Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve been reading some folks’ claims about how batteries are the key to a bright green renewable future. Of course, we wouldn’t need batteries if we didn’t try to depend on unreliable, intermittent sources like solar and wind, but let’s set that question aside for the moment.
A number of ways of storing energy exist that allow us to generate electricity as needed. Batteries, pumped water storage, compressed air, electro-mechanical flywheel systems, electro-chemical “flow batteries”, all are in use in various locations. And there are “intermittent flow” systems, which although they are not storage, allow for greater generation at certain times … including Niagara Falls, where the flow over the falls is reduced at night so more power can be generated when it’s not masquerading as a tourist attraction. Not storage … but pretty cool nonetheless …
Figure 1. Niagara Falls, minus the water.
Setting Niagara aside, I thought I’d look at how much energy storage exists in the world. Here’s a list of all of the world’s energy storage systems, by type.
Figure 2. Global energy storage systems, with capacity in terawatt-hours.
I love science because I am constantly surprised. In this case, the surprises are how much bigger pumped hydro storage is than all the others. The sum of all other systems is about a twentieth of the pumped hydro storage.
The next surprise was where lithium ion batteries, the Tesla Powerwall style of batteries, fall on the list … second from the bottom.
Being curious, I thought I’d look at just the US storage systems. Figure 3 shows that result.
Figure 3. As in Figure 2, but for US energy storage systems, with capacity in terawatt-hours.
The US pretty much mirrors the rest of the planet. Mainly pumped hydro, not much lithium ion batteries.
Now that looks all impressive … but is it really? So I thought I’d compare the electrical energy storage shown in the figures above with the amount of electricity consumed in one single day. I started by looking at the globe as a whole in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Global energy storage system compared to global daily electricity consumption.
Hmmm … doesn’t look at that impressive compared to even one measly day’s electricity usage. For example, all of the lithium ion “Tesla-style” batteries in service would only supply the global electricity demand for … wait for it … two-hundredths of one second.
And once again, I looked at the corresponding US data as well, as shown below in Figure 5.
Figure 5. As in Figure 4, but for US energy storage system compared to US daily electricity consumption.
Proponents of solar and wind power will be glad to know that lithium ion batteries can power the US for about 50% longer than the global average … which is to say, they hold about three-hundredths of one second’s storage for the US, rather than two-hundredths of a second for the world.
Now, looking at this, you’d be tempted to think, wow, we could do it all with pumped hydro energy storage. But pumped hydro has some huge disadvantages:
• To do it you need the proper geographical setup, with hills, a water source, and a place to dam up a valley to make a storage lake.
• Such sites exist, but they are few and far between. And a number of countries have no such sites.
• Often, such sites have roads, towns, or other immovable things of value located where the proposed storage lake would go.
• Even if there are no towns or roads in the proposed location, in California, as in many other locations, it’s basically impossible to put in any new dams, because feelings. The ever-so-green liberals, the ones insisting on intermittent energy sources that require backup, don’t want us to drown some worms and make some squirrels and cute bunnies move to the next valley over to create the backup they demand—that would be krool to nature.
• Good sites are often very far from where the power is needed. You can put a conventional power plant, or even a Tesla-style battery, next to a city where the power need exists … but you generally can’t do that with pumped hydro. So you end up with very large transmission costs and transmission losses.
• Pumped hydro is not all that efficient. You only get back about 70%-80% of the energy that you put in …
• The best sites are far too often already in use.
Subject to those constraints, pumped hydro storage is the best of our to-date bad choices. Some new ones will probably be created, but likely few and far between.
So that’s the current state of play in the world of storing energy to generate electricity. Short version? We are a long, long way from batteries or other storage systems being able to hold and deliver enough energy to do anything larger than balance out short-term fluctuations in energy supply versus demand.
My best to all,
w.
Post Scriptum: As always, in the spirit of avoiding misunderstandings, I ask everyone to quote the exact words that you are discussing. That way we can all be clear on exactly what and who you are responding to.
You forgot another key point about pumped hydro. The places where it might be useful are mostly the American southwest and west, Kansas, Colorado, Texas, etc. All of those states have something else in common, water rights are a very big deal because there isnt a lot of water and there is a large demand for water. I just dont see anyone selling their water rights for pumped hydro.
Yep… Kansas is flat. No place for pumped Hydro. … oh, That, Too …
Flint Hills ….
😉
Flint Hills simply aren’t tall enough to make pressure. You would need a ton of low pressure water AND large turbine wheels to get a lot of power. Not enough water to do it.
people who think kansas is flat have never been to florida
people who think kansas is flat grew up in colorado
I had a layover in Wichita once.
Ambled out into the parking lot to stretch my legs, stood in the bed of a pick up, and I could see Colorado!
Kansas IS flat – spoken as a Floridian who has been to Kansas many times.
Just as flat as the ocean is with a strong breeze to a fresh gale blowing.
People from West Virginia think everywhere is flat.
‘The Oologah Dam is located at 36°25′19″N 95°40′49″W and is an earth-fill embankment type. Its maximum height is 137 ft (42 m) above the river bed and the embankment is 4,000 ft (1,219 m) long.
There are many river dame 1/10th that height generating an appreciable amount of electricity. There are also a large number of pumped storage reservoirs generating electricity with less than height.
Also you not only need to have a suitable place up the hill to construct the store lake, you need a big lake at the bottom of the hill to pump the water from.
In Western Massachusetts- there is a fine pumped storage facility. It pumps up the water from the Connecticut River. When built- there was a nuclear reactor nearby. The theory was that the excess energy from the reactor would pump up the water from the river at night. Of course the enviros managed to kill the reactor and now they’re trying to kill the pumped storage facility. Here in Mass. the enviros hate every form of energy- even wind and solar. Well, they like wind and solar in limited quantities- only where it won’t disturb anyone- but the state is tiny with over 6 million people so not many such places.
Joseph; Is that facility what they used to call “Bear Swamp” ?…as far as I know that is/was the only pumped storage facility in Massachusetts.
That is First Light’s Northfield Mountain pumped storage facility. It is currently undergoing a very lengthy federal relicensing process so they can continue to pump water out of the Connecticut River. My forestry work on the 1,500 acres surrounding the reservoir was put on hold until they get a new license. The non-native insect pest the hemlock wooly adelgid has caused major decline in most of the hemlock trees which are a major component of the forest. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back up on the mountain next year to continue the forest improvement work. Pumped storage is by far the best way to store energy but works best with nuclear power. Unfortunately Vermont Yankee was shut even though it still had 18 years left on its license. 600 great jobs were lost with salaries averaging $100,000/year!
As a ferc employee the situation with Northfield is basically true but most of the issue is the downstream erosion effects. Having said that, Northfield has many other attributes that make it a signing asset; provides spinning reserve, blackstart capability and grid stabilization. Renewables don’t have that and another reason why they are poor systems.
Sorry meant significant asset- auto correct error.
I believe the erosion is minor. One of the other concerns for people who want to see Northfield shutdown is the effect it has on fish populations which I believe is also minor. The problem for fish are the dams. I think a new fish ladder is going in at Turners Falls. Some people are calling for Northfield to build a lower reservoir so it would be a closed loop system and they wouldn’t have to pump water out of the CT River. But that will never happen – the cost would be too great and try getting the permits to build anything these days. They will get relicensed but I hope the process doesn’t drag on for years.
I should think the erosion issues could be solved- it’s not rocket science. I just read in the local paper that the local greenies are also trying to shut down several hydro power facilities on the CT River, including the Northfield pumped storage- most in VT and NH. The local greenies hate all fossil fuels, nuclear, biomass, hydro and any solar or wind that bothers anyone. But they demand that the state become net free ASAP.
https://www.recorder.com/my-turn-donlon-urffer-HydroRelicensing-40868020
Smith Mountain Lake pumped storage in southwest Virginia (Appalachian Power) serves the same purpose. Run water generating power during the day & switch around using power to pump water back up into the lake at night.
True about it fitting nicely with nuclear. Nuclear are best when steady state level is maintained so you’ll have extra at night. Kirk Sorenson was suggesting refill the aquifer at night but pumped hydro is a good way to use the extra. Aluminium processing is another. Night shift LOL.
Virginia’s Bath County Pumped Storage has a max capacity of 3,000 MW and 24,000 MWHrs of storage. It’s the largest in the US, if not the world.
Another issue with some pumped storage facilities is that they are not really designed to take advantage of storing energy from a renewable source via a transmission line. The Blenheim Gilboa facility in NY comes to mind in that regard.
And it is cold and it is dark. Not a likely place for solar.
well, personally, I hope it gets warmer- maybe another 2-3 C!
solar “farms” are popping up like mushrooms in MA- big forest industry firms with thousands of acres of land are rushing to cash in on the bonanza, now claiming they’re doing it to save the planet- they should manage their forests to grow wood and provide habitat- not capture photons
I can’t blame them for cashing in on the ‘craze. As long as voters keep subsidizing alternate energy, you can expect more companies will do this.
Do the business owners really care what business they are in?
Ever met one of those enviros who actually lives like they are trying to make the rest of us live?
Me neither.
I recall dear little Al Gore, bless his heart, claiming he was carbon neutral when he was flying his jet all around because he bought carbon offsets – whatever that is.
I wonder if it will wash off if you spill it on your shoe.
A Traveler
“Ever met one of those enviros who actually lives like they are trying to make the rest of us live?”
Not met, but I know of one: Ed Begley Jr.
But he’s the only one.
Good work Willis – I published this years ago:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/29/google-and-the-adjustment-of-inconvenient-viewpoints-especially-climate/#comment-2416577
A pumped storage systems is the only practical super-battery. During off-peak times when grid electricity demand is low, water is pumped from a reservoir downstream of a hydro dam to the upstream reservoir, such that it can be used again to generate power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
This is established technology, but it is rare to have a suitable site. For example, there are ZERO such sites in the Province of Alberta an area of 662,000 km2 – bigger than all of France, or [Germany + Italy] combined. {What WERE you idiots thinking when you started WW2?}
The problem is that most hydro dams only have a river downstream, and if you started pumping water from that river up-and-over-the-dam you would drain the river in minutes. You need a sizable lake downstream of the dam for pumped storage to be practical.
Another problem(s) with pumped storage is that very few of those have a storage capacity large enough for more than one day! Primarily they are used as peak power plants – where the economics of the cost of pumping the water up is offset by the high price the power can be sold for or not paid to others when you do not have a PS facility. Note they may be the cheapest form or storing electricity but they are far from being the cheapest way of making electricity.
