Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Inspired by an interesting guest post entitled “An energy model for the future, from the 12th century” over at Judith Curry’s excellent blog, I want to talk a bit about energy storage.
The author of the guest post is partially right. His thesis is that solving the problem of how to store city-sized amounts of electricity would make a very big difference, particularly for intermittent sources like wind and solar. And he’s right, it would. But he’s wrong not to point out how devilishly difficult that goal has been to achieve in the real world.
Storage of electricity is a very strange corner of scientific endeavors. Almost everything in a 2013 car is very different from what was in a 1913 car … except for the battery. Automobile batteries are still lead-acid, and the designs only differ slightly from those of a hundred years ago.
Figure 1. Elements of a lead-acid car battery. SOURCE
Now, we do have nicads and such, but the automobile storage battery is the bellwether for the inexpensive storage of electricity. Cars need a surprisingly large amount of energy to start, particularly if they are balky. If there were a cheaper way to store that big charge, it would be on every car on the planet. Given that huge market, and the obvious profits therein, people have been busting their heads against the problem since before Thomas Edison made his famous statement about automobile batteries.
And despite that century-long huge application of human ingenuity, in 2013 the lead-acid battery still rules. It’s an anomaly, like fusion energy, a puzzle that has proven incredibly hard to solve. Potential solutions have all fallen by the wayside, due to cost, or capacity, or energy density, or dangerous components, or long-term stability, or clogging, or rarity of materials, or a habit of exploding or melting down, or manufacturing difficulties, the number of pitfalls is legion.
So I’ll get excited when we have something other than lead-acid batteries in our cars. Because that will be evidence that we’ve taken the first step … but even that won’t be enough. The other problem is the huge amount of energy we’re talking about. Here’s some back-of-the-envelope figures.
New York City’s electricity consumption averaged over a 24/7/365 basis is on the order of 5 gigawatts (5E+09 watts) continuous. Let’s take a city a tenth of that size, there’s plenty of them on the planet, China alone has dozens and dozens of cities that big, and lets consider how much storage we’d need to provide three days of stored electrical energy for that city. The numbers look like this
5.0E+08 watts continuous times 72 hours equals 3.6E+10 watt-hours of storage times 3.6E+03 seconds/hour gives 1.3E+14 joules of storage needed
So that means we’d need to store 130 terajoules (130E+12 joules) of energy … the only problem is, very few people have an intuitive grasp of how much energy 130 terajoules is, and I’m definitely not one of them.
So let me use a different unit of energy, one that conveys more to me. That unit is “Hiroshima-sized atom bombs”. The first atomic bomb ever used in a war, the Hiroshima bomb released the unheard of, awesome energy of 60 terajoules, enough to flatten a city.
And we’re looking to store about twice that much energy …
I’m sure that you can see the problems with scalability and safety and energy density and resource availability and security for that huge amount of energy.
So while I do like the guest author’s story, and he’s right about the city-sized storage being key … it’s a wicked problem.
Finally, as usual, Judith has put up an interesting post on her interesting blog. I don’t subscribe to a lot of blogs, but hers is near the top of the list. My thanks for her contribution to the ongoing discussion.
w.
PS—Edison’t famous statement about automobile batteries? He was offered big money in those days, something like ten grand from memory, to design and build a better battery for electric automobiles than the lead-acid battery. He took the money and went back to his laboratory. Month after month, there was no news from him. So the businessmen who’d put up the money went to see him. He said he didn’t have the battery, and in fact he didn’t even have the battery design.
Naturally, they accused him of having taken their money and done nothing. No, he assured them, that wasn’t right at all.
He said there had actually been significant progress, because he now knew of more than fifty ways NOT to make a battery for an electric automobile …
Curiously, Edison ended up inventing a nickel-iron-peroxide battery, which was a commercial failure … so even he couldn’t get past lead-acid.
Similarly, we now know hundreds and hundreds of ways not to make a battery for a city. So I suppose that’s progress in Edison’s terms, but after a century the wait’s getting long. I suspect we’ll solve the puzzle eventually, perhaps with something like a vanadium flow battery or whatever, but dang … it’s a slow one.
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Willis ,
a minor point, but I think this paragraph in your post may not be entierly correct,
“……
Curiously, Edison ended up inventing a nickel-iron-peroxide battery, which was a commercial failure … so even he couldn’t get past lead-acid.
….”,
if the wikipedia article (link below) has their facts right that the Edison company produced this type batteris for ~70 years (1903-1972) at a profitable level.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery
And I seem to remember having read somtime back about a century old restored antique electric car powered with the orginal Edson batteries it came with and performing “en par” with todays state of the art li_Ion-powered EV’s, and also a mention of a couple of remote lighthouses in use today still going strong with their orginal edison Edison backup batteriy units working perfectly after half a century ( though I can not 100% vouch for if this is correct, as i have not been sucessful in locating either one of the relevant article or news item again for refreshed reference . I just remember thinking when reading about said items , “aha , a century in battery storage improvement research and developement , has not really gotten anyone out of square one yet , despite the the much touted billinons-dollar intentensive touted recent research “)
A wicked problem indeed this one is.
