A California startup is repurposing trains and rail cars to help renewable energy utilities compete with fossil fuels.
August 21, 2017
6:45 AM EDT
What goes up must come down. This principle applies to most things in our current gravitational setup — college tuition being a conspicuous exception — and it could provide a significant boost to green energy initiatives, too.
A California-based company called Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES) is using the power of gravity to help renewable energy utilities compete with coal and gas. The idea is to help solve the perennial problem of energy storage. Because wind and solar installations can’t always generate energy on demand — sometimes it’s cloudy and the air is still — green utilities need a reliable method of storing surplus energy.
There are several ways to do this using high-tech industrial batteries, flywheels, or hydroelectric facilities, but these approaches tend to be expensive and complicated.
ARES’s solution? Run some old trains up and down a hill.
The company harnesses the power of potential and kinetic energy to help utilities add and subtract to the energy grid as needed. When the wind or solar farm is producing excess energy, that power is shuttled over to the adjacent ARES facility. The surplus energy is used to power repurposed electric locomotives, which in turn haul enormously heavy railroad cars to the top of a hill.
When less energy is being produced but more is needed for the grid, the railroad cars roll back down, turning potential energy back into kinetic energy by powering onboard generators with the force of their descent. The technique is similar to the regenerative braking system that is used in electric and hybrid vehicles, which routes deceleration energy to the vehicle’s battery.
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The system is also similar to existing hydroelectric (“pumped hydro”) solutions that essentially do the same things with water — pumping water uphill and capturing downhill flow. A benefit of the rail energy storage solution is that it doesn’t need to be near a large source of water. That’s good for wind and solar installations, which are often located in remote areas.
It’s cheaper, too. Ares contends that its rail energy solution costs about half as much as competing energy storage solutions, and has less of an environmental impact.
ARES
“We use no water, burn no fossil fuel, produce no emissions, and use no hazardous or environmentally troubling materials like lithium,” ARES CEO James Kelly told Seeker. “We are excited to be a green storage solution that can enable higher penetration of intermittent renewable resources — like wind and solar — in the US and around the world.”
Pushing rocks up a hill might seem like a curiously low-tech approach to energy storage, but Kelly said that this very simplicity is what gives rail energy storage an edge. Building a railroad loop is a lot simpler than maintaining a giant battery farm, and the ARES system can easily use repurposed locomotives and freight cars. An ARES site can be quickly and cleanly decommissioned and restored in months rather than years or decades, Kelly said.
None of this matters unless the system is efficient. Rail energy storage has about an 80 percent efficiency rate, meaning that the descending railroad cars can output 80 percent of the energy that was initially used to get them up that hill.
That’s better than pumped-storage hydroelectricity, Kelly noted, which typically runs in the 60 percent range. Batteries can return a higher efficiency, but their capacity degrades over time.
“The real question is how much you get out when you need the energy,” Kelly said. “If you discharge your storage batteries tomorrow, you will probably get 90 units out. If you discharge in six months, you may get 40 or 50 units. ARES units have essentially infinite cycles with no degradation.”
“What we’ve done with ARES is harness the inexhaustible, entirely reliable power of gravity,” he added.
HT/Rod Everson
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Ok, thinking outside the “box”.
Mac
80% efficiency seems to be a bit of a stretch. An over-reach. More likely it’s closer to 60% or less due to the multiple energy conversions and distribution system. It remains that the “wonderful” renewable energy systems are seeking to be propped up by multiple used energy systems. All of this means more infrastructure and more bandaids on systems that are inherently flawed, overly expensive, high maintenance, high infrastructure, huge ecological and geographical foot print, materials that are unrecyclable, use rare elements, and patently unreliable because the sun goes down and the wind ceases.
The ONLY reason wind and solar are present at all today as energy sources is because government has pushed them on us by funding them with our tax dollars. In a free market, wind and solar would only be useful to end users, such as a small wind turbine on a sailboat to keep the batteries charged. Only huge government funding and the insistence of government policy has led to the pathetic and expensive wind and solar we have today. As soon as they lose their subsidies and their rate protections, wind and solar will crash and burn, which, as we already know, they are prone to do anyhow physically.
This idea is one step from a solar powered fan pointing at a wind powered light. Terrific if it wasn’t for the laws of physics.
Actually 80% doesn’t seem far off, transformers are 98%, motors depending on loads can get into the 90%’s, so once to push it once to regenerate, about 80%.