Also they are not suitable whatsoever for recreation or fishing.
I seriously doubt that anyone even Anti-Environmentalists would want one of these reservoirs near them.
Those looking for more info — > fttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations
Rich – there are many such problems.
I started writing about the abject failure of grid-connected wind and solar power generation in 2002.
Wind and solar power do NOT contribute significant economic electric power to the grid. Both fail due to intermittency and diffusivity – they vary too much and take up too much land.
These are proven facts, yet trillions of dollars have been wasted globally on this green energy fraud.
I posted the following , probably circa 2010, for our idiot politicians and the mainstream media:
“WIND POWER: IT DOESN’T JUST BLOW – IT SUCKS!”
“SOLAR POWER: STICK IT WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE!”
Apparently that is still too complicated for most media and politicians.
As a Nuclear Engineer with an Electrical background I have over almost 50 years experience in the Commercial Electrical Utility sector. The BIGEST problem I see is that the Renewable Energy Advocates are pushing “Distributed Generation.” That is the ultimate Nightmare of the electrical distribution system.
Present electrical distribution systems are designed like spider webs [not as pretty though]. The Major power plants are at the center and the users are on one of the radius lines or radius connectors. The radius connectors are needed for reliability to get power when a radius line goes down. There will be a few lower capacity generator’s scattered around in a sort of node like pattern like you see on telecommunication, Internet, WAN or LAN diagrams. Each of these generators will be feeding a substation.
Each of the substations are PROTECTING the ENTIRE Spider Web. they are designed for protecting the flow of electricity from the main baseload source OUTWARDS to the customers. Critical in their design are Reverse Current Trips. A RCT will trip a breaker when the electricity is heading toward the center of the web rather than outward as it should be.
You may ask “What causes power to go toward the center, there is nothing out here to generate it? Ah, but there is. When there is an instantaneous loss of generating capability, every electric motor on the grid is still rotating. The rotating motors then become a generator and produce electricity. Thus the need to have a reverse current trip.
A RCT is also needed if there is a rapid almost instantaneous load applied near the center of the Spider Web. This would happen if/when a very large motor is started and the Utility Dispatcher is not aware of the starting of the large load. I know from personal experience that this causes havoc.
As a young Startup Engineer at the Nuclear power Plant I was responsible for testing the various motors. Two of the motors I had to test were the Main Feed Water Pump Motors. While testing these 10,000 HP motors I forgot to call the Dispatcher and inform him that I was going to start the motor. Needles to say the starting of this motor placed a very large, unexpected load on the local grid causing power to be drawn from any available source. This immediately activated the RCT feeding the substation feeding the plant. The lights went out over half of the county. I immediately headed for a phone and dialed the Dispatcher and informed him I forgot to tell him. It took months to get rid of the nickname the plant gave me.
Point of this story is that it is going to be near impossible to feed electricity from 50 – 100 Wind turbines and hundreds of rooftop solar panels and protect the grid. A Smart Grid will not work. You will need a Genius Grid of Einstein capabilities.
Thanks, Rich. The beauty of WUWT is that no matter what the subject might be, there’s usually someone like you who has a lifetime of experience in the area in question. And for me, experience trumps theory every time … you have my appreciation for a very important insight into the nature of the grid.
w.
Thank you Rich – an excellent, informative post.
How is it that our idiot politicians don’t listen to experts like you?
I wrote years ago that one day we will have a huge grid failure due to their wind-and-solar nonsense, right in the middle of a very cold winter. The death toll will be significant.
Since I am blessed to live on beautiful Smith Mountain Lake I will – per your advice – tell all the fisherman and recreational boaters that they are not to utilize or enjoy this Jewel of The Blue Ridge. There will be a lot of disappointed people.
Have always loved the Blue Mountain area and wish I was living there. The Smith Mountain Lake/Leesville Lake PSF is probably one of the better designed lakes for reactional use. Smith Mountain Lake only has a 2 foot change in water level to achieve the desired stored energy capacity. Typically, PS lakes have a much higher water level change. Whereas Leesville Lake increases/decreases by thirteen (13) feet. Have not seen either lake, however, I seriously doubt that Leesville Like is an “Ideal” recreationally Lake. I lived near a storage lake in Up State NY. The river was not restricted to public access, but did have several warning sirens along the outlet river. These were use to inform people to get away from, out of, the river as they are discharging water. While Trout fishing with my boys, we just made it to my Jeep, with water above our ankles after hearing these sirens.
Serious consideration has been given to get the height difference between the upper and lower reservoirs by using abandoned deep mines. I don’t work on designing those, but my opinion is they are less controlled environments than traditional reservoirs.
All of those states have something else in common, water rights are a very big deal because there isnt a lot of water
So? Pumped hydro just uses the same lakeful over and over, wasting energy generated elsewhere on the inefficiency of the pumps and the hydraulic friction of the pipes. It’s not like pumped hydro disposes of millions of gallons per day .
Ever heard of evaporation?
… and rainfall.
Guess what, you lose a lot more by evaporation and absorption than you gain by rainfall. Since they wont be able to have any streams or rivers running into them. And, as noted above, no one is going to be selling their water rights to the windmills. Water rights are a big deal as soon as you get west of Missouri, or south of Oklahoma.
“Guess what, you lose a lot more by evaporation and absorption than you gain by rainfall.”
Guess what, I was just adding to what you said, not contradicting.
That’s about as sensible as installing a pool, then waiting for the rain to fill it. In an arid state, no less.
You really need to bone up on water rights. Once rain falls on a property, it is owned by the water rights owner of that property.
Or do you expect the pumped water system to purchase a hundred times the land for the reservoir so they can collect enough water to fill it?
“Once rain falls on a property, it is owned by the water rights owner of that property.”
Not necessarily as some jurisdictions will not allow a rain barrel or underground tank to capture what falls on your roof.
Called riparian rights.
Same goes with diverting the natural flow of rain.
But, gubmints can do what ever they want.
“Once rain falls on a property, it is owned by the water rights owner of that property.”
From what I’ve been told, not in Oregon or Colorado. You can be fined for installing a rain barrel under your downspout.
52 years ago I was the junior engineer in the startup crew for a pumped storage plant. We figured that every inch of rain gave us about 5MWH of free energy. Acording to NOAA, the average annual rainfall for that location gave us about 240MWH a year. It would also replace about 320MWH of pumping energy per year for a total of 560MWH, about 1-1/3 hours of full power output.
A typical windmill (2MW and .3 cf guessed) would have to ‘run’ about 400 hours to generate 240MWH.
The evaporation surface was increased by the upper reservoir surface area of approximately 3/4 sq mile IIRC. The water surface of the lower reservoir didn’t change when the plant was constructed so its evaporation didn’t change.
Last I heard, the plant is still in operation. The original total storage was figured to be 4200MWH. I don’t know what it is today since the pump/turbines were changed out about 30 years ago.
This isn’t that hard. I thought that even a half-wit can figure it out, but apparently not. Create a second lake uphill to hold most of the contents of the downhill lake and you’ve just increased the amount of surface area for evaporation by a large factor. The total amount of water collected as rainfall doesn’t increase as the area of the upper lake is in the watershed of the lower lake anyway. Evaporation is a big problem, especially in dry, sunny climates, you know, where they put solar. You could have looked this up.
Isn’t the solution lots of shiny ping pong balls?
Why? To increase evaporative surface?
The floating balls dramatically reduce evaporation because the wind velocity at the surface is reduced to zero and the sun doesn’t hit the water much.
In Western states where water is in short supply, they can’t afford to not have the water to use for a Hydo-Battery. They need it to drink, irrigate crops, water livestock, etc.
Only when there is a surplus (rare) can it be spared to use energy to pump it from a lower lake into some higher lake to turn a turbine to get less energy.
Better to build a fossil fuel or nuclear plant for power and store the water for what water is really needed for, life.
The purpose of pumped storage is to make energy from ‘cheap’ generation available when energy demand is present. Having lots of cheap or green energy available when there is no demand does no good. It allows the cheap or green energy to displace the ‘expensive’ or ‘dirty’ energy. In effect it increases the capacity factor of base load generation.
Exactly. Pumped storage overall uses some power, but saves money by making the other generation more efficient.
Pumped storage does not consume water. Water rights are granted in terms of volumetric flow rates (cubic feet per second, or acre-ft per year), subject to availability and seniority. Pumped hydro therefore does not entail or require transfer of water rights. Pumped storage only affects the timing of water releases that are then consumed by entitled water rights owners.
” Pumped storage only affects the timing of water releases that are then consumed by entitled water rights owners.” … but that is the point, water rights owners don’t want to be told that they have to wait for their water until it’s convenient for the utility to turn it into electricity. They don’t want to give up any of their water waiting while the resouvoir fills up.
Timing is everything with water availability. Our local reservoir is drained each summer to f ill U. S. reservoirs located downstream. Aside from all the other horrors associated with reservoirs like dust storms, biologically depleted waterways and the destruction of formerly beautiful and productive littoral zones, the much ballyhooed recreational opportunities of full reservoirs are of little appeal when your ass is freezing in December. . Water reservoirs are like windfarms, another example of the tyranny of the urban majority over the sparsely populated countryside. We could have built ten natural gas power plants in BC with ten times the capacity and 1/10th the environmental footprint of the Site C dam but the urban wieners are all about virtue signalling and not really too concerned about destroying anything in the countryside as long as that destruction doesn’t affect their shopping opportunities
Right On!
Site C will be $16 Billion for a 1104 MW installed capacity, that has a plant factor of 54%, and a measly head of 150 feet. So 575 MW annual average output for what will be $20 Billion when the Treaty 8 court case is resolved, and accounting for escalating inflation since won’t be completed until 2026 now.
Probably the most costly hydroelectric infrastructure ever built on the planet, that will flood a fair bit of Class 1 farmland and requires new bridges and all kinds of extra expenses. Could have built a 1 GW nat gas plant closer to where the electricity is required for $2 Billion that ran at a 85% capacity factor. This was criminal what happened with Site C.
And this after mothballing the refurbished 1 GW Nat gas Burrard Generating Station which is near Vancouver, and shuttered in 2016 after extensive upgrades. Which they used to justify having to build Site C in the first place. Doesn’t get much stupider than this.
Also consider how much evaporation there is per Acre.