While the size of the storage is interesting, how about showing how many lead-acid auto batteries it would take to keep the typical household electrified during a typical night-time?
Everyone seems to assume that a storage system with city-wide capacity needs to be a centralized monolith. I think not.
Much easier for our “leaders” to mandate (with the full force of “law”) that each home and business within its jurisdiction install a more modest system. Such things would look a lot more like the night storage heating systems already used in England.
Making predictions is hard, especially about the future, but I reckon many homes will be required to install some significant energy storage capacity within a few decades.
There’s another instance where “Organized Science’s” denialism has discredited it.
Willis Eschenbach: 5. The cost, the cost, the cost of all of the above.
As I said above, the battery problem is a wicked one. Waving your hands at hydrogen is not even a beginning of a solution … and no, Hoser, the answer is NOT “pretty simple”. If it were, Edison would have solved it.
I think it’s remarkable that auto batteries have not been replaced after all this R&D. Where weight matters, though, as in medical devices, cell phones, power tools, and model airplanes, lead-acid batteries are not preferred. Liquid fuel, natural gas, and fertilizer have all caused costly explosions — is there any reason to think that large batteries would be more dangerous?
Thank you Willis, for addressing the scale of the problem, and for your and the other commenters’ cost calculations.
Instead of a “Hiroshima” as a unit of energy release, how about an LNG tank? One of those exploded in the Fukushima disaster.
rogerknights: As John Douglas provided, the ECAT is already moving into real applications.
There is today not one installation of any size powered by an ECAT.
How many lead-acid batteries would you need in a Volkswagen-sized, all electric car to give it a range of, say, 50-75 miles at an average speed of 60 miles an hour? You could use such a car for commuting to work with a stop off at the store on the way home. If it was cheap enough, I’d buy one and use it as a second vehicle strictly for commuting.
Most large mining equipment uses electricity to power it. So in a way the machines who are digging out coal, or drilling for oil, are converting electricity into a useful storage medium which can simply be process to release far more energy than what was used to produce it.
One more comment on pumped storage. What may be largest pumped storage station in the world is at Bath County in western Virginia. It has 6 pump/turbines at 500 MW apiece, giving 3000 MW of maximum generation and over 20,000 MW hours of energy storage. That being said, try to get a similar facility located and permitted under today’s regulations.
jbird says:
June 30, 2013 at 8:48 am
“How many lead-acid batteries would you need in a Volkswagen-sized, all electric car ”
Problem with EV’s is that the weight of the battery quickly becomes the limiting factor, so you can’t easily triple the size of the battery without making the entire car bigger, sturdier and therefore heavier, driving up the energy needed again etc.
That’s why the typical electric small car tops out at 120 km range or so, under optimal conditions, using Li Ion batteries. The link to withouthotair above contains calculations for that.
With lead acid: Don’t try, you’d only overload the Volkswagen. And of course, as usual some people fantasize about using EV batteries as buffers for the grid. The number of recharge cycles is limited. The batteries are designed for a thousand recharge cycles or so. You end up paying a Euro for each kWh going through the battery when you include the battery replacement cost. Or 1.30 USD.
Yes, all this will become slightly more feasible and slightly cheaper with next generation batteries. Just don’t expect a Moore’s Law. Energy storage is not information technology and cannot profit from progressive shrinking.
And don’t put more than 80% of the nameplate capacity into your Li-Ion battery if you want it to last long. They age faster when they’re full. And don’t discharge it too much. That’s not so good either.
Did some comparing of the lithium batteries with lead acid- the cost for comparable products is about 5-8 times.
Yes pumped hydro is great and wonderful. except just like solar and other interesting power solutions it has limited application.
The first limitation is that ideally you need somewhere large at a higher elevation than the power plant to put all that water. That means you have major limitations just in the natural landscape. We don’t have convenient mountains everywhere to stick a storage reservoir in. If you have a location that is great and pumped hydro just might be a storage solution for you but most places don’t.
Which brings up problem two. In the US the green/enviro movement has made it almost impossible to build new reservoirs. There is a reason you don’t see the greens pushing hydro as the clean solution of the future. They oppose ‘damaging’ all that land to create the necessary reservoirs needed. Add in as someone else mentioned that there are very odd laws that let green groups hold your water hostage or do things you didn’t plan on. So you could fill your reservoir with stored energy and then find that you can’t release it, or worse that you can’t divert the water you need to fill it in the first place because some green group didn’t like it.
So yes pumped hydro works great. Using it practically if you don’t have the right conditions? Not so much. It would be like me sticking solar panels on my house. I like with trees shading everything so they would never get direct sun. Would they produce energy? Yes. Would it be smart to install them? Not so much for me.
The best battery/energy storage unit?
A tank of gasoline.
