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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."
The best places for wind turbines (open plains) are usually far away from the best places for dams (canyons). The increased cost of building transmission lines and increased losses on those lines makes your solution impractical for most locations. A few exceptions may exist, but most "wind alley" locations like TX, OK, and IA don't have the elevation changes needed for hydropower.
I don't know if this is feasible but I've always thought that a mechanical solution would be better. Use the excess energy to lift a huge weight like the weights on a pendulum clock. When the wind dies down, just let the weight power a generator. Assuming concrete is reasonably environmentally friendly this would be a pretty clean solution.
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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...
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Selling a few million plug-in hybrids should help quite a bit.
It would be even better if those cars were on the Internet so they could talk to the power company. For instance if I tell my car to be charged by 8am the next day, it could negotiate with the power company to draw power whenever it is cheapest.
I heard a story of a datacenter in California doing this for backup power. The center was powered off of the mains, and also had a large (20ft or so) flywheel kept running. If the power cut, the flywheel powered the necessary systems for the minute or so it took the generators to start up.
Seemed ingenious to me.
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Actually, a few Formula 1 teams are adopting a flywheel solution to implement KERS (Kinetic Energery Recovery System) for the upcoming 2009 season.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/11/second-major-f1.html
From memory, BMW and Ferrari have opted for different technology though.
No, I ran the numbers on this a couple years back. The amount of energy you can store in a fly-wheel is limited by the (tensile) strength to weight ratio of the materials you are using. They could never be as inexpensive as chemical batteries (unless you use carbon nanotubes or something like that that doesn't exist). Also, they have moving parts, while batteries have no moving parts. To me that means batteries are a more elegant solution.