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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."
Does anyone know if this is being done? It seems like it would be more straight forward than the refrigeration method mentioend in the article.
Have you considered Reading TFA? (Yeah, I must be new here):
Hi I am running a company that implements a lot of software for most of the dutch electricity company's
There is a special communication protocol used to communicate between these electricity company's
It is called EDINE and is based on EDIEL which is again based on EDIFACT
One of these messages QUOTE-RRV is specifically used to trade over and under production.
But is also used to trade possibility to not consume for a certain time.
Which effectively lowers the demand for a period of scarcity
This is used a lot in aluminum factory's that can effectively shut down for a day when there is a problem in a power plant
Of course if the same can be done for cold stores that is great.
Most of those company's are very wanted by electricity company's and they normally have very lucrative contracts
almost getting there electricity for free.
Hydrogen plants would be also very good candidates
Greets John
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
Well electricity is not about energy storage per se so much as it is about potential difference. With mere physics alone we can show that by cooling off something to many degrees below the ambient temperature (and if we could keep it there at no cost), then we can extract energy out again (out of the ambient air) because there is a difference in temperature. Thus you can extract electricity out of the freezer from a certain point of view. Energy flows usefully in either direction. This is related to the entire field of geothermal energy production, which works in the winter so long as you have a heat sump (the earth). Of course none of this might have much to do with the original article. It's hard to know as Roland's blog adverts are often short on real details and facts. And being slashdot I can't possibly read the original article.
Eutectic salt solutions have been used in a lot of commercial applications to store "cold" generated during cheaper energy periods. The main disadvantage is that the eutectic salts break down over time and lose their phase change characteristics. There are also kind of expensive to replace.
Strategies like this that use thermal storage to modulate electric demand are pretty efficient ways to lower the required peak capacity of electrical systems. Other schemes like pumping water back up hill tend to run afoul of thermodynamic laws and can't be nearly as efficient.