Construction Begins On World's Biggest Liquid Air Battery (theguardian.com) 117
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Construction is beginning on the world's largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. The project near Manchester, UK, will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid. The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. The Highview battery will store 250MWh of energy, almost double the amount stored by the biggest chemical battery, built by Tesla in South Australia. The new project is sited at the Trafford Energy Park, also home to the Carrington gas-powered energy plant and a closed coal power station. The plant's lifetime is expected to be 30-40 years.
Storage (Score:1)
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You can lose a great deal of energy in the form of waste heat from compression. Heat energy which is pulled from the environment upon expansion - and in some cases even supplied by burning natural gas.
Re:Storage (Score:5, Informative)
You can lose a great deal of energy in the form of waste heat from compression. Heat energy which is pulled from the environment upon expansion - and in some cases even supplied by burning natural gas.
Highview has had at pilot plant in Bury, near Manchester, running since 2018 which has an efficiency of 50% while this new commercial scale plant will have an efficiency of 60% by capturing the heat produced by the compression and using it to reheat the air when it is used to generate electricity. There is nothing new technology wise here as it uses well known technologies used by industry to produce liquid air , the real difference here is using the liquid air to store and generate electricity. https://www.economist.com/scie... [economist.com]
Re: Storage (Score:2)
That sucks compared to pumped storage. It's not like the UK is short of more pumped storage sites so why on earth this is going forward God only knows.
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You can lose a great deal of energy in the form of waste heat from compression. Heat energy which is pulled from the environment upon expansion - and in some cases even supplied by burning natural gas.
Not as much as you lose from burning fossil fuels with ICE Cars 80% of the energy is lost to heat and with Coal fired electricity generation its 70% lost to heat.
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Most of the energy lost in an ICE engine isn't produced by humans.
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Thought about the waste heat too. I don't know what's nearby, but it would be great if they could use the low-grade heat produced as part of a district heating loop or as part of some industrial process. Fortunately capture and reuse of waste heat is common enough that it's likely the designers thought of it. Possibly they could capture some in thermal storage to use on the expansion valves when releasing compressed air (to keep them from freezing/icing).
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Yes, but the point is that WHILE compressing it you waste a huge amount of power thermodynamically.
Especially due to the phase change, this simply cannot be efficient unless you want a LONG term storage of power.
Efficiency will suck, big time. Mechanical wear will be high and therefore maintenance high. They better have a REAL cheap power source.
Natural gas wins again. (Re:Storage) (Score:3)
Efficiency will suck, big time. Mechanical wear will be high and therefore maintenance high. They better have a REAL cheap power source.
Real cheap like natural gas combined cycle turbines?
A combined cycle natural gas power plant can get efficiencies over 60%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What's the efficiency of this liquid air storage? Claims are it's as high as 70%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
0.7 * 0.6 = 0.42
What's the efficiency of a peaking power plant? About 42%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
For the same fuel burned they can get a round trip energy output as a natural gas peaking power plant. When not storing the ener
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is that why the price of electri
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is that why the price of electricity from nuclear is subsidised in the UK to make it competitive?
That's because regulations on nuclear power means it's the only fossil fuel where you're paying for the entire thing, from the first building foundation being put in, to the last foundation being removed, as well as complete waste management. Every other fuel source disposes of it's waste either in the air, at zero cost, or by tossing it into a huge pile in a third-world country where it slowly drains into the soil.
Gas/coal is getting a lot for free, simply by not being charged for waste disposal.
Solar
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You gloss over the whole nuclear waste management part rather glibly. It's not just spent fuel (which is still using the "bury it and hope" approach), the larger problem is decommissioning of the plant itself. The entire containment vessel and its contents are themselves now radioactive, so anything beyond simply fencing off the whole site can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars [wikipedia.org], and in some cases billions [cbsnews.com].
And very few sites have actually been fully decommissioned yet - many sites have to be put in
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That's not true. A molten salt reactor requires heaters to provide energy input to keep the fuel molten. Lookitup. ORNL papers have all the details. That's why it's passively safe--if electricity fails, the reactor shuts itself down as a matter of basic physics because the external electrical heaters turn off.