All that you pumped up there did not come tumbling down.
If you do not have a back up source of power, you will be shutting down the pumps when the plant has to be refueled or a maintenance outage is needed.
And what are you going to use as energy to pump the water up?
Best bet is nuclear, so why not just build a lot of nuclear plants to begin with?
An additional savings to ditching storage, pumped or otherwise, is the loss associated with every step in the process.
I encourage the reader to seek out Ben Franklins little essay on the Striking Sun Dial.
https://www.drjkoch.org/Misc/Franklin.pdf P 34
It was of great cost but little benefit.
A Traveler
Willis makes the point clear, pumped hydro dominates. I was surprised at just how dominant it is. Then we are shown the paltry contribution from Li batteries. Yet these Li batteries are routinely touted as the super cure for all our problems and woes.
Now the curious question.
Is there enough Lithium on the planet to make batteries which would match the current pumped hydro capacity?
Curiouser and curiouser!, Cried Alice.
how many decades would it require to make enough batteries, even assuming the raw materials to be easily available?
After 10 to 15 years, a substantial fraction of your manufacturing has to go to replacing the batteries that have worn out.
PragerU has a video that claims that the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada would need 500 years to produce enough batteries to be able to back up the US grid for one day. Of course, the Gigafactory would have to shift over to replacing burnt-out and degraded batteries in about 20 years so it would actually NEVER be able to do that. Think maybe Biden and his care-givers have a clue? … well you know the thing.
Is the Nevada Gigafactory ANY closer to being powered directly by renewables and not by carbon offset accounting gimmicks (which won’t be available once we really transition to a renewable utopia)? And forget about the Buffalo NY Gigafactory.
You can’t fix stupid. Or those math-challenged Dem idiots.
Short answer, no. Easier question: how about just for EVs? Short answer, still no.
My neighbour who works for Norwegian hydrogen development company said for battery powered vehicles “It’s a false start, hydrogen fuel cell are the solution in my mind. Just need a very large green energy source to power the equipment to break the hydrogen out of water. The process is a 80% energy loss.”
I just heard that again this AM on the Bloomberg business channel no less. After they admit that the EV with the Li-On battery has the same ‘carbon’ footprint of a similar sized ICE vehicle for its life history from resources to recycling. Yet they fail too mention that just the electricity electrolysis method roundtrip is only 60% efficient and even less if calculating the losses inherent in solar/wind. And then the losses on the fool cell car, and that makes it even less efficient for the initial energy input.
History will tell, but I doubt the hydrogen fuel cell will dominate in the future. Maybe a smallish gasoline fuel cell, to work in tandem with a fuel efficient Atkinson cycle Hybrid might make sense, if they can be produced cheaply enough. I just priced out a 400 watt propane fuel this Am, which also provides 1800 watts thermal heat, and they want $30,000 for a 400 watt fool cell.
Fool cell?
Was that intentional?
That’s what Elon Musk calls them…he must think they are a threat to Li-On. A cheap natural gas fuel cell high make sense for a home, especially if it could make full use of the waste heat for home heating and A/C plus refrigeration. No battery required.
There is virtually no “waste heat” from a fuel cell.
Not true. See essay Hydrogen Hype,in ebook Blowing Smoke. For several different types, the thermal efficiencies are referenced.
Unfortunately waste heat is the reason we dont already use ‘fool cells’.
They get very hot deliveribg high power
Super capacitors eliminate the need for batteries at all. And they can be charged in seconds, and millions of times to boot. The coming thing is ceramic supercaps, about 1/25th of the weight and a fraction of the cost of a comparable Li-Ion per stored KWH.
“Super capacitors”
Otherwise known as “bombs”. Catastrophic failure of one of these would be, well, catastrophic. If you had this in your garage, you could kiss a good part of your house goodbye. You’d need to put it in an explosives storage magazine with earth-berm walls and a blow-off roof.
“Super capacitors eliminate…”
See my comment about catastrophic failure modes.
Nope – you’re completely wrong. Bad data
Well then, tell me then why bad my data is bad and why I am completely wrong? BTW…Fuel cells can operate at higher efficiencies than combustion engines, and can convert the chemical energy in the fuel to electrical energy with efficiencies of up to 60%. Where do you think the other 40% losses go, especially when there ain’t a whole lot of moving parts in a fuel cell, not that it matters as it all winds up as heat?
https://thehydrogenskeptics.blogspot.com/2021/03/confessions-of-former-hydrogenist.html?m=1
Consider also, if hydrogen fuel cells are used, the cars will always be dripping water on to the pavement. In the Summer, that will contribute to slick roadways and increased humidity and heat index. In Winter, it will replace all the amusement park/carnival bumper-car rides as people try to drive on ice. Invest in road salt!
You have it exactly backwards. The electrical energy input to electrical energy output via hydrolysis is 80% efficient, or only a 20% loss end to end. That is vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines that are indeed only about 20% efficient end to end at the wheels.
Apples to oranges. First you give a high efficiency for electrolysis at 80% end to end. Your words…whatever end to end means as if it means at the wheels as per your next sentence. And then you say an ICE engine is only 20% efficient end to end at the wheels. My brand new RAV4 Prime 2.5 ICE Atkinson engine in a hybrid is 41% efficient on the engine and wind up recovering some of that energy in the hybrid ‘braking’ when stopping or going down a hill. Probably approaching the practical limits of ICE efficiency with energy recovery from regenerative braking. Everything has losses, which usually shows up as heat.
Don’t put the hydrogen into an ICE. Waste of energy. Use a fuel cell to generate electricity directly. It doesn’t have to be used for transportation. Your RAV would be ~50% efficient if you had supercaps instead of batteries.
My RAV4 Prime 2.5L ICE burns gasoline, not hydrogen, although Toyota does make a hydrogen fuel cell car now. Will be interesting to see how that sells. The ceramic super capacitor sounds very interesting. Perhaps that will be a breakthrough, if it can deliver major amps continuously for hours such as the Li-On currently does. The Star Trek phaser must have been a super capacitor powered by a nuclear pellet. I can see it some day…in a couple hundred years.
Li is very much more abundant than what one surmises from existing ops and their resources. Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec all have large and small significant hard rock resources and big potential for more.
20yrs ago there were 5 or 6 very long time producers in the world for the relatively small chemical/ceramic demand. When the electric car hype came along, inside of a few years, there were 400 serious projects scattered over 5 continents (exploration geologists, particularly Canadian and Australian are a remarkable lot!).
The world’s largest are not yet in production. Manono and Kitolo in former Katanga, Congo have multi-billion tonnes of high grade lithium ore. The surface was mined for tin (Sn) for 50yrs and the lithium was discarded in tailings that comprises a few hundred million tonnes – the piles are a 10 km range of hills that are the region’s topographic highs.
Nevertheless, Tony, your thoughts seem on target when you consider competition for lithium from 100s of millions of E-cars envisioned.
Re the tailings, a Canadian company that holds them is evaluating large scale processing of them at the present time.
Similarly, the US has reserves in waste rock and in-place in New England and the Black Hills of SD, to mention just a couple. The question is, how is it beneficiated? Is there a flotation reagent that can separate the lithium silicates and phosphates from quartz and feldspar?
Clyde, an ingenious gravity tech known as dense media separation (DMS) can make
a concentrate of spodumene comprised of 75% spodumene. The dense media is a mix of water and ferrosilicon and there are a couple of different mechanical types, but basically quartz and feldspar float in the liquid and spodumene sinks. Moreover this can be done with coarse feed up to an inch 2.5mm and minimum, 0.5mm. The screened undersize can be concentrated by flotation using a fatty acid type collector.
Treatment costs in DMS are under a dollar a tonne. 50-60% recovery from ore into conc. is typical. Crushed ore with with very coarse spodumene is amenable to re-crushing of a rich “middling” to be repassed through the DMS to scalp off another 25%.
There seems no oversize limit. A DMS for ore sorting (a drewboy) can separate pegmatite from basaltic or amphibolitic contact rock up to 18″. DMS is also used for cleaning shale from coal
Thank you for the info.
Bolivia and Argentina also have vast resources of Lithium salts. They could do very well for their countries if they manage that resource correctly. But their politics are sort of all mixed up with socialistic and corruption policies that may see that delayed.
The Bolivian one is the world’s largest Li-brine. It is problematical chemically (very high in Mg), and it receives more rain that dilutes it. One could pipeline it to the Altoplano of Chile for solar evaporation, probably to produce a double salt of Li-Mg choride that could be shipped to a dirt cheap source of limestone for further processing.
You’re missing the point: read again, “Hmmm … doesn’t look that impressive compared to even one measly day’s electricity usage. For example, all of the lithium ion “Tesla-style” batteries in service would only supply the global electricity demand for … wait for it … two-hundredths of one second.” (I didn’t verify the math, but on the face of it that sounds reasonable).
Do you envision utility level lithium battery storage someday being enough for a full one second of storage? What about a functional 6 hours of storage? You better hope not if you’re paying your own power bill.
It has been estimated that there will be 2 billion cars around the world by 2050 and then there are all the LGV and HGV fleets.
Imagine the enormous fires in storage battery farms, impossible to put out.
But then how do you dispose of kilotons of lead-acid batteries, if not mega?
You don’t “dispose” of lead acid batteries. You recycle them. Recover and refine the acid. Melt down the lead and recast it. There’s a reason the auto parts store charges a “core” charge if you don’t bring back the old battery – it’s worth money for the metal and acid therein.
Happen to know the actual data on PbA. 96% recycled world wide. The 4% isn’t in the US, where the recycle number is over 99%.
Yep. been there. ‘Dont park there’ ‘why not’ ‘that’s sulphuric acid dripping from that tower’
The lead wasnt melted down separately, it was simply added to the ore that was being smelted
The International Energy Agency calculated that the needs for “energy transition minerals” such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metal would rise by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions
Also, what about disposal and recycle of such batteries? What is the energy impact of that? Enormous! Also what about the fact that these batteries are tending to fail much more prematurely than expected, does any one factor that in? Just asking for a friend.
Lithium is not a rare metal and the UK, Portugal and Germany, for example, have areas with great potential for lithium sourcing from brines and hardrock sources. The problem is the amount of mining that would be necessary and the inevitable NIMBYism.
“ Pumped hydro is not all that efficient. You only get back about 70%-80% of the energy that you put in …” that seems fairly efficient to me, but it is a long time since I did energy efficiency in physics !
