Slashdot Mirror
Storing Wind Power In Cold Stores
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Nature, a European-funded project has been launched to store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses used to store food. As the production of wind energy is variable every day, it cannot easily be accommodated on the electrical grid. So the 'Night Wind' project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses and to release this energy during daytime peak hours. The first tests will be done in the Netherlands this year. And as the cold stores exist already, practically no extra cost should be incurred to store as much as 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy. Here are additional details and a picture illustrating this brilliant idea."
This has to be one of the stupidest ideas launched in a long time.
Electricity is a low entropy energy source. Heat is a high entropy source. The maximum efficiency one can obtain from _any_ heat engine is the sterling cycle and it is limited by the differences in the temperature between the hot and cold energy source and sink.
It is just amasing how little thermodynamics people know. So why is this story on slashdot? It would find a better home in the rags at the supermarket checkouts.
A much smarter idea would be to use the energy to produce yas hydrogen (if we had a place to store it) and failing that even pumping water up to the top of a hill to power a hydro-electric station makes more sense.