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At this point & for at least a couple more decades, MSREs are still hypothetical.
The only one that ever operated never produced electricity or at least not continuously and was shut down quite often.
We can't wait for the tech to be demonstrated at scale and tested for commercial reliability but it'll be welcome when it's ready.
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Okay, no water cooling tower [flickr.com]. See?
That's because it's a molten salt reactor and it's endothermic. You need to *supply* heat to the primary piping with external electrical heaters, or it will shut off, causing what was known as "freeze plugs" and dumping the fuel into a safety tank. If you cool it with a giant tower, you're shutting it off completely! There was *no water whatsoever* in the system.
The cooling loop in the MSRE existed only in place of the turbine, as a purely experimental module, because they
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Also, because I'm pretty sure I know what your next comment will be, I'll answer ahead of time.
What about core heat?
Well, if something goes fucked, then the turbines won't be spinning (meaning they won't take away the heat), but, the electrical heaters on the primary loop also go down, causing the primary loop to phase change to a solid, and then the secondary loop follows because it will also quickly undergo a phase change from the lack of input heat.
That was the whole crux of the design. Require active he
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Shhh. You'll destroy BS's narrative.
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is that why the price of electricity from nuclear is subsidised in the UK to make it competitive?
Nuclear power in the UK is likely subsidized because the government was listening to this gentleman:
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
Is it possible for the UK to build enough windmills to meet their energy needs by 2025 without nuclear power? It's possible. What happens if they can't build enough wind mills? Then they face an energy shortage, or a spike in energy prices, or any of a number of bad things. To make sure the lights stay on in 2025 they needed to start building at least one new nuclear power
Re:Natural gas wins again. (Re:Storage) (Score:4, Informative)
[Solar and wind] are guaranteed £92.50 per MWh
Perhaps you've confused that with the £92.50 per MWh [theguardian.com] that EDF is guaranteed for the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant. Solar and wind typically cost £50-75 per MWh in the UK per that 2016 article, but since then the price of even relatively-expensive offshore wind dropped as low as £39.65/MWh [current-news.co.uk].
You don't cite sources for your installation costs, but neither do you compare operation costs (solar being almost free). A better comparison is levelised cost [wikipedia.org], where you'll see solar is under half the price of nuclear, $30-48/MWh vs $72-92. And solar with storage is currently being offered for just $40/MWh [spglobal.com] in the US (the storage component being $10 of that), with costs for both projected to keep falling further in the next few years.
It's true that solar has been subsidised more than nuclear in recent years, but don't forget that the nuclear industry has already received $85 billion since 1950 [wikipedia.org], with all renewable subsidies totalling $34 billion. I'm all for subsidising further nuclear development like this [energy.gov], as there is absolutely an important place for nuclear power in our energy mix, but after 70 years I'm not holding out much hope of costs suddenly dropping.
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Real cheap like natural gas combined cycle turbines?
According to HighView Power's website, the storage cost alone will be 14 cents / kwh [highviewpower.com].
That is insanely expensive. I have no idea why this project is moving forward.
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That is insanely expensive. I have no idea why this project is moving forward.
It is not insanely expensive when compared to natural gas peaking power.
The rates consumers like you and me pay is an average of the utility cost of generation plus their overhead and profit. The 14 cents they pay on peaking power or storage is offset by cheaper energy from coal, combined cycle natural gas, onshore wind, and perhaps others. It's also likely cheaper than throwing away electrical generation from noontime solar that they can't find a buyer, or likewise excess wind power at midnight. If they
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That's not excessive for stored energy. For comparison the new nuclear plant Hinkley C costs around 13 cents/kWh just to make the energy in the first place.
Renewable energy is so cheap in the UK the price goes negative sometimes. Domestic customers get paid to use electricity. Even at 14c/kWh if the energy is collected when the price is negative it will actually be cheaper than nuclear power, and that's not even accounting for the much higher prices during peak times.
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Efficiency will suck, big time. Mechanical wear will be high and therefore maintenance high. They better have a REAL cheap power source.
Real cheap like natural gas combined cycle turbines?
A combined cycle natural gas power plant can get efficiencies over 60%.
Ummm.... this is about storage, not generation.
