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To Hit Climate Goals, Bill Gates and His Billionaire Friends Are Betting on Energy Storage (qz.com)
Akshat Rathi, writing for Quartz: The world needs radical new energy technologies to fight climate change. In 2016, Quartz reported that a group of billionaires -- including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson -- launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) to invest at least $1 billion in creating those technologies. Now, 18 months later, Quartz can reveal the first two startups that BEV will be investing in: Form Energy and Quidnet Energy. Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation. So power companies are paying less in fuel for power that is just wasted.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They should consult Tesla. Elon Musk has excellent battery technology and has it all figured out already.
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This is why I'm not worried about climate change getting out of hand. There will be some warming, but not enough to cause any alarm.
A huge part of this is because over the coming decades there are many technical advancements like this that will greatly diminish emissions, not just in first world countries, but fundamental changes that are truly cheap enough they can replace emissions in third world countries also.
There is no need to impose hardship on anyone when the solutions are more desirable on their own.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This doesn't sound like a good idea to me:
Instead, it uses excess electricity to pump water into the underground shale rock found in new wells dug for the purpose or in abandoned oil-and-gas wells. After water fills up tiny cracks in the rock, forcing more in creates pressure, which compresses shale like a spring.
I known nothing about this at all, but... won't the water come back contaminated with oil? Will that contaminated water get dumped into a lake or river? This doesn't sound like a good idea. Can someone explain?
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... are responsible for bad ideas like shitting in your mess kit.
Shareholders, CEOs, and investors are, more often, manic about asymptotic profits over nanosecond time frames.
Economies built around such shortsightedness are like train wrecks: It doesn't end well.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'm willing to accept a solar and battery install from Bill Gates in my house, to help his investment in energy storage, of course.
I'm always excited about new battery technology, but aren't molten salt batteries already providing a pretty low cost, high energy density solution? Japan has been rolling them out for their wind farms, but I haven't heard anything about using them in the US.
Storage can achieve 70-80 percent efficiency with compressed air, which is fairly tech driven, but modern tech patents can achieve 60-80 percent themselves.
Even pumped water up an incline, which works both with dams (and has the lowest impact for mini-hydro) and solar water distillation, is fairly efficient. If coupled with renewables, which tend to overproduce at certain periods, this allows you to achieve 120 percent renewables, allowing for variation, and export of the stored energy.
Large trains and trucks are optimized for large-scale fuel cells, but if you want to reduce GHG emissions, you shouldn't be using methane, other than as a capture technology to remove it from escaped gasses, such as with landfills, algae, and, yes, diapers on cows (it's more of a building capture method, really).
The major missing part, as it was with renewables before, is the lack of capitol. So Gates is spot on by leveraging capital here.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm picturing a fire at a "grid-scale" lithium-ion battery farm...
... that more money to your name doesn't make you smarter. It might make you think so, though. A special case of Dunning-Kruger, etc.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. Eventually temperatures will rise to and exceed the levels we've been told are bad, it's simply a matter of how quickly they get there.
This is not in dispute.
So what we're talking about in reality is how long a time-frame will humans and civilization have to adapt to inevitable future higher temperature norms.
What must be weighed is first the efficacy of reducing CO2 in slowing rising temps, but even given that it's the best methodology, how much extra adaptation time is needed and at what cost to society and people does the time-frame increase become a bad deal.
For example, I think most people would agree it would be bad if nations spent huge amounts of their people's money and curtailed standards of living just so that the elites could maintain their luxury beach homes for a couple more decades.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Winding down the fossil fuel economy means more than just making bigger batteries.
Storage is a big part of the solution.
A gas turbine can spin when demand is high, and slow down when it is low.
Wind turbines don't work that way. They spin when the wind blows.
There are alternatives to storage:
1. Long distance HVDC transmission, to move supply to demand over a larger area.
2. Flex-pricing, to shift demand instead of shifting supply.
These will help, but you still need storage.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation.
Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
We already have ideal energy storage - crude oil. We just need to stop squandering it on nonsense like SUV's and bitcoin mining.
Getting population growth negative wouldn't hurt either.
Not going to happen though.
It not being a cycle is!