As far as I am aware there’s one such system in Wales, I don’t think we have any in England and likewise for Scotland.
I believe there is pumped hydro at Loch Ness.
The UK has 5 major pumped storage facilities, as far as I’m aware. All in Scotland or Wales.
1. Dinorwig Power Station: 1,728MW2 Ben Cruachan Power Station: 440MW3. Ffestiniog Power Station: 360MW4. Foyers Power Station: 300MW5. Sloy Power Station: 160MW
In December 2020 the Scottish government approved the construction of the first new one in about 30 years.
The Coire Glas project, Initially approved for a 600MW scheme in December 2013, revised plans were submitted in April 2018 to the Scottish Government for an up-to-1500MW scheme. The changes were designed to maximize the potential of the site and help the UK in its transition to a net zero energy system by 2050.
Suitable locations in England would be in the Lake District, which would never be allowed on the grounds outlined by Willis, Northumbria where they’ve only just got over the building of the Keilder reservoir in 1982. South West England has the same problems as The Lake District.
In Switzerland the have hydro storage, Austria… no idera.
There are 2 in Wales (Dinorwig & Ffestiniog) and 2 in Scotland (Cruachan and Foyers), with plans for at least a couple more.
Dinorwig is so amazing, both from a visual and engineering perspective, it has a great visitor centre and offers tours. It is powerful enough to reboot the whole UK grid. From a standstill it can generate full output in 75 seconds. Spun up ready to run, 16 seconds !
It’s a very long way from the centres of population where the demand exists. Line losses?
Nothing in the UK is very far from population centres.
In Australia, on the other hand, pretty much everything is.
All depends what you consider a long distance I suppose.
Can’t speak for the Welsh facilities but the Ben Cruachan and Coire Glas are a long way from London and not that close to Scottish population centres in the Central Lowlands. Sloy is about an hour’s drive from Glasgow.
Then see how much the Beauly – Denny connector cost to join wind generation to the grid, about a billion £
Not really. Its only 50 miles from Liverpool, 80 from Manchester, 100 from Birmingham.
How can Dinorwig reboot the whole grid with less than 1.8GW? That’s like only 2 or 3 reactors. How long can it provide that before the water is too low?
Black start is a chain reaction. The grid frequency has to be held stable as other plant comes on line, then the new plant begins to take up the stabilising effects, and more come back.
I don’t have the numbers for how long a UK black start would take, but Dinorwig can dump full output for around 6 hours IIRC.
The Cruachan pumped storage hydro plant above Loch Awe in the Scottish highlands was one of the first in the world, built in the late 1950s and has been producing electricity since the early 1960s. It has a capacity of ~7GWh. But, as Willis points out, you can’t just build these things everywhere.
Storing water to return electricity.
Does it actually “produce” any energy? i.e., is the upper lake fed by streams to allow the system to actually produce electricity?
Is all the energy first placed into the pumped hydro system by electrical power from somewhere else?
Not a big deal, but climate crazies don’t know that batteries just store power first produced elsewhere.
Drake,
You pump the water from the lower level to the higher level when there is a surplus of power, for instance during the night when you have a surplus of, for instance, nuclear power, and then reverse the flow when you need it during the day; the pumps then become generators. The upper level doesn’t need feeder rivers. So the answer to the question in your third sentence is yes.
The lake doesn’t need feeder creeks but the pumps do! After taking for farming ain’t much left.
Loch Awe, the”feeder” for Cruachan is quite large. catchment 840 km2 (320 sq mi), length 41 km (25 mi), volume 1.2 km3 (0.29 cu mi) shore length 129 km (80 mi).
It’s also very scenic, the Pass of Brander is quite spectactular and the scene of an early victory for Robert Bruce (1308)
Pacific Gas & Electric has a station near Jackson, adjacent to the Mokelumne River. They have a storage reservoir above the river that is recharged from upstream, and then put the water back in the river, which quickly ends up in another reservoir on the river. Consequently, there is a section of the river that has abnormally low flows in the Summer, and a section for a few miles on the river that has rapid changes in speed and depth, and is unusually cold for that area. However, the crayfish seem to like it.
you need feeder streams to replenish evaporative losses – some pumped hydro are ordinary hydro where the upper reservoirs is also replensheed by pumping
That’s the point, the pumped storage is storage not generation. The inconvenient and unreliable output from wind and solar is used to pump water into the upper resouvoir, ready to generate power when it’s actually needed. All the claims that wind and solar are inexpensive are bogus since expensive storage is needed to make a valid comparison with ready when you want it fossil or nuclear power.
Phil Rae –
I thought I remembered reading in an article of pumped storage in “Mechanical Engineering” (the magazine of the ASME) that pumped storage went back to the turn of the twentieth century. Here’s a quote from an ASCE online article:
See:
Rocky River Pumped Storage Hydraulic Plant | ASCE
Minor correction: The Rocky River project is in New Milford, CT. Milford, CT is on the coast…
My grandparents bought land near New Milford hoping it would become lakefront property when the project was completed. Their property did reach the lake – but it took a nice walk along a dirt road to get past the swampy part.
Good memories.
Nice facility at Rocky River, have inspected it many times over my career. It actually functions as a ‘seasonal pumped storage’ in that it pumps water up from the Housatonic in the spring to fill candlewood lake and then releases the water over the season until it reaches it low point in fall. The winter shows and spring rains also help to fill the lake as well.
old engineer……..
Yes, there were numerous pumped storage facilities built in the early 20th century. Cruachan was one of the first using reversible pumps that also serve as generators. Sorry for not being clear on that.
Dinorwic, the Electric Mountain. You can see its output on Gridwatch Templar. It’s purpose is to cold start the Grid if there is a catastrophic failure.
If there was any sense in the UK constitution then the engineers who have managed to keep the Grid working in spite of the politicians would be in the House of Lords.
JF
As a very very young engineer, I grew up in the NW of the UK, and the Manchester centre of the Institution of Electrical Engineers was full of the guys who specified it, designed and built it. I heard some great war stories. They had major issues with the design of the alternators, and had a couple of goes at it to make it work right. One engineer was tasked with laying a very expensive (then) fibre optic cable in the floor, only for a contractor to cut it into pieces a week later.
Many years later, my family were in Bangor, Wales with my eldest son for an archery event, and I was tasked with keeping little brother busy, so I took him to Dinorwig. At 6 years old, he was pretty interested in pressing the buttons in the visitor’s centre, and was well behaved during the tour of the plant. What blew his mind though was standing on the top of one of the turbines when a demand came in, and the system turned on. I think that’s when a career decision was made.
He graduated as a civil engineer last month 🙂 New Mexico Tech.
There are lots of fun stories about the UK grid, or more precisely, people working on it. I was told a story, which I have reason to believe is true, by one of my lecturers in Electrical Engineering (this was 50 years ago…). His story was as an apprentice, he worked on the installation of a new generator to expand capacity in an existing station. The day came to fire up the new machinery.
In those days, getting a new generator running at the right speed and in-phase with the grid was achieved by connecting bulbs between the generator output and the grid. the bulbs would get brighter the further out of phase, and go out when in phase.
When in phase, the generator was connected to the grid and that kept it locked in sync.
Done properly, there would be three bulbs, one for each phase. However, the chief engineer insisted only one was really required, because if one phase was in sync, the others had to be.
They spun up the generator, carefully adjusted the speed and phase and flipped the switch to close the huge contactors connecting the generator to the grid.
That was the point at which they discovered that two of the phases were reversed.
The generator was fixed in place by 6″ diameter bolts.
The bolts ripped out of the concrete base, and the generator left the generator shed via the roof.
I’ve heard similar stories. I was one of the last generation (no pun intended) of Electrical AND Electronic engineers from Leeds (1985) when we had the run of the motor laboratories and were taught all about synchronising machines – and with light bulbs too ! We were all expected to break sync too, with a couple of lab techs standing by the machine’s breakers, ready to catch it.
For those not in a state of reverie at this point, if a generator breaks sync with the grid, there is nothing stopping it accelerating uncontrollably, if its still being supplied with energy.
Congratulations to him from an old NMT graduate (Chemistry, 1970).
Australia has identified 22,000 potential sites for pumped hydro with 67 TWh storage potential. https://www.arena.gov.au/assets/2018/10/ANU-STORES-An-Atlas-of-Pumped-Hydro-Energy-Storage-The-Complete-Atlas.pdf#:~:text=Australia%20has%20many%20potential%20sites%20for%20pumped%20hydro,potential%20between%201%20and%20200%20Gigawatt%20hours%20%28GWh%29.
And how many of them are not culturally or environmentally significant?
Australia has the ABC and The Greens, remember and none of them are going to ever let science or engineering get in the way of a good cardboard sign and a screaming match.
True, David … identified.
And if we stored compressed air in ballons under the oceans, there are millions of TWh of storage potential identified …
Get back to us when either of those becomes a reality … because until then, it’s just more green dreams.
As a comparison point, the last pumped storage built in Australia was 40 years ago …
w
The theory, as I understand it at least, is that during the day when demand is high you let the water flow and sell the power.
Then at night when demand and hence price of electricity is lower, you use the power to pump the water back up hill again.
With a good excel sheet you can do this and still make a profit, but in some ways it is the same concept as using flood lights on solar panels. If the running cost of the flood lights is less the the sell price of the solar, then you come out in front… but… not really the actual spirit of ‘renewable’ solar if we were all honest with each other.
Remember it only really works as long as the day/night price difference is in your favour. If for any reason everyone decided to Build Back Better(tm) by working from home at night and sitting in energy isolation during the day – or some other convoluted situation that exists only for the example – then the system would fall over.
Price. Drives a lot of things in the real world.
In the UK, Dinorwic and Ffestiniog were built at a time when we were expecting an all nuclear grid. Nuclear reactors make the most money when they are continuously generating, because the cost is all in the construction, not in the fuel.
Dinorwic saved a whole nuclear power station fron needing to be built, simply to cover the evening peak when everbody switched on the TV and settled down to watch ‘Coronation Street’
I mention this to show that short term storage is profitable and effective in the absence of any renewable energy. All thermal plant takes time to come on line and is slow to respond to large demand changes. [Pumped] hydro complements it really well.
As far as suitable sites go, although one prefers fresh water, enclosin e.g. a bay, loch, or a fjord, with a concrete wall, and pumping all the seawater out, is another possibility.
