Beyond Batteries: Imaginative Alternatives for Grid Energy Storage (newyorker.com) 204
Solar and wind power are "intermittent," points out Slashdot reader silverjacket . "A feature in this week's issue of The New Yorker highlights current efforts to use gravity, heat, momentum, air pressure, and other methods to store large amounts of energy for the electricity grid."
In other words, alternatives to massive lithium-ion batteries: Quidnet [has] patented a new kind of pumped hydro. Instead of pumping water uphill, the company's system sends it underground through a pipe reaching at least a thousand feet down. Later, the system lets the Earth squeeze the water back up under pressure, using it to drive generators. Wright and Craig are veterans of the oil and gas industry, and Quidnet's technology is like a green riff on fracking.... Initially, Quidnet encountered skepticism about its ability to form lenses of the right size and shape. By the time I visited, however, it had successfully completed multiple pumping cycles in Texas, Ohio, and Alberta. The company has received thirty-eight million dollars in private and government funding, including contributions from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, established by Bill Gates.
The New Yorker science/technology writer also interviewed Bill Gross, a longtime investor in solar power and a co-founder of his own energy-storage company called Energy Vault. He points an inconvenient truth: "it actually costs more to store electricity than to make it." In many cases, solar and wind have become less expensive than coal and gas. But add the cost of storage, and renewables can lose to fossil fuels.
But he's working on his own solution... Energy Vault's first attempt at a system was EV1, a looming, Transformer-like tower crane with six arms. The idea was that such a crane would stack blocks in a wall around itself, then unstack them.... [T]he company moved on to a new, enclosed design, called EVx. In renderings, it resembles a boxy automated warehouse forty stories tall. Elevators will use clean power to lift blocks weighing as much as thirty tons and put them on trolleys, which will move them toward the middle of the structure. When energy is needed, the blocks will be moved back to the elevators. As they descend, the elevators will power generators, producing new electricity... The EVx demo is being developed in a bucolic Swiss mountain valley in the shadow of EV1...
[T]he company isn't alone in pursuing what's known as "gravity storage." Gravitricity, based in Scotland, recently concluded a demonstration that involved hefting a fifty-ton block up a tower, two stories at a time; it now plans to raise and lower single, thousand-ton blocks inside disused mine shafts. Two other companies, Gravity Power, in California, and Gravity Storage GmbH, in Hamburg, aim to place a massive weight at the bottom of a shaft and then pump water underneath to lift it. To withdraw energy, they'll let the weight push the water down into a pipe and through a turbine. RheEnergise, based in Montreal, has come up with yet another take on pumped hydro, centered on a fluid that the company invented called R-19, which is two and a half times as dense as water; its system will move the fluid between tanks at the top and bottom of an incline. The work is still at the crowdfunding stage.
Just as you can store potential energy by lifting a block in the air, you can store it thermally, by heating things up. Companies are banking heat in molten salt, volcanic rocks, and other materials. Giant batteries, based on renewable chemical processes, are also workable. In so-called flow batteries, tanks can be used to manage electrolytes, which hold a charge. In hydrogen storage, electrolysis is used to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water; the hydrogen is then cached underground, or in aboveground tanks, as gas or liquid or part of ammonia. When it's recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell, it forms water again and releases electricity.
The article's last line? "Nature can help us generate power. Maybe it can help us hold on to it, too."
In other words, alternatives to massive lithium-ion batteries: Quidnet [has] patented a new kind of pumped hydro. Instead of pumping water uphill, the company's system sends it underground through a pipe reaching at least a thousand feet down. Later, the system lets the Earth squeeze the water back up under pressure, using it to drive generators. Wright and Craig are veterans of the oil and gas industry, and Quidnet's technology is like a green riff on fracking.... Initially, Quidnet encountered skepticism about its ability to form lenses of the right size and shape. By the time I visited, however, it had successfully completed multiple pumping cycles in Texas, Ohio, and Alberta. The company has received thirty-eight million dollars in private and government funding, including contributions from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, established by Bill Gates.
The New Yorker science/technology writer also interviewed Bill Gross, a longtime investor in solar power and a co-founder of his own energy-storage company called Energy Vault. He points an inconvenient truth: "it actually costs more to store electricity than to make it." In many cases, solar and wind have become less expensive than coal and gas. But add the cost of storage, and renewables can lose to fossil fuels.
