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Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town

Posted by kdawson on from the where-were-you-when-the-lights-went-out dept.

separsons writes "The largest sodium sulfur battery in America, nicknamed 'BOB,' can provide enough electricity to power all of Presidio, Texas. Until now, the small town relied on a single 60-year-old transmission line to connect it to the grid, so the community frequently experienced power outages. BOB, which stands for 'Big-Old Battery,' began charging earlier this week. The house-sized battery can deliver four megawatts of power for up to eight hours. Utilities are looking into similar batteries to store power from solar and wind so that renewables can come online before the country implements a smart grid system."

2 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Question: how much energy did it take to make i by Prof.Phreak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So you're saying instead of smelting metal, making concrete, and paying construction workers to build the battery, it might be more cost effective to pay that same smelting facility, concrete making plant, and construction workers to provide a few hours of power for this town every week or so?

    I doubt this project has anything to do with "renewable" but all to do with convenience of not having to lose power for a few hours every few weeks. Sure those few hours may be 10x as expensive as normal, but, eh, you don't have to adjust clocks on all those VCRs every week.

    --

    "If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy

  2. Economically ridiculous solution by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let's do the math here.

    The article suggests the battery can put out 4 megawatts for 8 hours. So that's 32,000 kilowatt-hours. My electricity here costs about 7 cents a kWh, so that BOB can hold almost $225 worth of electricity. At a cost of many millions, that does not sound like very economical power per kWh!

    For example, your basic Honda generator can run for two thousand hours, putting out 1,500 watts, before the little putt-putt engine needs an overhaul. So that's about 3,000 kilowatt-hours for $400. Let's assume the power fails ten times a year, so you'd wear out 10 Honda generators per failure (avg), at a cost of $4000 per, or $40,000 per year. By comparison BOB's cost of financing in itself is going to be at least $3 million a year, not to mention maintenance.

    So these poor sods are paying about 75 times as much as they should.

    ( Not to mention that generators are much more economical in larger sizes )