But how much can you really store for a large city, or rather how many tracks would you need.
Now you could do the same by drilling holes, and running the trains up and down in a vacuum.
And what are the hysteresis losses from the rolling stock into the ground. Rail beds are not rigid. They flex significantly. One may assume the aerodynamic drag losses are low if the velocities involved are also low, but surface winds will effect things. Furthermore regenerative breaking efficiency diminishes as the revolutions decrease, so will a transmission to regulate rpm vs. ground velocity be required?
First and foremost one must have a significant grade to achieve any potential. The shallower the grade the higher the rolling losses. The steepest operating grade is only 5.9%. Unless they propose cogged railways this might have some real limitations, or are they also proposing huge transmission lines between the wind mills in the prairie and the tracks in the foot hills?
Another appropriate use for “so -called renewables” is a solar panel or two to aerate a small fish pond. Or a solar panel to keep a 12 volt automobile batter charged when the vehicle is only used occasionally. Finally, dollar stores have some wonderful toys powered by light on small PV cells that will offer amusement over time.
Rocket,
One of the freight haulers, I have forgotten which company, use to advertise 500 ton-miles per gallon of diesel. That implies pretty low total losses per mile from track friction, air resistance, etc. I don’t think they defined where they measured that but I assume it wasn’t all down hill.
Also, the steepest standard-gauge mainline railway grade in the United States is the Saluda Grade running from Tryon, North Carolina up the front range of the Blue Ridges to Saluda, North Carolina. At least according to wikipedia it has a maximum grade of 4.9% for about 300 feet and averages 4.24% for 2.6 miles. As kids we were always told it was the steepest grade east of the Rockies. Back in the ’50s, when it was still in heavy use, the Tryon Boy Scouts, along with anyone else they could round up, use to get called out several times each summer to go fight the fires started by the engines grinding there way up the mountain. On the down hill side it had two run-out areas for when any east-bound train lost its breaks. But, we were told it was always the uphill trains that caused the fires when the engine’s drive wheels started to slip, throwing sparks out onto the dried out weeds and grass growing alongside the track.
Yikes! I hope I can keep enough acreage to not have to see any of that foolishness happening.
Every hair-brained idea they present is fraught with costly maintenance, and efficiency sacrifices, plus there is unintended ecological collateral damage likely.
I’d heard much higher claims for hydro which always seemed improbable to me in view of turbulent losses and viscosity. This makes more sense.
In view of the limited incline which standard rail lines can pull freight, my gut feel is that this will need to pull a lot of rocks an awful long way but it seems like a good way to address the intermittent problem. Ironically hydro storage is used for nukes for exactly the opposite mismatch, supplying intermittent demand from a technology which has to run flat out 24/7.
“I’d heard much higher claims for hydro which always seemed improbable to me in view of turbulent losses and viscosity. This makes more sense.”
You’re probably right about the efficiency of pumped storage. The Gilboa-Blenheim pumped storage facility in upstate New York says it operates with about 73% full-cycle efficiency. Since it’s been around for decades and the turbines were upgraded toward state-or-the-art about a decade ago, that’s probably a reasonably realistic number.
OTOH, I doubt these guys can really do 80% with a real rail based system. And maintenance costs are likely to be non-trivial.
One possibility though are the existing RR grades like the 40km or so grade from Cajon Pass (3700ft-1100m) down to San Bernardino. . Since loads — and there are a lot of them — have to come down that route anyway, it might be economically viable to generate electricity on the way down and use renewable power when available on the uphaul.
Only question is: If electricity generation would be economically viable, why isn’t SP doing it now?
Hmm, what could go wrong with a train at the max weight limit, running on as little maintenance as possible (nonhuman cargo), continuously being dropped down a long runway towards a city?
It’s possible that they could use the same land that is being used for wind and solar generators. Run the “trains” under the windmills or below the solar panels.
“Hmm, what could go wrong with a train at the max weight limit, running on as little maintenance as possible (nonhuman cargo), continuously being dropped down a long runway towards a city?”
Already happened — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_train_disaster
But the trackage over Cajon Pass is still in use and I’d guess that most of the cargo inbound and outbound from the container port at Wilmington passes along those tracks.
“80 percent of the energy that was initially used to get them up that hill.”
Of which, what percentage was lost getting an ultra-heavy load up that hill? Heat loss, gear transmission loss, etc.
