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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Don K at 3:39 am
largest currently existing battery storage unit — 64mwh — Sodium-Sulfur battery at Marfa Texas.
Wow — maybe that explains the Marfa Lights (joke).
Some background and OT: If you go to the Buffalo Trails Scout Ranch two side trips commonly are the McDonald Observatory and the Marfa lights. The observatory is cool. Marfa reminds me of a scene from “Close Encounters” where people are parked on a hillside waiting for ET.
Wikipedia says: the Marfa lights are: “atmospheric reflections of automobile headlights and campfires.” So the atmospherics have to be right, a no-moon night, and distant lights just right. There was a recent Smithsonian show on the sinking of the Titanic which convincingly blamed warm-air over cold air atmospheric refraction as a key why the lookouts didn’t see the iceberg until it was 30 secs away and why the S.S. Californian didn’t see a massive liner like the Titanic. Many ships logs recorded refractive atmospherics and indistinct horizons. The Titanic story ought to be told as a science lesson while one is waiting (forever) to see those Marfa lights. End OT.
From The Economist …
Packing some power
Energy technology: Better ways of storing energy are needed if electricity systems are to become cleaner and more efficient
[ … ]
Surely the answer is to use giant batteries? Although batteries can deliver power for short periods, and can smooth out the bumps as different sources of power are switched on and off, they cannot provide “grid scale” performance, storing and discharging energy at high rates (hundreds of megawatts) and in really large quantities (thousands of megawatt hours). So other technologies are needed—and growing demand, driven chiefly by wider use of intermittent renewable-energy sources, is sparking plenty of new ideas.
http://www.economist.com/node/21548495?frsc=dg%7Ca
SandyInLimousin says:
June 30, 2013 at 9:46 am
Best to leave 12th century technology where it belongs, in the 12th century.
AMEN.
And the 12th century technology is so bad our government is hopelessly wasting billions to bring it back to life. Since it contains a fatal flaw, in that it is intermittent and requires development of a yet to be realized source of storage; e.g. batteries.
Pushing solar, wind, biofuels etc. is a misguided distribution of technical and financial resources based on the hoax that CO2 is harmful to mother earth. Efforts would better be spent elsewhere.
Our leaders should learn from history as presented by the History Channel re the “Men who built America.” Good thing we did not have the EPA or Government regulators in those days or we would still be lighting our homes with whale oil and our transportation system would be fouling our cities with horse Manure.
While these men are not treated kindly by “today’s” historians they changed the quality of life that the much of the world enjoys today and we need to recognize that.
Check this documentary out:
http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=383364&ecid=PID-200011181&pa=SEM_HisMenWhoBuilt_men%20who%20built%20america&s_kwcid=AL!3793!10!1775340542!26370390417&ef_id=OPTOUT:20130630165908:s
“Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor, Ford and Morgan. Their names are part of history and synonymous with the American dream. These men transformed every industry they touched: oil, rail, steel, shipping, automobiles, and finance. Their efforts transformed a country. Rising from poverty, their paths crossed repeatedly as they elected presidents, set economic policies and influenced major events of their day – from the Civil War to The Great Depression. 12 million historical negatives, many made available for the first time by the Library of Congress, are brought to life to offer an unprecedented view of America’s Industrial Age – and the men who built it. ”
These men were fiercely competitive, which forced technology development without significant Government subsidies (although they did try to get favors from politicians). For example when Rockefeller saw electric lighting making his kerosene sales obsolete, he moved on to develop gasoline for the internal combustion engine which made electric cars useless for over a century. Now we have a foolish policy of pushing for outdated technology that still lack a viable battery. Yet we subsidize and yearn for the development of a car without a viable power/ energy source to provide reasonable range.
You’re correct, although there is some wiggle room in “moving into.” (Rossi has been “moving into” for years now.) But there ought to be something out in the wild by this time next year. I gather that his new anonymous partner has imposed a gag on him about this. The partner may want to get ready to flood the market with E Cats to get a headstart on the Chinese copycats.