E.g. gasoline is perfectly clean and renewable, if burned in a fuel cell, and its exhaust gases are compressed and sent back, to be turned into gasoline again. It just takes a lot of energy to do it. But we can do it in remote deserts with way more sunlight than we need year-round, so it does not matter that it is not instantaneous.
In general, there re two kinds of processes: Those in stable and hence infinite cycles... and those that end.
Especially not growingy let alone exponentially. Because that is called a deadl pathogen or an explosion. And both kill their host.
It is so blatantly simple and ideology-free, that it is sickening that this ia not the standard way of doing everything.
Storage allows you to make better use of energy sources that can't otherwise be scaled to match demand. Winds don't blow according to when we need air conditioning; that's why we need natural gas plants. If we could store the wind energy when the wind happens to blow, and release it when we need air conditioning, we would need less natural gas.
It might be a spectacular fire but, even if you put all the batteries in one place, it would be nothing like Chernobyl if something went wrong because they use a chemical relation, not nuclear, so once the fire burnt out there is no dangerous radiation hanging around for decades afterwards and lithium isn't particularly toxic so while there might be some contamination it should not be that hard to clear up.
However, the more import question is why would you put all these batteries in one place though? A far better design is to spread them out and store the power locally. Then, not only can you gain in efficiency but you also gain in reliability since if a transmission line goes down you have several hours of battery power during which you can repair it.
While I am okay with new technology, I am very sure this will instead become something of a venture that will just be used like a utility in the future.
Lets just have everyone have solar on their roofs and a battery to store it and all connected to a grid with other supplementary forms of power generation to offset times when solar does not generate enough energy. Between a mesh electrical network, storage, solar, and supplementary power generation we should easily have a very fault tolerant, difficult to hack, and disaster resistance power grid.
I am sure that these guys are happy to build that... if they get to own it and charge YOU to use it.
I mean this is Bill Gates we're talking about, one way or another he plans to profit from this energy storage endeavor.
Ugly problem: Billionaires must spend time deciding what to do with their money.
Who has a better life? A surfer who pays his parents $500 per month to live in their basement, or a billionaire? A serious investigation of all the associated details may sometimes indicate that the surfer has a better life.
Maybe the surfer is not doing anything that is destructive to other people.
Bill Gates said he still manages Microsoft: "I'm there about 15 percent of the time." Even though he is rich, Bill Gates spends his time managing a company that took advantage of technical limits (People can't change operating systems easily.) to abuse people.
Examples of abuse by Microsoft and Bill Gates:
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you.
Microsoft again forced upgrades on Win10 machines specifically set to block updates (March 12, 2018)
Abusing people is a really, really ugly life.
Remember: This is supposed ro be an *ice age* that we currently live in!
But keep letting psychopaths rape you in the lacerated asshole of your^Wtheir pathetic limp human sock puppet body.
The problem right now with solar and wind (especially wind, apparently) is that, because they are not constant or reliable, you wind up with "hot standby" power generators, generators which are consuming fuel to keep a boiler hot enough so that when you have to instantly turn on a turbine, you can (without waiting for the boiler to heat up, a process which can take hours).
This means that solar and wind right now are not "green"; behind every field of solar cells or every expanse of wind turbines is a (often coal-powered) power plant on "hot standby," wasting energy.
For solar and wind to become truly "green"--setting aside the resources used to build the solar and wind turbines to begin with--you must do one or both of two things. First, you can accept "rolling brownouts"; simply accept the fact that voltages are not constant. But this means redesigning all of the equipment which uses electricity to deal with rolling brownouts: with dips in voltage and current. And that is extremely wasteful, though for some equipment (like laptops with built-in batteries) I think you can redesign the power adapter to deal with it.
Or you can build massive energy storage. As in "capable of powering the entire grid from battery backup for hours at a time" energy storage, not the couple of seconds most battery backup systems now on the grid.
And that requires thinking about more than just stringing together a bunch of batteries together.
