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Power Grids: The Huge Battery Market You Never Knew Existed
ashshy writes Unlike the obvious battery needs for smartphones or electric cars, many consumers are unaware of the exploding need for enormous battery banks as modern power grids are bringing a whole new set of requirements. From the article: "'Our electricity grid was built a certain way, and that way is to have on-demand production,' Argonne National Laboratory battery researcher Jeff Chamberlain explained. 'So as I flip my light switch on at home, there's some little knob somewhere that turns the power up. There is no buffer. It's a very interesting production cycle compared to other consumer goods. It was built a certain way, and the grid is currently changing in two different ways. One is, first our demand is increasing. But another is, around the world human beings are trying to get off fossil fuels and that means using solar and wind. Well, we cannot turn up the sun or wind, or turn down the sun or wind according to our energy needs. So the more those technologies penetrate the grid, the more you need energy storage. You need a buffer. And that is a very difficult challenge that's similar to transportation because it's cost-driven,' Chamberlain said. 'But it's also different from transportation because we're not limited by volume or mass like we are in vehicles. We're working on energy storage systems that are stationary.'"
Some good use for Graphene! ...in theory.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Storage could be nice and also substitute for transmission but it may not be as large a market as they anticipate: http://www.engineering.com/Ele...
Aside from the big supply end solutions there are also demand end solution opportunitues.
Because we have day and night consumer rates there is a market oppotunity for an appropriatly priced home storage unit able to shift night power to day power.
I've been hearing about batteries being needed for sun and wind is as long as I've been hearing about sun and wind...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Battery storage for bulk power has been talked up for years. Mostly by the wind industry. With solar power, you get peak power and peak air conditioning load around the same time. Wind varies about 4:1 over 24 hours, even when averaged across big areas (California or the eastern seaboard). So the wind guys desperately need to store power generated at 4AM, when it's nearly worthless, so they can resell at 2PM. When the wind farm companies start installing batteries at their own expense, this will be a real technology.
With the US glut of natural gas, this isn't needed right now. Natural gas peaking plants aren't all that expensive to build, and make money even if they only run for maybe 6 hours a day. That covers most peak needs.
There are other ways to store energy. Some of the dams of the California Water Project have reversible turbines, which can run either as pumps or generators. They pump water uphill at night, when power is cheap, and let it down during the afternoon to generate power. Since the dams and pumps are needed for water handling anyway, this adds little cost.
I believe that Tesla has this as a target market. A recent article about a Tesla factory tour mentioned that they were in the process of assembling a 4000 kwh battery pack to be used for fixed place energy storage (the cars are 60 or 85 kwh). Tesla will have an amazing capacity to produce batteries once they build their "gigafactory" (supposedly greater capacity that all of the existing Li battery factories) and it seems that they are looking to have a business selling battery packs.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
With pretty good reliability, any "report" like that is followed by someone direly needing taxpayer funding to provide ... whatever, ignoring that profit originally was supposed to be reinvested instead of dumped on some idiots that are already overpaid.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Japanese seem to be building a 60 mega watt hour battery based on this technology.
The largest battery in the world already exists in Virginia.
Bath County Pumped Storage Station
Which can deliver 3 GIGAWATT for a metric shitload of time
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There's a much easier solution, already in operation - pumped hydro power plants. They're hydro electric power stations, but when there's a surplus of supply, they pump water up into their reservoir. When peaks of power production are needed, they generate. They can be turned on at a moments notice (all it takes is opening a sluice, and dropping the water), and can store vast amounts of energy.
Pumped storage costs about $200 million per GWh of electricity stored to build. It needs specific geography, high and low reservoirs close to each other to reduce losses pumping water uphill over long distances. It also needs a guaranteed supply of water, lots of it and the sunny parts of the US where large amounts of solar power are being generated are distinctly lacking in water to the point of being either deserts or often in drought conditions during the summer. Pumped storage is also lossy, typically about 65% efficient round-trip.
Mass battery technology costs about ten times as much as pumped storage ($2 million per MWh for sodium/sulfur batteries from NGK), flywheels are a bit less but still a lot more than pumped storage. Cheaper methods of energy storage like compressed air tend to be very lossy.