Here’s something to bear in mind: a gallon of gasoline gives us about 34,500 W/hr of energy. Thus, a new Tesla S battery pack holds the equivalent of about 2 gallons of gasoline. I think we’re on the fringe of an energy revolution on the order of the industrial and information revolutions, but the breakthroughs will have nothing to do with windmills, solar arrays or hydrocarbons. When we need it, we’ll focus on the problem properly.
RE: DirkH at 8:59 am.
The [EV] 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. [Per kwh]
That is an excellent point. You are ammortizing the battery cost over the electrical energy it will DELIVER over its life, not on its energy CAPACITY. So if a Li-Ion battery costs $2 / watt-hr (capacity) and you can get 2000 cycles in its life (3-7 years of commuting.) , then yes the cost is about $1/kwh transported. The EPA says that a gallon of gasoline = 33.7 kwh. So that means the energy transported by batteries is equivalent to paying $33.699 / gallon of gasoline. …Such a deal!…
wsbriggs says:
June 30, 2013 at 9:06 am
Numerical grammar Nazis … there’s a first.
People don’t seem to understand that English doesn’t make logical sense. It works just fine, but it’s not logical at all. For example, folks froth at the mouth when someone says “I could care less”, claiming that the “correct” usage is “I couldn’t care less”. And logically, they are right … so what?
Since the meaning is perfectly evident, well, I could care less which one they use. It’s like the difference between “ravel” and “unravel”, which to the dismay of purists everywhere, mean the same thing. English is like that.
To start the illogic, “24/7/365” means something different than “24/7”. Since “24/7” covers everything, it should be enough. But instead you can say, for example, that “I was going 24/7 for a few weeks there”, and everyone knows what you mean. Now you are perfectly correct that the next step up from “24/7” should logically be “24/7/52” … but English is not logical in the slightest.
And as a result, we end up with 24/7/365, and with “ravel” and “unravel” meaning the exact same thing, just like “flammable” and “inflammable”, and “passive” and “impassive” … drives the grammar Nazis spare, but that’s just English—and I see it as one of the most valuable (or invaluable) qualities of the language. Language exists to describe things that can’t be described, or as the ancients had it, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao”. As Godel proved, reality itself isn’t all that logical …
And as a result, we end up with a language that is far from logical … but works pretty well to describe this most illogical of worlds.
w.
Neo says:
June 30, 2013 at 9:11 am
That’s definitely one reason I chose “Hiroshima bombs” as the unit of measure … because people (as you point out) don’t realize the safety implications of stuffing a huge amount of energy into a small box.
w.
Speed says:
June 30, 2013 at 10:29 am
“From The Economist …
Packing some power
Energy technology: Better ways of storing energy are needed if electricity systems are to become cleaner and more efficient”
Oh, they have those Isentropic guys from the UK who want to store elctricity as heat and convert it back with an efficiency of 72-80%. I’ve seen that claim from them before.
Now maybe I missed something. Can anyone explain to me how one converts heat to electricity with that efficiency? It looks like magical thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_Engine#Efficiency
Thanks to Willis and all involved in the pumped storage discussion. I’d always assumed that was a reasonable way to store large scale power. As usual, serves me right for not doing the math; I didn’t fully realize the scale of the problem until today.
usurbrain says: June 30, 2013 at 10:18 am “Ask any Navy Submarine Vet how “Safe Lead Acid Storage Batteries” are. ”
There are a couple of SS qualified posting here. Yes, there is risk with batteries, but what is the rate of problems relative to the experience?
Much like comparing contemporary reactor technology safety with Thorium-in-the-sky. A properly asked questions can get a hard numbers answer. How much evidence is there of LFTR safety? The ensemble has zero. The components are individually hazardous.
Max™ says:
June 30, 2013 at 1:51 am
I’m a huge fan of Teslas, and yes, Edison did try to screw him over … but both of them were “actual super-genius inventors”. Edison’s first invention came before he had a lab or other people working for him. It was the Universal Stock Printer, invented when he was 22 years old. He was paid $40,000 for it, more than most men made in their lives in those days … and you claim he was “not an inventor”??? His very first invention made him rich enough to have a laboratory and other people working for him, and he kept on inventing … but if you think that those other people are the reason Edison succeeded, you’re mistaking the puppets for the puppeteer.
