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Nevada Startup Stores Energy With Trains (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nevada's Bureau of Land Management has granted a land lease to a $55 million project by Advanced Rail Energy Storage, which "proposes to use excess off-peak energy to push a heavily-loaded train up a grade," according to Fortune. "Then, when the grid needs that energy back, the cars will be rolled back down the slope...that return trip will generate energy and put it back on the grid."
The company claims its solution is about 50% cheaper than other storage technologies, according to Fortune, and boasts an 80% efficency in energy reclamation, "similar to or slightly above typical hydro-storage efficiency." Citing Tesla's factory, the magazine callsthe project "further evidence for Nevadaâ(TM)s emergence as a leading region for innovative transportation and energy projects."
The company claims its solution is about 50% cheaper than other storage technologies, according to Fortune, and boasts an 80% efficency in energy reclamation, "similar to or slightly above typical hydro-storage efficiency." Citing Tesla's factory, the magazine callsthe project "further evidence for Nevadaâ(TM)s emergence as a leading region for innovative transportation and energy projects."
When I was a kid I always wondered by we couldn't store the cold air in boxes in the winter and then use it in the summer to cool us off. I was a dumb kid.
Citing Tesla's factory, the magazine callsthe project "further evidence for Nevadaâ(TM)s emergence as a leading region for innovative transportation and energy projects."
And the existence of Las Vegas is evidence for Nevada as a leading region for innovations in ways to needlessly waste energy and resources.
I can see this project going off the rails.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Sisyphus
That's not the issue. The problem is that demand is highest during the day, and you end up with unused power at night. That's especially true during the summer. You still generate the energy at night but you waste some of it when it's not needed. In the case of wind, in some places the winds tend to be stronger at night. If your turbines are high enough in the central US, that's absolutely true. That's probably somewhat true out west, too. The goal is to store the energy generated at night so it can be used during the day. Otherwise you have to build more of those generators that work 24x7 to meet peak demand, and it costs everyone more money.
There are some very interesting things going on with storing mechanical energy using Flywheels. It isn't quite the same concept but takes a lot less space than moving a large train uphill.
They should call it project Sisyphus.
I Don't Work Here
Sounds like a variant of Electric Mountain in the UK. The same thing is done, only instead of moving trains up the hill they move water instead. There's more in the Wikipedia article - essentially though, this idea works fine.
Rube Goldberg...call for Mr. Rube Goldberg...
Grid Scale Energy Storage (complete with requisite animation)
It looks interesting, especially for places in the West of the US where water access is slowly becoming problematic. On the East coast (where there is a lot more available water) there is the Bath County Pumped Storage Station which has 3GW generating capacity.
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I recall reading about a huge cutting/shredding blade that weighed (a wild guess) between 80-200 metric tons and took over 8 hours to stop when it was shut down for maintenance. I imagine flywheels could indeed be a space-conserving and *extremely simple* solution for storing energy when there's abundant energy laying around the grids.
The output of a flywheel generator could be also easily evened out using gears and/or variable frequency drives. When the flywheel gradually starts losing speed, the gears and VFD's guarantee an even output right up until the flywheel stops. The best part is that the energy output of a flywheel based energy storage method is very reliable and output can easily be calculated based on the achieved RPM's, mass and historical data.
The only fear I have is if such a multiton monster ever gets lose and goes on a wild rampage out the walls... :-)
To be fair... it does make some sense that these two things would chase each other around in circles.
I think you are correct. Necessity is the mother of invention and apparently invention can be the mother of necessity too. The amount of wasted human effort involved in making a major metropolis in the middle of a desert in a location with zero natural resources to justify its existence is astonishing. Same thing applies to Phoenix. Great examples of doing something because we can without stopping to wonder if we should.
ARES quotes an energy efficiency of 80% which would outperform pumped water storage (70%), so that's pretty good.
Converting CO2 into carbon is being worked on, but no large-scale efficient process has been found yet.
There are some very interesting things going on with solar power as well, but apparently humans simply love shoving, swinging, or spinning insanely heavy shit around as an alternative.
