Slashdot Mirror
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... 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.
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! --
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.
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.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. ...
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
This is not in dispute.
Obviously there is nothing to dispute about the fact that you are simply wrong.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Low specific energy is less important in stationary storage and poor charge retention is less important when talking about, say, weather-related weekly cycles and very low priced intermittent electricity sources. The fact that NiFe batteries don't use any rare or problematic materials could easily render them relevant again in the future if mechanisms for automated maintenance of the electrolyte get improved.
Ezekiel 23:20
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 imagine that they would have a water tank on the surface; once the well is full they start pumping in water from the tank up to whatever pressure the system can handle. Then they release the pressure, sending the water back into the tank through a turbine. In theory there would be no reason to dump the water anywhere, it would essentially act like a closed system.
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.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
The bold part is wrong (unless you are referring to the sun exploding into a red giant). So why are you thinking I'm mudding the water?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is why I'm not worried about climate change getting out of hand.
That is not so simple, climate has quite an inertia, and true the Earth was worm in the past but not with 7+bln people mostly leaving at the coastal areas. There are estimated maps available online, which shows coastlines depending on average temperature increase.
There is no need to impose hardship on anyone when the solutions are more desirable on their own.
Yes, that what we always worry about - the hardship of coal industry. The fact that green-energy industry employs people the same way, giving additionally savings due to clean environment benefits on health, not to mention costs of rebuilding coastal cities or relocating people due to floods somehow are not mentioned.
None, since that never happened? Water is the low-energy waste product of many chemical reactions. You might as well try to burn ashes.
One of the major problems we have is population control, people keep fucking and breeding, I don't see the solution other to impose some hardships, like China did with their one child policy
Actually we know how to solve this. Education, especially of women.
It results in women having far fewer children, to the point where many first-world nations are below replacement rate, 2.1 children per woman (1 to replace the woman, 1 to replace the man, and 0.1 for infertility and death before reproduction).
France is at 2.01, US is 1.84, UK is 1.81, Germany is 1.5, Japan 1.46. Their populations are stable or growing only because of immigration (except Japan, which shuns immigrants).
In Africa, programs to educate girls have resulted in many countries going from about 5 children per woman to about 2.
Just keep teaching, and it will work out.
The other issue is that I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
That's a false dichotomy.
We can both improve our standard of living and reduce the impact we've had on the environment. We do this with nuclear power. Perhaps in the future we will have another choice but right now the choice is petroleum (and the effects that has on the environment), reducing our standard of living, or nuclear power. I may have just given my own falsifiable set of choices but you've only given the first two in my list, oil and ecological disaster, or wind and sun and reduced quality of life.
There is a third choice and ignoring nuclear power as that choice means misery.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.