Large storage with fast startup can make the entire grid more efficient. It'll also save mechanical wear and maintenance costs on the rest of the grid.
Luckily they don't employ slashdot engineers in the design of these things.
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The power source is solar or wind, which is actually as cheap as you can get once you get around the capital costs.
So, what would happen if the two were combined? Turbines expending a lot of energy compressing the air before it enters the combustion stage. Turbines are still ICE engines, and still go through the "suck, squeeze, bang, blow" cycle.
What would be the system efficiency if the unreliable, but renewable, energy was stored then used to provide the input to the turbine?
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One means they use to increase the efficiency is to heat off a power plant that would otherwise be wasted. They need a heat source for this to work at peak efficiency.
Serious LAES scenarios consider storage of the heat generated during compression as the source of heat for the gas expansion.
That's because there are more reasons than their intermittent nature on why we can't have 100% renewable energy. This technology is more likely to make such unreliable energy sources even less attractive.
FUD FUD FUD. And the "even less attractive" part doesn't even make sense, because if this turns out to be a worse solution than all the others, it will never be used and won't make said energy sources "less attractive". They will
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Industrial liquefaction of air is used and well understood for about 100 years (Linde, Siemens, Claude, etc.). I would guess (as a physicist) that efficiency is OK and mechanical wear is pretty low, but I may be wrong. Maybe you can explain why you think compression "wastes power thermodynamically" or why mechanical wear is so high?
Also wind power which is superfluous at certain times is of course extremely cheap.
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It wastes a fair bit of energy because you need to go through a phase-transition. Though obviously you could recoup a fair bit of that by selling the released heat from compression as heating water.
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The linked Wikipedia article of the other poster actually states how bad the efficiency is:
The summary and article are not really correct on this. The storage is not just by compression of air, which would never result in a liquid at normal temperatures. The more important and more energy-intensive part is cooling.
Liquification for storage as a process in isolation is 25% efficient. Since you are a physicist you should know (from school already) how ineffic
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ummm, no.. (Score:2)
Just to add another comment.
No, you need to keep the liquid air cryocooled, unless you have a magic super-pressure vessel to keep it in.
This is just such a stupid idea it is impressive, I can only imagine it is a 'research' project with 'funding'.
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Would a few hundred feet of bedrock be magical enough?
Re:Storage (Score:5, Informative)
The air is cooled and when they want the power back it is warmed and expanded through a turbine. It doesn't mention efficiency in the article but I doubt it's very high. The Wiki article [wikipedia.org] seems to support my suspicions:
So is this plant 250 MWh input or is it truly 250MWh output? Either way, they compare it to Tesla's Australian battery but with that efficiency it doesn't seem like they are comparable.
Re: Storage (Score:2)
Rough math
900kwh month home usage (Google result)
730 hours in a month (Google convert)
900/730 = 1.25
1.25*5*200,000 = 1.23 megawatt hours
That's approximately half the 250 number.
Obviously I rounded all my math.
Re: Storage (Score:5, Interesting)
Now compare that to the efficiency of putting a full solar panel array on 200,000 houses and having two batteries, one for the house and when that one is full, it goes to a battery for the grid to sell to other users. Which is the most efficient, seeing as the structures are already then and secured and monitored, they just need the panels and the batteries.
It makes far more sense to make deals with home owners especially landlords, for solar panels and batteries for a distributed energy generation and storage solution. Some will buy the gear, some will lease it and some will just pay for the electricity at a reduced price. The capital cost is higher but owners cover a lot of it, for the corporation that owns the grid, a big win.
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Exactly; when you look at component costs of electrical energy, distribution is the biggest problem. Demand-side and supply-side (or in this case grid-side) energy storage maximize the grid efficiency and let you do a lot more with less.
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It's difficult to imagine let alone calculate efficiencies if first we have to go retrofitting panels to 200,000 houses in a built up place like Manchester. The traffic alone would justify every single NIMBY reaction.
If starting such huge building works from scratch is not possible, placing this energy storage in a centralised location seems like a valid approach.
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I remember in the 90s reading about how expensive it would be to convert the telecom infrastructure to fiber.
"It's not going to happen. No one can afford it."