Seriously, and speaking as an inventor myself, yours is the worst case of genius envy I’ve ever seen. Yes, Edison took credit for some of the work done in his lab … but it was called “Edison’s lab” for a reason. When my older brother worked for Hewlett-Packard, he invented a number of things … do you think he got the patent rights? Don’t be silly, the rights all belong to HP. Does that mean that my brother should bitch and moan that Hewlett and Packard “used [their] understanding of things like patent laws to appropriate the work of actual intelligent individuals” like himself? Does it somehow mean that Hewlett and Packard weren’t inventors themselves? Again, no way. Like Edison, they were both inventors before HP Labs was even a dream.
That’s the way labs whose output includes intellectual property operate. When you sign up, you agree that things that you invent on company time belong to the company and not to you, just like in Edison’s lab. And that does NOT mean that Edison (or Hewlett and Packard) stopped inventing when they started their labs, it just means that Edison ended up with the patent rights for things invented by men in his employ, just like Hewlett and Packard.
w.
Gildemeister’s CellCube. Sold in N.A. by American Vanadium Company. Coming to a city near you:) Efficient, scaleable, modular and affordable. 2 years deployed in locations around the world with no failures.
@Willis: Since you like Hiroshimas as a unit, how many Hiroshimas of battery energy exist in NYC right now, including computer, car, truck, industrial, watch batteries, etc.? Is NYC poised to blow itself up tomorrow in a batta-mageddon? Story in the Sun tomorrow.
One very real “pumped storage” strategy is Ice Storage Air Conditioning.
You freeze a volume of water in the basement of an office building during the cheap night time rates, then you use the ice to chill the air in your air conditioning units during the day.
One metric ton of water (one cubic metre) can store
334 million joules (MJ) = 317,000 BTUs = 93kWh
How how must I lift that ton of water to get that much potential energy?
Enthalpy of Fusion (ice) = 334000 J/kg
Enthalpy of Fusion (ice) = 334000 m^2/sec^2
If PotEnergy = mass * g * height
and g = 9.8 m/sec^2
height = PE / (m * g) = 34082 m
So, freezing a mass of water during low demand is an “energy storage” equivalent to raising that same mass of water to a pumped storage reservoir 34 KILOMETERS in the sky with near 100% efficiency. It is all done within the basement of your building. That is “low hanging fruit.”
We already have an efficient electricity production system. We have a just-in-time manufacturing process with relatively low distribution costs.
But this is not what we are looking for; we need more expensive electricity so that ‘prices will necessarily skyrocket’ (©B H Obama).
One way of doing this is to store huge quantities of unsold product in expensive wharehousing facilities, variously known as ‘pumped storage’ or ‘batteries’ or ‘compressed air storage’. Another way is to increase distribution costs by an order of magnitude by fragmenting your manufacturing base. Instead of using a few, efficient facilities, gain from the diseconomies of lack-of-scale and spread your manufacturing out to thousands of mom and pop shops, variously known as ‘windmills’ and ‘solar PV’.
I am not being sarcastic.
wharehousingwarehousingComparing Edison to Tesla is ridiculous. Edison was a tinkerer. Nothing more. He hired others who were desperate to be able to work in a lab, but Edison almost always took credit himself. Tesla actually understood the principles behind his inventions. And let’s face it, Edison was a grade A A-Hole. He refused to pay Tesla for a DC motor. He was arrogant. He continuously patented inventions from other people without their permission and without paying them. Edison was a tinkerer. He was a hard worker. But ultimately, a tinkerer with zero knowledge of the principles behind what made his inventions work.
There is, in my opinion, a rather simple way to accomplish what effectively amounts to city-wide storage without actually having to build any. All the utility needs to provide is information. Get a cup of coffee and read this:
First, imagine a house that is off grid. Think of your house as being, for the moment, off the electricity grid. Now this doesn’t have to be EVERY house or business, mind you, lets start out small, just a few. So you have a shed or basement with some AGM deep cycle batteries that can power your house for, say, 12 hours of average daily use. You have a charging controller. Lets say in this case you also have a natural gas or propane generator for emergencies and you have the necessary gear to feed power back into the grid. If you are really an off grid system you would have your own wind and solar but in this case what you have so far is some storage, a backup generator, and a charging controller. Maybe you can add a solar panel and a windmill if you want to, no biggie. The important thing comes next.
