– Jul. 31st 2017 9:10 am PT
While clean energy is not a new area for Alphabet’s X, the moonshot division has previously only focused on energy creation. With a new “exploration” called Malta, Alphabet is now looking at cost-effective energy storage solutions.
Nintendo Switch
“Explorations” are X’s “early-stage attempts to investigate new moonshots.” Energy storage is increasingly falling into that category as companies like Tesla are building battery-centered solutions to capture energy from renewable resources.
X is instead “developing a thermal storage system that uses salt to store renewable energy at scale.” Malta is specifically tackling the “mismatch” between the abundance of renewable energy from wind and solar and the lack of cost-effective technologies to store it, especially during peak power usage:
If there’s more energy produced than the electric grid needs, the capacity of wind and solar farms is simply wasted.
With no clean, cost-effective technology for storing renewable energy to serve these peaks, the amount of renewable energy the grid can handle could be capped, and the growth of renewable energy over the next decade could stagnate.
Malta’s solution is to contain just captured electricity as thermal energy. The work behind it comes from Nobel prize-winning Stanford physics professor Robert Laughlin who created as “theoretical system that stores electricity as heat (in high temperature molten salt) and cold (in a low temperature liquid similar to the antifreeze you have in your car).”
HT/ Resourceguy, although next time could you at least link to a story instead of making me go find it? 
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The diagram of the proposed energy storage system brings back thermodynamic induced nightmares I had in grad school and looks suspiciously like a Coyote solution to capture the Roadrunner. Never worked out well for the Coyote.
I’ll expect a large ACME sign next to the field test unit.
And this is different from solar thermal how? Because they also waste energy pumping the heat out of the cold sink? I begin to see why we haven’t designed an aircraft that can outperform the SR-71 introduced 50 years ago. We’ve become morons.
Funded morons, so perhaps con-artists instead of morons.
Tsk Tsk
If I told you about all the aircraft that outperform the SR-71 I’d have to kill you. You know how it goes…
If they are going to store heat, why create electricity as an intermediary? Just turn the wind energy into heat. Far more efficient.
A successful full installation of this system will be cotemporaneous with porcine aerobatics.
Instead of a heat ‘engine’ how about a thermoelectric back end to get electricity out of this system?
Have been in use in space for decades.
Not sure of cost and efficiencies.
But with millions of thermocouples mass produced, economies of scale may help.
Alphabet’s X may safely be ignored from now on, as may Abner Li’s Technacity. No energy pro or engineer would participate in horse puckey such as this. Goodness…
They are not looking for engineers or energy pros. They are looking for morons with money to burn.
This is another new battery/storage prototype scheme
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/german-energy-company-wants-to-build-flow-batteries-in-old-natural-gas-caverns/
Natural gas caverns?
Bogus from the title on down.
There is a real natural gas cavern in Turkmenistan, but it is still active.
It feels a bit like watching another slow motion train wreck. As with the running-everything-with-renewables-electricity brainstorm, Google is spending a lot of money to slowly rediscover what sensible people already knew, and said, about energy storage. Oh well….it is their money. And if they announce the inevitable as honestly as they finally did with the renewables project, then it will put another nail in the coffin of impracticable green fantasies.
And the Stanford Physics Professor… He must feel a little bit sick to have to be drawing high-schoo/undergrad level science cartoons for schemes he knows won’t fly, when presumably he has some real physics projects he would love to be working on. O.K., I’m sure the money they pay him must help, but he probably feels he has sunk way below the dreams he once had for his career.
Thermodynamically this makes little sense. Electricity to heat goes with 100% efficiency, the other way around with at most 40%. You directly lose 60%.
The “in” electricity is an extra power from wind turbines. Today it is 100% lost. Recovering 40% of it would be a success.
Thermo isn’t my thing, but the “efficiency” at the front end may be greater than 100%; people who I think know this stuff have told me it takes less than a BTU of energy to drive a BTU from (say) antifreeze to salt.
Am I misinformed?
No. With a heat pump you can “pump” one kilowatt-hour of heat from a colder medium to the medium being heated, let’s say you use a kilowatt-hour of electricity to do it – this is also converted to heat. You have achieved an “efficiency” of 200%.
I can’t take this seriously.
That diagram actually says “store the cold,” as if “cold” was a thing that can be separated from heat.
Yeah, the elusive “coolth”.
Hard to find as them dang magnetic monopoles.
Not considered is the expense of long-term maintenance of a molten salt system. Unless *expensive* measures are taken to scrupulously eliminate oxygen and water from the system, a molten salt system will corrode any ferrous metal components – yes, even ‘stainless’ steel. Non-ferrous alloys such as Monel that will withstand sustained molten salt temperatures are not cheap to produce or fabricate, either.
Reminds me of Project Plowshare, where they proposed using nuclear bombs to heat up an underground salt dome (that might be redundant) and pumping water down to generate steam…
I can’t believe that didn’t work out.
seems to me a water storage system would be the cheapest, safest and most efficient storage system for electricity …
Perpetual motion, alchemy and the Holy Grail live on.
The purpose of this is to eliminate off-peak price reductions by removing off-peak energy. The demand on the grid will approach a flat line as off-peak hours are spent heating the ground and the atmosphere. Given the energy losses in this system and similarly for pumped storage (which is just like pumping water back over the dam it just came through), it is a net consumer of electricity and that is artificial demand that competes with consumers.
“to store it, especially during peak power usage:”
Why the heck would you want to be storing power during times of peak usage.
I thought the idea was to store when demand was low, then release when demand was high.
How does one store cold? I understand excluding heat from a volume but since “cold” does not exist except as the absence of heat, how is it “stored”?
Not much to it. You either chill something, or you find something which is already cold, and you insulate it:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/-/media/Images/MEN/Editorial/Articles/Magazine-Articles/1972/09-01/How-to-Build-an-Ice-House/017-020-01a.gif
It can be a lot of work, though.
My great grandfather was run over and killed by his own ice truck when his horse bolted when one of them newfangled auto-mobiles backfired.
1906, 13th and Race, Philly.
BTW, him and his partner were boatmen, transporting goods on the Schuylkill river. In Winter they carved out blocks of ice from the river and stored them to sell in in Spring and Summer.
That river never freezes over reliably anymore. One year in five maybe. Or less.