Since some of the sharpest people are contributing to this thread, I’d like to beg folks to quit using the MSM’s favorite 7/24/365 line, and either use 7/24/52, or 24/365. The first one, and the one that is used, is a 7 YEAR timeline. They really only meant to say all the time for one year. Yeah, I know, modern schooling…
I’m always amazed that most people don’t realize that these energy storage devices are so explosive ( just try shorting the terminals on a car battery with a wrench).
Storage on a commercial scale would be target for just about every nut out there.
@arthur4563 5:13 am
I might add that nowadays Edison’s direct current is considered the best way to transmit electricity over long distances, not Tesla’s AC current.
“Edison’s direct current” was low voltage and never intended for long distance transmissions without huge conductors.
High voltage DC is indeed a promising means of transmission, but you need to convert it to Tesla’s AC power to reduce voltages to consumer levels.
Hey guys, I have a question for you. Has anyone heard what happened to the solar highway project that the DOT ordered for testing back about 6-7 years ago?
The concept was great as it handled generation, storage, distribution and a whole host of other roadway issues.
Son of Mulder: I looked at my bill for Feb. My house is all electric, and in the Willamette valley in Oregon, I think conditions are pretty average. Obviously, heating costs will be much more in colder areas, and cooling costs will predominate in areas like Arizona, so this is only a guideline.
Anyway, in Feb., according to Portland General Electric I used about 100kWh per day.
That is about 3.6×10^6 J. That is about 3 gallons of gas.
However, converting gasoline to electricity is a lossy proposition, so we are looking at more like 12 to 15 gallons of gas.
A Lead-acid battery charge/discharge is much better, in the 50 to 90% range. You are not going to see anything like 90% efficiency, so assume 50%.
The take-away is that you are much better off using the electricity directly than trying to store it.
In other words, using electricity as we have been doing for the past 100 years.
@ATheoK says: 7:05 am
it is entirely different to claim said energy storage is good for ‘son of Sandy’, ‘daughter of Katrina’ or ‘San Francisco’s next 1906 scale quake’.
Not to mention that the energy storage system must SURVIVE the catastrophe without releasing its stored energy uncontrolllably. Even simple cogen substations are vulnerable: 3 min video as 14th Street East River Con Ed power station transformers explode.
Ooh! this is a cool new document:
Post Sandy Enhancement Plan – Consolidated Edison – June 20, 2013 (PDF, 2.5 MB, 114 pg.)
Best to leave 12th century technology where it belongs, in the 12th century.
Ambri.com develops grid batteries. The inventer:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy.html
Germany subside battery solutions:
http://www.solarenergystorage.org/en/staatliche-forderung-von-solarstromspeichern-gestartet/
There are comments above the “Pumped Storage” is “efficient” and the way to go. Actually it is just cheaper and very inefficient (energy wasted pumping and then energy lost in making electricity again. I recommend those that think PS is the way to go search “Pumped Hydro Storage” Or go to http://www.duke-energy.com/about-energy/generating-electricity/pumped-storage-faq.asp and look at the size of the reservoir needed Google Maps – “Jocassee SC, Oconee Co.” for what they claim is only good for a “peaking” power station (i.e., about 4 – 6 hours.)
A rough estimate (guess) shows that that Lake Jocassee is much smaller than the NYC Water Reservoirs. So, where are the going to put a lake five – ten times bigger than the largest NYC Water Reservoir? And what is its environmental impact? I seriously doubt a reservoir large enough would get EPA approval let alone the approval of the displaced population.
The energy density is just not there with “Pumped Storage.” This falls in the same category of Carbon Sequestration. Do the math on how much volume that takes. It is in the neighborhood of the Chicago landfill for a 1000 MWatt Power Station. And they are concerned about the problems of “Fracking?” Where are their brains?
Next harebrained idea please.
Integrating wind with hydro, nuclear & fossil fuel energy sources is not easy, as the history of the Bonneville Power Authority shows. The Columbia River system is probably the largest wind-hydro complex on earth.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/08/05/hydro-forced-to-take-a-dive-for-wind/
Without generous federal subsidies, of course, the vast forests of windmills on the Columbia Plateau would not exist.
coldlynx says:
June 30, 2013 at 9:59 am
“Germany subside battery solutions:”
Well we subsidize all kinds of things. It’s not that significant; you get a cheap loan from the state-owned KfW, a subsidized loan if you will, or more precisely, you can borrow the money for the battery at conditions that only banks normally get, something like that. The KfW BTW is a gargantuan bank only slightly smaller than the Deutsche yet never in the headlines… they are the governments very own financial muscle and subsidizes all kinds of projects in all kinds of countries; only very little ever makes the news. Buying political goodwill; German checkbook diplomacy.
Ask any Navy Submarine Vet how “Safe Lead Acid Storage Batteries” are. Several fires and explosions and submarine losses are attributed to battery problems. When taking readings on the battery we had suits with no metal, could only carry non-conductive wooden pencils and a paper pad – no wrist watch, pocket watch, rings, necklace, etc. All tools were plastic coated, etc. OSHA Regulations on battery safety fills a book. Utility procedures are even thicker. More people have been killed by battery fires/explosions than commercial nuclear power.