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Underground 'Wind Mines' Could Keep Datacenters Powered
Nerval's Lobster writes "Major IT vendors have been including custom-built wind- and solar-power farms in their datacenter construction plans. But while wind and solar power may be clean, they're often unreliable, especially by the standards of datacenters that need a way to keep operating through any unexpected surges or drops in power. How about saving the wind that generates the power? That might work, according to researchers at the federal Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), and U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. A study published in February (PDF) outlined the potential benefit of pumping pressurized air into caverns deep underground as a way to store wind energy, then letting it out whenever demand spikes, or the wind drops, and the above-ground facilities need help spinning enough turbines to keep power levels steady. The technique, called Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) isn't new: existing CAES plants in Alabama and Huntorf, Germany (built in 1991 and 1978, respectively) store compressed air in underground salt caverns hollowed out by solution mining (pumping salt-saturated water out of concentrations of salt buried far underground and replacing it with fresh water). But implementing such a technique for datacenters might take a little work. The BPA and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have already identified, and are evaluating, sites in the Pacific Northwest that would be suitable for CAES underground reservoirs; the first, which could be located in Washington's Columbia Hills could—via existing CAES technology—store enough compressed air to generate a steady 207MW for 40 days of continuous usage, ultimately delivering 400 additional hours without adding any compressed air."
Wouldn't it take a buttload more power to move the air down, and then back up, than it would generate?
burritos. Then we have them run over to the turbines and release any stored energy. The department of energy calls it Flatulence Assisted Regeneration Technology. Doesn't work quite as well as pumping the earth's crust up like a baloon though.
If you use an air-water mixture, this can be done quite efficiently: http://lightsailenergy.com/
to "breaking wind"
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
There are already anti-wind crowds who claim they kill bats/birds and are altering wind patterns to deleterious effect. If it exists there are people who are against it.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Calling a chamber to store energy as pressurized air a "wind mine" is like calling the fuel tank in my car a "gasoline well".
OK, this could be really interesting. One of the problems of compressed air storage is that the air is very cold when it is decompressed. You generally need to burn a little natural gas to warm it up a bit before hitting the turbines.
Now we put this at a data center that has enormous cooling requirements....
This could turn out very well.
207MW * 40 days =
207MW * 3456000 s =
715392000MJ =
7.15392*10^11J
This is roughly equivalent to 170 megatons of TNT. 1.7 times the size of the maximum theoretical yield of the Tsar Bomba.
Probably more than enough to start an earthquake in an area that is susceptible (such as the pacific northwest).
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
How about an alternate headline:
Underground 'Wind Mines' Could Keep Electrical Grid Powered
Or is this electricity somehow only usable by data centers? In the same vein, couldn't you also store excess production from nuclear plants or coal generation this way?
Is electricity no longer fungible?
There aren't many locations where pumped storage is feasible - you need a big hill with a lake on top and either another lake or a river at the bottom. When it works its amazing. There is a pumped storage facility in Massachusetts that can dial up 1,000 MWe in about 15 minutes.
On the other hand, the Columbia River (where the Pacific Northwest Lab and Bonneville are located is an amazing pumped storage facility itself. Lots of wind around the Columbia Gorge and many dams with big reservoirs on the river. When the wind varies it can be balanced against generation by the dams. Lots of wind, keep more water in the reservoirs. There are situations when the reservoirs are full and have to be spilled and there are times when the pesky salmon need flow or they die (wimpy fish!) so some alternative storage would be useful.
"Hey look, Bob, I found a new cave! All we have to do is move those rocks out of the way and..."
Table-ized A.I.
you are all thinking about generating electricity and after that making compressed air with the electricity from the wind mill.
instead, generate compressed air directly at the wind mill and store it for later use. you can also use this stored compressed air for your car or bus or whatever.
when you need electricity you run it through a compressed air driven generator.
don't forget that adding heat to the pipe will making more energy available as well.