It is like reading one of those fifties Popular Mechanics rags I used to enjoy so much when I was about 14 years of age and knew naught of thermodynamics and other real stuff.
They would always resurrect a perpetual motion scheme ever two months or so, under many aliases and disguises.
There were the atomic powered cars and aircraft, as well as diet chocolate.
Great fun to see it all coming back to the mainstream again.
call Sizif
Might be even better if they used a series of stationary motors on cable connected railway cars.
Run a whole batch of them at once, and the generator mechanism doesn’t have to move
Electricity doesn’t have to be transferred by overhead wires back to a central point.
What’s wrong with moving the generators? It’s all just extra weight that increases the amount of energy stored.
nothing, its just that a single big fixed generator will have more synchronous mass
Yes, synchronization of many small generators does not make as much sense economically either. They must all be synchronous with the grid and that complicates the (grid) interface.
All those cables are going to have a lot of friction.
But what happens when they use up all the gravity? Do they have to move the system somewhere else?
If there was any possibility of using up all the gravity then you simply enforce a tax on all those people who are using gravity.
This is a very grave situation.
Overweight people use up more gravity, so they should pay more taxes.
(yeah, like gore)…
yeah, like gore)…
Al Gore is fat!
Al Gore, is Sooooooo Fat, he rides on top of the 747!
Yes, peak gravity is a concern. Fortunately, it’s possible to re-frack it, although certain states like New York will outlaw it.
Isn’t gravity affected by CO2, or is that methane, or ozone?
Ah, when the gravity runs out, the government will just legislate a new constant and we’ll be back in business.
Do you mean they’ll float a loan to those who float alone?
Boooooo
Another real-estate hog and blight on the landscape.
Simple and clever, but no mention of capacity, whether practical or theoretical. Utility scale storage needs to be truly utility scale, not some interesting windup toy. I would like to know what is actually possible.
Yes, just how many megawatt-hours is this system good for? If they start measuring the system in gigawatt hours, then perhaps it might be useful.
I also noted they stated it was about half the cost of batteries. This is like discussing skinny sumo wrestlers .
Knew somebody would try to derail this idea!
runs —————————>
The conversation is going off track !!
It’s all down hill from here.
(i think i can, i think i can, i think i can)…
http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/70/14/1232489a85fcebc3a3068de2c20c8b5b.jpg
“Yes, just how many megawatt-hours is this system good for?”
You might get an idea by looking att the ore railway over the Scandinavian mountains from Kiruna to Narvik. That has a maximum grade of 1 % going westwards (=full trains). The trains weigh 8500 tons and the coupled double locomotives output 10.8 MW. So at that grade, a bit more than 1 kW per ton weight. Steeper grades would equal more power per ton, but railways can’t have steep grades because even very heavy locomotives will start slipping and ruin both wheels and rails. Railways are very economical power-wise because of the very low frictional losses between a steel wheel and a steel rail but the price is near-zero hill-climbing capacity. And incidentally low capacity for this new power-storage concept-
And for how long could they produce? It of course would depend on how long the grade is, but realistically at the very most an hour or two per train. You would need to store lots and lots of trains at the top to get a significant amount of power storage.
Better pump hydro – simpler. cheaper and much lower maintenance costs.
I went to the company website and it is claiming 16-24GWh capacities are possible. Worth looking at the site. I am willing to see what happens here. A good idea worth pursuing. Certainly better than Tesla’s battery storage. Even good ideas fail sometimes.
Easy, dplorable, they just need a few thousand acres of land to build a whole series of rail-lines next to each renewable power plant. And if there are no hills nearby, they can be built very easily using unemployed people with shovels shipped in from the city & housed in pop-up villages. Who cares if the result is a storage system which is visual pollution, kills native animals, & interferes with their migratory patterns? Anything good for the owners of renewable power companies is good for the planet, & we are obliged to sign off on it.
The siting criteria for a big facility seems to be 3000′ elevation gain over 4 miles. Seems like a lot.
Suggest you use old electric street cars (lots of them around) and fill them with homeless folks (lots of them around) for ballast. Solves two problems at the same time!/sarc
Don’t forget that you can also use the urine from homeless to make electricity. They can contribute to hauling the mass up the hill by peeing into the provided tubes. Keep the water flowing, LA needs more power!
