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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@A. Scott: 4:05pm
Ok, so a “3 ton HVAC system” running 12 hrs, uses enough energy to freeze 1.5 tons of water.
A ‘icebox” that is 2 m x 1 m x 0.5 meter would be as big as could move into most houses, it would be as big and heavy (empty) as a refrigerator and weight 2500 pounds full. It gives 1 ton of ice good for 3 ton HVAC for only 8 hours. But it is modular… buy three, stack ’em side by side and loose 1.5 sq m or 15 sq ft of floor space. With enough thermal insulation, you can put them outside. All that’s left is to have electric billing rates change enough to make the system pay off in a couple years.
I may be wrong about this and its based on many visits to the Lake Oroville Visitors Center and probably watching the movie they have about building the dam for Lake Oroville 20 or 30 times over the years. But I think that Lake Oroville near to where Anthony and I live, he in Chico and I up in the foothills above, has the ability to do stored hydro.
It’s a half remembered bit from the documentary. The way it might work is that below Lake Oroville are two large artificial bays or lakes on the valley floor. They are generally mostly kept full. But my memory says that part of the planned design is that you can pump water from the bays back into the river and reverse the turbines in the power plant built under the base of the dam to pump water from the bays back into the lake. I don’t think it has ever actually been done but I have the distinct but hazy memory of it being a mentioned feature of the dam and power plant design. It is one reason that the two artificial lakes called the Forebay and the afterbay were built when the damn was put up.
KenB,
“Incidently does the earth already store such energy in huge quantities to keep its molten interior in a fluid state?”
Kirk Sorensen, at http://energyfromthorium.com/13-thorium-power-the-earth-literally/
Says Thorium heats the Earth’s core and also produces the magnetic field.
From EIA.gov
Centerpoint says a 17 kW nat gas generator uses about 1.83 CCFH (hundred cubic feet per hour) at 1/2 load … using nat gas cost of $0.73164 (CenterPoint Energy Houston natural gas rate per CCF as of April 2013) they say your natural gas cost for one hour of use is $1.34. At full load, the cost is $1.91 per hour. That breaks down to about $0.158 cents per kW at 50% load or about $0.112 cents per kW at full load. That seems competitive in cost to the electric rate – with all costs and fees etc appears to be appx $0.14 to $0.17 cents per kWh
At the typical avg monthly usage of 940 kWh that would be appx 31.3 kWh per day or about 2 hours operation at full capacity to provide 100% of daily power. More typically I would think it’d be set up on a peak demand system – like the “energy saver” switch avail from some utilities that allow them to cycle your power at times of peak demand.
Seems the backup could run at high load during these peak demand times and send a fair amount of power back to the grid?
@Stephen Fisher Rasey
Cool. For new construction (or serious remodel/retrofits) in suitable climates these could go below grade in a foundation protected basement area. Wall it off and it will remain appx 60-65 degrees most places year round. Modular idea is perfect – add as many as you need.
Any idea what one of these would cost?
Keep in mind as well that in many areas the AC doesn’t run continuously all day – so that 8 hours would potentially be close to enough. At minimum it would handle the high cost (both for elec users and for peak generating capacity) peak demand periods …
Mulder (son of): Car batteries are probably not the best solution. A long time ago, I visited a GPO telephone exchange (end of the mechanical relay age). Two things were unforgettable, one was the sound of all those relays/uniselectors clicking, and the other was the battery room. The batteries were open vats of sulphuric acid with enormous lead plates – they were probably 5′ cube. The provided enough power to keep the exchange running for a week in the event of power failure.
I doubt that those batteries are still made, but those are what you need.
Charging them is another question altogether. Exactly where you get 100kWh from, each and every day is a bit beyond me.
With each wind farm build towers which will support massive weights. When there the wind turbines generate excess power, use it to drive a motor to lift the weights. When the wind turbines can’t keep up with demand, let the weights drop and drive a turbine to put the stored power out on the grid.
This would have the additional benefit of providing a compactor to make it easier to hide and then dispose of all the bird carcases.
PS If the towers can’t be built at the wind farm they should be built within sight of the homes of the politicians and other proponents of CAGW “solutions”.
(I should probably put a sarc tag in there somewhere ….)
I’m not sure if this is a true story, but I heard that years ago some of the big Auto Manufacturers in Ontario crunched the numbers and found it would be cost effective to build their own private generator. This was back when they would have been able to do it with a Coal powered generator though I don’t know if that was what they intended.
The local utility caved and backed off on the increased rates they had been threatening their biggest customer with.
Of course these days they could simply sic the EPA on them and either make it impossible for them to build their plant, or make the regulations so onerous that there would be no advantage.
@Steve Garcia asks:
“On that front, I have a question to ask everyone:
Does anyone know if hybrid cars use the electrics at any time in tandem with the gasoline engines? Or is it one or the other?