The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia is a pumped storage hydroelectric power plant with a generation capacity of 3,003 MW:
Water is released from the upper reservoir during periods of high demand and is used to generate electricity. What makes this different from other hydroelectric dams is that during times of low demand, power is taken from coal, nuclear, and other power plants and is used to pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir. Although this plant uses more power than it generates, it allows these other plants to operate at close to peak efficiency for an overall cost savings.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The Columbia Hills are part of the Columbia River Basalt Group, which were flood basalts, not volcanic eruptions, contrary to what TFA states. I was always under the impression that basalt was porous but almost entirely lacking in permeability, too. The fact that CAES is utilized in hollowed out salt caverns elsewhere would suggest to me that you'd need quite a void to make use of compressed air, and you'd need to frack the crap out of basalt to obtain similar volumes.
Not that there isn't permeability, but it isn't in the form of tunnels like the picture shown in TFA. I grew up south of Boardman and my Dad used to get calls in the middle of the night from people needing to have him drive out with his pump rig and pull pipe from their water wells, which had crapped out all of a sudden. The whole area has had its water table drawn down quite drastically over the last century, which I'd always figured was accounting to the lack of channels and low porosity adding up to limited volume for storage of this fossil water.
Widow Mines are OP when you get the 1 second burrow upgrade.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Old underground Mines aren't that big, (or that common), but there would clearly be some local potential for blow-out.
The first thing that would happen is the compressed air would start dewatering the mine. (Almost all abandoned or un-pumped mines fill with water in short order). That might force a lot of polluted water back into the aquifers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The inexhaustible supply of hot air blasting out of Washington, D.C. these days could probably power half the Third World. (Hint, also looking at you, Executive Branch)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Using compressed air as a storage medium has a number of problems:
1) Low energy density. Air is very compressible. While that's what makes it usable as power storage in the first place, the amount of energy that can be saved in a gallon-sized container as compressed air pales next to a gallon of gasoline.
2) Power loss through thermal contraction.. When you compress air, it heats up. As that heat energy escapes, it effectively takes away a good chunk of the energy you consumed compressing it in the first place. Once the compressed air has cooled, the effective pressure drops. The more air you compress into the same space (See Energy Density above) the worse this effect is.
3) Power loss through leakage Even when available, caves are terrible places to store compressed air. Even if you seal the cave somehow, you then have to deal with seismic shifting, creating leaks and causing your beautiful, N-redundant power source to leak into an underwater stream bed. Lastly, even when sealed properly, air will *still* leak out. Ever wonder why your bike/car tires need to be aired up every so often even when they *aren't leaking?
Air molecules are wily little critters
4) turbine inefficiency The higher the pressure of compressed air, the more the above problems manifest themselves. However, the lower the pressure of compressed air, the less efficient it is to convert the compressed air back to electricity!
Good solutions address the multiple facets of the problem. For example, much of the cost of running a data center is spent on cooling. It might be preferable to store "coolth" in a stone or liquid cooling chamber under the facility than to try to store compressed air. Compressed air can be turned into electricity, which is more flexible, but is also more lossy for the reasons listed above. A combination of technologies will be needed to provide the best answer for redundancy and efficiency.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If the (wind|water|nuke) energy is just going to go unharvested/unused due to low demand during high or peak production, it's much less of an issue.
If you lose 20% of something that you were throwing away anyway, you're still ahead of the game.
I did see they are trying out (or by now using) heat exchangers to help lessen the thermodynamic losses, storing the heat as well as the air.
One plan even used some natural gas heaters during the generation phase.
Won't this inevitably lead to a situation where we are forced to purchase wind-generated energy just to get the wind farmers to release enough breathable air for humanity to survive? I, for one, say "no thank you" to eternal debt slavery to the alternative energy consortium.
Wouldn't it take a buttload more power to move the air down, and then back up, than it would generate?
it doesn't generate power. it's for storing the power.
it's just a method you could use if for some reason you couldn't use some artificial lake or other efficient method for storing the energy. and if you happen to have a suitable mine handily available.
as long as you're constantly burning coal plants in the the area nearby that's near enough for transmission losses though it gives no actual benefit, could just feed the extra power to the grid and then take the coal(or whatever, but coal and gas is more on/off than say nuke) generated in when you need it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If the power is just going to go to waste anyways it would defiantly be worthwhile. But compressed air energy storage is pretty inefficient. If you could do it, pumped water storage is much more efficient, but even then your looking at some significant mechanical losses. Its always better to directly use the power if possible but again, if the wind generators are going to just be sitting idle otherwise its always better to use them to do some form of generation.
it's for the hippies. out of sight = doesn't exist! so it's like magic for storing energy.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They should be using it to help provide additional cooling to the data center. So, if you have to switch over to power generated by the release of compressed air, you should be able to divert the lower temperature air to the data center to lower your cooling need and decrease the overall power draw. Of course, this all sounds good, but the actual implemention is surely fraught with issues.