What actually happened in that companies used fiber for new installations, and only replaced existing cable when it wore out. 30yrs later, nearly all of the infrastructure is fiber and it was all taken in stride.
rb61 paints a good end goal. It is something that would grow organically over years, and will won't make headlines.
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It's difficult to imagine let alone calculate efficiencies if first we have to go retrofitting panels to 200,000 houses in a built up place like Manchester.
When? On Tuesday? Is that when you're going to retrofit all of the houses?
Or maybe you should spread it out, and do it over a week. Perhaps a year? Maybe ten years.
And if you're doing it over 10 years, that's 2000 per year, which comes out to 5.5 every day. Which is also 0.00275% of the houses in the city, so you're going to increase traffic by that much, or even DOUBLE that much!
I guess we should cancel switching to solar. That's just not workable.
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Like most things in energy production it's an economic problem. Much easier to raise capital to build a storage plant with clear, tried and tested business model.
Especially in the UK a lot of people are ignorant and scared of solar power and batteries and wouldn't allow them to be installed in their house even if it was free and guaranteed to reduce their energy bills. Unfortunately certain newspapers have spent decades sowing lies about renewable energy and it's very hard to undo that. Realistically we may
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Like most things in energy production it's an economic problem. Much easier to raise capital to build a storage plant with clear, tried and tested business model.
Especially in the UK a lot of people are ignorant
Possibly
and scared of solar power
Not true.
and batteries
So outlandish a claim as to be hard to say whether it's true or not. Seems unlikely.
and wouldn't allow them to be installed in their house even if it was free and guaranteed to reduce their energy bills
I see houses covered in them every day. New builds quite often have them pre-installed.
Unfortunately certain newspapers have spent decades sowing lies about renewable energy and it's very hard to undo that.
I'm sure there's cases of newspapers lying about wind farms and other "visible from space" stuff but solar panels seem to have largely escaped.
Realistically we may have to simply wait for those people to die of old age because undoing the brainwashing at scale is almost impossible.
Aaaaand there we have it - people who disagree with AmiMoJo are brainwashed (or racist. Probably both).
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The scaremongering around solar panels was mainly about the effect on house prices and maintenance issues. The stuff about batteries was the usual nonsense about them only lasting a few years and catching fire.
Parts of the British press will print any old scare story to sell a few copies. They did the same thing with electric cars, telling people they would need to rent the battery and pay £8,000 to replace it after 3 years even as Nissan were selling cars with an 8 year warranty.
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Assuming 50% efficiency, I think they're using input numbers. Rough math 900kwh month home usage (Google result) 730 hours in a month (Google convert) 900/730 = 1.25 1.25*5*200,000 = 1.23 megawatt hours That's approximately half the 250 number. Obviously I rounded all my math.
Highview say they plan on 60% efficiency from input Electricity used and there are two numbers 50mwh /250mwh - 50Mwh generation and 250 Mwh storage and from what I understand that is actual storage and generation capacity.
https://www.economist.com/scie... [economist.com]
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The company is quoting 60%. When combined with waste heat and cold storage (or usage), then the economics get better. You could build one of these next to a bio-gas sewage works, for instance, and use the waste heat as part of the water treatment, and the waste cold to increase the efficiency of your gas turbines. This technology looks very scalable and re-locatable; so you could put it where waste heat and cold is most useful.
The impressive thing here is the not the efficiency though, it's the scale. IIUC,
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(amusing no leaks)
I love this
1) Word choice
2) Neglect for reality
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I hear it's good for stopping T1000s, too. But all seriousness aside: this is not compressed air, this is liquified air. I was looking for a good phase diagram for nitrogen (the primary component of air), but couldn't find one that went up to room temperature or there abouts. But my impression is that it would take a huge pressure to liquify nitrogen at room temp, meaning you'd probably have to keep it cold, even cryogenic. If that's the case, then I don't see how they could store it for weeks without u
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Probably. So IIUC, liquid nitrogen can't exist above -147 C = 126 K. So it does look like storing liquid nitrogen requires cryogenics, which means lots of energy to keep it cold (unless you're on Titan).
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Nitrogen is what is known as a 'permanent gas'. It cannot be liquified at room temperature using pressure at room temperature.