But he's working on his own solution... Energy Vault's first attempt at a system was EV1, a looming, Transformer-like tower crane with six arms. The idea was that such a crane would stack blocks in a wall around itself, then unstack them.... [T]he company moved on to a new, enclosed design, called EVx. In renderings, it resembles a boxy automated warehouse forty stories tall. Elevators will use clean power to lift blocks weighing as much as thirty tons and put them on trolleys, which will move them toward the middle of the structure. When energy is needed, the blocks will be moved back to the elevators. As they descend, the elevators will power generators, producing new electricity... The EVx demo is being developed in a bucolic Swiss mountain valley in the shadow of EV1...
[T]he company isn't alone in pursuing what's known as "gravity storage." Gravitricity, based in Scotland, recently concluded a demonstration that involved hefting a fifty-ton block up a tower, two stories at a time; it now plans to raise and lower single, thousand-ton blocks inside disused mine shafts. Two other companies, Gravity Power, in California, and Gravity Storage GmbH, in Hamburg, aim to place a massive weight at the bottom of a shaft and then pump water underneath to lift it. To withdraw energy, they'll let the weight push the water down into a pipe and through a turbine. RheEnergise, based in Montreal, has come up with yet another take on pumped hydro, centered on a fluid that the company invented called R-19, which is two and a half times as dense as water; its system will move the fluid between tanks at the top and bottom of an incline. The work is still at the crowdfunding stage.
Just as you can store potential energy by lifting a block in the air, you can store it thermally, by heating things up. Companies are banking heat in molten salt, volcanic rocks, and other materials. Giant batteries, based on renewable chemical processes, are also workable. In so-called flow batteries, tanks can be used to manage electrolytes, which hold a charge. In hydrogen storage, electrolysis is used to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water; the hydrogen is then cached underground, or in aboveground tanks, as gas or liquid or part of ammonia. When it's recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell, it forms water again and releases electricity.
The article's last line? "Nature can help us generate power. Maybe it can help us hold on to it, too."
They're all scams (Score:2, Insightful)
All scams looking for VC money to vanish into a black hole. Especially the crane thing.
Just google "debunking XXX" for the reasons why they won't work.
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You mean kilowatt-hours (kWh), not kilowatts. I didn't check your maths because it's kind of missing the point.
On a grid with a large amount of renewable energy and decent long distance interconnects, most of the time it's just a question of moving energy around. There will be some small scale storage just to smooth the output for things like wind power, just to make controlling the frequency a bit easier.
Small scale storage like this could potentially help with peaking. When there are short periods of high
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Main issue with mechanical stuff is that it takes a while to kick in. Batteries can react in microseconds. As vehicle to grid becomes more common, that will probably be the biggest source of storage.
Plus the fact that the first few blocks they stack won't have much energy at all, only the ones at the top could be worth while.
The ones near the bottom might even have negative energy if you have to lift them up to stack them on top of the other blocks.
Why don't they build this at the side of a tall cliff? Or in an old mineshaft, like the already-working-and-in-use-today ones do?
(Answer: Because they never intend to actually build one, they're just after money...)
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They claim that they want these towers to be deployable all over the place, so limiting themselves to locations with cliffs would not fit with their business model.
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Pumped hydro is nice but there is a lot of flat geography out there where it can't be built. The Energy Vault concept isn't described in much detail, they seem to be still working out the design of the "10-story building" version. I've seen a couple of articles where they mention trolleys to transport the blocks laterally. I presume this is to reduce the effects of the stacking problem.
But they do have firm contracts to build some installations and the money to do it.
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If the "build a tower" scheme is economically viable, how about just putting a water tank on a tower? Pumping water seems a bit easier than mechanically handling thousands of manufactured blocks. Even if using the same elevator-generator scheme, filling it with water at the top, then draining it at the bottom to be hauled up empty for the next load sounds like it would drastically simplify this scheme.
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Someone should try building this water-tank-on-a-tower scheme. We could even use such a scheme to store water for later use and to maintain pressure in municipal water systems!
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Water is a lot less dense than compressed dirt, so for equivalent weight you would need a vast expanse of water towers. And a large reservoir at ground level.
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That will truly help us to get rid of Russian gas.