” … build a whole series of rail-lines next to each renewable power plant. ”
There is no reason why the storage has to be next to the wind / solar generation. It should be somewhere between generation and point of consumer usage. It should be possible to find suitable hills rather than trying to build them.
Also it depends on extra power being generated during the day, wonder how much of that there is….
easy to work out capacity.
weight times height essentially.
which has mire energy storage? a lake up a mountain or a rain up a mountain?
think about the weight of water behind a dam, against the weight of a train…
PS pumped storage achieves around 75% eff.
All you need is a slope for this system to work. Pumped storage needs a bowl that can be dammed.
“Pumped storage needs a bowl that can be dammed.” And a lot of water.
Also, maybe I didn’t read attentively enough, but I’m missing the actual method for producing and transmitting electricity. How does simply letting a train descend a slope produce energy? There has to be some physical way. Perhaps it is self-evident, and my non-scientific mind doesn’t recognize it.
The electric motors used to drive the cars up the hill are reversed and used as generators on the way back down.
“but I’m missing the actual method for producing and transmitting electricity”
The purpose is to store energy rather than produce it.
In this case, ZIP.
So not to worry.
Interesting, but the key question seems unanswered… How many of these systems would be needed to store the required amounts of power?
why do you think it isn’t answered?
inconvenient truth
That’s what I’m wondering. How many trains rolling down the hill will it take to supply the required electricity shortfall for say 12 hours? I’m thinking they are going to need one heck of a large train yard. I used to be a railroad yardmaster at one time in my life so I find this very interesting.
Don’t you also need a long, steep, nearby hill, I mean mountain?
Put the whole system on a see-saw – then it can run uphill forever.
Looks like another use for a hockey stick – large slope to run the carriages down and a flat section at the bottom. As CO2 is such a miraculous element, it can probably raise carriages up the hill as well as raise temperatures.
Waste of time. A train is a class 100 load. 100 tons, Let’s say it goes up 500m (quite a lot actually). A bit of math and this is less than 20 kW-h. It could power a city block in the suburbs for an hour. On the scale of what is needed, this is butterfly sneeze. Even if the train was 10x heavier, or you went up higher, it isn’t even close to being enough. We need a million times this amount.
That was my reaction.
Suppose we wanted the same energy from pumped hydro. Suppose also that we had only a 100 m head. We’d need to pump 500 tons of water. That would be about 500 cubic meters. That’s a cube about twenty feet on a side. That’s not much. The average lake is way bigger than that. 🙂
The capacity of the average pumped hydro installation is measured in thousands of megawatt hours. link
Viable pumped hydro locations are not common but neither are twenty five km 2% grade rail lines.
They’ve used mined out mines for pumped storage.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviest_trains
It seems that you have gravely under-estimated the weight of trains. The Fortescue from Australia can store 8Mw-h by your estimate (40 KTons load).
I was thinking that as well. With that really heavy train, the city block would stay online for 16 days. Or 16 blocks for a day. Question is, as always – are you storing energy for peak load or for base load?
” A train is a class 100 load. 100 tons”
100 tons per wagon maybe, not per train .
“100 tons per wagon maybe, not per train .”
That’s correct. A loaded coal or grain car is 100+ tons.
IIRC correctly, the formula is Theoretical maximum Energy (in joules) = mass of train in kg x acceleration due to gravity in m/sec2 x height loss in metres. World record train weight is roughly 10,000 tons (https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/worlds_fastest_trains.html). Assume height drop is 1000 metres. Plugging in those numbers gives just under 100,000 megajoules or 28 megawatt-hours. I have no idea where their gigawatts come from unless they are talking thousands of trains. US wind generation looks like about 20 Gw/month (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States#Statistics) or maybe 700 megawatt hours per day. Roughly then a world-record weight train dropping 1000 metres vertical height has a potential energy yield = 1 hour of US wind energy production. Actual yield is less (round trip regeneration efficiency in EVs is ~ 70% (http://papers.sae.org/2013-01-2872/)
It isn’t going to time-shift renewable energy production but could in theory help with short term peak smoothing (the surge when a million people watching a soccer or baseball game make a coffee at half time.
” 20 Gw/month ” unit mix up. GWh/mo
” = 1 hour of US wind energy production.” Storage is needed for hours of production when there is not demand to avoid dumping or disconnection. 8 such hypothetical trains could store the totality of US overnight wind production. Even using more reasonable height drop , it seems ballpark workable.
greg – quite right: typo.
wuld you explain your second statement (8 such trains…)
…assuming ( big word) it is workable sometimes, what has been accomplished?