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Correction:
Nitrogen is what is known as a 'permanent gas'. It cannot be liquified at room temperature using pressure alone.
Re: Storage (Score:3)
Once the air is compressed and stored in a sealed container, it should last indefinitely (amusing no leaks) until energy is used to unseal the container (like a screw or something).
It can't last indefinitely without further energy input. Air only stays liquid at -194 degrees celcius. If the temperature increases past that it boils and turns back into a gas. You could insulate the shit out of your container, but even the best insulation will allow some heat transfer. Ergo you have to keep actively cooling it if you want it to stay liquid.
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Re: Storage (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I'm aware, I've worked with cryogenic liquids myself. However whether you're adding energy to cool it, or allowing it to offgas to cool it, you're still using/losing energy to maintain it in that state. Ergo it cannot "stay in that state indefinitely", which is what I was pointing out to him.
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In this instance temperature keeping is pretty easy. Heat transfer is proportional to surface area while capacity is is proportional to volume. At scale, the surface area to volume ratio gets tiny such that losses are tiny. Your lab dewar flask is not a good proxy.
Also keeping the liquefied air cold is as simple as letting a bit boil off as needed. The vaporization takes huge amounts of heat with it. It's a loss for sure but small. Even lithium batteries have some self discharge to contend with. This
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I'd also wager that most of the time they don't plan to "burn off" the entire store of liquid air at one time, just chunks of it and probably with some regularity to it. So there's probably regular boil off and re-compression cycles that go on, making the idea of making and storing the entire lot of liquefied air for years kind of an irrelevant problem.
The value in these renewable storage systems seem to be the regular marginal unneeded energy produced "for free" by solar or wind that can be put to use sto
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Re: Storage (Score:2)
Efficiency? (Score:1)
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That 75% efficiency can only be reached using post-normal thermodynamics and social engineering. In other words, it's a lie.
Huh ???
The Pilot plant that they have is 50% efficient, the plan for this Commercial Plant is 60% using well known technologies nothing "post-normal" about it
just efficiencies of scale and the capture and reuse of waste heat.
Paywalled (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NOT Paywalled (Score:3)
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The Guardian is paywall for you? It always lets me straight in with just a little begging box at the bottom. If it's paywalling people I'll look for alternative sources next time but I thought it always showed the full stories.
Re: Paywalled (Score:2)
Invalid comparision -2x storage but 1/2 power load (Score:4, Interesting)
These are two very different beasts - Highview power project will be able to provide power to a small city for an entire day but is unlikely to have much "spinning reserve capacity" to help the grid when something goes wrong elsewhere. You simply can't go from zero to full load in under 15 seconds (hydro plants can - timing is in seconds, the Tesla battery solution responds in milliseconds).
HOWEVER - Nice to see an alternative storage suitable for base-load applications, currently battery solutions are more expensive per kWh capacity compared to grid supply charges (cheaper to buy power off the grid than to install a battery to store power that would otherwise be lost - from memory the battery pricing is about 150% of the local grid supply cost).
Would like to see a storage solution that is at most half the current cost of a battery equivalent solution.
Zombie Engineer
PS: Comparison between battery and grid price - 5 years x 250 days/year x supply tariff ($/kWh) x storage capacity (kWh) vs Battery installed cost ($)
250 days is for a typical office building that does not work weekends or public holidays. Yes the comparison is a bit simplistic but it is equivalent to the MPG sticker on a car - depends on the actual circumstances.
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This will be aimed more at replacing peaker plants, rather that grid stability like the Tesla battery in NSW. Rather than spin up some coal or gas for a few hours a day they can use this to time shift generation from the previous night.
It will also help smooth out renewable output. If the wind dips a little for 15 minutes they can make it up by releasing stored air, making renewables suitable for base load and even more highly predictable than they already are.
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*small cough* it's in South Australia.
Carry on.
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Thanks, I'll improve my geography skillz next time.
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The more times you can cycle the storage system within the economic life of the system, the more cost effective it becomes.