I think most people would agree it would be bad if nations spent huge amounts of their people's money and curtailed standards of living just so that the elites could maintain their luxury beach homes for a couple more decades
This is already happening here on the east coast of Florida, and has been for at least 15 years. They call it "beach renourishment", but that's just a propaganda name. A more truthful description would be "sand dumping". They spend tens of millions of taxpayer money on each project which dredges and dumps sand over a total of about 2 miles of beach. Pork barrel politics at its finest, especially considering that it destroys the natural ecosystem, including the breeding and feeding grounds of the endagered sea turtle.
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Indeed. Improving electrical storage would have benefits for many applications, not just for reducing carbon emissions.
We are not going to get a carbon neutral electrical grid without nuclear power.
Smart grids and energy storage can do a lot on making wind and solar more viable for producing reliable energy but it can't do it all. Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power. I know people will claim that wind and solar will get less expensive with advancements in technology but then so can nuclear power. We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now. We used to build a lot of nuclear power plants but we effectively stopped for four decades. Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down.
Storage also helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Any steam based energy source does not follow load well, whether that steam is produced by natural gas, coal, solar collectors, or nuclear fission. If we are going to add energy storage to the grid then nuclear power starts to look even better. We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear. Prices will come down for all of these energy sources in time. I see no reason to expect that the development of solar will allow for energy cheaper than nuclear any time soon. Wind is pretty cheap but it needs storage. Once we start adding storage to the grid then cheap energy sources we already have now start to look even cheaper, like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. If the goal is to replace coal and natural gas then the technologies that replace them will include nuclear power.
Not using nuclear power means increased prices, brownouts and blackouts, or burning more natural gas.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I don't think my grandma can maintain solar panels on her roof. I don't think she wants to maintain batteries so that she has enough power stored up over the summer to last her the winter. Heck just in the spring she would need a large set of batteries to even out her personal usage. Maybe she could get together with a couple of neighbours and share a battery, maybe one neighbour could put up a windmill so they have an alternative. Wait, even better they could get together with even more neighbours and maybe dam a river and then add hydro to their mix, or put the solar panels in a field or on a tall building. Even better is if this group of neighbours got together with another group hundreds of km away where the weather was a bit different and the solar and wind production between all of them might be more even.
Solar, batteries and everything else will always be better and easier to manage if we create a large grid. I can manage batteries and solar panels but guess what my time is worth so much more doing other things that it is worth it to me to pay someone else (say an electric utility) to manage them.
I think you and headwind are talking about different things.
You are talking about eutectic salt thermal energg storage: https://energydesignresources....
He is talking about molten-salt electrolyte batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Completely different things.
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I said that Bill Gates apparently spends part of his time being abusive. Maybe there are other things he does that are helpful: Cascade Investment.
I did not criticize the "other billionaires".
I guess the fact that there are more people every day and they want the same things as us
Most of the industrialized nations these days are no longer at replacement level for births.
Population of the earth as a whole is still growing slightly, but at this point mostly in third world regions who do not want "the same as us", they are have greatly reduced needs compared to new first world citizens.
Earth is a finite, closed system.
Sun says NOPE for all practical purposes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for the excellent link: Cobalt mining for lithium ion batteries has a high human cost.
Also, lithium ion batteries age and lose storage capacity. They are very expensive to buy and replace.
That is an example of an issue I mentioned. Always examine all the surrounding information.
Why did they stop making them?
They didn't. But their price to performance for most applications isn't very good so there have never been a lot of them. They are expensive, they have relatively low energy density and low specific power, they charge slowly and discharge slowly (not good for large sudden power draws), they product a lot of hydrogen requiring ventilation, their charge characteristics are challenging with solar inverters, they require frequent and routine inspection and maintenance to maintain performance, and they are very bulky and heavy.
They have their uses and have been used in specialized applications for a long time. But there are better options out there for most use cases.
The battery life is in decades, even with constant charging and discharging.
Only with very diligent maintenance. They aren't very good for applications like solar.
quote>Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
Cost has a lot more to do with scale than it does anything else. And there isn't just one type of Lithium Ion battery out there. Li-Ion is a family of battery chemistries with varying performance and price points. There is no fundamental reason to believe Li-Ion batteries cannot be made for reasonable cost given sufficient volume and advances in chemistry.
In any case, as one of the other commentators noted, it's worth looking at multiple technological solutions, rather than fixating on just one approach.