Unfortunately the efficiency goes down with the head, IIRC, so whilst the capacity would be there, the efficiency would not match mountain based hydro.
As with all things – like interconnectors – the market if left alone works out cost income ratios.
(I was always amused to discover that undersea interconnectors take money for transferring electricity both ways, at the same time.The operators take fees to transfer electricity in both directions, and only need to actually transfer the balance).
Given current or expanding populations, and a maintenance of current life styles, the future can be predicted quite accurately.
Two in wales and at least two in scotland
Thank you Willis for highlighting very nicely the scale of the storage problem.
Even if the Musk fans are right and Elon produces some amazing battery that hold tens times more energy, charges 10 times faster and can be made for one tenth of the cost, it won’t even make a dent in the problem when the sun ain’t shining and the wind ain’t blowing.
Would you care to compute the number of TWh currently stored in the seawater deuterium? 🙂
0.0 milliwatt-centuries if you’re referring to fusion power.
Compute first the energy in the 4 billion tonnes of naturally radioactive seawater uranium.
Imagine the furore if we said ‘we are going to dump 4 bn tonnes of nuclear waste in the sea’.
The late Dr David Mackay, did asll tehse sums and the answers are on the website and in his book ‘without the hot air’.
Fossil fuel will last at best another couple of hundred years. Fission with breeders and fuel recycling, around 10,000
“We are a long, long way from batteries or other storage systems being able to hold and deliver enough energy to do anything larger than balance out short-term fluctuations in energy supply versus demand.”
I’m not clear what you mean by short-term fluctuations. Are you saying those were bad decisions to bid solar plus storage in the Phoenix area for the purpose of adding two hours of additional power after sundown? Shouldn’t the decision be based on marginal project cost benefit analysis and not macro issues?
Absolutely. And if we did that there would be no solar panels or windmills at all.
Although this observation is part of your first paragraph Willis, I reckon it is actually the bottom line on this whole matter.
The electricity could come from clean nuclear, and we’d still need batteries for our electric vehicles.
Don’t forget that gasoline powered cars put out of real air pollutants, not just CO2.
with modern cars it’s pretty much CO2 and water. What little “pollution” coming out of the combustion chamber is taken care of by the catalytic converter.
The two more imponderables are carbon particulates and nitrogen oxides.
Yes, even on petrol (gasoline) engines.
Two responses to that:
And if it is supplied by thermal combustion of sone sort, what pollutants will it produce and how best to control them?
Mass consumer and serious land freight transport originated in the 19th century, as steam trains, morphed into the internal compustion engine simply because coal first, and oil later, were available and cheap.
Pandemic lockdown has showed us how little of it we actually need.
Home working replaces commuting, town centre shopping is replaced by internet shopping and so on. Thus reducing the comsumer miles travelled hugely.
Obviously the need for off grid power cannot be eliminated completely, but it can be highly reduced.
And some of it can obviously be supplied by e.g. small nuclear reactors – a nuclear submarine is in the few MW class of power. You could stick a small reactor on a truck and plug into that.
Or you could look at how and why internal combustion engines pollute, and stop that at source, and then use fossil or synthetic hydrocarbon fuel in those.
The reality is that catalytic converters take care of all unburnt fuel and carbon monoxide, and indeed even burning oil residues. What is left is particulate carbons and nitrogen oxides. Filtering and or burning on hot catalytic converters takes care of particlates, and NOx production is solved by not allowing atmospheric nitrogen into the combustion process at all. Have a tank of liquid oxygen instead, or some other way of generating a pure oxygen feed to the combustion process. Or use a fuel cell instead of combustion.
The point is that we have options . Which ones turn out to be the way forward is something a free market should be the arbiter of. Remove all subsidy and let the market decide.
It is however not exactly true. Short term storage is cost effective at dealing with short term demand fluctuations. It is like the capacitors in a power supply. An audio amplifier doesn’t last long if you switch it off at the mains, but the capacitors do deal with the ripple – both on the demand in terms of sound peaks and on the supply in terms of the 50/60Hz fluctuations.
It would be impossible to have a grid that didnt have some short term energy storage… in the case of conventional power that’s spinning turbine and generator mass.
The more variable the demand/supply imbalance is, with any given suite of generation technology and consumer demand, the more storage you need. Or the more overcapacity of dispatchable supply you need. I used my gridwatch stats to calculate how many windmills we would need to cope with worst case demand in a becalmed high pressure winter UK and the answer was that not only did they cover the whole country and most of it’s national seas, but the wholesale cost of electricity would rise from the 5p it is today with thermal power to around £10 per unit!
At that sort of insanity any storage you can get at any price would be cost effective!
So whilst the need for storage increases with the intermittency of the supply, it does not disappear when renewables do. There is still the intermittency of the load, to be catered for.
Hydro and pumped storage represent very good storage that is efficient and accessible in under a minute. At times less than that we rely on spinning turbine kinetic energy.
The point about batteries that they are not telling you, is that we need them with renewable energy to replace the sub-second functionality of spinning turbines. Everybody thinks they are there to cover renewable intermittency, but with respect, grid engineers know perfectly well what people here seem to have just discovered – that batteries can’t cope with that level of storage. But they can cut in and support a sudden loss of a generator for a few minutes and prevent grid collapse.
Back in the day UK grid engineers were told to produce the lowest cost reliable grid that they could. It was mainly coal, then it was going to be nuclear, but the rise in interest rates scuppered that and it became gas. Pumped storage was added because it saved money.
Today they are told to produce a renewable grid. Not even a ‘zero carbon’ grid, but a renewable one. By political corruption, the aims of carbon reduction were transliterated into the ‘solution’ of renewable energy. The European Union, bless its corrupt little cotton socks, formulated it’s ‘directives’ in terms of ‘Renewable Obligations’ and German windmill and solar panel manufacturers got massive cash handouts in subsidy as a result. Jobs were created, energy costs rose, but it was ‘all for a good cause’ so everyone was happy.
Anyway, the point is that engineers are not looking to produce a lowest cost grid, or a reliable grid, or even a net zero grid, they are tasked with stabilizing a monstrous Heath Robinson combination of renewable sources, many completely out of control (domestic solar) as a political fait accompli.
And batteries are not just needful, they are a necessity, to provide short term stability to compensate for the loss of spinning mass on the grid. In that Willis is correct, renewable energy makes batteries not just nice to have, but have to have, but not for the reasons of long term storage. No one has solved that one yet, or even come close. Engineers know we are walking over the edge of a cliff, but what can they do? To protest is to lose your job.
That is why I suspect that there is a subtle shift away from ‘renewable‘ towards ‘net zero‘. That opens the door to nuclear, which is of course – and was identified as such decades ago – the only viable low carbon emission primary energy generator we have available.
Nuclear won’t obviate the need for short to medium storage, but it will remove the need for sub second storage and for multi-day or seasonal storage.
Anyway, the engineers view of storage is a lot more nunaced that the average ArtStudent™’s view. To wit, storage comes in 4 categories that fulfil different needs
And this is the dilemma facing engineers trying to build a ‘renewable’ grid: Existing hydro coped to an extent with case 2, but not case 1. Batteries are being thrown at the grid to cope with case 1.
As far as case 3 goes – sufficent reserves of something to come on line in less than a couple of hours and last at least a day – without large scale hydro you are ‘foxtrotted’ . This is where pools of molten salt and hydrogen tanks (I’d rather live inside the exclusion zone at Chernobyl than next to a county-day’s worth of hydrogen) are being touted as ‘the answer’.
There is currently no viable ‘renewable’ solution to case 4 whatsoever. Apart from building twice as many windmills as are needed in summer, to have enough in winter.
A massively expensive exercise.
Note how all of these problems disappear with a nuclear/hydro grid.
Sub second response storage is there in the spinning turbines and generators.
Sub minute is catered for with hydro and pumped storage. All this has to do is cope with peak demand for an hour or two.
Although it’s not ideal sub hour response can be achieved by running (some of) the nuclear power stations below full capacity most of the time. Slew rates of around 10% of rated capacity per hour are achievable in a typical reactor, in complete safety and without any adverse effects. Also the technology that Bill Gates is looking at of using molten metal as the primary coolant allows heat banks of e.g. molten salt to be maintained that could act as temporary sources of energy in this sort of time range.
Long term reserves are simply piles of plutonium and uranium rods in or near reactors that are currently off – necessary maintenance and refuelling scheduled for summer, all sets up and running for the winter.
Once you take the holistic costs of renewables into account, the nuclear solution is simply a no-brainer.
And if you haven’t got any hydro locally, you probably will find that the cheapest solution is an extension cable plugged into someone who has….
I think a non fossil fuelled future is not ‘desirable from a climate change view’ but inevitable from a dwindling resource point of view. I thinbk its is a shame that greed corruption and political cowardice have prevented the problem from being faced squarely and the options looked at rationally – instead we have what we in Britain call a ‘right buggers muddle’ of renewable solutions that dont actually work financed out of public money with oriofits going into a few well placed politically connected pockets.
Rant mode off, and returning to the original point, we need storage of some sort, whatever. It’s just that with ‘renewables’ we need enormous quantities of as yet undreamed of storage
great post.
Thank you.
In California these days any pumped storage water would be more valuable for consumption, industry, and irrigation than producing energy.
That assumes that the storage consumes water, instead of just pumping it around all the time.
Evaporation losses…all that water in the lower pond or the water you pump uphill…some evaporates, so double loss. Over long periods of time, it all adds up. Ok, maybe that balances out with some rain inflow, but maybe not in a desert setting. Electricity storage and the efficiency of such costs more than just creating it and using it real time.
The thing to do would be to find some near coastal mountain ranges – preferably in arid / desert / low population areas with no water (we need potable water for more pressing needs).
You dam up the dry valleys and fill them with sea-water.
You pump seawater up and down.
No problems with cycling the entire volume on a daily basis – something you would not be able (or allowed) to do with fresh water.
You would also as a consequence change the surrounding area’s ecosystem due to evaporation creating its own system (maybe).
Can’t see the eco-loons signing off on that solution.
What I’d love to see happen here in California, is to build 10 more Diablo Canyon nuclear plants, and we’d have 100% reliable energy for 100% of our electricity needs.
Then we can use what deployed solar/wind we do currently have (and any excess from the nukes) to desalinate water and fill up our reservoirs.
THAT would be the best solution overall.
Oh, no!! The China Syndrome!!