We're currently talking about power Storage, which makes solar more viable. We're not talking about power generation. #notevenwrong
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's an invention that can help with that. You may have heard of it, it's called "brakes".
There are some very interesting things going on with solar power as well, but apparently humans simply love shoving, swinging, or spinning insanely heavy shit around as an alternative.
...or perhaps they simply comprehend the distinction between generation and storage.
Beacon Power tried to commercialize that concept 5-10 years ago. Their flywheels were cylinders of spun carbon fiber, in vacuum chambers, and levitated on magnetic bearings. These were sunk into concrete silos - in case any one of them flew apart. The technology was used not so much for bulk storage, but rather for peak-shaving and arbitrage.
The company went bankrupt a couple of years ago after building their first 20 MW storage plant. They're now owned by a private equity firm and making another go of it, so there's hope yet.
Hearing the "8 to 12 hours to stop" reminds me of MRIs and their superconducting (lossless) magnets that take a really long time to start. There should be some kind of low loss energy storage potential in superconducting electromagnets. Lots of problems there, but moving parts (in the major energy pathways) isn't one of them.
IMHO, concerns about storage energy losses when the source power system (solar for sure, wind mostly) is capable of generating power but for which there is no useful work for it seem to throw away useful ideas.
If a solar farm can produce 10 megawatts of power and the grid demand is 5, does it really matter much if the storage system is only able to reproduce 1 megawatt of the surplus 5? Sure, you've lost 4 megawatts, but not doing anything at all is a loss of 5 megawatts.
Obviously there are some economics in play -- if the construction and operation costs and the facility life of the storage system don't work, then it's an economic problem, but still not really an energy problem. And even if the construction costs are high, it's not hard to see some more esoteric systems with extremely low maintenance costs and long facility lives might make sense even at high energy losses.
With wind I can see arguments where braking the turbines may make more sense than high loss storage if you take into account that a turbine is a mechanical system that will wear out.
Their brochure has more info on their proposed solution. 2 rail yards, 8 miles apart, 70 4-car trains weighing 1000 tons each, capacity 2 MWh per train. Each train is about 60 m long and ~3 m wide. Peak capacity 333 MW.
Rail cars weigh 240 tons, mostly concrete. A block of concrete 15*2.5*3 m weighs that much.
The least amount of energy you can store is achieved by parking one train somewhere up the slope. Want to store 200 kWh? Drive 0.8 miles.
Yeh, I'm not convinced there's energy storage potential when you have to use massive amounts of energy to keep the superconductor cool.
Because pumped water storage isn't 80% efficient.
It's not a train like you normally see on the tracks while going for a drive such as an Amtrack or a freight train. There are a large number of independently controlled flatbed cars on a series of parallel tracks. Yes the tracks are still long. When you have excess energy one or more cars are moved towards the top in order to take up the electricity. When electricity is required one or more cars can be send down the tracks using regenerative braking to create electricity. If a car reaches the bottom and electricity is still required another car can be started from the top. But if the demand for electricity stops then full brakes are applied and the cars stop where they are waiting for the next demand or surplus.
It's mostly off the shelf technology. The only new thing might be the software to control the cars based on the demand or surplus of electricity plus any software for the cars.
A power station I worked at had a backup generator that size run by an engine out of a British fighter jet from the 1950s. Not big but it could run conveyors and coal crushers to get a coal fired unit up and running from a cold start. A pump storage plant I spent a day working at had two 250MW turbines that could run until the storage dam was dry. Not big for hydro or pump storage.
Twenty megawatts is tiny.
The Boeing 777 has a few 75MW engines, and that's something that flies let alone land based power generation or land based storage.
I know pilot plants are supposed to be small, but I thought I'd better add some perspective about how tiny a scale that is - engine for a small single seater fighter jet from the 1950s small.
Why not optimize it further so you drive freight trains uphill when the electricity is cheap and then downhill when it's expensive and feed back the braking energy to the grid?
The downside is that it would require a lot of tracks to be electrified, but that can be seen as an investment. You will also need some large holding areas at the top and bottom.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Their would be wayy more than one train, hopefully dozens, if not hundreds. I imagine a triple track leading up a steep grade with a large flat switch yard at either end. Enough for doxens/hundreds of trians at either end..
