On the surface, this looks promising. OTOH, often when you look below the surface, things aren’t what they are advertised to be. A good example is Elon Musk’s solar battery boondoggle in Australia. Large mega-batteries are difficult to implement, and very expensive to build and maintain, they also require special hookups to the grid and a fair amount of landscape. They are also a single point of failure that could take down the entire grid if it fails to switch on when needed.
However, a distributed solar battery approach right at the solar cells might be far better strategy. From the University of Texas at Austin:
Solar Energy Storage Problem May be Solved in New Single-System Technology
Generating power from the sun isn’t the problem. The technology has been there for decades. Storing that power efficiently, however, has been a challenge. Until now.
AUSTIN, Texas — Generating power from the sun isn’t the problem. The technology has been there for decades. Storing that power efficiently, however, has been a challenge.
That’s why the Department of Energy has awarded $3 million to engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Austin to overcome the Achilles’ heel of the solar power story since Day One: how to store its energy.
To date, most major solar energy systems are bulky and expensive, with inefficient storage capacity. Energy coming from existing solar power systems must be housed in storage systems outside of the generators that create the power. In other words, two separate systems are required to ensure successful operation.
But experts from UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering have developed a way to integrate solar power generation and storage into one single system, effectively reducing the cost by 50 percent. The UT project will develop the next generation of utility-scale photovoltaic inverters, also referred to as modular, multifunction, multiport and medium-voltage utility-scale silicon carbide solar inverters.
Collectively, the combined technologies are known as an M4 Inverter – their main function being the conversion of the direct current output of solar panels to medium-voltage alternating current, which eliminates the need for a bulky and expensive low-frequency transformer.
Electrical and computer engineering professor Alex Huang, who directs the Semiconductor Power Electronics Center in the Cockrell School and works with the UT Center for Electromechanics, is the lead principal investigator for this DOE-funded project. He believes the M4 Inverter will create efficiencies in a variety of ways.
“Our solution to solar energy storage not only reduces capital costs, but it also reduces the operation cost through its multifunctional capabilities,” Huang said. “These functionalities will ensure the power grids of tomorrow can host a higher percentage of solar energy. By greatly reducing the impact of the intermittence of solar energy on the grid and providing grid-governing support, the M4 Inverter provides the same resilience as any fossil-fuel-powered grid.”
One such additional functionality is the ability to provide fast frequency control, which would prevent a solar-powered grid from experiencing blackouts on days when large cloud cover might obstruct solar farming.
To achieve the level of efficiency needed to convert the solar energy to the power grid, new silicon carbide power electronics switches will be used in the M4 Inverter. The need for a bulky 60-hertz transformer is also eliminated in the M4 Inverter to further increase the efficiency and to reduce the capital and installation cost. Construction of the system will be based on the modular building block concept that further reduces manufacturing costs and provides reliable operation through a power backup. The team will partner with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Toshiba International, Wolfspeed and Opal-RT, as well as Argonne National Lab.
The DOE awarded $20 million in funding for nine projects to advance early-stage solar power electronics technologies. The projects chosen were deemed critical to addressing solar photovoltaic reliability challenges, lowering the cost of installing and maintaining a photovoltaic solar energy system and achieving the DOE’s goal to cut in half the cost of electricity for a solar system by 2030.
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h/t to WUWT regular, Roger Sowell
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Solar and battery together make it a double boondoggle.
More proof that solar power technology isn’t ready for massive installations. This innovation made $100’s of billions of inverters obsolete.
WHAT??
The article is suppose to be about how they store energy (at night) to be competitive with Fossil Fuel power plants that remain up continuously. I understand the dynamics of low voltage switching to create a more functional interface to be transformed down the line and integrated into the grid…. but where was the battery…. all I read was… “ability to provide fast frequency control”…. what does that have to do with storing energy for when the sun doesn’t shine.
Can someone help me out. Did I miss something???
“The UT project will develop the next generation of … modular, multifunction, multiport and medium-voltage utility-scale silicon carbide solar inverters.” I know nothing about the subject of this article, but, judging by the description of the project, the product will not be competitive with fossil fueled energy sources without huge subsidies.
So, you have one system that simply accumulates energy. Where is the modulation and control of the accumulated energy if this is one system? Basically, a sunny day will be charging up a bomb, that could fail catastrophically at any time.
This is exactly why capacitor-based storage systems are dangerous. We can easily build electric cars with amazing amounts of energy storage, but capacitor energy can be releasable in an instant if there was a failure. Gasoline and diesel are available energy but only when mixed with air and ignited such that the energy release in a failure is simply a treatable fire. A capacitor failure would be equivalent to a low-yield non-nuclear event.
Another pie-in-the-sky PBI (partially baked idea).
Wait, this system does nothing in the way of storing energy, just converting it to 60-cycle AC? Wow, Who cares? The Sun sets and so does your life.
There is nothing in this article that begins to suggest how the energy is stored, other than in possible capacitor structures, in which case the danger is obvious.
To paraphrase a famous saying. Not only this press-release isn’t true, it isn’t even a lie.
Almost all Li-Ion systems, including all Li-Ion power tools, as well as the Tesla, use the standard 18650 cell, wired in series and parallel. A little known fact is that during the Li-Ion charging cycle, only 50% of the charging energy gets stored in the battery, while the other 50% is lost as heat. Another way is to say the storage efficiency is 50%. There are many ways to store energy changing from kenetic to static and back again that are more than 50% efficient. Makes one wonder why they are choosing such an expensive, yet low efficiency system.
The following is background for the technical-oriented readers: from the IEEE, the nuts and bolts of transformer inverters, paper from 2014.
Translation for the non-technical readers: The spark-chasers figured out a safe, and more economic way to send high-quality power from a solar photo-voltaic power plant into the grid.
“A Multilevel Medium-Voltage Inverter for Step-Up-Transformer-Less Grid Connection of Photovoltaic Power Plants” M. R. Islam et. al., IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics ( Volume: 4, Issue: 3, May 2014 )
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6777547/
Abstract: “Recently, medium (0.1-5 MW) and large (>5 MW) scale photovoltaic (PV) power plants have attracted great attention, where medium-voltage grid connection (typically 6-36 kV) is essential for efficient power transmission and distribution. A power frequency transformer operated at 50 or 60 Hz is generally used to step up the traditional inverter’s low output voltage (usually ≤400 V) to the medium-voltage level.
Because of the heavy weight and large size of the power frequency transformer, the PV inverter system can be expensive and complex for installation and maintenance. As an alternative approach to achieve a compact and lightweight direct grid connection, this paper proposes a three-phase medium-voltage PV inverter system. The 11-kV and 33-kV PV inverter systems are designed. A scaled down three-phase 1.2-kV test rig has been constructed to validate the proposed PV inverter. The experimental results are analyzed and discussed, taking into account the switching schemes and filter circuits. The experimental results demonstrate the excellent feature of the proposed PV inverter system.”