100 years from now that’s what will happen, because there is no alternative, certainly not worth less than nothing wind, solar, battery storage.
I think the timescale is shorter than that.
People persist in their follies until the widespread consequences of them are obvious even to ArtStudents™
People warned that at some stage the globalised society was vulnerable to a global pandemic. We got off lightly this time, so far.
California or some other equally right-on ecoloon state/country will in the end have a major grid collpase that will inform the average dimwit that renewable energy has its limitations, and some politician will then start a nuclear power bandwagon within a decade.
Engineers know this. Work is ongoing to have a rapidly deployable solution of mass produced small modular reactors ready for when it does, while the political rhetoric is being subtly moved from ‘renewables’ to ‘net zero’ …
In Ken Irwin’s pumped-seawater system, wind turbines on top of the mountains could possibly provide energy to run the pumps, then a hydro-electric turbine could be used to generate electricity when the wind isn’t blowing. Such a system wouldn’t be hurt by drought, since the ocean will never run out of water. Such a system could possibly work in California, which has a long coastal mountain range.
However, the “eco-loons” might have a problem with salt water flowing down what used to be a fresh-water river, possibly killing some freshwater fish. The pumps would also need good filters to keep out seaweed and other critters from the ocean.
“eco-loons” might have a problem, might?
There was a wild plan in the 1940’s to dam off the Med from the Atlantic, and exploit the level change there would be there.
Also refilling the Dead Sea.
I think Willy Ley wrote a book on both ideas
Grand Canyon?
Build enough of those and you can do your part to counter rising sea levels.
You forgot the amount of energy stored in coal and oil.
But, but.. griff promised us grid scale batteries.. he pwomised.. 🙁
Gwiff is a twonk.
I would have chosen a different word that starts with “tw” ;).
RHS the solution is simple – Congress just needs to legislate that there must be grid-scale batteries by 2025, and it’s a done deal! It’s just the laws of physics that’s the problem, right? Congress writes and amends laws, so that should do it!
While it is true pumped hydro ‘stores’ electricity as water potential energy, it isn’t used for the sort of storage renewables need. It is used for peak load shifting on a daily basis. The pumping takes place at night with low grid loads, then the generation takes place during daytime peak loads. The generation can run full out 24/7, and the grid avoids peaker generating capacity in places like TVA and Michigan (Luddington).
Those are facts and fail the PC test so they are irrelevant in current discourse.
That is correct and in the case of the Swiss facility they were/are paid to take surplus French nuclear generated power overnight.
A wind farm of sorts has been built near the Ludington (one “d”) pumped storage project. Originally it was designed to store energy from nuclear plants so they could run 24/7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant
Fun fact that few people know …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Michigan
Willis you say;
“• Pumped hydro is not all that efficient. You only get back about 70%-80% of the energy that you put in …”
Why is that inefficient? Lots of primary energy cycles are in that range and remember, those pumps run to load balance excess capacity that would otherwise go to waste.
Because you’ve already had deductions made based on the inefficiencies in generating the electricity to run the pumps.
A gentle correction. PHS efficiency is just electricity in, electricity out. Doesn’t include the generating efficiency of the originating electricity. And the PHS average depends on ‘head’ plus age, but realy is about 75%.
I never understood how the efficiency even gets close to 75% “round trip”.
To move the water uphill: Electric Motor Eff. of 95% and Pump Mechanical Eff. of 76% yields net (.95 x .76) = 72% on the uphill side.
On the output side: Water Turbine Eff. of 80%, Generator Eff. of 95% yields net (.95 x .8) = 76% on the output side.
Combining the two yields (.72 x .76) = 55%.
I was not certain of the efficiency of a water turbine but it would have to be pretty close to 100% to really boost the overall number.
I think the same turbines are used in both directions and their efficiency is indeed very high. 90% is standard. 95% is achievable. I am not sure what pumping efficiences are, but I believe >80% is possible. One thing to remember is that within practical limits, the electrical losses through electric motors and generators can be reduced by simply making them bigger. Or under running them. but then you run into fixed losses of e.g. bearing friction. Neverthless if size weight and cost are not such important factors, you can make an electric motor or generator easily 95% efficient.
If we have the motor and generator efficiencies at 95%, the turbine at 90% and the pump at 90% then overall efficiency is 73%..
Thanks for the reply. I was going by the efficiency of larger HVAC circulating pumps for hot/chilled water – they seem to top out at a mechanical efficiency of 76%.
Larger “off the shelf” electric motors of course are 95 to 96 % efficient.
I had no idea that water turbines were in the 90% range., but that would make the overall efficiency pretty high.
Thank you Rud. I didn’t reply for fear of starting a flame.
As I mentioned, the electricity in is otherwise wasted energy. Grid surplus.
My “education” was the Northfield Mountain project above Turners Falls, MA that I got to tour when it was first opened in the early 70s. In those days it was supposed that the surplus energy wasn’t just grid excess but would come from the Yankee Nuclear projects that were going to provide all of New England with electricity too cheap to meter.
It is really much harder (although not impossible) for pumped hydroelectric to catch fire, compared to lithium. But there are other advantages in that you just have to pump it back up again to recharge. You also don’t need perfectly clean water, and keeping it upstream gives you more chances to scrub nasty stuff out of it.
About 35 years ago, I worked on the planning of a pumped hydro storage facility to be sited in New Jersey. The lower reservoir would be an old iron mine with additional excavation. The upper reservoir would have been created out of an old mine pond/lake. The project, as I recall, was largely shelved when the finances weren’t what they needed to be. But it was a very interesting concept, and I think had some promise.
True, it got licensed too by ferc but for some reason it could not be made financially feasible. How that happens in the NY/NJ market is hard to understand.
I like to explode liberal heads with scale issues.
Take a small 1MW wind turbine and attempt to back it up with 100kWh Tesla batteries. Ignoring losses it would take 10 to back it up for one hour. If you want the ability to cover a 100 hour time span like what happened in Texas, it would take 100h X 10 Batteries per hour or 1,000. If the wind farm has 100 turbines that total is now 100,000 100kWh batteries. To my understanding this would require at least 1/3 of the entire production of Tesla batteries over a years time to one small wind farm. How many wind farms are there in the US? The total number of turbines is 67,000 and on average for back of the envelope calculations, 4 days of backup for each would be 1,000 X 67,000= 67,000,000 batteries. This is not possible with the systems and materials available today or in the near future.
These lefties and watermelon green Marxists suffer from both magical and low resolution thinking.
Awhile back I used Texas data to estimate battery back-up.
It seemed expensive: https://naptownnumbers.substack.com/p/battery-grid-backup
Those numbers will run off liberals like water off a duck. They are racist and insensitive to environmental justice; besides Exxon knew and 97% of scientists agree.
I have read of another potential energy scheme that is apparently being researched somewhere in Europe—what I call the rock & hole. A very large weight is suspended in a very large and deep hole in the ground. Energy is stored by using excess electricity to raise the weight in the hole, and is retrieved by allowing the weight to move down while turning a turbine. Have no idea about any numbers that are proposed.
Yep, a company in Edinburgh, well Leith in fact, is trying to make this work. They are considering using old coal pits.
Compare the weight of a really big rock, to the weight of all the water in even a small lake.
Most rocks are denser than water, but not by a lot. So the total potential energy available for a rock and hole scheme is a tiny, tiny fraction of what would be available from a pumped storage facility.
Most rock is about 3 x denser than water
So although it eliminates the need for water and a reservoir, lots and lots of rocks and holes would be needed.
Another idea involving weight – an inclined railroad track and cars loaded with rocks. Winched up the slope with ‘excess’ power, and allowed to roll down the hill to generate power when needed.
It was a newspaper report about three years ago, in Arizona as I recall – no mention of efficiency given in the article. It does sound cheaper and less ‘messy’ than some of the other ideas.
I read about that as well, Gabby. So I ran some numbers. A fully-loaded 100-car train weighs about 12,500 tons (11,360 tonnes), or about 25 million pounds (11.4 million kg). If that weight drops about a hundred feet (30 metres), requiring maybe 2,000 ft (600 m) of track, that’s 9.4E-7 terawatt-hours, just under a megawatt-hour …
Gonna take a whole lot of trains to do much good. Seems like there’d be problems with the winch and cable necessary to pull it up and lower it down … I suppose you could put geared wheels on it and pull the power directly off the wheels, but then you’ve got to get that power to the grid.
As usual with the real world … lots of obstacles.
w.
G’day Willis,
“A … 100-car train …” … ” … requiring maybe 2,000 ft (600 m) of track …”
You’ve had more to do with railroads than I have. A 100 car consist would be how long? Was that length considered when you used “2,000 feet of track”, or is that figure just travel distance. Yup, real world…..
Just wondering…..
Gabby, sorry for the lack of clarity. I meant 2000 feet of track the train could run on with a 5% grade to give a vertical drop of 100 feet. However, the total length of the track itself would have to be greater, because a 100-car train is about 5,000 feet long. So all up, we’d need about 7,000 feet of track to get the 100 foot drop.
As to my experience with railroads, see my post “Freighted With Memories“.
w.
Thanks Willis,
I wondered about that length of track. Laying well over a mile of track to generate a MWH of power – would require considerable government subsidy in practice.
“Freighted With Memories“ – Have read, which is why I brought it up. Still waiting for the book – in your ‘spare time’ of course. Meantime, keep up the good work.
How about level Mt Wilson, wall it off. Add some ceiling to it {put the telescope or whatever on the ceiling. Since it’s higher elevation each cubic meter of water gives a lot energy {though you put energy in to it by pumping water up there. They already do this, but they tend to be small.
Assuming that potential for pumped storage is about tapped out and that either mechanical or battery storage would have to be the way forward, I would add another wrinkle:
Catastrophic failure modes need to be accounted for. 25 GWh of storage is roughly equivalent to a Hiroshima bomb.
That’s 1000x the largest flywheel-type storage being envisioned, but would only be about 1 days backup for a large power station. But even at 25 MWh that’s still ~21.5 tons of TNT.
The big problem with flywheels, is that when they fail, ALL of the energy stored in them will be released in just a tiny fraction of a second.
That is the big problem with MOST forms of energy storage. The better forms of storage can’t release it that quickly (a pile of coal) or need something really complex that could never occur naturally (an atomic bomb) to do it in that time scale
Coal and uranium remain the safest form of practical energy storage I can think of.
Willis, two questions.