At any one time they could have ten or more mile long trains on two of the tracks generating electricity. One only needs enouigh specialised three phase motor/generator 20-50MW locomotoves for the trains on graded tracks.(third track woud be used to return locomotives to the top/bottom of grade) as needed They could regulate their speed to sync with the grid, thus incurrng minimal losses..Here is a link for more details
Sisyphean Railways
Requiem for the American Dream
GP's post brought to you by: the people that sit on a hill at a light with a manual transmission and keep slipping the clutch and gunning it to hold their position.
Let's see now.
suppose they have oversized axles so we'll estimate 200 metric tonnes per car, then a 2000 meter mountain difference, and 100 cars long. we'll round g off to 10.
E= mgh = 200*200E3*2000*10 = 800E9
If they could release that in 1 hour then they could have 200 megawattHr
I found an old estimate that by 2015 Las vegas would need 10,000 megawatts of power on a summer day. Thus 50 trains could power it for an hour.
Or roughtly speaking 1 train would power las vegas for 1 minute
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The big advantage of hydro is that the useful mass cost almost nothing.
I live in a region that have many hydroelectric infrastructures, including the Grande Dixence Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that store 400'000'000m3 of fresh water so essentially the same number for his mass in ton. Now try to replace this mass with some cheap metal like iron that is about 50 USD/ton and you have to pay about 20'000'000'000 USD to get the same mass alone.
This is a very big investment, not counting the global iron supply price disruption that a such project will cause.
It doesn't have to scale. It just has to store and provide energy with enough efficiency to be commercially viable. This particular technology may not "solve all our problems", but I foresee a future in which we don't turn to just one thing to "solve all our problems". This is why we ought to upgrade our electrical grid; to allow more diverse energy sources to deliver over greater distances.
As for "mother nature's solution", it has a name: biomass. Environmentalists like biomass in principle because it forms a closed loop: carbon is emitted into the air in exact balance to carbon being taken out of the air. But there are still a lot of problematic details, such as conventional air pollution (i.e., other than CO2) and biomass crops displacing food crops. So they don't like corn ethanol, but ethanol from crops like switchgrass that can be grown in land not suitable for food crops could be a different story.
By the way I hate the "mother nature" language because it makes nature seem like Nature wants to make things nice for us. Mother nature is more like, say, a coot mom, which produces plenty of chicks in case there's a good resource year, then ruthlessly kills the excess. Mother nature doesn't care whether we suffer or die.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Train routes through mountain passes are already pretty saturated, very expensive place to lay track, hence not overbuilt. There is no place to park trains at the top.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You speak of the Las Vegas of today, when the city was established it was known for it's numerous natural springs
The Las Vegas of today is the only one we have. Whatever local water supplies it naturally has ceased to be adequate a looong time ago in order to feed utterly pointless displays like the fountains at the Bellagio. Vast amounts of water resources have been diverted to supply a city that never should have gotten larger than a small town. I've ever heard people from Nevada talk about ideas like diverting the Mississippi or the Great Lakes to supply water to the idiocy that is Las Vegas.
why didn't I think of this????
Because it’s been done before. The Virginian railroad used to haul coal down the hills of Virginia; it was electrified, and the engines used regenerative braking. When they slowed down, the electric motors turned into generators and sent back power through the wire. When one fully-loaded train was going downhill, it provided enough power to get two unloaded trains up the hill; the net energy consumption was pretty negligible
OK, something here doesn't "compute."
The cost and challenge of pumped-storage hydro is finding an available mountain or hilltop where you can store enough mass in the form of water. Here you are storing mass on top of the hill in the form of train cars and electric locomotives. If you had enough room on a spare hilltop to park the train, wouldn't you have enough room to put in a bunch of water tanks, or better yet, and open-air pond or maybe an underground water-storage cavern.
And if you are going to have the train make a bunch of trips to move gravel to the top of the hill and then later bring it back down, why would you not have room to store water? OK, water is less dense than gravel, but water can be pumped as opposed to loading and unloading gravel from those train cars and the attendant friction loss?