Now lets say you also do have a grid connection. Lets say it runs through a “smart” meter. Let’s also have six second billing on electricity. Every six seconds the electric company sets the price of grid power based on availability. The electric company broadcasts that price via multicast IP over the grid itself. If the wind comes up and power suddenly becomes abundant, the utility can immediately lower the cost of the power. If the weather gets really hot and there is not a breath of wind, the power company can jack up the cost of power.
At first, imagine you charge your storage at night from the grid and run during the day off the grid. You have “load shifted” your house from being “demand load” to being “base load”. More importantly, if the price of power suddenly drops due to a burst of wind energy, your controller can decide to buy more of it at the lower price and charge your system for less money. If the wind goes away and the price goes up, your controller can back off on the demand. Now lets say an emergency happens where the grid has lost one or more power plants and the cost of power goes through the roof. Your power controller could completely disconnect you from the grid and charge your system from the nat gas generator or even run that generator and SELL the power back into the grid if it is cost effective to do so.
What you have done is by simply providing information i.e. the price of power at six second resolution, you have enabled free market forces to modulate demand to track supply. It becomes advantageous for people to purchase their own storage and maybe keep their energy consumption constant across the whole day or completely shift the load to when prices are lowest. When the grid gets stressed, using the broadcast price of power, controllers begin to back off and the load drops even more. This is all done automatically without any human intervention required. In a dire emergency, the homes could act as additional generation stations, more so if they have a decent local solar or wind generating capacity but if things got really bad, they could even feed the grid from natural gas generators.
The important thing here is that nobody forces anyone to do anything. The utility simply charges fine resolution billing and people are free to buy smart controllers and storage if they want to take advantage of cheap power when it is available. This also acts to increase the load on the grid when power is abundant and allows the utility to sell power that might otherwise go to waste. A freak burst of wind in the middle of the night might mean I want to increase my charge rate and fully charge my system by 2am to take advantage of that cheap power.
Once this information is available to consumers in a standard way and the tech is incorporated into charging controllers, that will drive even more demand for better storage. The extent to which this is “worth it” for someone would depend on the price differential of power between high and low demand times. This also allows the utility to regulate demand by regulating price that reflects the actual supply of power on the grid.
One can even have different multicast groups for different pricing structures. There could be one for commercial, one for standard residential, one for low income residential, etc. Which group a customer’s controller is “allowed” to subscribe to can be managed by the smart meter itself. The meter simply needs a jack or even an inductive coupler that allows it to transmit current price information to the charging controller.
The market then manages its own storage individually.
pump water up into a reservoir or produce heat and store the heat. both not without their issues but much better than batteries.
this company has been working on some interesting projects.
http://www.shecenergy.com/shec-energy-system-detail
a friend has been working for them and he is impressed with their technology.
Re: usurbrain says:
June 30, 2013 at 10:06 am
I don’t think that those who discount pumped storage due to efficiency concerns and capital costs appreciate electric power economics. The cost of electric power varies greatly between peak consumption hours and off-peak hours. That variation stems from the cost to generate that power which, intern, stems in great part from the cost of fuel to drive the machines. During peak hours, relatively inefficient and fuel gobbling machines are brought on line to supply that power. During off-peak, inefficient machines are throttled back or shut down and only the most efficient machines get you through the night. Pumped storage essentially converts cheap, off-peak power into very valuable peak power. The spread between those two figures far exceeds the 20% or so power loss that occurs during the conversion.
Although it is true that the capital cost of pumped storage is very high, I know of no existing facility that is not a screaming money-maker from both revenue generated and the value to system regulation and stability. However, as a practical matter and as I noted in my original comment on the subject, environmental intervention pretty much precludes further development of hydro pumped storage in the U.S.
@Yancey Ward at 9:00 am
Did some comparing of the lithium batteries with lead acid- the cost for comparable products is about 5-8 times.
What do you mean by “comparable”?
Li-ion are better where weight is an issue, holding 5 times more energy per kg</a than Lead-acid.