What is electro-chemical, at first I thought it would be batteries, but then I saw that Li-Ion and lead-carbon were also on the list.
Second, you mention Musk’s power walls, does Li-Ion also include EV batteries?
Not WE, but a simple answer. Electrochemical Grid batteries are either molten sodium sulfur, or flow batteries such as based on vanadium redox. Both illustrated with their various problems exposed in essay California Dreaming in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Thanks for the post, Willis.
Also, you wrote, “I love science because I am constantly surprised. In this case, the surprises are how much bigger pumped hydro storage is than all the others. The sum of all other systems is about a twentieth of the pumped hydro storage.”
I’m not only surprised; I’m amazed.
Regards,
Bob
Germans are having lot of fun ‘On the busses’
06 June 2021
https://newsrnd.com/life/2021-06-06-hanover–million-damage-in-a-fire-in-the-depot-for-electric-buses.Bke5b3xqcO.html
01 April 2021
https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-04-01-major-fire-in-düsseldorf–40-buses-destroyed.SyWG57JXHO.html
No mention if Dusseldorf busses were electric or normal fuel powered.
Most buses would have diesel engines. Diesel doesn’t ignite without pretty extreme temperatures, so they were likely electric.
Another linked article states:
https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-04-06-38-buses-burned-in-depot–cause-of-technical-defect.SyAwAjFHO.html
Electricity storage is expensive and not that efficient, although pumped hydro is probably as good as it gets, if you take the time of the infrastructure into account, since it should last 100 years or longer with maintenance. How long is a Li-On battery going to last? And why do we need those resources for stationary storage? A vanadium redox battery should scale up better, longer and cheaper than a Li-On battery that is best used for mobile applications.
Storage of electricity is expensive and should only be used for off grid applications, or at best, a load levelling scheme for a grid to balance frequency for a matter of minutes before other generating assets can be put on-line to stabilize voltage and frequency. Just like a big capacitor bank. As far as I can see, there will never be economical grid scale electricity storage, and we are going down the wrong road if we try and store very expensive solar and wind production, even to flatten the duck curve. And then if the Sun don’t shine, and the wind don’t blow, well then it really sucks.
It’s like putting a Casio watch in a Rolex box.
To have pumped energy storage (or any other kind) you have to first massively ramp up generating capacity beyond daily requirements. Where will all that excess generation come from? More wind and solar?
Not really. The peak to mean ratio of demand in annualised terms is only about 2:1
In daily terms is only about 1.5:1
Have a look
The problem is turn around time when discharged. If you don’t have sufficient excess capacity to quickly recharge, you will encounter situations where you are without sufficient backup power. You basically reach the point where you need to duplicate your renewable generation so you can insure your backup is ready to go asap.
Systems sometimes fail, they just do. When energy containment systems fail they usually fail very dramatically. Think of what almost happened to the Oroville dam.
Whatever system (battery, pump storage, air pressure, etc.) needs to store huge amounts of energy. Think of it in mega joules. The storage medium doesn’t matter. The huge quantity of energy does.
A few years ago I ran the numbers for California (from their own website). Storing 1 hour of average electric usage is the equivalent of 2 Hiroshima bombs!!!
Am I missing something here? This seems to me to be a huge problem. We argue about storage efficiency and cost. What about the probably it will explode!! We just had an article about German electric buses burning. Multiply that by a million then put it in someone’s backyard.
The more energy you stuff into a given space, the more inherently dangerous it becomes. One small failure can cascade into a major catastrophe.
If a lithium ion cell discharges too far, it starts to grow metalic whiskers internally. Those whiskers can eventually short the electrodes, and the cell burns. If it’s packed into a huge battery, one shorted cell can ignite the whole battery, and any surrounding batteries, and BOOM, Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.
I don’t want any of Elon Musk’s grid storage batteries anywhere me. We’ve seen his approach to developing rockets.
For safety, grid scale batteries are either going to be stored with a substantial distance between them, or there is going to have to be some mechanism to mechanically separate the batteries in the event of a fire.
In either case, cost of construction skyrockets.
Since the batteries have to be kept in a fairly narrow range when being charged or discharged, they are going to have to be kept indoors where the temperature can be controlled.
One exception to what you are saying is a nuclear fuel pellet. It’s really a battery that puts out more energy than was put into it and can be renewed numerous times through reprocessing.
Well it’s not a secondary source of energy, so it can’t be used to store energy from the grid.
Reproicessed or not…
Another good detailed article here about electricity and energy storage from the World Nuclear Association.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/electricity-and-energy-storage.aspx
Pumped Hydro does have some disadvantages, but nothings perfect, however one major advantage I think worth emphasising is there longevity. Here in France we have dams that first started producing electricity in the 1930’s, the pumped hydro part was added in the eighties… and it’s still going strong.
I can’t see Musks batteries lasting that long.
I look at all of this purely in terms of engineering and cost.
So, a few years ago, I had a new house built. I looked at a wide range of HVAC and electricity approaches. I will focus here on solar panels and batteries. Our rate is $21/mo flat + 9.63 cents/kWh, which works out to an all-in price of about 10.5 cents. Panels would have run for about 14 cents, so I didn’t bite.
I also looked at battery storage. This is a less straightforward matter than you might imagine. The big decision: Storage for daily use when the panels aren’t producing, or enough to go fully off grid, which in my region would have entailed storage between seasons.
Given our rates, I saw no point in daily storage and took only a brief look. For “off grid,” the cost of enough storage would have been $600,000. And Tesla’s “power wall” batteries are warranted for only 10 years while the panels have a 25-year warranty, making the storage cost $1.5 million — more than the new house, 20 acres, new outbuildings, and extensive landscaping. Not only that, but both the panels and the batteries degrade in use, and even a brand new battery loses 4% of the energy as it’s being discharged.
At the utility level, the numbers would obviously be much bigger, but the implications for battery storage are stark.
Polar latitudes are a problem for off-grid PV, but it is successfully used to power installations such as remote instrumentation sites. But the total energy demands are way less than a residence.
There are certainly good applications for PV solar and batteries, but not for residential “off grid.” The numbers don’t work.
You know what else is a form of energy storage? Fossil fuels! Amazingly enough, we have whole systems in place for extracting and converting those energy stores into usable form. Decades of experience mitigating the issues with those stores. To use them we don’t have to litter the landscape with wind turbines that destroy birds, bugs and bats. We don’t have to mine vast quantities of rare earth’s, copper and other resources. We don’t have to rely on the wind to blow and sun to shine. We don’t have to create an increasingly complex stack of unproven technologies to pretend we won’t have another Texas disaster. Amazing. Who’d of thunk.
All we would then have to do is invest a tiny fraction of that wasted on wind and solar, to ascertain the truth about the undesirables in the flue gases and deal with them. A relatively simple task in comparison, if only the politicians and activists would stay out of it!
My informed estimate is that if we go with wind or solar you have to start by overbuilding supply by at least 5 times needed by nameplate. So if you need a gigawatt of power on average peak, you need to build 5 gigawatts of supply.
You then need to build at least 5 days supply of storage.
I am not sure the world has the infrastructure available to supply the needed materials to build all that in wind and solar. And certainly not in battery backup. No where near enough known lithium.
I agree – I have done some calculations for solar PV here in Massachusetts, and by my calc it is a factor of six.
However, that is only for long term average conditions of solar radiation that takes cloud cover into account.
I have not modeled it further yet, but my guess is that a small increase in the length of time that the sky is overcast or nearly overcast as compared to long term average will maybe double or triple that number.
You must live in California. Here in the UK solar output collapes in the fall and is virtually nonexistent for the whole winter.
The capacity factor is 10% – that is the average annual output is 10% of what a bright summer midday will produce. In winter you might as well not have the panels at all. So you need aroun 6 months of storage, for solar.
Wind is a bit better.
Random trivia I recall from ‘places’
In the pumped storage, energy loss comes from 2 main sources.
1) The turbulence created as the water goes through the pumps and turbines and all that splashing and gurgling as it leaves and re-enters the lakes’
Turbulence in water was how Joule related energy (that of a falling weight) to temperature rise in a known sample of water – hence how the unit of Energy came to be so-named
2) A;lso that the water on its descent and re-ascent requires to be ‘accelerated’ – where it goes from standstill in the lake to x metres per second in the pipes.
It is that Force = Mass times Acceleration that is wasted energy.
In the trivial case, if you could move the water from one lake to the other without accelerating it, you’d improve efficiency no end.
T’was a figure that came from the Aswan Dam and why a UK firm of consultants, who were initially approached to design the project, turned it down flat.
On 2 counts:
1) It would destroy the very fertile farmland, of 7,000 years and counting by damning up the silt other goodness hat actually maintained said fertility.
The Blue Nile brings minerals from Ethiopia and the White Nile bring organics from Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda,
A perfect mix. We could all learn a lesson or two from that.
But also the project was turned down because the UK consultants calculated that 33% of all the water that flowed into the lake behind the dam would simply be lost to evaporation.
So not only was the fertile land of the Nile Delta being trashed, so was 33% of the water it needed to grow stuff.
Ah, The Goode Olde Dayes – when folks actually had principles AND upheld them.
Alas no more
Any comment, Messrs Mann, Gore, Hansen, Biden, Obama, Johnson Schmitt, all of NASA, U of EAnglia, Uni Exeter, UK Met Office…..?
Forgot….
Lithium batterries can actually last quite a long time, IF you don’t overcharge or over discharge them
The classic Lithium Cell is nomiinally 3.7 Volts but will safely charge up to 4.2 Volts
Then, you can still get iuseful grunt out of them down to about 2.7 Volts.
They wont last very long at that, 500 cycles tops.
But if you contain your enthusiasm by not charging them higher than 4.05 and not sucking then down below 3.3, you’ll get 10,000 cycles
THAT was the principle of how Elon gave Tesla drivers a bit of extra grunt to get out of Florida when Hurricane Wot-his-Name came through – whenever it was recently. ish
He told the onboard battery manger to allow that little bit deeper discharge, was it about 40 miles worth?
There are no free lunches. Without knowing the exact charge & discharges allowed in Teslas, that stunt potentially took years off the life of the ‘updated’ batterries
Batteries really are ‘living things’ and just like elephants##, they don’t forget if you mistreat them. Treat them as living creatures and they will return the sentiment, possibly 1000’s of times over
## All animals are like that, not just elephants 🙂
Data. we own a 2007 Ford hybrid Escape AWD. Uses NiMH battery cells. Trick is, the charge is floated between about 45% and 55%. Never more (engine kicks off) never less (engine kicks on). After 14 years and about 90 k miles, still going strong. There were NYC Escape hybrid taxies with 350k miles after 4 years, also with no battery problems.