This could be thermal storage in the earth.
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Are you saying we could store up heat from the sun into underground storage for heating buildings through the winter? I'd like to see the math on how that would work.
Germany tried to get rid of their dependence on Russian natural gas with wind and solar power and it failed. They had years where they added more capacity in wind and solar and still saw annual production lower than the year before. One summer with unusually cloudy weather can mean not enough heat is stored up for the winter.
Storing heat for
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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Looking at demand today isn't all that helpful, because it will certainly change as the grid transitions to renewables. Many loads can be made "smart", e.g. you could accept having your AC turned up a degree for 15 or 30 minutes when the power company asks for it, in exchange for a discount on the energy. That way the power company can shift some of the load and you won't even notice a change of 1C in room temperature.
The peaks we used to see are already going away, and will continue to get smaller. The pro
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Many loads can be made "smart", e.g. you could accept having your AC turned up a degree for 15 or 30 minutes when the power company asks for it, in exchange for a discount on the energy.
That's presumably a way off. From what I gather there's quite a few unsolved problems like how to maintain stability. It would be horribly easy to induce oscillations once that kind of active control is present. I think some degree of local buffering will be needed (though sodium sulphur batteries are already well proven an
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Smart thermostats have been in use for a while now, and some US energy suppliers offer the kind of deal I mentioned. There was a story about it a few months back, some Texans apparently didn't understand what they were signing up for and got very angry when they failed to understand it.
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Smart thermostats have been in use for a while now, and some US energy suppliers offer the kind of deal I mentioned.
It's one of those things that's fine until it becomes too widespread, then it has to be done properly to involve screwing up. The grid can take a fair bit of variation but only up to a point, and the flexibility will be a bit reduced having to ship in power from very long distances.
I don't think it's unsolvable. Things like randomizing time offsets for the price boradcasts, local storage and o
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Smart thermostats have been in use for a while now, and some US energy suppliers offer the kind of deal I mentioned.
It's one of those things that's fine until it becomes too widespread, then it has to be done properly to involve screwing up. The grid can take a fair bit of variation but only up to a point
Literally the entire point of doing this is to reduce grid variation. That's literally the only reason they do it. And it's not trivial exactly, but on the general scale of stuff being done it's pretty close. If you forecast a shortfall, you delay a load which will reduce the shortfall. It's not rocket surgery. There are considerations (like how much you can feed through a given portion of the grid) but those are well known today, because of "smart grid" upgrades over the last two decades that let operators
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It's going from completely uncontrolled, where every AC system kicks in essentially at random, to the power company being able to request short term increases in load in anticipation of peaks. It's really not a huge deal for the grid.
If you look at the UK grid frequency and demand, it's all over the place. Controlling thermostats won't make it worse, it will make it better.
https://data.nationalgrideso.c... [nationalgrideso.com]
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Well random isn't so bad: over grid scale random activation of domestic things comes out as pretty smooth.
to the power company being able to request short term increases in load in anticipation of peaks.
That sounds reasonable to be fair. The proposals I've seen about realtime price broadcasting and selling sounds like a control theoretic nightmare of astonishing proportions. It's probably even better for things like tanked hot water heating. That's even insensitive to delays in poorly insulated houses
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Smart thermostats have been in use for a while now, and some US energy suppliers offer the kind of deal I mentioned.
Micro managing thermostats is a feel good marketing gimmick that accomplishes very little. When it comes to heat pumps this strategy is worse than doing nothing.
The way to save any meaningful amount of energy with a thermostat is long term reduction of set point.
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The best option is insulation, to reduce the need for heating and cooling.
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Many loads can be made "smart", e.g. you could accept having your AC turned up a degree for 15 or 30 minutes when the power company asks for it, in exchange for a discount on the energy.
That's presumably a way off.
It's literally being done now in both residential and commercial installations. The technology has existed for decades and has been use in commercial installs for most of them.
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Many loads can be made "smart", e.g. you could accept having your AC turned up a degree for 15 or 30 minutes when the power company asks for it, in exchange for a discount on the energy.
Or, we could stop the government incentives on wind and solar power which is driving this madness.
How about we reward lowering CO2 emissions regardless of how utilities lowered CO2?