People are doing just that. But do not discount the economic value of standardizing on a common technology even if it isn't optimal for a given use case.
It is time we start to thing long term and strategically. Other wise just let the nukes fly now and get it over with.
We ether become part of the solution, or were part of the problem.
This is how we start, and this is how we do it.
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That will need energy storage too.
Do the math.
The 1% are not willing to give up anything for anyone else, nevermind everyone else on this "doomed" planet.
We need to kill the 1% with more poison Chnese drugs and personal assassinations. Its the only hope for change.
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It's became blindingly obvious that the people who kept telling us it was a crisis weren’t acting like it was a crisis. They kept their big houses, SUVs full of bodyguards, and private jets. They’re like fervent abolitionists who never got around to freeing their own slaves.
Energy storage allows the purchase of cheap, low-efficiency popcorn solar cells and whatnot to charge on sunny days. It also allows long-distance electricity with inefficient loss because who cares when the sun is doing it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
But storage of what? Winding down the fossil fuel economy means more than just making bigger batteries. You still need an energy source, otherwise you're just standing still.
Look up "duck curve".
Solar panels produce the most power mid-day and produce little/no power in the evening... when people get home and start cooking dinner. So if all these new storage devices do is 'time shift' the generated solar power by 6-12 hours, that will be immensely helpful.
They pool their money together to get the first dumbass to sell out, so Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson can enslave humanity even more.
Whenever you see billionares pooling their resources together, it's a huge red flag for:
1. enslaving yourself more
2. doing to exact opposite of what their stated goal is.
However, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson are merely underling boot lickers
It's a great start, 1 billion for that group is such a small number though, for Bezos alone it's less than 1% of his net worth. Why not invest 1 billion EACH, then another 1 billion EACH giving away free solar and wind installations for schools, libraries, and parks, get the ball moving faster...
What I find obnoxious about this is this should be a government project for the people. But even Gates and his friends pay the minimum tax so they can do their own thing with their Dukes/Duchess mindsets. Worse, they will "own" it when it is completed and can become even richer if it succeeds. Unbridled capitalism at its best. Time for a french revolution.
Yes, absolutely. But that's some tremendous amount of storage needed. So I don't think it's much viable yet except for off-grid people.
See for example the large Tesla battery installation in Australia, it has good power capacity - watts, megawatts - but relatively little energy capacity. It's still tremendously useful in improving the local grid.
More storage is better but time shifting by several hours is not much practical, it'll be done but not to shift an entire "duck" to tens millions of people, in my opinion.
So you still need to mix solar, wind, hydro, long distance HVDC to mix the wind etc. over large areas, probably some decades of nat gas use to come though the less the better...
The best alternative is probably 250 million electric cars with their 100kWh batteries. My back of the envelope calculations (250 million cars, 125 million households, ~30kWh/day/household) means that's enough storage to run the entire residential load for almost a week.
Other interesting thing about cars, is that they tend to congregate where the people are, which is often where the power use is.
I'm already storing my extra energy in random lumps of coal.
Flex pricing is just “serve the rich” and “make the poor not be able to afford it, thus lowering their standard of life, making them practically poorer”.
You can’t shift demand, just strangle it.
I mean I’m pretty ok with it I guess, but let’s call a spade a spade.
Sweaty Javier still wants AIr conditioning weather he can afford it or not.
The best alternative is probably 250 million electric cars with their 100kWh batteries. My back of the envelope calculations (250 million cars, 125 million households, ~30kWh/day/household) means that's enough storage to run the entire residential load for almost a week.
Other interesting thing about cars, is that they tend to congregate where the people are, which is often where the power use is.
Haven't you been following the self-driving car hype? By then nobody will own cars anyway as they'll be all be autonomous and continuously driving themselves about while people hire them via apps.
The stock is up 20% this week so I have switched my short TSLA positions to long! Gooooo Tesla!
If your investment strategy is that you've been going short before the stock goes up, and now that it went up you're going long, you're doing it backwards.
Storage is a big part of the solution.
A gas turbine can spin when demand is high, and slow down when it is low.
Wind turbines don't work that way. They spin when the wind blows.
FTFY.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Not really. If you plot the curves of solar and wind, it closely matches the actual power consumption of end users.
