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."

Comments

Roland Piquepaille

[suso]

Um, what the hell? This guy has a spot on ZDnet now? At least we know what he looks like.

Re:Roland Piquepaille

[solevita]

When the summary said there was a picture, I didn't expect to see a blogger! I thought there'd be a windmill or something.

Re:Roland Piquepaille

[Lord_Dweomer]

How come there is no editor response? Seriously, every Roland story there are TONS of +4 and +5 comments bashing him (rightfully so), often times at the top of the comments, and yet the editors remain suspiciously silent. It is a slap in the face as a reader to be ignored like this when so much of the community is up in arms over this guy. Why do the editors refuse to give any comment on him?

Has anybody been able to do a rough calculation of how much he makes when his stories show up? Also, has anybody tried to contact ZDNet about him to complain?

But back to the core of the matter, Taco, why do you ignore us when we are all up in arms over this? It is only serving to make the editors look guilty even when that may not be the case at all. Prove us wrong!

Holy Frozen Kippers

[The Dobber]

This has nothing to do with storing power, it's simply a transfer of usage from on-peak to off-peak.

Wow.

Re:Holy Frozen Kippers

[alshithead]

"This has nothing to do with storing power, it's simply a transfer of usage from on-peak to off-peak.

Wow."

You are 100% correct. It is not storing power. It IS more effectively utilizing generated power. Maybe it's not a big "wow" to you, but to me it's a fantastic (not so) common sense solution to better utilizing limited resources. The more we can utilize our resources as efficiently as possible, the less we need to generate/use/procure.

Re:Holy Frozen Kippers

[VagaStorm]

D that and you will soon discover yor baterys aint working to well til you heet em up a bit :p

This can be used in many places

[Reverse Gear]

I think the post is a bit misleading, energy is not stored by cooling down something, actually energy is taken away, but never mind.

As far as I can figure what is being done is to cool down these refrigeration rooms more when there is more power beeing produced because of the strong wind and then you don't have to run the refrigeration systems when there is little wind for a time as they slowly heat until some level.

I would think that even more power could be saved if the energy was used to freeze water and the ice then was taken to melt in the a frame used as insulation for the freezing houses.

I don't see this as much of a new idea though, it is something that has been talked about a lot here in Denmark, there are many other places where the use of energy can be spared when there is lot's of production from windmills, for example local heating plants, smaller refrigerators in homes (would require some kind of online connection to tell them when there is cheap electricity, but I think these intelligent freezers already exist), electric cars, pretty much anything with an attached battery really.

This can to a large degree be controlled by letting the prices vary on the market and let the consumer feel these variances also, that way it pays of to use energy when there is plenty of it.

Using the power when it is produced sure is more efficient than using the extra energy to produce hydrogen, but still that is still something that I think should be still done. The two things doesn't oppose each other as such, if we are to bring down our CO2 release we sure need a lot of windmills.

Re:This can be used in many places

[Rich0]

Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.

I'm sure a lot of industrial processes work on the principle that they need to generate x quantity of some particular good in a 24 hour period, but the capacity in the plant is such that they can maybe run at less than full output for some of the day, and catch up at other times. The refrigeration in this article is just one example of this sort of thing.

If the rates varied in realtime you could design your industrial process to automatically tailor its power consumpation to the going rate. As a result you can save megabucks on your utility bill, and the utility in turn can save even more bucks on now-unneeded coal-fired plants.

The same would apply in residential situations - people could have their air conditioners fluctuate their setpoint based on the price of electricity within some limit. If during a particular hour of the day power is cheaper than average go ahead and drop the temperature an extra degree or two, and then coast through times of price-spiking. Instead of brining plants online and offline utilities would just vary the price of electricity throughout the day. If the fluctuations in price are large enough homeowners would probably buy solar-based systems or energy-storage systems of some kind (bigger water heaters that don't run during the day, storage tanks to hold cold water for cooling during the day, etc.).

Basically all you need is an electric meter with online access to the power company, and a way for power-consuming devices to find out the current rate. For cheaper devices a simple timer would at least cover general on/off-peak times.