What are the energy sources with the lowest CO2 emissions per MWh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
According to reports from UN committees nuclear power is either alone at the top or is tied with wind power, depending on which someone believes to be most accurate.
What energy sources are the safest?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/.. [nextbigfuture.com]
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All that stuff has been debunked here repeatedly.
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Your own link points out that Nuclear can contribute quite a lot, far more than renewables, to global warming. As for safety, nuclear has killed about 2x as many people as wind per Wh generated. The financial cost of the damage is many orders of magnitude greater.
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And it will radically increase once we succeed in "electrifying everything" including transportation and manufacturing.
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Main issue with mechanical stuff is that it takes a while to kick in.
I have read of one short term energy system that is already in use, which is a big flywheel attached to a motor-generator. Most of the time, it is just kept up to speed with relatively little energy input. When there is a sudden surge in demand, that the main generating system can't respond to, the thing starts generating power right away, running the flywheel down. When the main generating system has caught up, the flywheel is spun up to speed again. I believe this system can respond within a fraction of a
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Flywheels have excellent response times.
Flywheels have absolutely terrible energy storage density. A flywheel unit roughly 1x1x3 meters can store about the same energy as a lithium battery the size of one of those hard shell wheelie suitcases.
There is a now effectively defunct LLC called Beacon Power that tried developing scalable flywheel storage for grid applications about 15-20 years ago. They're now a brand asset of some investment management group and don't actually do anything as a business entity oth
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Not to mention that they are fairly susceptible to mechanical failure. Didn't someone install a bank of these somewhere near NYC? And didn't the bearings on one of them fail while it was near capacity energy? And didn't it immediately self-destruct into a cloud of debris? And didn't that immediately cause all the other ones nearby to self-destruct?
This is a fundamental problem with all energy storage technologies, though - as the energy density increases, the storage device becomes indistinguishable fro
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> Didn't someone install a bank of these somewhere near NYC?
Yes, that was Beacon Power (legally still is). Stephentown, NY is about 150 miles north of NYC.
42.556404803793804, -73.37606239627239
In aerial photographs you can see the blue caps of the underground concrete vaults which house the flywheel units, which themselves are cylindrical steel vacuum vessels with the carbon fiber composite flywheel inside, suspended on magnetic bearings.
I'm not aware of any failures, though. To the best of my knowledge
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My point about about flywheels is that they provide immediate very short-term power, while the main power generation meets the demand. We might only be talking about seconds. It is kind of like putting a big capacitor across the output of a DC power supply, which probably only has to supply the output current for a fraction of a second. My mention of this technology was in response to a comment that mechanical systems are sluggish to respond to sudden changes in demand.
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On a grid with a large amount of renewable energy and decent long distance interconnects, most of the time it's just a question of moving energy around.
Decent long distance interconnects are not going to solve the day/night and seasonal cycles for solar. They might help for wind energy though.
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Decent long distance interconnects are not going to solve the day/night and seasonal cycles for solar. They might help for wind energy though.
In North America and Australia long distance interconnects can largely solve the day/night cycle for power as the sunny western states are offset by three hours from the North East Corridor and can provide power during the mid-afternoon to evening peak.
In the summer power usage in New York peaks about 4 pm, and then drops 25% by 9 pm, whereas solar power output in California stays high until about 6 pm (9 pm New York time). So the major North American daily power cycle can be handled with solar and long dis
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As vehicle to grid becomes more common, that will probably be the biggest source of storage.
Vehicle to grid is a horrible idea. I like the idea of vehicle to home because I can then choose if the wear on my battery is worth it. Batteries have only so many charge/discharge cycles in them and I'm not going to put my (so far hypothetical) on the grid because the utility failed to plan for sufficient generating capacity.
Rooftop solar PV is a terrible idea unless there is a battery to go with it so if there is a loss of utility power the people in the house can still have lights and such. When it co
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Modern car batteries are likely to outlast the rest of the car. Owners can of course choose how much wear they want to allow the battery to take from vehicle to grid, based on their calculation of expected lifespan and depreciation.
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The thing about lithium battery charge cycles is that the degradation is much higher at very high and very low states of charge. If you cycle say 70% to 40% and back to 70% every day, that's not 0.3 cycles. That's more like 0.03 cycles.
