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Why Our Antiquated Power Grid Needs Battery Storage
Lucas123 writes: Last year, renewable energy sources accounted for half of new installed electric-generation capacity (natural gas units made up most of the remainder). As more photovoltaic panels are installed on rooftops around the nation, an antiquated power grid is being overburdened by a bidirectional load its was never engineered to handle. The Hawaiian Electric Company, for example, said it's struggling with electricity "backflow" that could destabilize its system. Batteries for distributed renewable power has the potential to mitigate the load on the national grid by allowing a redistribution of power during peak hours. Because of this, Tesla, which is expected to announce batteries for homes and utilities on Thursday, and others are targeting a market estimated to be worth $1.2B by 2019. Along with taking up some of the load during peak load, battery capacity can be used when power isn't being generated by renewable systems, such as at night and during inclement weather. That also reduces grid demand.
There are many ways to 'store' electricity. Batteries are just one.
I rather like this one, a thermal storage solution. Putting air into and out of bladders under deep water is a very simple method, as is moving water up and down hills. Then there are flywheels and fixed volume compressed air storage. (The air bladders above are fixed pressure compressed air storage.) There other thermal storage possibilities, but getting good round trip efficiency is tricky.
There are non-traditional battery techniques too: flow batteries (liquid electrolytes in tanks, adding storage capacity is as easy as adding tanks full of electrolyte) and molten metal batteries (take the idea of aluminium smelting and make it reversible).
All the non-battery alternatives I can think of work at industrial scale, so if you're looking for a household/small business solution, I think that at least for now batteries are it.
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Trouble is you need very large tanks of water, or to seperate them a long way. For instance a house might use 2 kWh overnight, that's about 7 MJ.
Round trip efficiency for pumped hydro system is around 88%, call it 100, and call g 10. So you need a tower or hill 350m high with 2 tons of water in it, or if you prefer, a swimming pool, 2*5*10m suspended 6 metres above your current pool. So, that's a fair bit of unlikely, just to power one house.
Most sensible big hydro locations have already been gobbled up, they made sense decades ago.
Hawaiian Electric is full of crap. It's an excuse to charge people thousands of dollars for an "interconnect study" before allowing them to install a grid-tie system, which is totally bogus. It's essentially them making it more difficult/expensive to install solar, and when you do jump through that hoop, they get to extort a big chunk of money from you.
Most sensible big hydro locations have already been gobbled up, they made sense decades ago.
The other issue , at least in the U.S. is that it has been near impossible to deal with the permitting process for large water projects. Look at California, if you need an example of just how much damage people are willing to do when it comes to stopping these projects.
Not true. Electricity can wear out. The time frame is much longer but it does happen.
Electricity has resistance. resistance adds heat. The sun adds heat. hot ,cold, hot, cold, that changes the temperance of the metals, making them brittle. Granted it takes a while. but over time electric cables wear out. Then you have the insulation materials which ear out faster, when those break you get shorts.
That isn't even talking about erosion and physical damage from being outside.
So yes solar panels can wear out. You might get 30-50 years out of one but it will happen.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.