Grid gas, coal and nuclear generators don't need storage as they either run flat out to meet the instantaneous demand and they can throttle back in quieter times. At the moment intermittent wind and solar generators use the grid as free storage but the more intermittent power that is added to the generating mix the more that storage will be needed to deal with peak inputs and debits. Getting wind and solar farm operators to pay for this extra storage probably isn't going to happen, sadly.
"Nukes have ramp times on order of 2-3 days...."
Nonsense! You couldn't run nuclear ships if that were true! You can design nuclear reactors to have any ramp time you like.
Current Grid-connected nuclear power stations are designed to provide base load, where ramp time is irrelevant. Bu they don't have to be...
Nuclear ships have a very simple way around this: They run at full power most of the time, and dump the excess energy when not needed to run the engines. It's horribly inefficient, but even used with such inefficiency nuclear reactors still pack an energy density that puts any diesel engine to shame.
Remember what happened after the Fukushima reactor's unplanned shutdown: Emergency pumps had to be rushed in to keep cooling water running through the core. It's called decay heat: Even if you shove all the control rods in full, it still takes a long time to stop emiting heat. Ramping up is easier, but still not thirty seconds.
It's the fact that about half or more of the population is so scientifically illiterate that they actually believe stuff like this, that is leading me, at my age, to begin to just not care anymore. I'm just going to goof off for the few years I might have left on this world.
Look, if these f*cking self-powered generators are real, and are so f*cking simple to build that some guy can build one in his garage (which must be true, since there are literally 1000s of these videos out there) then why the f*ck aren't they making them and selling them? Or even disconnecting their own houses from the grid--without some hidden generator/fuel source going on behind the fraudulent scenes)?
WHAT is stopping these things from being sold at every hardware store and all over Amazon, with 5 star reviews saying "It powers my whole home, I cancelled my utility connection, and when there was a minor break down, the manufacturer sent the repair guy a few hours after I called and had me back up in no time! Love it! Would buy again."
Lemme guess, some "conspiracy" by "big oil" or some other claptrap, right?
The answer of course is that these self-powered generators are bullshit, and the people who believe they work idiots, and the people who believe they made one that works scarier still, with most of them knowing full well that it is bullshit, but they are just sociopathic criminals who hope to defraud others, knowing that most people are stupid enough to believe in these generators, along with other fairy tails, so perhaps there should even be a special exemption in the law that prevents charging them for defrauding people who seriously just plain deserve it.
Umm, no.
Former Naval Nuke guy here...we didn't run the plant at full power most of the time. We seldom ran it at half power.
Yeah, the nuke plant on a sub or surface ship is engineered differently than a power reactor ashore. Among other things, the fraction of the maximum output dedicated to making electricity is generally quite small, since we need steam more than we need electricity.
Even so, we didn't operate near max electrical output all that often either, much less maximum steam output.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's a partial solution. Hydro power is only really available in certain areas, and transmission losses kill some of the gains. BC makes a good amount of money this way. North America's hydro capacity is probably as large as it will ever be, because it's extremely destructive of wildlife habitat and of arable land.
There is a variation on this which has huge potential and can be done on a large scale. It requires large construction efforts, but what hydro-power options don't?
Construct a huge vertical cylinder in the ocean. During periods of surplus, pump water OUT of the cylinder. During peak periods, let water back in (and of course turn turbines with it).
I read about this not long ago, and I think (I am not certain) someone is building one right now, or has applied to build one.
and transmission losses kill some of the gains
This is true of any storage solution. It is hardly unique to pumped storage.
Pumped storage ... needs specific geography, high and low reservoirs close to each other to reduce losses pumping water uphill over long distances. It also needs a guaranteed supply of water, lots of it and the sunny parts of the US where large amounts of solar power are being generated are distinctly lacking in water
One only needs a low reservoir (see the Taum Sauk). Furthermore, while pumped storage certainly isn't a good idea in the Southwest, it is ideal in the Great Lakes area, where there's tons of wind resources (see: Iowa, Minnesota, etc.). And, as it turns out, there is a (functionally) infinite supply of water in Lake Michigan and a functionally infinite amount of land with delta h on the West Coast of Michigan, which has hills immediately adjacent to the Lake due to thousands of years of wind blowing from Wisconsin to Michigan. A storage plant like this already exists, just south of Ludington MI. We could easily build 100 GW worth of pumped storage there, equal to the capacity of all nuclear power in the US.