All car batteries build some buffer into their charging systems, for this reason. The battery might be 70kWh total capacity, but you can only use say 65kWh and the other 5kWh is used to prevent charging right up to 100% or discharging right down to 0%. Many cars let you set a
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There are groups like Methanology prototyping power-to-methanol systems. The concept is that you have a 15kW solar array and use the power to synthesise methanol out of air and water. It looks a reasonably sensible idea to me, but the costs are still too high - they're touting a price of CHF 20k, which works out to about £16k. You've then still got to install a 15kW solar system (supposing you have room for it), and that'll set you back at least £8k. The thing produces about 10L of methanol
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"Solar power costs more than onshore wind, hydro, or nuclear fission", that's an outright lie as has been shown to you several times.
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Gaps, Not Peaking (Score:2)
I didn't check your maths because it's kind of missing the point.
No, it is exactly the point. On a grid with a large amount of renewable energy, you need a large amount of storage to cover the periods at night or during no wind when you need to supply the same power from storage. Peaking is not what drives this - it's being able to keep the lights on during a calm night which requires a much higher storage capacity than coping with a brief peak.
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Like the German winter.
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That is 3930 / (24 * 365) = 448 Watts on average, including days and nights, which is 448 J / s.
Potential energy is m x g x h, in J.
Let me follow you, a mass of a 1000 metric tons and a height of 50 meters.
With the weight of reinforced concrete being roughly 2500 kg / m^3, that is 2.5e7 kg.
Lifting that over 50 meters gives an energy storage of 2.5e7 * 9.81 * 50 = 1.23e10 Joule.
Let us have a bal
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I assume you meant a 1000 cubic meter block, which is 2.5e6 kg, not 2.5e7.
Which means your block can only supply 54 households.
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54 households indeed.
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All scams looking for VC money to vanish into a black hole.
I don't think that is fair. Some of them have merit, and some may just be magnets for funds. The problem is to do as you have done, and dismiss all such ideas out of hand, just because some schemes are rubbish.
There is a general problem in business finance, of startups founded purely to attract venture capital, with no viable business model to generate profits in the future. I recall a neighbour business where I worked, and when I chatted to their MD, he said they were going through the "burn phase", which
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An interesting aside point is that if an energy storage scheme were operated as an independent business, how would its service be paid for? It does not actually generate energy, unlike a wind farm, for example. Just a thought.
I would assume they buy power when it's cheap (windy and sunny), and sell it when it's expensive (no wind or sun).
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Sounds good to me. I had assumed that wind and solar might incorporate temporary energy storage as part of their generating capacity, so they can sell more energy without installing extra generating capacity.
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Sounds good to me. I had assumed that wind and solar might incorporate temporary energy storage as part of their generating capacity, so they can sell more energy without installing extra generating capacity.
What I hear is that wind and solar projects are sited to be close to natural gas pipelines. This means they can save on costs for the pipes to get natural gas to the backup generators. This also means the power lines will be running close to maximum capacity. Solar power has a capacity factor of about 20% to 25%, which leaves a lot of room for power to flow when the sun isn't shining. Wind power has a capacity factor somewhere around 30%, perhaps as high as 40% at really nice spots but closer to 25% in
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You can debunk wind energy as well
How? It's pretty obvious that wind exists (and it's free!)
It doesn't blow all day everywhere but there's enough places where it's windy most of the time to make it work.
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> How? It's pretty obvious that wind exists (and it's free!)
It's pretty easy. If you're willing to be dishonest and appear to emotion rather than present factual data and well formed arguments, you can "debunk" anything.
Heck you're half way there already; The wind doesn't blow all the time! And you'd need SO MANY turbines we couldn't possibly build enough and the landscape would be ruined! You need fossil fuels to build them! And the blades end up in landfills so it's not really green anyway! They kill b
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Wind and solar produce a significant fraction of electricity in several European countries and a number of US states. They work just fine and the landscape isn't ruined.
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How? It's pretty obvious that wind exists (and it's free!)
Wind power is just as "free" as petroleum, natural gas, coal, wood, or anything else we can burn for energy.
To turn wind into useful energy we need to construct machines to do the power conversion. We have to build machines to convert heat from burned fuel into useful energy as well. The steel and whatever else we use to make the machines are dug out of the ground like anything else, which makes steel and such "free" too.
I'll have people claim that once the windmills are built then the wind is "free". Th
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And how well does pumped hydro work where the terrain is flat?