Really? So demand for electricity varies according to the wind with more electricity being used on windy days than on calm ones? Not to mention that usage will have to drop to zero on a calm night.
I think there is some averaging going on in whatever comparison you are referring to and to average out fluctuations in power consumption and generation you need storage.
Wouldn't really hurt us to live a simpler life that didnt demand a gigawatt of power for a family of four.
Apart from the fact that you are about 6 orders of magnitude off I think your concept of a simpler life is not actually any simpler. It's far simpler to buy groceries once a week and store them in a fridge or freezer. It's simpler to use electric lights instead of oil lamps and candles (not to mention safer). It's a lot simpler to have a central water or air based heating system that uses electric pumps/fans to circulate air instead of having to have fires in each room that need regular deliveries of coal or wood. Hot water heaters and electric cookers are far simpler than heating water or cooking using a fire.
Going without electricity is NOT a simpler life - it's far, far harder.
Just be patient for PV to get cheaper until you can fill a desert with it. There's still lots of room for it to get cheaper.
When filthy alberta shale oil brings in a big return, he does that (so massive is his personal and his save-the-world "foundation"'s investment, that canada raised the % stake that a foreigner can own in one single company - just for his g8zness!)
Of course, batteries will be a huge long term return, that's obvious... And the mega-rich who can afford to get the inside track on this will be shoveling the profits, down their profit-holes, while venting bilious liquids slowly down their avaricious chins...
very sad.
Did Micro$oft recall Melinda Gates to do their latest super-crappy Hotmail/Outlook PoS interface? I believe she must be the unholy architect behind it?????
Bill Joy is getting into the act with polymer/solid state batteries.
The activities of man are a statistically insignificant factor in climate change. The purpose of the "climate change" meme is to extract more taxes from willing liberal/progressive/socialist sheep.
..equiped to deal with a transnational crisis without a gaurentee of profit? Government has repeated demonstrated the ability to look beyond profit, private enterprise? Yeah not so much!
Ild say YOUR assumptions are the ones needing a check, and take that rich man's cock out of your mouth while you're at it.
This isnt about fixing our planet, its about being able to steal enough energy to live in orbit once things really go to shit here in 50 years.. all those rich bastards are planning to still be alive then too because its all about them.
Millions of those gender-skewed boys have grown up in a culture that ACTIVELY encourages them to be gay because there is only one chinese woman for every eight of them.
What a GREAT culture! Sooo #1!!
Youre an Amerikuk. We can tell. No need to keep spelling it out all the time you mongoloid.
Engineering school is as dangerous to the human mind as religious school. Put em together and you have only the very best terrorists money can buy!
Flex pricing would inevitably induce investments into energy storage on all levels: producer, distributor, and down to the level of each individual consumer. However, first to come will take the lion's share and than the rest will have too little to gain from procuring energy storage, unless they invest in local power harvesting as well, but once big guys reach equilibrium, perhaps it will be cheaper for little guys to just trade with grid (which will be able to absorb fluctuations at marginal price hit) then to keep their own batteries. On the other hand, once the monopolization kicks in, it will be once again prudent for consumers to install their own storage (and to hide it cleverly from captured government's enforcers).
What Billie and his buddies are betting on is that governments will force taxpayers and ratepayers to pay for this storage, making it a sure thing even if it is not economically feasible on its own. It's required by the dominant religion.
The flow battery has already been tried https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc–bromine_battery
JCI spun off its ZBB unit as ZBB Energy which is now known as Ensync and will probably go bankrupt in early 2019. ZBB Energy/Ensync has never made a profit in its ~20 years of existence and accumulated deficit is closing on $300M
It may be calm where you are, but over a region, there tends to be enough generation.
Actually, that has been shown not to be true for continental-sized regions. There was a study done in the UK several years ago that looked at this and discovered that over a region the size of Europe there was a high degree of correlation in wind patterns. So if it were calm over the UK then the chances are that while there might be some wind in other areas of Europe it would not be very much: the amount of wind was correlated over very large areas. The conclusion was that while regional sharing gains you something it is not much and nowhere near enough to provide a stable source of power. You have to have storage.