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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."
I hope it's not 9 volt. Those are hard to find.
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...
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
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.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
They do that. It's called Pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
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.
1,100 megawatts, eh? Why, that's almost 1.21 gigawatts! Now we just need to come up with a flux capacitor and find an old Delorian!
The only way to tell the difference between a hamster and a gerbil is that the hamster has more white meat.
As a sailor, I'm sure your maritime experience is vast. But... do you happen to know where Minnesota is? You might want to check a map... XD
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I am so sick of science writers who mess up the story because they don't understand the units of energy and power.
The article says the batteries store 7 megawatt hours. Fine.
Then it goes on to say "meaning the 20 batteries are capable of delivering roughly one megawatt of electricity almost instantaneously" WTF does that mean? Power, measured in megawatts is by definition an instantaneous unit. What's with "almost instantaneous". Also, the rate of discharge of a battery MW is unrelated to its storage capacity MWh, so the entire meaning of the sentence makes no sense.
Then the article says, "Over 100 megawatts of this technology [is] deployed throughout the world," Huh? Battery capacity is measured in megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
Then the article says, "costing roughly $3 million per megawatt" same thing. Battery cost must be proportional to megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
I suspect that their idea is to make a battery with 24 megawatt-hours of capacity able to deliver 1 megawatt of power uniformly for 24 hours, then say so.
Shame on Sciam writers and double shame on Sciam editors for not mastering such basic units in an article about energy.
How about a little economics. The article mentions two understandable numbers, an 11 MW wind plant, and 7 MWh of battery capacity. The combination of the two, allowing for wind variations during the day believably deliver 1 MW continuously to the grid. That's 24 MWh per day.
Now the batteries cost $3 million, and the wind generators cost $22 million. Total $25 million to deliver 1 MW of base load. That's $25 billion per GW.
The peak generating capacity of North America is about 750 GW. Let's say 250 GW when levelized to base load. Therefore, to supply 100% of that with wind and batteries would cost roughly $6.2 trillion dollars. Now Al Gore says, "No problem. We can do that in just 10 years." WTF is he thinking?
Even if we did spend $6.2 T, there will still be periods where not much wind blows for large regions for many weeks at a time. I live where it's cold, and I know that when it hits -30F, the wind is almost always still and the sky dark, and that it can stay like that for a couple of weeks. We therefore, need to double or triple the $6.2T plus more for transmission, to provide backup power sources, plus the means of delivering the energy over large distances.
Wind and solar are wonderful for up to 15-1-20% of the total grid generation and the cost of construction and operations dominate. More than that, and reliability and deliverability of the electric supply become dominant in the economic equation.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So if a reactor is built in the US to today's abbreviated containment standards, yes, that reactor would include a failure mode similar to what occurred at Chernobyl.
The failure mode at Chernobyl was very specific to the design of the RBMK-1000 and to it being near the end of the core life. The problems at Chernobyl were that it had a positive coolant void coefficient, the reactor was burning Plutonium (delayed neutron fraction of 0.2% versus 0.65% for 235U), the graphite moderator was not thermally coupled to the fuel or coolant, and last but not least, the scram rods increased reactivity at their initial portion of travel - the Chernobyl accident was triggered by an operator scram'ing the reactor.
American light water reactors were design explicitly to have a negative coolant void and temperature coefficient.
FWIW, I do have a degree in nuclear engineering.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.