The problem with EVs is you top the battery off and then drain it way down. And fast charging makes the battery life problem much worse, something Musk does not tell you about his superchargers.
Is the usage band really that tight? I know it’s best to store NiMHs at only 40%, but it seems like you’re not getting the full potential of savings if you are only allowed to use 10% of the battery. It would be interesting if anyone driving a lithium battery hybrid cloud respond with their battery charge-discharge levels.
Er no, that is energy moved from potential to kinetic energy
You get that back when you slow the water down again at the bottom
Well most of it, anyway. 🙂
As heat?
Willis- How about including the energy stored in biomass in the mix. Stockpiled biomass (not of the fossil kind) could provide dispatchable power. What would that look like?
The best way to store solar energy is in photosynthetic organisms, such as trees. More plant food in the air improves this process.
Yes, definitely, burn the really old trees stored in the ground as oil and coal, and let the trees grow for future generations. I wouldn’t mind paying a small carbon tax knowing it went to good ideas like tree planting, city greening projects, artificial coral reefs construction, etc., but not flushed down the toilet of general government accounts or subsidizing rich people’s ev cars or solar incomes.
I refer you to the late Dr Mackays ‘without the hot air’ website and book.
I am sure that climatet change fanatics will know how much energy falls on the earths surface as sunlight.
On average you can recover about 100W/sq meter of solar panel
A wind turbine averages out at 1-2W/sq meter of land area used
I think biomass is between 0.1 and 1W/sq meter.
As with all these things, the ArtStudent™ approach of ‘I cant do sums, but surely…‘ belies the truth.
The appalling fact is that David Mackay is beloved by Greens, because they think – well believe – they dont do ‘thinking’ – that he was showing how to make renewable energy work. Whereas when you read it carefully, he is proving that it never will.
Quite right. They just read the title ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’ and never bother to read the book itself.
What about the pollution from that? Fossil fuels, even coal, are cleaner burning that wood or other biomass, and you don’t have the hidden fossil fuel energy used to harvest and transport the trees, etc. to the plant. It’s fine using biomass if it’s just waste with no other use and you need to get rid of it anyway, but actually growing trees specifically to cut them down after a few years and the animals have all settled in doesn’t make economic or environmental sense, imho.
The other advantages of trees is that they are not just fuel. They can be used to make houses, paper, sometimes even have fruit to eat each year. Some even look pretty, hold hillsides together, shade the sidewalk.
For the cost of an acorn, and the area of land to let it store the sunshine; there comes a resource of many options. Today the heat / electricity may be most valuable, but tomorrow it may be the paper; Next day it might be just the place to dispose of (recycle) sewage waste………and wood smoke can be scrubbed. The technology is able to be used from homestead scale to industrial scale.
Best time to plant a tree was fifty years ago, next best time is tomorrow. Yes it is an expensive set-aside of good productive land, but there are savings from mining pollution to disposing of faded-out photoelectric arrays.
Just saying, I thank God for designing the trees.
Thing is, pumped hydro has a HUGE base of pre-existing technology (and scale) to back it. Humungous water pumps at surprisingly high electrical-to-head-pressure efficiency have been around since the 1960s. We use them to move water all over parched California. And to fill salt-water dams, for the pumped hydro-near-the-coast.
More definitely could be done, for sure.
Thing is though, there are a couple of electromechanical outliers that might make sense – mostly centripetal rotary storage. It is rather amazing what modest-house-sized rotors made from carbon fiber, kevlar and titanium can store. Ought to be engineered at the University-top-priority level, to make the green world vision … basically possible.
The other are compressed-air in spent (competent) mines and kind of the same at the ocean coasts: ginormous submerged cellular air bags. Not giant single bags… they represent disasters waiting-to-happen. More fractal: tens of thousands of much smaller bags, hooked together like cells, in rather oversized synthetic netting arrangements. Perhaps almost impermeable, so not continuously attacked by local biota.
500 m depth has an energy capacity of over 4.5 kWh per (original!) m³ of air. Most of that compressional. Smaller cellular ‘bags’ also dissipates heat-of-compression, yielding a more adiabatic energy equation, again being nearly optimal given the surrounding conditions.
just saying…
The problem with rotary storage is that you either have to bury it under tons of concrete, or site them many miles away from any habitation.
When they fail, they explode. All of that rotational energy is turned to heat in a matter of milliseconds.
Letting the heat of compression dissipate is a loss of efficiency.
Hydrostor is doing some projects with submerged air bag A-CAES (Advanced Compressed Energy Storage) in open water, and have refined that to underground caverns filled with water, using old mining pits and/or shafts. They are building a 200 MW project in NSW, Australia that will deliver 1,600 MWh for 8 hours. I tried (in vain) to find out from their website what the round trip efficiency is. Nowhere to be found, but using some calculations from what they say to compress and uncompress (retrieving the adiabatic heating) it seems they think they have a 77% efficiency. I really doubt that, but maybe they counting the lost heat they claim to recover. While this tech would work practically anywhere, my gut sense is that it isn’t efficient for the cost. Plus it is subsidized heavily, so probably not really economic.
Maybe this one deserves its own main post, like that scheme to lift up heavy bricks with a crane (and drop them when electricity is required) that was here last year. I think that one was busted as inefficient too.
https://www.hydrostor.ca/technology/
I assume you mean a 1600MWh storage system that will deliver 200MW for 8 hours?
Yes. From their website about the Broken Hill A-CAES project. But crickets for end to end efficiencies.
“The Broken Hill Project is a 200 MW utility-scale Advanced-Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) facility that is being jointly developed by Hydrostor and Energy Estate. The Project will be located at a local decommissioned mine and is designed to provide up to 8 hours of electricity discharge at a time (i.e. up to 1,600 MWh). The Project is the first large-scale, long-duration energy storage project in Australia to be selected as a preferred solution in the first stage of a regulatory transmission planning process by a major utility. The feasibility-stage development work for the Project is supported with funding from the NSW government’s Emerging Energy Program. The Project will provide critical back-up generation to ensure reliability of the electricity supply to the Broken Hill community and will solve significant congestion issues being experienced by existing renewable projects in the region. The Broken Hill A-CAES project will allow the region to sustainably unlock the full economic potential of its traditional and renewable natural resources and our goals include working with existing and new resource companies to provide them with a low cost sustainable energy solution.”
I wonder how long they would remain competent with constant cycling of the pressure.
It is always good to begin the week with a laugh, and Figure 4 & 5 were hilarious! Thanks.
I am surprised by the low numbers for pumped storage, but I guess it depends on the definition.
Because, in addition to these pumped storage, there are all the storage in pure hydroelectric reservoirs without pumping facilities. However, it is quite common that large facilities also have some pumping capacity.
A good example of such a facility is Blasjo, Norways biggest Hydroelectric reservoir, which alone has a capacity of 7.8 TWh.
See: https://www.statkraft.com/newsroom/news-and-stories/archive/2013/statkraft-five-largest-batteries/
/Jan
Yes. also look at the Hoover dam.
In reality hydro represents storage without the pump, and in places like france sweden new zealand and switzerland, you can have rain limited hydro that is viably augmented by renewable energy – or preferably nuclear power.
Even in the UK scottish hydro of the non pumped persuasion is a handy source of energy that is hoarded until energy prices are really high, and then used to make up the shortfall.
Hydro and biomass are the only ‘renewable’ sources of stored energy.
While the US is a bit less than 20% of hydro in the world, and something like a quarter of lithium-ion storage, it looks to be around 90% of electro-mechanical storage?!
What would those be, huge flywheels? Where are they used?
They are farms of small, very fast spinning flywheels. Usually underground for safety. And they are only used for voltage (frequency) stabilization on grid fringes.
I had assumed that was the natural storarge inherent in the rotating mass of conventional power stations.
These days spinning reserve doesn’t just mean power stations on and connected to the grid ready to have the steam valves opened, it also means power stations on and connected to the grid ready to use their rotaional energy to support it.
I dont know what ‘grid fringes’ means, either.
Willis,
Would 5 million new EV’s each year with bi-directional chargers and 70kwh battery storage change the equation after a few years?
Tom
I fear not, Tom. Since all of them are likely to be charging at the same time (night), I don’t see how they could be of use for storage.
In any case, globally, 5E+6 * 70E+3 = 350E+9, which is about a third of a terawatt hour if you drained every battery dry … but then the people couldn’t go to work, could they? So only a small portion of their charge could be added back into the grid.
Finally, since the EVs represent a new additional load on the system … all they could do is ameliorate some small part of the increased load.
Regards,
w.
So wouldn’t it be cheaper than lithium batteries to make a couple of giant metal plates (I mean huge) and turn the Atlantic into giant battery. What could possibly go wrong? It’s about as believable as powering the modern world with non-existent fantasy battery breakthroughs.
(Do you really need sarc?)
Very interesting read. I’m still in awe at the sheer stupidity of our leaders still heading down their blind path of useless “renewables” that are not the answer. Now the same blindness for the EV and battery push but it’s ludicrous as no one stopped to think of the actual grid itself and how will they ever support their brainless ideas? Many countries have severely dated grids the cost will be enormous to bring them up to par and will still need fossil fuel in every aspect of their green dream. It’s just insane.
And the name renewables in itself is a total oxymoron title for such energy that sure does have a short life timeline like wind and solar and batteries that are not easily recycled and mostly end up buried and worse for the land then before. And to those that preach bio is a true renewable if you think having to use trees then replant them, wait a century to reuse is the way to go well …..
I am far more in awe of the greed and corruption that our leaders display in promoting unworkable solutions to nonexistent problems, whose only result is in transfer of money from hoi polloi to the elite.
They will get away with it as long as you let them.
The facts have all been out there for decades. It is not possible that they are not known.
I’ve mentioned that before too. Just think of the massive work to be done to upgrade local utility distribution equipment. Substations, local power lines, house transformers, home breaker panels, etc.
There is NO safe way to store energy. All stored energy is a bomb waiting to go off.
The storage systems we use at the moment are mainly coal, oil and gas. These can, and do, explode, but we know how to handle them. Big batteries, or big dams, are more dangerous.
I assume that by “safe” you mean “foolproof”. Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.