The Australian "National Energy Market" (commonly known as NEM) has a few quirks which makes the Hornsdale Reserve battery (South Australia) viable. During a south east heat wave (impacting South Australia and Victoria, the cities of Adelaide and Melbourne respectively) there is simply not enough generation capacity to power all the air conditioners when it is 40+C/105+'F outside. This
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The technology is both black start and 1 minute response. Gas turbines need to compress before ignition I guess, where as this form of technology doesn't. You just open the tap and away it goes.
They are looking at adding batteries for 1 second response.
Cool (Score:4, Funny)
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Because attaching heat sink fins to a cryogenic tank accelerates the heat flow into the tank?
Man weaks? (Score:3)
I thought we had no problem storing compressed air indefinitely. Did they somehow use a very shitty release valve?
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It's not "compressed air," it's "liquified air."
The cryo container is probably heavily insulated, but a small amount will continuously evaporate and keep the bulk below the boiling point.
Alternative use for the compressed air (Score:4, Insightful)
So the regeneration cycle is atrocious, but still better than loosing the energy all together.
Can anyone think of alternative good use for this compressed / liquefied air, other than direct conversion back to electricity?
For instance. It's very easy and cheap to power a simple car with compressed air. So imagine having the city's buses driving on the excess energy. The heat required to expand can be used to provide airconditioning in the interior of the bus. No toxic fumes in your inner city has a large health "gain" / value.
Or, to maintain a liquid state, a small continuous leak is needed. The waist air is still very cold, and could be used to keep a large frozen warehouse cold.
anyone other creative alternative uses?
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Can anyone think of alternative good use for this compressed / liquefied air, other than direct conversion back to electricity?
Rocket fuel. Well, rocket oxidizer by separating the liquid oxygen from the other gasses. In seeing how the liquified air process works there's dry ice that comes out as a by product, as does argon and perhaps a number of other gasses in quantities valuable enough to bottle up. Liquid nitrogen has a number of industrial uses. Argon is used in welding. Those four gasses, oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, and argon, make up something like 99.9% of the atmosphere. All of them have value when separated out, which ki
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Blow the air back at the windmills to make them spin when windspeed drops.
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Blow the air back at the windmills to make them spin when windspeed drops.
Poe's Law or Dunning Kruger? Maybe both.
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I kinda ripped it off from an XKCD although that used an electric fan so my idea is probably more efficient.
Scammer alert! (Score:3)
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It is being used. This is their second plant. The pilot plant has been in operation for a number of years.
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It's been in use for ages, this is just the first time it's been scaled up to this level. They have had a smaller demonstration plant operating for a couple of years now.
This seems....really lossy (Score:2)
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The UK's main pumped-storage facility (Dinorwig) runs at around 75% efficiency. This liquid-air battery will run at an estimated 60% efficiency, so it is fairly close.
Thanks to the UK's large-scale rollout of wind farms, the liquid-air battery will be harvesting energy that is essentially "free" at off-peak hours, and using it at peak times. For that reason, the efficiency of the battery can afford to be relatively low.
If done right even more power could be recovered. (Score:3)
As someone who lives in the southern part of the United States this interest me. We get plenty of sun in the summer time - and much of the rest of the year as well. I could see using solar to compress the gas to store the power and run air conditioners at the same time.
I've also thought of just how much regular battery capacity would be needed to run air conditioners at night. The area I'm in doesn't have reliable wind power BTW.
If properly harnessed releasing compressed gas to run the air-conditioning power would be great (the low last night around here was about 80F), but it could be harnessed more directly as well. Decompressing gas blows cold, and cools the container it was in as well. The decompressing gas itself could be used to cool a house on a small scale. If ambient air then by directly venting it into the cooling system, if something less safe by using "radiators" in a heat exchanger.
The world's biggest whistle? (Score:2)
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Yeah, I was thinking about this: What if the terrorists take it over? They could release all that oxygen and increase the risk of forest fires!
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and once again, the dog will get blamed . . .
(Clifford, is that you?) :)
hawk
vs. Pumped storage (Score:2)
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Re: Bad name (Score:2)
No, I think if it it's a good name, and the word battery should be used for every electric energy storage.
I think the difference is, that you imagined the turbine to be outside the case with the electric leads, while I imagined it inside.
In your case, yes, it's a bad name.