in his backpack (yep, one of the rather big ones..), got up there (took a few hours), cut the power, removed the old one and popped in the new one. Put on the power, everything looked ok and he went back down.
When he got back down, the central had tried reaching him for a while, because they'd lost contact with it. So up again he went, and when he got up there, the power station was gone. There was some wood splinters here and there, and some twisted metal, maybe enough to fill a bag. But the station was gone.
Re:Game of telephone (Score:3, Interesting)
> And I'm sure that price varies on which year the 2ns US power line is built.
You are right, I have read another blog post saying the new line would have cost 35,000$ in 1905. At least, that blog post specified the year. What were the others thinking when not specifying the year ? ;-))
Re:from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
A gas generator would make more sense as the infrastructure is already available to fuel them.
4 - G3516 LE [cat.com] should do the trick, plus there isn't a single point of failure. Get 5 generators and run them all at partial load.
What happens when BOB gets wet?
Re:from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Of more concern to me is how exactly do you take 4 MW of DC power and turn that into sinusoidal 220 Vac RMS. Large motors with spark gaps or something similar will get you a square wave.
A giant AC-DC inverter would work, but where are you going to find such a thing that can handle 4 MW?
Rain should be the least of their concerns.
Re:from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder what a diesel generator would cost them?
Diesel generators of that size (you would want to buy 2 of them) would probably run between 1-2 million dollars. But keep in mind that they would consume about 300 gallons of #2 diesel (non-taxed) per hour. What would that cost you?
Re:Economically ridiculous solution (Score:3, Interesting)
If that was the case you would see the whole state of Arizona covered in panels. The reality is that at current installed cost there is no ROI without govt subsidies.
Well, to be fair, I don't know what the reality is on the large scale, (I suspect few honestly do), but I do know that on the small scale it can work out very well. --It's not a direct conversion, to be certain. I know a fellow whose entire house is wired for 12 volts DC, and all of his lighting and other electronic technology has to fit this mode. It hasn't proven to be a particularly complex issue. He and another few people I know have taken different approaches to home-building using non-traditional technologies to heat/insulate and supply power and plumbing, and it really hasn't taken very long at all to justify the initial costs. By contrast, I've lived in houses which cost in excess of $2000 per year for electricity. That adds up fast, and you get no return on investment. After five years in a house like that, you've spent $10,000 and what do you have to show for it?
$10,000 buys a lot of insulation and solar technology. I know a guy who has these huge windows which allow IR in, but not out again, and the light from the sun is cast on this huge, indoor wall of stone which stores and slowly dispenses heat. In the middle of winter, you only need a tee-shirt in that place. And that's just rocks, treated glass and fluff in the walls. Another $6000 and you can buy enough solar electricity generation to run all your technology without the need to attach your home to some corporate meter. It really doesn't take long for this kind of technology to put itself far ahead of the guy next door who still buys electricity and/or heating fuel.
The other thing people seem to ignore in so many of these comparisons, (as per the example with the OP) is the initial costs of installing traditional technologies. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's free, but for some reason the cost of installing normal systems seem to never be in evidence on the balance sheet. It's just, "Oh, well, Solar Cell installation costs X, and I only pay Y per kilowatt, therefore. . ."
I think it's just a fear of having to toss out old knowledge one worked hard to obtain in favor of new solutions which drives people to behave in such an odd manner. Like how old people scowl at new fashions. Some geeks thrive on new ideas and the exploration of science. Other geeks don't like new approaches to technology if it threatens their self-esteem and sense of security in already knowing the right answers. Being wrong around here can be such a painful experience that you can understand why New Ways are to be despised. But that's only for some. Some geeks aren't scared of anything.
Too bad you can't heat a building on orneriness!
-FL