Now your conventional steady state producers can ramp up or down less often? This also means they sell less. ( become more expensive) So, are you simply part time replacing your steady state lowest cost ( before regulations added cost) producers with more expensive producers and at the same time further increasing the cost of your steady state producers?
It will only produce while in motion so if it takes 10 minutes to run downhill that is all you get. I bet it will take 3 times as long to get the train up the hill as it takes to get down.
Yeah, if you want hours of electricity from train generation, you are going to have to run a heck of a lot of trains because their time going downhill is short. One train right behind the other, for hours and hours. Meanwhile, if your wind and solar are not producing, how do you get your trains back to the top of the hill?
Try 100 tons per car.
I say “Rube”
You say, ..
Dear Lord…can’t we just burn something and be done with it………
Ha ha, excellent comment.
Anyway is this energy source going to work to provide power on the NASA Mars mission – could be tricky launching half a dozen old train and tram cars as well .
plenty of rocks available, they just need 3D printer to make the trains 😉
If they use depleted uranium as the freight, they might ( big might) make it competitive with the pumped hydro.
Low friction on rails and high energy density ( sepecific mass of the freight) might (might) do it .
The capital cost could be lover than pumped hydro significantly as well.
I just cannot see how it can be scaled up to any size of significance.
A GWhr(e) of storage? Yeah, show me the wares!
Marvelous idea actually — using excess, unsold, green intermittent power to run heavy trains uphill, and then running them back down to recover the power.
VERY much like “pumped hydro” — the question is what are the power losses involved.
Lots of old unused rail lines running up mountains.
The HUGE problem for energy storage is energy density and scaling. Power losses are less important, given that the power will only be going to waste anyway. And this proposal is likely to fail on both of these. Scale it up to any useful size and the costs become prohibitive, amongst other things…
Dodgy ==> Pumped hydro is used here in NY State — and has been for a long time. There are losses.
As far as physics is concerned, it doesn’t matter what you move uphill, you get the energy back when it is allowed to come back down. If one had a tall enough tower, you could crank a huge weight up with a rope and then let it come down again spinning a generator. The train idea is similar — run an electric train up and then run it down as a generator.
I would be concerned about all those overhead wires though…..
You could do it as third rail, larger conductor would have less resistance losses. Of course the overhead line is safer.
Mark ==> Yeah, and maybe some problems with snow cover etc — none insurmountable. Might have more acceptance than new pumped hydro — and re-purposing abandoned rail lines is a plus.
Additional information from the “All About ARES” tab on their website:
http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/santa-barbara-energy-storage-environmental-integrity
Maybe they can recommission those thousands of cabooses which are in storage and fill them with whatever, as they are already rail worthy… I saw a storage place in Lock Haven. PA with hundreds of them in storage there…:
https://www.google.com.mx/search?q=Lock+Haven.+PA+caboose+storage+pic&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjBmeic3e7VAhVV2GMKHTOYDMAQ_AUICigB&biw=1517&bih=708
I had a photo – probably a color slide of hundreds of them… I guess restaurants bought them up???
If this was practical idea methinks it would already be in use.
It’ll never replace Niagara Falls.
My biggest gripe. Niagara Falls has a pumped storage facility – water fills the reservoir at night and supplies peak power during the day. At least that was the theory. Now they don’t even max out the Falls direct power. They let the turbines idle (practically free) on windy days so they can pay wind operators the wholesale cost plus feed in tariff. So Niagara Falls doesn’t generate anything, we pay wind operators a subsidy, and then sell to the US at a discount because we have excess capacity. We have excess capacity partly because of lost employment due to high energy costs. (This is all on the Ontario Canada side)
Well, gee! It looked good on paper.
Don’t ya just think mining companies have been looking at these concepts for 50 years. But what would they know?
…and they have the advantage of bringing up empty cars.
Where is the this “excess” energy from solar, or wind being sent right now?
Here in Ontario we pay other jurisdictions to take it.
Ontario Power Generation is routinely told to spill water at Niagara Falls, to reduce the amount of hydroelectric power generated.
http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/2013/04/11/fraser-institutes-report-shows-green-energy-blows
Indeed, handicap your best player to make others appear adequate.
Not news. I wrote on this more than a year ago.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2016/05/gravity-grid-scale-storage-system-using.html
Yes, indeed, you did.