Pumped storage is also lossy, typically about 65% efficient round-trip.
My experience is that the average is closer to 75%, and it can be as high as 90% with modern, well maintained pumped storage. Pumped storage also has extremely fast ramping capabilities, making it very useful for the minute-by-minute operation of the grid. Of course pumped storage, like all major power plants, requires transmission investment to be fully useful.
Grid gas, coal and nuclear generators don't need storage as they either run flat out to meet the instantaneous demand and they can throttle back in quieter times.
Nuclear, coal, and gas steam plants have very real operational limitations. Nuclear is almost never ramped back to follow load; it's cheaper in the long run to pay negative locational marginal prices (LMPs) if need be. Coal and gas steam can only ramp a few MW per minute, and have minimum outputs whereby they can't maintain power any lower -- and that's often at about 50% of capacity. At that point, any lower output requires a shut down, and then a 12-30 hour cool down whereby the unit can't be restarted. Nuclear, coal, and gas steam are extremely inflexible generators relative to hydro, gas/oil CT, and even gas CC.
At the moment intermittent wind and solar generators use the grid as free storage but the more intermittent power that is added to the generating mix the more that storage will be needed to deal with peak inputs and debits.
Free storage? Wind and solar fueled generators, like all generators, sell the energy instantaneously. Your metaphor makes no sense. All operating power plants sell in real-time. Same price for the same power. Eventually, substantially more storage will have economic value, but on the mainland US grid, not for a long time. California is poised to have 33% renewables by 2020, and they don't need additional storage. (There's an order for ~1.5 GW of storage to be procured, but it's not needed -- it's CA's way of pushing progress forward, seeing that eventually storage will be a less expensive resource (LCOE) than CTs.) Most other parts of the mainland won't have exceeded 10% non-dispatchable renewables by then.
Getting wind and solar farm operators to pay for this extra storage probably isn't going to happen, sadly.
Why should they? In most of tUSA, there's a day ahead and a real time market. Power has a price (LMP). Generators can sell into that market or not. When supply exceeds demand, the LMP goes negative, and all generators who are operating are equally responsible for the problem; all generators who are operating at those times pay the same financial penalty. That includes operating wind and solar and the nuclear and gas and coal that can't turn down.
In the mean time, the number of MWh that are curtailed is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total MWh consumed in America. Storage simply isn't very valuable on the American grid right now because we
Support a few technologists in Washington.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dona...
Basically the same technology used in aluminum smelter, with liquid salt for the battery...
Does anyone know if this ever got off the ground?
I build robots and they all suck
Fembots?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Because I try not to respond to ACs, I'll stick it in here.
As you pointed out, Nuclear ships DO NOT run their plants at 'full power all the time'.
But even HUGE nuclear plants can be built to be capable of 'load following', going from 100% down to 50% and below on a consistent basis. France has a number of them.
Part of the problem with using reactors for load-following is that all the reactors in the USA are very old Gen-II designs, you need to be at least 'newer' Gen-II to do a lot of load following, and we don't have enough nuclear for them to NEED to load-follow, leaving them as the cheapest margin for on-demand power.
If we went from our current mix of about 20% nuclear, 40% coal, to a carbon-neutral mix of 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'other, including hydro', you'd have most of your peaking power in 'other', but nuclear power would still have to adjust for peaking.
I don't read AC A human right
I like pumped storage:
o Lovely water recreation areas - swimmable, boatable, fishable ...there's lots of pumped storage already (~104 GW). More. More! MOAR!
o So while it costs land, it returns most of that land for public use
o Fish and other aquacritter habitat
o excellent control of recovery rate
o doesn't significantly wear out (and if you were to make it underground, won't even evaporate... expensive, but...)
o easy maintenance
o highly scenic
o No red-hot nothing, no batteries, works fine unless it freezes (so in higher latitudes... not good.)