Anything that encourages energy-users to be conscious of the realities of electrical supply/demand fluctuation will only help the environment, the supply of fuel, the general economy, etc. With the current system a kWh is a kWh and consumers have no incentive to shift their usage off-peak.

Re:This can be used in many places

[Rich0]

Adding user-feedback to a moderately unstable system like the electricity grid is not necessarily the best thing to do. Adding load-leveling capacity by storing power in the form of ice is a very, very good idea.

But in this case the load-leveling is being done by end-users. They just happen to be cooperating with the power company.

How would user-feedback make the system more unstable? Do you think that some users would set up their processes to INCREASE consumption when the price RISES? Users would either ignore the realtime rate, or they'd use it in a way that furthers the grid's goals - reducing usage when capacity is low, and raising it when capacity is high.

Right now utilities already do this in the form of on/off-peak metering. Generally only large industrial consumers are eligible (this varies greatly by country/region/etc). This is useful to save on gas-fired turbines and such, but as you point out wind is far less predictable - it might be more available at 1PM and less available at 1AM. To handle a grid with a lot of wind capacity you'd need realtime rates, and users who base their consumption on the realtime rates.

Regardless of the scheme you pick you need to make sure customers have incentive to cooperate. If you just tell them they're doing it for the common good they'll realize that they're going through a lot of trouble and possibly undertaking costs just to line utility executive pockets. If on the other hand you vary the rates in realtime, or give them breaks on their bills for participating they'll go along with it. Too often environmental initiatives are not reward-based, and as a result everybody pays them lip-service but silently undermines them. In most industries the greening-up of processes has not been the result of any desire to help out the environment, but rather large efficiency gains associated with recycling waste streams and reducing waste in general.

Why would he want to kill her in public?

[Dachannien]

store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses

No, no, no.... There's no wind in these refrigerated warehouses. The point is that wind power fluctuates, so to smooth things out, this guy wants to use the electricity generated from wind power to overcool refrigerated warehouses at night, and then undercool them during the day when electricity demand peaks to make more of the electricity generated during the day available for other purposes.

Re:How to get rid of Roland Piquepaille...

[LiquidCoooled]

It can't work that well.
Afterall, you are posting in one of his articles.

alt fuels and systems

[drDugan]

Very nice. However, we're still just window dressing the Titanic.

500,000 years+ worth of stored energy in oil has been used in 200 years, and will be gone in another 200. Bummer. We found it, and used it. We have 6 billion people now (and growing fast) who want energy -- lots and lots of it.

All the alternative-fuels scenarios - even in the very best case where we grow vast oceans and fields of seaweed and switchgrass and use yeasts to process cellulosic 5-carbon sugars and make ethanol -- even in these best case scenarios (which incidentally would close the carbon loop), humans are still 1-2 orders of magnitude lower in energy production compared to the current oil-fueled system. If we add to that calculation efficiency measures we get closer, lower population - closer still, conservation - still closer... but: the harsh inescapable reality humanity faces in the next 30-50 years is this: there will just not be enough energy for the growing (first-world) population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol
http://bioconversion.blogspot.com/2006/08/celunols -wet-biomass-conversion.html

We need to perfect nuclear power engineering, software, and extremely long term storage processes as soon as possible.

Re:alt fuels and systems

[Grail]

That, or we need to wean ourselves off the high-energy-consumption habit.

Oookaaay

[iminplaya]

Let me get this straight. The refrigerator is "feeding" the grid because it consunes less from the grid? Because we get some power from a wind turbine, right? Is there some kind of net metering thing going on here? Or is it just simple reduction of usage? Sounds like somebody's playing with words.

Article and post misleading

[AaronW]

I think both the article and post are misleading. Basically all they are doing is turning down the temperature at night and letting it warm up during the day. This just means that most of their energy consumption occurs at night, when there is often a surplus of electricity. It's a great idea though. Many forms of power generation cannot quickly adjust their outputs due to the wear and tear it would cause by temperature changes. I.e. coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants usually run at one output level, resulting in a lot of extra energy available at night when demand is low.

This wouldn't be restricted to just wind power like the article says. It would also be very useful for many other power sources.

One other method I heard about many years ago was to use the extra energy at night to pump water to a high elevation resavoir and during the day use that water to help generate electricity.