But if weight isn't an issue, then Lead-Acid is cheaper in $/kwh.
from the “BatteryUniversity”:
In $/Kwh (capacity): Consumer (table 2)
Lead Acid: $8.50;
NiCad: $11.00;
NIMH: $18.50;
Li-Ion: $24.00;
Transport (Table 3) where cost per kwh is amortized over life of energy source:
Li-ion: $0.50 ($0.40 replacement, $0.10 cost of charge)
Gasoline: $0.34 ($0.01 replacement, $0.33 fuel)
Fuel cell (Mobile): $1.10-$2.25 (based upon 4000h life)
A) Compressed air systems
Compressed air systems currently have an efficiency of roughly 50% as the compressed air must be heated (natural gas is used to heat the compressed air as it expanded) when it expands to avoid damaging the turbine. (Gas cools when it expands).
It should be noted that 50% efficiency does not include the energy lost to transmit the wind generated electric to the storage site. That would be a further 20 to 30% loss in energy to transmit the wind generated electric to the compressed air storage system.
According to this article there are only two large scale commercial storage systems.
The scheme that stated they could achieve 70% efficiency state that they used the heat that is generated when the gas is compressed to produce electricity. That does increase the efficiency of the system and roughly double the cost of the system. Another consideration is cost. Note German electrical power cost is currently twice that of the US with no storage systems.
http://energyinformative.org/compressed-air-energy-storage-caes/
Compressed Air Energy Storage Efficiency
Determining efficiency for CAES systems can be hard. If we compress and decompress at a rate that is not appropriate for the specific cavern, efficiency takes a huge hit. In general, CAES is not very efficient to store energy, which is driving costs up. On the other hand, storing the surplus of energy is better than not using this energy at all.
The reason why CAES typically only has an efficiency of about 50% is because we have to reheat the compressed air to be able to generate electricity with a gas turbine.
CAES is currently not very applicable for small-scale residential situations, but rather on larger-scale, closer to where the energy is being harnessed. However, CAES can be used on smaller scales by air cars and air-driven locomotives.
There are currently only two CAES facilities operating on utility scale in the world, one in Alabama and the other one in Huntorf, Germany. We can expect to see more of these facilities in the future when renewable energy sources are taking up more of the grid.
B) Advanced Nuclear engineering, super conducting sheet (further to my above comment)
I believe (see my above comment, after some more thought) the super conductive material was formed from deuterium nucleus (rather than neutrons) in a very, very, strong electrical static field. In a very strong electrical static field the deuterium nucleus which are proton-neutron pairs line up which I would assume enables them to be linked to form a very long string that is then looped onto its self to form a stable super nucleus which is a loop. The loop could have almost an unlimited number of deuterium nucleus (hundred of thousands of proton-neutrons) The concept is the creation of nucleus formations that do not occur naturally. As noted the bond strength within the atomic nucleus is roughly a million times greater than the chemical bond atom to atom. The concept is by creating linked, large loops of nucleus strings to create a material with a very strong tensile strength (roughly a millions times stronger than steel) and a room temperature super conductor.
As I noted in my above comment, I am attempting to reverse engineer a description in 1949 of a room temperature super conducting material that has described as a sheet, of very shiny, uncut able, not affected by a blow torch, material. The super conductive sheet when compressed expanded with an internal force in the material. What the observers in 1949 were describing is a super conducting sheet. I thought the description has interesting as the description was by a number of independent individuals that had no back ground in physics. The description is interesting as it was decades before the discovery of super conducting materials and the individuals did not have time or reason to fabricate a story.
about that 1949 material. This sounds like some of the descriptions I have heard about material found at Roswell. Is this the source for your description?
Now lets scale the idea I presented back a little bit. Rather than having enough storage to power your home for 12 hours, say you have enough to handle the delta from when you run the dryer or air conditioner or oven or when the refrigerator compressor kicks in. You basically keep your demand load on the grid stable during the day and charge your “surge” storage at night when power is cheap. The entire point of “smart” meters is the ability to eventually do demand pricing for power. If they do that, making the demand price available over the grid allows the consumer to better manage their power consumption. Even having a small amount of storage to handle surge demands would be advantageous.