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If you have to build towers why is this scheme with blocks and handling gear moving them around better than just pumping water up into a tank. Water tanks on towers are everywhere in flat terrain.
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They don't plan to build towers now, it would be an enclosed building. The blocks are made of compressed dirt with a binder, a lot denser and heavier than water.
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They are all scams until the ones that work, and allowed to expand and become more affordable.
Current Fossil Fuel based energies, have numerous environmental impacts problems, as well widely fluctuating prices. While the Fossil Fuel industry wants us minimize its problems, and over exaggerate the problems with alternative energy, as well lobby politicians, and buy news coverage. People are starting to see that green energy does has have value, both being more (not completely) environmentally friendly, off
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Nowhere does it say: "The electricity that is generated by these systems is greater than the energy that is consumed lifting a bunch of thousand ton blocks".
Do you think it ought to be?
What about clockwork springs? (Score:2)
Is a large-scale clockwork spring workable? What's the efficiency of energy storage?
In the spring, the energy is stored in elastic material deformation. So unlike batteries, energy does not 'leak' unless the structure fails because of corrosion or excessive storage.
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Is a large-scale clockwork spring workable?
Yes.
Is it practical compared to other methods? That's a different question.
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I meant 'workable' for large amounts of energy storage.
And no - it's the one question. Please see the second meaning here: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Indeed. Spring wound watches needed winding daily, lithium battery watches run five years on one battery.
Do renewables cost more though? (Score:2)
"In many cases, solar and wind have become less expensive than coal and gas. But add the cost of storage, and renewables can lose to fossil fuels."
This doesn't take into account all the damage fossil fuels have caused. Fossil fuels might cost less now, but the future is fucked forever because of them.
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This is true, but the cost of enough storage to make renewables a feasible replacement for all fossil fuels would be so huge, the economic damage would be immense. I'm not convinced that any of the technologies mentioned scale to anything like the required proportions, but the problem remains an urgent one.
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"An optimal deployment of different storage types can address different types of renewable fluctuations, for example, intra-hourly, diurnal or even seasonal (Safaei, Keith, 2015, Scholz, Gils, Pietzcker, 2017, Zerrahn, Schill, 2017). Such a differentiated storage fleet also tends to be smaller and cheaper."
Yeah, sure ... seasonal storage can be small. Seasonal storage is all the relevant storage, once it gets installed it will take care of all the other storage needs. Differentiation is wasting money. Solve
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Yeah, sure ... seasonal storage can be small. Seasonal storage is all the relevant storage, once it gets installed it will take care of all the other storage needs.
The paper literally says that you don't need seasonal storage. Did you read it?
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No, it's not. That really doesn't make a lot of sense. We already know that the actually required storage is vastly lower than what many people think it to be,
The only way to reduce grid storage for the same energy mix is to increase interconnection effectively creating a larger more interconnected grid.
The study you cite also demonstrates what happens when non-renewables fail to be included in the mix as a means of compromise to maintain the grid without ballooning storage requirements. As renewables get closer to 100% the storage requirements become enormous.
This paper also suggests on over provisioning of renewables as a strategy to reduce storage requirement
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This paper also suggests on over provisioning of renewables as a strategy to reduce storage requirements which is just a shell game creating more avoidable waste.
Overprovisioning is necessary and won't create waste. It's only waste if you don't fully electrify our society. But if you do, as many people assume, you'll need lots of extra energy that can actually be shifted around on top of your baseload needs that this paper analyzes. Just for ammonia production alone, our world needs several hundred extra gigawatts *on average*. The overprovisioning needed for just that avoids an awful lot of storage. The paper doesn't even consider all these needs which are not in t
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The economic impact of AGW is already massive, and getting more massive by the day.
funny... (Score:3)
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Yep. There's existing projects that use this exact principle. They use large weights suspended in disused mine shafts.
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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They were not perpetual, nothing can be as friction eventually brings it to a halt. Such clocks relied on the fact that a pendulum will always have the same period, no matter how far it swings. Well, there is a slight variation due to how far it swings, but so little that it allows for moderately accurate clocks.
Anyway, the owner still has to come along and push the pendulum to keep it swinging now and again.