The reason I ask is that back in the days of the oil embargo there happened to be a study of engine efficiency in St Louis. The study found that, for a car going only 30 miles per hour, when it stopped for a stoplight and then accelerated back up to 30 mph, a car used up 14 times as much gasoline during that decel-accel period compared to if it had kept going at 30 mph. I’ve never forgotten that study.”
Basically, you need to “invest” a significant amount of energy to get your vehicle up to highway speed (Newton’s 2nd Law, F=ma). Now you are humming along at constant speed, and other than air friction, you tend move along at constant speed with relatively little power (Newton’s first law). But the light ahead now turns from yellow to red, and you are apparently forced to lose the initial “investment” of energy that you expended to reach highway speed. For an electric drive system a clever trick can be used to recapture a good fraction of that initial investment and to re-utilize it after the light turns green. Regenerative Braking; The vehicles’ electric traction motors can be used to brake the vehicle by acting as electric generators and creating electrical energy. In my supercapacitor example, the electric energy could be stored temporarily and drawn from to get the vehicle moving again after the light turns green.
The same principal has been used for years in diesel-electric locomotives, except that the electric energy generated by the traction motors is normally shunted to large ballast resistors on the roof of the locomotive, and rejected as heat to the atmosphere rather than stored.
Look at these vehicles using the “ProPulse” system developed by Oshkosh: If such a system could be efficiently miniaturized, in my opinion you would have the ultimate general purpose hybrid vehicle. Fully electric vehicle. (Electric motors are so efficient!). Onboard electrical generation (extension cords are so inconvenient!).
http://www.dieselpowermag.com/features/1107dp_diesel_electric_hybrid_hemtt_oskosh_a3/
http://www.oshkoshdefense.com/propulse
Willis, you seem to be a lightning rod for the fanatics. Maybe you can figure out a way to harness their negative energy into something useful.
Oh, you already have–witness nick stokes licking his wounds from your last post. (If you can bear to imagine nick licking his wounds….)
Keep up the effort, we much appreciate it.
Philip Bradley says:
June 30, 2013 at 3:35 pm
Actually, as many people have pointed out in the comments, the main obstacle is physical. It takes a nearby big hill and a big reservoir on top of that big hill … and most places, one, the other, or both of those is impossible.
w.
LamontT says:
June 30, 2013 at 4:54 pm
Thanks, Lamont. I was just there a couple months ago, and I didn’t know that. From Wiki:
All that storage right next door, and they’re still charging Anthony $0.92 per KW-hr … criminal.
w.
dbstealey says:
June 30, 2013 at 3:29 pm
MrX,
Since inventing commenrcial products is easy, could you invent something for us? I’d like to see how it’s done. Thanx in advance. ☺
——————-
Who says inventing commercial products is easy? Not sure what your comment was about.
The energy density of gasoline is 9,700 Watt-hours/Liter. But internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient (thereabouts). So for a battery to compete with gasoline it would need an energy density of 0.2 * 9,700 W-h/L or 1940 W-h/L.
Mike Ramsey says:
> But internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient (thereabouts).
A nitpick, but that would be the efficiency of a small two-stroke motorcycle engine. Even a lawn mower engine is more efficient. Diesel engines reach values in the range of 50% for engines above 10 MW.
JDN says:
June 30, 2013 at 11:54 am
“@Willis: Since you like Hiroshimas as a unit, how many Hiroshimas of battery energy exist in NYC right now”
“One Hiroshima Bomb” is the official unit of energy in warmunist science. Similar to ice area, which is measured in Manhattans (but only when it melts).
“Willis – maybe you could take a look at how much energy could be generated with a modest head difference – maybe say 50 feet – which could be more easily achieved in a “constructed” reservoir system (as opposed say to using natural terrain and damming). How bi and deep a resevoir you’d need. It seems these could also be recreational lakes as well?”
I believe the british statistician David Mackey (name is close) did a study on this for England. He concluded that maybe 10% of the nation would have to be paved over for reservoirs. My numbers could be off some–but the percentage was astonishingly high.
Richard M @ur momisugly June 30, 2013 at 4:49 am
said
“… the ECAT is already moving into real applications. MIT is testing LENR and the government is funding several of these studies…”
No the “Ecat” is not being sold. It is not “moving into” being sold or anything like it. Only licences to sell the “Ecat” are being sold to suckers.
But yes the US government did fund Rossi’s previous fraud, his thermoelectric generator. That one was a total failure also
“Rossi sent 27 thermoelectric devices for evaluation to the Engineer Research and Development Center; 19 of these did not produce any electricity at all. The remaining units produced less than 1 watt each, instead of the expected 800–1000 watt.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_(entrepreneur)
I believe Rossi collected something just short of $2 MM from the DOD for his thermo-electric fraud.
