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Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town
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."
Reminds me of the boom in wireless ISPs... telco claims prohibitive costs to lay new copper or fiber to a neighbourhood, instead a WISP comes along and at a cost of a few thousand dollars puts up an AP and we're off.
bomb the us up set someone
It's been a long time since I last heard about Sodium/Sulphur batteries. Twenty-plus years ago Ford Aerospace in Newport Beach, CA had a small research facility looking at this technology. The smell of sulphur was pretty strong around that building which was cleverly situated both downhill and downwind from the rest of the campus. The idea of being anywhere in the neighborhood of a bunch of hot,liquid sodium and a bunch of hot,liquid sulphur somehow never seemed like a good idea to me.
...and how much would a gas or diesel powered generator with a 4MW capacity cost? Since the battery consists of rather dangerous chemicals (e.g. pure sodium metal), has a limited life span and has to operate at 350C (ok - that's probably less of an issue in Texas in the summer ;-) it is hard to see any environmental argument for it over a diesel generator once the heating, production and charge/discharge efficiency are factored in.
BUB might be a better nickname. Big Unexploded Battery.
I'm sure it's safely enclosed and all the safety aspects have been taken into account, but it will be an impressive boom when it does go off, assuming the size of the boom goes up proportionally with the size of the battery (I had a tiny watch battery blow my little remote control car apart...)
Agreed. A 4MW generator is going to run $1-2M, or you could buy one rebuilt for far less. For another million, you could install enough flywheel storage to last you until the generators can be brought online. Double it for added redundancy, and you're still talking 1/3 the upfront cost of the system.
The pilot studies in South Africa show that pebble bed reactors acn abe built for $800 to $1000 per kilowatt. A 4mW reactor could be built for around $4 million and they could completely disconnect themselves from the grid.
No sig today...
I'm curious as to why they used Sodium Sulfur rather than Vanadium Redox.
I'm unaware of any advantages to S.S. except maybe size (which wouldn't particularly matter in a stationary installation. And the Vanadium Redox is already productized for exactly this service.
Maybe too much patent encumberment and the guys with the V.R. patent don't have enough production capacity or are charging too much?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I wonder what a diesel generator would cost them? Reportedly many communities in Alaska are serviced by power generated by massive diesel generators. 4mw is what a data center consumes, right?
moox. for a new generation.