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Was just thinking this morning about the old grandfather clock mechanism, with the 2 weights, which could drive the clock for perpetual
Errr no. You see those little holes in the clockface of a grandfather clock? They are for winding keys, the clocks had to be wound frequently or they stop.
How about ARES? (Score:2)
https://aresnorthamerica.com/n... [aresnorthamerica.com]
They already have a project under construction in Nevada, to store and supply energy from and to California.
You need to have hills in your country, though, but the US has plenty.
Other options out there (Score:4, Interesting)
It's disappointing that this article ignores Power-to-X technologies. These show the greatest promise, both for energy storage and for future industrial processes that change how we use energy. There's a first commercial-scale deployment, generating methanol from geothermal energy in Iceland; scale is 4 million litres per year.
Producing methanol or liquified natural gas is useful because it works with lots of existing processes, but there's also the prospect of directly synthesising ethylene (as a feedstock for polyethylene plastics) and ammonia (as a feedstock for lots of things, including synthetic fertilisers).
Indeed there are! Even at scale. (Score:3)
Why Plastics? (Score:2)
there's also the prospect of directly synthesising ethylene (as a feedstock for polyethylene plastics)
Why bother with this though? Using crude oil to make plastics is not a carbon problem because the carbon remains in the plastic and, as we move away from burning fossil fuels oil is likely to become much cheaper.
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Then what do you do with the plastic?
If your answer is "stick it in landfill" then you've still got a problem.
If your answer is "burn it" then you still have a problem.
If you made the plastic from synthetic ethylene, you can burn it afterwards and it's carbon neutral.
Yep, is a scam. (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The only scam here is that guy's video. I've already done [slashdot.org] my [slashdot.org] ranting [slashdot.org] about this guy's halfassery.
TL:DR; he's too preoccupied trying to "pwn" people to actually for a cogent argument. Calling something stupid and the people behind it scammers is not debunking, it's juvenile (and possibly slander). If you find yourself agreeing with him and others like him, you might do well to step back and really think about what it is you're agreeing with, and why.
=Smidge=
Steel is 7.9 times heavier than water (Score:2)
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You need rainfall to supply the water for a dam, and the Colorado River frequently shrivels up to a stream due to prolonged drought.
Fuel is stored energy. Uranium & thorium are (Score:2)
The best way to store energy is in fuel. We keep tanks of fuel all around us. I have jerry-cans full of gasoline, a pressurized tank full of LPG, and my little SUV has a tank of fuel.
Batteries store energy too but they are not stores of energy like fuel because we consume fuel to put energy in batteries. Fuel is a primary source of energy, batteries are secondary.
When choosing fuels we want fuels that offer the best energy return on energy invested. We want safety. We want abundance. Given the centuri
Missing option (Score:2)
The article didn't mention gravity storage using rails [aresnorthamerica.com]. Instead of using a crane, you put rail tracks on a hillside and store energy by pushing rail cars uphill. This scales much better than a crane.
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Putting rails on a hillside is expensive. I would be stunned if it didn't cost more than a crane, especially since the crane isn't sticking way out. It's really more just a glorified winch.
free market solution (Score:2)
I am hoping to see mine shafts and open pits (Score:4, Interesting)
Where the crane thing could make sense... (Score:3)
...is at wind turbines themselves.
We already have to build those things super tall. Could be interesting to do either pumped hydro up to the top, or the lifting-solid-weights-thing there. Wouldn't even have to go through an mechanical->electrical->mechanical->electrical loss, necessarily.
Am I missing something? Yes. (Score:3)
Yes it's net negative in energy. You get less out than what you put in.
But you are putting in cheap energy and getting out more expensive energy.
When no-one wants to buy your wind energy because solar is matching all the demand for a lower price. Store your wind energy for later, when there isn't any solar to compete against.
There are times when we have more energy than we can use and it is completely wasted. You could store it and get some <100% of it back out. If was free anyway. Why not.
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No, obviously, those systems are net negative. Dams already work like that: when nuclear power at night is exceeding the needs, use the excess energy to pump water back in the dam.
That way you can keep your nuclear output steady (nuclear is slow to react), use hydro to absorb the peaks of the day (hydro is the fastest energy source to power up or down), and reduce the dam drain by refilling it a bit.
The difference with all those new scams, is that pumping water back in the dam is quite simple and robust, it