And you said that “This appears to be a viable solution to grid-scale energy storage.”. But without any of the scaling calculations required. I wonder why you did this?
So What? Like anyone reads your site.
Trains quit working if you don’t maintain them. It ain’t cheap. link
The rail line they run on, too. In fact, if that goes anywhere along the line, you are completely down. If it also involves the derailment of your cars, you are talking about several weeks, a bunch of heavy equipment, and a seven-figure check before you get back into service.
If you insist on doing gravity storage, and don’t have an economic place handy for hydro – build a set of vertical towers. More efficient, and one going down doesn’t put you out of business while it’s repaired.
“The rail line they run on, too. In fact, if that goes anywhere along the line, you are completely down. If it also involves the derailment of your cars, you are talking about several weeks, a bunch of heavy equipment, and a seven-figure check before you get back into service.”
Railroads are pretty efficient at cleaning up derailments. Their incentive is very high because they cannot afford to be shut down for long.
“If you insist on doing gravity storage, and don’t have an economic place handy for hydro – build a set of vertical towers.”
That might actually work, without decimating the countryside.
Like to Geosynchronous orbit, and elevator cars.
I’ve long thought linear induction motors, where you drop one full in orbit, while you have one on earth with cargo to go up.
But heck, you could use it for storage too!
Note that I was not the first by any means to propose this here (I hadn’t read down far enough in the comments). Something about great minds…
Well, yes and no.
From that link, it’s about $15 per train-mile to maintain the hardware (trains and track). That’s for a fully-crewed passenger and freight system, though, running at several times the speed of a “storage” train.
With a much-simpler system, mostly automated, you should be able to get the hardware maintenance costs down to about $5 per train-mile, which means (using a one-megawatt, thousand-ton system) about $20 to $50 per megawatt-hour for storage. Which puts it down near 2 cents to five cents per kilowatt-hour.
Note that the system itself is fairly cheap – rail cars can go a LONG way between major maintenance cycles when running at lower speeds, and if you buy used train cars and abandoned right-of-ways, the whole system price is pretty cheap to begin with.
Considering how cheap energy is in the first place, though, it’s not really attractive, economically.
The along came the skunk to the garden party, nuclear. Compact, dispatchable, no storage needed – and liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR) dispose of stored nuclear waste from legacy nuclear systems. But don’t spoil a fine garden party.
Name one (just one) LFTR in operation today.
We had one at Oak Ridge for decades, and China has a crash program (with our help) to build one in ten years.
“In 1973, the Nixon administration made a momentous decision that altered the course of civilian nuclear power: It fired the director of the renowned Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scuppering development of a reactor widely regarded as safer and superior to the complicated, inferior behemoths that define the global industry to this day.
Nixon banished a reactor that was virtually meltdown-proof, left comparatively little long-lived waste, made it more difficult to fashion a bomb from the waste, ran at friendlier atmospheric pressure instead of the potentially explosive pressurized environments of conventional reactors, and ran at much higher temperatures, making it more cost-effective as an electricity generator.”
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor/
Mark, can you name one solar or wind back up storage system which right now is capable of providing the power necessary to carry normal demands for a week in winter in the Northern Hemisphere when it’s heavily overcast and wind is dormant. This happens for periods in Germany every winter, which is why they are turning to burning a lot of coal.
“had” is past tense, so you acknowledge that there isn’t one operationg TODAY?
operating
And do you acknowledge that there are not and have not been any industrial-level back up power storage systems that would meet the power needs of say, Germany for a week in winter, without need for coal, natural gas, and hydroelectric support? The lack of a viable LFTR generation capacity was political, not practical, just as the various Rube Goldberg solar and wind back up systems are political, and are not practical until the crazy day when money is no longer an object.
I don’t have to acknowledge anything, because there is not a single LFTR in operation today. They tried them a long time ago, and they didn’t pan out.
https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/608712/a-thorium-salt-reactor-has-fired-up-for-the-first-time-in-four-decades/
As Ken Finney notes, there is one in operation today, and the Chinese will have industrial sized ones within 15 years. Is there a rail energy storage system you would like to show us in operation?
