DailyDirt: Storing Lots Of Energy

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, May 26th 2016 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The obvious challenge with renewable energy sources like solar and wind is: what do you do when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing? Solar and wind generators don't tend to produce electricity in convenient amounts whenever we want, leading to wasted resources and further reliance on fossil fuel generators to keep up with electricity demand cycles. Storing lots of energy in an efficient way that can be readily recovered isn't easy, but there are some solutions that could work.

It sounds like a made-up high school physics problem, but there's a startup called ARES (Advanced Rail Energy Storage) that wants to store energy by pushing heavy trains up a hill. When the energy is needed, the trains would roll back down the hill and generate electricity doing so. The rail system takes up a bit of space, but its backers compare it to a hydroelectric dam -- but without the water and with less environmental impact. [url]
The Llyn Peris reservoir has a hydroelectric generator with a peak output of 1.728 GW (great, Scott!). This storage station supplements Britain's national grid, but it could power ~~the city of~~ Wales on its own for about 5.5 hours. [url]
Storing energy in chemical batteries doesn't sound quite as simple, but batteries take up a lot less space. Big cheap batteries for grid storage could use molten metal salts, but the technology still needs a bit more work before scaling up. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

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Filed Under: advanced rail energy storage, ares, battery, energy, energy storage, generators, llyn peris reservoir, solar power

18 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 26 May 2016 @ 5:11pm

The city of Wales???
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- M. Alan Thomas II (profile), 27 May 2016 @ 12:25am
  
  Re:
  To be fair, it has a total population only slightly above my home city and well below the city I live in now. Heck, it's smaller than the total metropolitan area of the city I live in now (Chicago).
  
  That said, it's legally a country.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 27 May 2016 @ 2:53am
    
    Re: Re:
    It's one a them newfangled "green cities".
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  - Jeff Green (profile), 27 May 2016 @ 5:22am
    
    Re: Re:
    And massively smaller than my home city, but then so are all but 7 of the US states and over 100 countries.
    
    Wales does contains 6 cities - Bangor, Cardiff‎, Newport, St Davids‎, St Asaph‎ and Swansea‎ - three of which are admittedly very small.
    
    And it's not exactly legally a country I guess, being one of the "Home Nations" part of the United Kingdon of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but yep it's a country :D
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    - M. Alan Thomas II (profile), 27 May 2016 @ 9:57pm
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      I've always seen it as a "country" (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdom). The BSO and ONS use that terminology.
      
      I would also accept "principality." :P
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mb (profile), 26 May 2016 @ 5:32pm

Chemical Energy
There are many bio-diesel systems available, Sources like wood-byproduct, agricultural leftovers, and even human waste has been used, but one of the largest drawbacks is the requirement for energy input.
I am surprised that nobody has planned a biodiesel processing plan powered by renewables. The output product could then be fed into diesel generators to provide supplemental power. The output of the diesels heat/gas can also be captured and fed back into the bio-diesel production process.
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- Ninja (profile), 30 May 2016 @ 9:45am
  
  Re: Chemical Energy
  Careful. Brazil has this experience and replacing land that would generate food for fuel is pretty much fool's gold. There are problems with soil salinization due to the reuse of the byproduct (that is rich in potassium), huge swats of land with a single culture and the obvious food issue. You need fertilizers (that come from petroleum), the transportation of food from farther regions means more fuel used (specially when we stupidly decided to use trucks instead of trains and boats) and you still need to control pests. So it's not that good.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 May 2016 @ 5:48pm

Carbon Nanotube Batteries
MIT figured out how to take sucrose and carbon nanotubes and generate power:
http://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-develops-nontoxic-way-generating-portable-power
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David Anderson, 26 May 2016 @ 6:58pm

Move the Electricity
Local generation only really works when power can also be efficiently transmitted long distances. Sure, storage is good. But the sun is shining in many places even when it is night in Los Angeles. And wind blows in many places. Combine storage with transmission and make a better Earth.
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Greevar (profile), 26 May 2016 @ 7:08pm

Angular momentum
Storing energy by angular momentum of a flywheel suspended by bearings in a vacuum is another option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

Imagine flywheels as big as hydro-electric generators storing energy.
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- Anonymous Coward, 26 May 2016 @ 9:05pm
  
  Re: Angular momentum
  I read a short story once where advances in material sciences allowed people to drive a vehicle with a flywheel that was spun up to near relativistic speeds. It was destroyed once in place and the resulting kinetic energy redistribution was more damaging than any chemical based destruction that could be smuggled into a city.
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  - JoeCool (profile), 27 May 2016 @ 9:34am
    
    Re: Re: Angular momentum
    CSB, but that's just a story. We're nowhere near making flywheels rotate "near relativistic speeds" and won't be for decades or centuries. A flywheel spinning at several tens of thousands of RPMs is currently what we do, and is no more damaging in an accident than an internal combustion engine. If a flywheel failed, shrapnel could injure or kill one or two people, but that's rather unlikely in the first place, and no higher risk than being injured or killed if your gas motor failed in some way.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 May 2016 @ 8:12pm

The trains up a hill strategy sounds awfully similar to the pump water up to a tank method that's been discussed before. The nice thing about water tanks is that they're probably going to take a lot less maintenance than using freaking trains. Further, having extra water higher up provides side benefits such as helping to sustain water pressure for small communities. There's no reason not to combine the systems.
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- Andrew D. Todd, 27 May 2016 @ 8:31am
  
  Mining Skips, to Anonymous Coward, #6
  There's a type of freight elevator, used in underground mines, for handling crushed rock, known as a "skip." A skip is designed so that it can be filled from a chute at one level, and discharge into another chute at another level, thousands of feet higher or lower. A skip would be simpler and cheaper than a railroad. If, for some reason, one could not use pumped water storage, a skip in a mineshaft would be a reasonable alternative.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 27 May 2016 @ 9:23pm
    
    Re: Mining Skips, to Anonymous Coward, #6
    Various types of open cut mines use similar technology and on dropping the skip downhill use regenerative braking to feed power back into the grid. Usually used to cut grid power usage and cost.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 May 2016 @ 9:57pm

Salt water batteries
I recently discovered a company, Aquion Energy, that manufactures batteries that use salt water as an electrolyte.

Although they're in production and available now, they're still too expensive for me, but all they're made out of is carbon, magnesium dioxide and salt water so I'm hoping the price quickly comes down to less than equivalent capacity lead-acid batteries.
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JoeCool (profile), 27 May 2016 @ 9:38am

Another method
One method I've always liked was to use excess electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen and store to use in fuel cells later when the wind/sun weren't generating enough energy. A little more complicated, and you have to be careful with the hydrogen, but it's completely feasible with current tech.
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- Anonymous Coward, 27 May 2016 @ 9:25pm
  
  Re: Another method
  If you only have short term storage of hydrogen then should be useful, if longer term storage is required then you have to get around the problematic leaking of hydrogen through most materials.
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