There are significant facilities that freeze water at night when the electricity rates are low and then use the ice as a cold source for air conditioning the next afternoon when electricity rates are high. Stanford University has a 4-million gallon water tank under a parking garage they use for this purpose. They estimate this technique saves them ~$1.5 million per year in electricity costs.
A press article here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/cool-as-ice-air-conditioning-that-doesnt-burn-up-money/article1375942/
Frank, its not he head that is important but the velocity of the water. Doubling head, doubles power whereas doubling velocity quadruples power.
Grey Lensman said:
> … its not he head that is important but the velocity of the water. Doubling head, doubles power whereas doubling velocity quadruples power.
But nobody uses the energy of flowing water. It is almost universally left to dissipate in reservoirs, and then it’s only the head that matters.
One exception is very small-scale generators driven by floating drums or Archimedes screws that scoop water on the surface.
It isn’t just storage capacity but efficiency of enery storage.
For example, we use hybid cars thinking we can store the energy from deccelerations to reuse for accelerations but how much of the energy sent to the battery is available to be sent back to the drive unit? If we were to try to save surplus energy into batteries how much of that energy would be there when we want it back? How do the losses of any possible system compare? Maybe filling sub-sea ballons with air or pumping water uphill (as has been suggested) compare? (water, being more massive should rule over air as a storage medium but if you don’t have an uphill handy…And…if you fill undersea balloons you would make the oceans rise; fullfilling a vital prediction)
At some point in the efficiency curve it becomes foolish to produce energy to store vice finding a larger energy producer that will meet peak demands and work always. If the energy you are saving in your batteries is free energy that will waft away if unsaved then saving it makes some sense but just because government subsidises something does not make it cheap or free.
Cheat sheet for energy storage: see http://db.tt/KyFzWfPt
In the NY case it would require 890’000 tons of lead acid batteries to store these 3 days of electricity production.
Necessity it is said is the mother of invention. It is therefore unlikely that renewable energy systems will drive battery development as dangerous or catastrophic global warming due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is a physical impossibility. The most efficient use of large scale energy storage would be to balance peak and off peak power demands from hydrocarbon fueled power plants, preferably closed cycle gas turbines.
Trying to make solar voltaic or wind power workable as base load power by the addition of large scale energy storage is pointless. The initial problems with the energy generation indicate that these technologies are already a failure in engineering and financial terms without the justification of fraudulent science and subsidies.
PV panels are costly and convert less than 20% of of the visible spectrum to energy. They also require exotic materials in their manufacture and don’t ask about the pollution. The albedo change due to the vast surface area required to produce 17 Terawats would cause near surface heating to rival the warming fraudulently attributed to CO2 by pseudo scientists if built on land.
Wind power requires rare and expensive materials such as neodium for magnets as their generators run intermittently at variable speeds. Low cost common material magnetos require more constant speeds for efficiency. Further to this wind power increases the number of moving parts needing maintenance for a given MW capacity and spreads them over a vast area. Not smart. Removing 17 Terawatts from near surface air in high wind speed areas? Snivelling idiocy.
However large scale energy storage is possible. The most workable methods are hydraulic and pneumatic storage. Both are limited by the geological considerations at given locations, however lake and ocean pneumatic storage is worthy of further consideration. Pneumatic storage has one advantage over hydraulic storage when gas turbines are considered. Stored compressed air can reduce the work needed by the compressor in a gas turbine and thus be reused without the need for a separate turbine. In this scenario, base load power would be provided by closed cycle gas turbine and peak power would be provided using compressed air from storage in an open cycle gas turbine.
Despite natural gas being available on century timescales, it may be that we need to consider changing to solar power in the near future. As CO2 cannot cause global warming, aliens removing all hydrocarbons and nuclear fuels from the planet is the more likely scenario*. If this were the case, large scale solar thermal power could be an option. Open cycle solar air turbines connected to lake or ocean pneumatic storage may work.
http://www.csiro.au/en/Organisation-Structure/Flagships/Energy-Transformed-Flagship/Air-Turbine.aspx
The mirror cleaning issue can be overcome by non-greens. A roll to roll sheet of vacuum metallised Mylar can be moved across each mirror panel, with rolls removed for recycling every 3 months. Open cycle solar air turbines also require an air compressor stage.
There is a future for large scale energy storage, it just has nothing to do with wind turbines or PV
arrays.
*Preferred scenario – aliens removing AGW cultists from the planet for vicious and sustained probings.
sorry: The case is 1 tenth of New York City electricity for 3 days
Further to:
brad ervin says:
June 30, 2013 at 11:54 pm
It isn’t just storage capacity but efficiency of energy storage.