I *also* like this idea for pumped transport:
Imagine a C shape that is almost closed -- just a few feet short of meeting at the ends. It's an almost circular canal. From one end of the C, you pump water into the other end of the C (and add any replacement volume required by evaporation.) This creates a current that operates the entire length of the C. Now, put two of these next to each other. Pump the second one in the opposite direction. Put cranes (or locks) at the ends, so that transport platforms can be moved from one direction to the other. Cost? Initially, Pumps, cranes, canal, transport platforms. In operation: pump energy (solar, please) and evaporation refill. Unless you roof it. :) Length? very, very amazingly long, and if roofed, even longer.
Air pressure. Gravity. Water. Make it work for us. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Adding a pump to an existing dam to convert it to pumped-storage operation, is rather inexpensive.
You have no idea how dams work. Water that leaves a dam flows down river and is not available to be pumped up again. Even if you added another dam to catch the water it would decrease the efficiency of the original dam as the drop would be decreased.
The power loss is overwhelmingly because of evaporation from the dam reservoir.
Again you need to look into facts before commenting. The no electric motor or generator is 100% efficient. For example, water turbines have an efficiency as high as 95%. Since that is for a turbine optimized for generation and pumped storage uses the same turbine to pump and it does to generate the efficiency would be less. Assuming losses from the pump are the same at least 10% of the electricity is lost due to converting the electricity into potential energy and back again.
You'd have to build a turbine hall under the sea with all the ongoing maintenance arrangements. Easier said than done.
Yes, indeed. I did mention that it would involve major construction. But I am convinced that if they can do oil wells, they can do this.
The majority of the construction, though, is of course a massive concrete and steel wall. We do have the requisite experience to do that well enough underwater, or (more likely? I'm not sure) above ground and hauled out in sections.
Unless you dig a nice big hole at the bottom that can hold a day's worth of water.
Do you even realize how much water that is? For example Taum Sauk is a 550MW plant that has a reservoir with 1.5billion gallons of water in it that would drain in 24 hours. A hole big enough to hold that water would be 46 acres and 100 feet deep. Digging a hole that big is not a viable solution. Can you show a reference where this has been done or even contemplated?
It's not like I imagined any of this. Dams ARE converted to pumped-storage.
References please.The only places I can find where conventional dams are used for pumped storage us where there is a lake close downstream and those locations are few and far between.
That's just a little bit high, but still a tiny fraction of the 35% losses previously stated,
You need to learn a bit of math. Ten percent is not a tiny fraction of 35%. It is in fact 29% of the loss. It also does not take into account moving water the horizontal distance between the lower reservoir and the upper reservoir. Most references to pumped storage efficiency refer to 70% to 85% efficiency. Losing up to 30% of the energy attempted to be stored is not a good thing. Add together the cost of electricity generation, losses during conversion and the cost of running the pumped hydro station and you get very expensive electricity.
Try reading whole sentences. The following is a quote from this article.
Due to evaporation losses from the exposed water surface and mechanical efficiency losses during conversion, only between 70% and 85% of the electrical energy used to pump the water into the elevated reservoir can be regained in this process.
Here is a quote from another article
The cycle is generally about 80% efficient, with losses due to water evaporation and engine non-idealities.
And another article.
Pumps and turbines (often implemented as the same physical unit, actually) can be something like 90% efficient, so the round-trip storage comes at only modest cost.
Please note that 90% pump efficiency + 90% turbine efficiency equals 81% overall efficiency.
Here is another;
First, the charging process in pumped hydro storage is affected by the pump efficiency that pumps the water into the upper reservoir at times of low electrical demand. The losses during discharging process on the other hand are caused by the turbine operation to generate electricity at peak load periods. The total charging and discharging rate is given by calculating the product of the efficiencies of pipe (friction losses) and the mechanical equipments
The hourly evaporation losses is assumed to be negligible because the amount of water evaporated is far too small compared to the total water volume in the reservoir
That paper quotes efficiency at 75 – 85 percent.
Here is an article stating that evaporative losses are minor;
North Eden Creek will be the primary source of water for the initial fill of the lower reservoir. Water rights will need to be secured, both for the initial fill and annual evaporation maintenance. The advantages of this system are that once the initial fill has occurred, the only water needed will be a small amount to offset annual evaporation from the reservoirs. The precipitation and evaporation balance will result in an annual water loss of approximately 0.2m over the total surface area of both reservoirs.
While higher in the desert evaporative losses do not effect cycle efficiency significantly.
Need I go on? Yelling without up backing you statement with references just weakens your case.