Batteries To Store Wind Energy

Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientific American reports that Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility company, has started to test a new technology to store wind energy in batteries. The company is currently trying it in a 1,100 megawatt facility of wind turbines in Southern Minnesota. The company started this effort because 'the wind doesn't always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren't using much electricity, like late at night.' It has received a $1 million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development Fund and the energy plant should be operational (PDF) in the first quarter of 2009. If this project is successful, the utility expects to deploy many more energy plants before 2020 to avoid more polluting energy sources."

Comments

Seems silly to use this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are more utilitys not using something like what beacon power is doing.

Storing energy in flywheels. Spin it up when the wind blows. Draw it off when you need it. They last for a very long time when compared to batterys.

Batterys are kind of high priced for a low lifetime. Require all kinds of nasty chemicals to make and need to be disposed of someday. And take HUGE banks to store what a large flywheel would store.

Seems silly...

Re:Seems silly to use this.

[Meumeu]

I remember that flywheels were considered for electric cars as well.

Some of the issues I remember off hand were:

1. Specialized materials needed to build flywheels that are small, yet heavy enough to keep spinning for a long enough time after being "charged"

2. Getting the energy IN the flywheels in the first place - it takes more energy to get them spinning than what you draw from them.

3. Given the high velocities - what will happen when they fly apart? Also, the gyroscopic effects they generate while spinning.

4. The heavy mounts needed to safely position them negated any advantages through increased weight.

I don't know if any of these apply to stationary flywheels built into power plants though...

They don't apply for a power plant:

1. you don't care about the size and you don't need to keep it charged for weeks
2. you will have it with every design you can come up with, the question is how much do you lose?
3. put a big container that can contain it if it flies apart, you don't care about gyroscopic effects
4. not applicable to a stationary plant

Re:Seems silly to use this.

[iluvcapra]

In a stationary mount, you don't have to worry about gyroscopic affect

Not completely accurate. The rotation of the Earth will cause a stationary gyro to put some torque on its bearings, depending on your latitude, just as a Foucault pendulum veers over time. It's not a big effect, but there are no "small effects" when we're talking about gigawatts of kinetic energy :)

a dam sounds like a pretty good battery to me

[wjh31]

i believe some dams release water through the turbines during peak times, then pump it back up off peak at night with excess cheap electricity ready for the next day, is that not a reasonable form of energy storage? i imagine a similar level of energy storage in anything recognisable as a battery would be insanely expensive and/or involve alot of toxic chemicals

Re:How about Hydrogen

[LWATCDR]

Hydrogen is a PAIN.
Hydrogen embrittlement makes storage and transportation a problem as does it's low density.
If you are going to make hydrogen you might as well take the next step and convert it to NH4 and use it for fertilizer or CH4 and use it for fuel. NH4 will also work as a fuel if you want. Both would work in a fuel cell or a gas turbine.

Of course Nuclear doesn't have these problems and if they would allow fuel reprocessing the storage problem would go away as well. As to safty modern western reactors have a great record. And any one that brings up the C word is just spreading FUD since it that disaster would never have been allowed to have been built in the US.

Re:Store the energy in a massive weight

[dachshund]

How did I know that environmentalists already had an objection? It's like I didn't even have to read the response... The usual thing to do in these circumstances is pump water uphill, but I'm sure there's an immediate objection to that, too.

Hills have an enormous carbon footprint :)

Seriously, right now you're having a problem with reality, not "environmentalists". For some reason many otherwise rational Americans have developed a persecution complex--- if something doesn't make sense (scientifically, or engineering-wise) they get pissy and blame the evil environmentalists. But in reality it's just life getting in the way, and life does that. We engineer around it.

In other words, if concrete has a huge CO2 cost (more than is acceptable for the application described by the parent poster) then that's just bad luck. If the application itself doesn't make sense, then that's even worse luck. But move on and try something else, don't shoot the messenger.