William:
Summing up the key issues concerning the absolute need for storage if one insists on funding the green scams.
1) ‘Green’ energy wind and solar require storage. Western countries are spending billions upon billions to subsidize wind and solar ignoring the storage problem. Ignoring economic and engineering reality does not make the problems go away.
2) If there is no practical storage system then it is a fact that there is a limit to ‘decarboning’ using wind and solar. The limit without storage is around 10% to 15% (very, very optimistically). The 10% to 15% limit is due to real economic and engineering facts which do not change by being ignored. The storage problem has been ignored. As there is no ‘practical’ storage solution the only viable option to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by say 40% is nuclear. The problem is the ‘green’ parties have a pathological hatred for nuclear power.
3) There are currently no practical storage systems. A back of the envelop calculation indicates the proposed storage schemes are not scalable and the cost to store energy is more than double the cost to generate the power from the super subsidized ‘green’ scam. This fact has been hidden from the public and politicians when funding ‘green’ scams. Obviously it does not make sense to subsidize wind and solar as they are dead end schemes if ones goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40% and then by 80%.
4) Cost, scale ability, efficiency, and reliability of the storage system are key factors. The current compressed air storage system (prototype two locations in the world) is 50% efficient; however, other losses such as 20% to 30% power system losses to transmit electric power from the wind farms or solar farms needs to be included. Cyclic fatigue and cracks likely make compressed air storage not viable. (The compressed air will escape into the geological formation if the scheme is tried for say 20 years or 30 years which require a new geological formation.) There are obviously limited viable geological formations. (A very large storage system is required.)
5) There is a limit as to how much industry and the public can pay for electrical power. The cost of electrical power in Germany is twice that of the US. The high cost of electrical power is a type of tax as there is less money available to tax and for basic needs. The Western countries are already spending more money than take in via taxes. Very high yearly deficits lead to collapse.
6) A back of an envelope economic analysis indicates that wind and solar are ridiculously expensive if the cost of storage systems is added, even if there was a scalable reliable storage system which there is not.
Comments:
The EU jobs are concentrated in German. The implications of that fact are not understood. German is hogging the limited EU jobs. Prior to a single currency that would not happen as the German mark would have increase in value relative to high unemployment countries (EU) this would force the jobs to be shared with the other EU countries. The EU is no longer competitive with the world and has been steadily losing jobs. The green scams are one of the principal reasons why the EU will collapse. Green energy to ‘decarbon’ a country is a fantasy, ridiculous.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/business/global/european-unemployment-sets-another-record.html?_r=0
For the 27-nation European Union, the jobless rate was unchanged in March, at 10.9 percent. Eurostat estimated that 26.5 million men and women were unemployed in Europe, including 5.7 million young people.
Jobless figures for both the euro zone and the European Union are the highest Eurostat has reported since it began keeping the data in 1995, in the days before the euro. In comparison, the unemployment rate in the United States was 7.6 percent in March.
The European economy remains trapped in a torpor with little relief in sight. Governments have tightened public finances to meet deficit targets, and companies remain reticent about hiring. The euro zone’s gross domestic product is widely expected to decline for a second consecutive year in 2013.
Super subsidizes for ‘green’ scam job results in the loss of real jobs.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/06/the-data-is-in-more-green-jobs-means-less-real-ones/#more-28909
Each green job in Britain costs £100,000 (and 3.7 other jobs):
The Telegraph points out how expensive it is to support a wind-industry job. My plan to bury bottles with £50,000 apiece in them could halve the cost and employ just as many people.
• A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year. They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.
• “Among the examples of extremely high subsidies effectively for job creation is Greater Gabbard, a scheme of 140 turbines 12 miles off the Suffolk coast. It received £129 million in consumer subsidy in the 12 months to the end of February, double the £65million it received for the electricity it produced. It employs 100 people at its headquarters in Lowestoft, receiving, in effect, £1.3 million for every member of staff.” — Telegraph, 15 June 2013
• In Scotland the VERSO study showed for each Green Job created, 3.7 were lost. — BBC, Feb 2011
In Italy, each green job cost 5 jobs from the rest of the economy:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7969102/The-Clean-Development-Mechanism-delivers-the-greatest-green-scam-of-all.html
I have read of several systems, one in development for cars, that uses hydraulics to capture energy in accumulators to use to boost a vehicle at start up. The first one I read about over a year ago was very heavy duty and intended for use on Garbage trucks which made frequent stops. Payback was estimated at about a year. Too expensive for more conventional vehicles. But apparently there is a car company who has developed a system that uses hydraulics to capture braking forces and store the energy with compressed air to boost the vehicle. They claim a potential for eighty miles to the gallon,though that sounds like blue sky to me.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31346_7-57572749-252/peugeot-debuts-first-ever-hybrid-gasoline-air-vehicle/