...So you're telling me, they've invented a way to store wind in caves, and they called the acronym CAES?
Come on guys, figure out something to slap a V in there.
Where's the water going to go?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the goal was to take wind currently moving through a wind power center, and store that potential energy somewhere for later use when it wasn't windy... haven't we solved that issue many decades ago, with a technology called "batteries"?
Blenheim-Gilboa Pumped Storage Power Project
I love this place. It is set in the beautiful countryside of the Catskills
So just to be clear, you don't care about salmon? Because to me, they are very tasty, and I want them to not be extinct because then I cannot eat them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not to mention the "turbines are ugly" crowd. Yeah - well so are coal power and nuclear power. Suck it up - or live in the stone age MOFO!
You mean Earth Farts? Wouldn't it be easier to dump all leftovers from mexican restaurants into large Earth Holes? That would provide even more energy. Earth Wind AND FIRE!
Actually it is since methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. (This presumes that releasing greenhouse gasses is bad, which is the current consensus among those representing themselves as scientists.)
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
They're going to be injecting the air into deep reservoirs that are already pretty hot to start with. Somewhere in the paper it stated that the temperature went as high as 175C in the basalt basin.
The same sort of thing could work very well in water with great big plastic bags full of air anchored on the sea bed. With a known depth you have a known pressure, and it's cheap since you don't need to build really strong pressure vessels since the pressure inside and outside are equal no matter what the depth/pressure is.
Isn't using it to compress air in confined spaces or pump liquids uphill to recover some single-digit percentage of energy input, an bigger loser? Or is this one of those, we lose a little on each transaction but we make up for it in volume, er, things?
How about setting aside some tiny corner of one of the cave systems to store an itty bitty bit of nuclear waste, for as long as it takes to develop the technology to use the rest of the energy stored within it? For this privilege I am sure the nuclear power plant would give the data center all the electricity it needs. And light Las Vegas.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The lost GDP in Salmon exports outweighs the Power exports in Washington State: Grand Coulee's primarily provides power to the US Government facilities, not anyone in Washington State. It also provides power to Arizona. People buy power from Bonneville Power in Washington State. The return of proper salmon runs will currently add > $4 Billion in GDP.
Ugly, check. In our area, most of them are built upon previously protected natural areas that were pretty idyllic before.
Noisy, check. The biggest ones can be heard and felt from more than two kilometers downwind.
Pollutes, check. Each of the turbines is going through 20 gallons or so of grease a month, a lot of which is being released in main wind direction and contaminating the ground.
Crazy subsidies. Here, we pay the producer of wind energy about 12c/kwh, while we are paying less than 4c/kwh for the hydroelectricity production, and selling all the electricity at an average of less than 7c/kwh. As such, we are giving away at least 5c/kwh for the wind production, not counting the distribution costs.
Affects the ecosystems, check. Albeit solely a single point of view, my grand father has been tracking all the birds in the area where he lives for years (30+). He has noticed a sharp declines in the diversity and quantity of birds in the last 3 years, since those were built. He also heard a lot of complaints from neighboors that the snow distribution after snowstorm has been affected, but that one could perhaps also be pinned on the climate extremes.
All in all, beside the oblivious corruption (which we are slowly trying to get rid of!), there is no reason for this to ever have existed around here.
compressed air is a horribly inefficient way to store and transfer energy, industrial systems get about 15%
sure. not to mention the atrocious efficiency of wind power. Just pump water to a reservoir instead and let it out when you need it. I think that the article is trying to be clever, but missing an important point in doing so. Energy is generated from the compressed air using a more conventional turbine/generator setup... not a wind farm. This system is just an ENORMOUS UPS.http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it