Pumped Storage and Compressed Air Storage

[rohar]

This idea isn't really storage, it is just lowering usage during peak hours and making up for it in off hours. The idea doesn't seem to align with the mentioned wind power generation. I would think that except for during storms there is less wind at night at most locations, and they are talking about increasing load at night.

Other grid energy storage

Pumped storage could be adapted to wind.
Compressed air storage is another idea. The gas turbine generators have clutches in the compressor section and stored compressed air that is compressed in off-peak hours is used rather than the turbine powered compressor. The existing systems use the gas turbines in off-peak hours to compress air, but I would think that using wind powered compressors in a compressed air storage gas turbine plant would be a simple retrofit.

Re:Stupid idea

[toQDuj]

Actually, your idea to produce hydrogen at the windmills is one of the stupidest ideas in a long time. I was reminded of this by the CEO of NUON, a dutch energy company.

The argumentation goes as such: imagine clean power from windmills. Then imagine an electrolysis machine to produce hydrogen. then imagine a huge compressor, required to liquefy the hydrogen gas. then imagine storage tanks, which will slowly leak hydrogen. These tanks have to be regularly replaced because hydrogen tends to mess up the metal lattice structure, degrading the stability.

Then imagine actually transporting the remainder of the hydrogen across roads (pipelines would lose too much hydrogen), and subsequently converting what's left into electricity.

For your idea to work, we need hydrogen storage materials, which can be loaded and unloaded under more gentile conditions. Look towards metal hydrides for a potential answer there.

B., M. Sc.

p.s. RTFA. please, before you start labeling people as stupid.

Re:This doesn't matter with regard to wind power.

[jonbryce]

Yes, they can do this without using wind power, and they probably do. That isn't the point though.

The point is that the output of a wind generator is pretty erratic and unpredictable, and this limits the % of total electricity that this source can supply.

If you have a power input that can take an erratic and unpredictable electricity supply and still function effectively, then this increases the % of electricity that can be supplied by wind turbines.

Re:This doesn't matter with regard to wind power.

[maxume]

Except that there might be wind power available in the middle of the night that is currently getting pissed away into the ether. There isn't really any other power source that happens to have excess capacity available in the middle of the night; wind is generally built as 'peak' capacity, because it might not be there once in a while. This system highlights a way of making sure that the energy gets used when it is available(it is good for the power company to simply 'give' the power to the cold houses, as it reduces daytime demand in a predictable fashion).

Re:Stupid idea

[radl33t]

Using windmills to generate hydrogen is hardly his idea, but in fact one that currently occupies many research groups with researchers that most people would probably not identify as stupid. As much as I would love to deride the 'argumenation' of your dutch CEO, may I simply point out that there are other methods for completing each and every step in your proposed scenario. I don't understand how you (or he) feel(s) this case is representative of the generic goal of using wind power to produce hydrogen locally. Furthermore, how is it incompatible with the gentile load[ing] and unload[ing] of hydrogen using metal hydrides? Why exactly can't they be incorporated into your hypothetical scheme to alleviate some of the problems you name? Lastly, don't you think it's a bit silly for you to chastise GP for making criticisms based on incomplete information when you do the exact same thing? Branding your post with your degrees in some vain search for credibility is embarrassing.

Mostly ludicrous

[Ancient_Hacker]

Kinda ludicrous idea.

First of all, if you cool off the fridges, the increased temperature difference between inside and outside the fridge increases the rate of heat loss.

Next the larger the termperature difference, the greater the load on the compressors and the lower the overall efficiency. Although it helps a bit if it's cooler outside at night. But they're already capable of taking advantage of this without any "Night Wind" project babble.

The larger warehouses have more activity at night-- therfore more heat losses. The least best time for having a lower temperature.

A better approch would be to give somewhat lower rates for night electricity usage. Many industries use a *lot* of electricity and could save big bucks by shifting to nighttime work. There's one big steel-mill in town here that uses about 30% of all the electricity-- they'd love to get a few percent off their $13 million per month electric bill by using their electric arc furnaces at night.

Re:April yet?

[smartdreamer]

Memo to myself:
- Do not reply to a post trying to be funny with an informative answer.
- Go back to this post on April's first and have a good laugh.