The main reason that there are no LFTR reactors in operation today is that they did not produce enriched weapons grade materials to build bombs with. They were actually found to degrade weapons grade materials to the point that they could not be used. Hence the claim that nuclear wastes could be disposed of using a LFTR. There were a number of LFTR test reactors built and operated but to upscale it to a commercial reactor needed the support of the Atomic Energy commission. At the time the Atomic Energy commission was looking for ways to make more weapons grade materials quickly. So they shutdown all of the LFTR’s and instead supported the development of the fast breeder liquid sodium cooled Plutonium reactors. The Fermi 1 outside of Detroit Michigan was an example of this misdirected focus. You should look for a copy of the book “WE Almost Lost Detroit” by John G. Fuller. it makes for interesting reading about what was going on at the Atomic Energy commission and why they went down the wrong road of development they did. While we are on the topic of Fast breeder sodium reactors maybe look up the SImi Valley California nuclear accident at the Rocket-dyne facility in 1959. The Atomic Energy commission kept this accident secret from the public until it was discovered in 1979 when some grad students who stumbled across some old files of the accident reports from the reactor meltdown in storage at a university. The Atomic Energy commissions mind set and priorities back in the 1960’s killed the development of the LFTR and today there are a number of scientists who are trying to revive this technology because it maybe a way to give us cheap reliable energy again.
majormike, your conspiratorial mind is delightful. But please note, there was never any thorium in the reactor at Oak Ridge. Not a bit. You have no clue what you are talking about.
A sisyphean idea.
That’s what the company should name the system.
Yes, like most things the ancient greeks had it covered.
And even more pertinent when you discover that Sisyphus’ father was Aeolus, the keeper of the winds.
A match made in heaven perhaps?
This looks to this old cynic like yet another distractor by the pro-CAGW crowd to try to fool a few more gullibles into thinking that there are practical ways to make useless, subsidised, non-dispatchable ‘renewable’ power appear not to be. Good luck with that.
Scenario: 50 cars, 263000 lbs gross weight each car (standard max weight for commercial rail lines) 1000 meter rise (possible in Spanish Fork Canyon in Utah hauling coal down to the power plant in Delta, UT) = storage of 59 GJ which sounds like a lot of energy until you convert it to MW-hrs. Delivery on a 2% slope at 50 MPH = a drop of 0.44 m/s = 26 MW delivery. I guess you could run several trains at a time up and down the tracks, but this is still in the ballpark of one or two gas turbines (the big boys from GE are 280 MW). They cost less and have a footprint measured in feet instead of miles.
In 1968, the main author of the proposed reform of the Czechoslovak socialist economy with a human face, Dr Ota Šik of Pilsen, found a mine and a coal power plant in the city of Ostrava such that the plant burned all the coal from the mine, and the mine consumed all the electricity produced by the power plant. A useful pair, indeed. 😉
https://motls.blogspot.com/2010/04/spain-produces-solar-energy-at-night.html?m=1
How bout this idea. Instead of using rail lines that take up lots of land, how bout just digging vertical wells, with a giant weight attached to cable that drops 3000 feet. Use the renewable energy to run a motor that lifts the weight to the top …. then when you ne d the energy, drop the weights, and turn the generator. May be a tad more costly to build, but would take up a heck of lot less space. Just imagine how many of these units you could make on a single acre of land.
You can get my contact info from Anthony to send me my royalty check …. err government subsidy check! 🙂
And we could make the weights out of recycled junk, …. addressing another environmental issue.
+10!
No, no, no!
Don’t drill. Build towers to suspend weights in sight off, oh, say, Hollywood or DC or Martha’s Vineyard or New York City and/or everywhere else the natives seem to be divorced from reality.
(I forgot Berkeley.)
We could actually use all of those dead windmills out there for the the weights. Kill two birds with one stone. Oh sorry there are not many birds left because of the windmills killing them off.
Come on, this is the 21 century; think space! Capture an asteroid (as huge a mass as you desire), bring it to say, within 10,000 miles of Earth in orbit, lassoed and held by a single nanotube carbon fiber filament. Store energy by reeling the asteroid in, get energy back by playing it out. But stay the heck away from the filament! Bonus: you get a secondary use for the filament – as a launch elevator cable for satellites. We could send Algore up to see if it snows in space.
I’ll bet the environmental impact statement on that would be interesting — changing the period of earth’s daily rotation. Suggest it and wait for all the studies which show (based on modeling) how changing the length of the day will cause mass extinctions, more severe weather, smaller fish, etc., etc.
Maybe you could combine the bird choppers with the weight droppers and get a two-fer one….