[HN Gopher] Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy...
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Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage
Author : rwmj
Score : 232 points
Date : 2022-01-12 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.canarymedia.com)
| treyfitty wrote:
| I remember reading this article a few years ago that Goldman
| Sachs. It's paywalled but the basics was that GS stores energy
| during the night, and uses the energy during the day. I thought
| it was neat, but they're obviously not new to this concept.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-01/goldman-s...
| reacharavindh wrote:
| I'm not an electrical engineer. But, thinking about the power
| storage/retrieval problem with a computer engineer's lens, I can
| draw a parallel to data storage/retrieval.
|
| L1/L2/L3 caches - expensive, small, but fast.
|
| RAM - mid tier, still fast, bigger than cache, less expensive
| than cache, but limited in capacity compared to disk/flash based
| storage.
|
| SSDs...
|
| Disks....
|
| You get the point.
|
| Would it be the same with the grid?
|
| Several power sources - nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, hopefully
| not coal and gas.
|
| Banks of Lithium batteries acting as first level(efficient and
| immediate but limited capacity storage).
|
| Whatever excess is directed to longer term, non immediate storage
| - pump up water to generate power later, molten salt, air
| compression etc.
|
| Even more left? - spin up production of time insensitive
| materials that would be used anyway later - sea water
| desalination plants, green hydrogen generation, sewage treatment
| etc.
|
| At large scale such tiered ecosystems would be very cool and
| super useful.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Sounds trivial enough, now someone just has to built it all.
|
| Jokes aside though everything has pros and cons. For storing
| large amounts of energy from the grid, are you sure lithium
| batteries make sense? Take a look at this, it's not a
| scientific article but it gives you a basic overview of the
| problems we'd face when storing energy in lithium batteries at
| scale: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/lithium-or-
| vana...
|
| And that isn't to say that flow batteries are the ultimate
| solution either, we will have to do better because it's still
| very expensive.
| epistasis wrote:
| That article is from 2014. Since then we have deployed dozens
| of GWh of grid storage. There have been a few small fires,
| but otherwise it's worked out really well. Lithium ion on the
| grid is nearly doubling every year, and in places like Texas.
| I'm having trouble finding a recent article, but this one
| from 2020 has 3x as many battery GW thank gas GW in the
| interconnection queue:
|
| https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/09/08/interconnection-
| queue...
|
| And if you check out RV and boat forums, you'll find that
| small scale lithium ion batteries plus solar are enabling a
| huge change in power for these mobile applications, because
| it's just damn cheap these days.
| loceng wrote:
| I've wondered if putting an compressed air energy storage
| system under certain types of buildings would work. Any
| thoughts on that? E.g. Apple's Ring HQ is already on a floating
| system to counter earthquakes, so why not add a layer of air?
| Unnecessary? Much more expensive than other options? Else?
| beders wrote:
| Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson makes a similar case but
| with renewables and storage only:
| https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/WWSBook...
| stcredzero wrote:
| Look into natural gas trading and scheduling. There's already
| an entire body of knowledge around storing energy, and
| sophisticated automated contracts, financial instruments, laws,
| and regulations. "Pools" are just energy storage, and the same
| geologic features used for those facilities could be used for
| compressed air storage.
|
| (EDIT: I used to do this software!)
| ccvannorman wrote:
| I knew Danielle Fong from Lightsail Energy, folded in 2016, and
| at that time compressed air seemed like a great solution
| especially for LatAm that needed robust low cost batteries for
| critical infrastructure (like hospitals) on an unreliable power
| grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danielle_Fong
|
| Would be great to see this technology reach maturity!
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| That wikipedia page answers everything you need to know about
| compressed air energy storage.
|
| In 2018, the tech couldn't compete against lithium ion, and the
| price of lithium ion continues to fall 10-20% per year.
|
| Compressed air and that concrete-block-stacking nonsense that
| keeps getting press are just magnets for uneducated investors.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That wikipedia page says:
|
| > Compared to traditional batteries, CAES systems can store
| energy for longer periods of time and have less upkeep.
|
| Sometimes the cost per MW/hr or equivalent is not the only
| metric worth thinking about.
| tradesurplus wrote:
| Plus, always a good idea to hedge: against lithium
| shortages / gouging and battery supply chain disruptions.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| She's on HN, curious what her thoughts are:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DaniFong
| DaniFong wrote:
| https://twitter.com/DanielleFong/status/1481339424730497025?.
| ..
| [deleted]
| jrockway wrote:
| Would energy storage not be a good use of that money? Society
| is facing a large problem: climate change. One way to reduce
| the impact of climate change is to use renewable energy like
| solar and wind. Solar and wind have a big problem; they can't
| be turned on and off. That means to displace fossil fuels, we
| need to store energy when it's sunny and windy, and release
| that energy when it's not. Hence, things like compressed air
| energy storage. This is the kind of technology that can prevent
| entire cities from disappearing over the next 100 years. Seems
| pretty valuable to me.
| thomaslangston wrote:
| Small nitpick. Wind can be turned off. The turbines can be
| equipped with brakes to stop power generation in case of
| oversupply, in addition to other uses.
| jrockway wrote:
| I guess turning it on is where the problem comes from.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I think this is a great idea if you have systems that also use
| compressed air to function. If you need to convert compressed air
| to electricity the inherent losses in that conversion seem like
| they just would not be worth it as battery tech increases.
|
| Would love to see DC to DC grids become a thing again and it
| looks like they may - crazy to think that SF still has a fully
| operating DC grid powering all kinds of stuff.
| eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote:
| What is the expected efficiency of this?
| rikkipitt wrote:
| I too was wondering that as the ideal gas law states that PV =
| nRT. When you compress a gas it gets hotter, conversely,
| allowing it to decompress cools it. I assume they store the
| heat energy...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| Yes, their website says they have a thermal store.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| They should do free ice maker on the other end.
| dragontamer wrote:
| CAES has lower efficiency, probably closer to 70% and only if
| you use something to reheat the air. (Compressed air loses
| temperature and needs an external source of heat to restore it
| to full volume)
|
| Even if you use natural gas as a reheating element, the
| compressed air stores a significant amount of energy and is
| doing the majority of the work.
| konschubert wrote:
| What matters is efficiency per dollar:
|
| Efficiency / cost
|
| I am worried that the cost is the driving factor here...
| EricE wrote:
| If you ignore efficiency then you stop making a profit pretty
| quickly. You can solely focus all you want on cost; sooner or
| later efficiency will make you pay.
|
| Goldman wouldn't be making that kind of an investment if they
| didn't have a handle on both parts of the equation. Indeed
| efficiency (dealing with losses from seepage) have been the
| nut that hasn't been cracked with compressed air storage;
| these guys seem to have an economical (efficient) way to deal
| with that problem. If true, then they really are worthy of
| Goldman's investment.
| terpimost wrote:
| Interesting, I guess the water freeze isn't a problem in those
| places
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| I was wondering the same. Although they can somewhat mitigate
| that by adding some antifreeze additives to the water perhaps?
| nemacol wrote:
| I would like more detail on the "Thermal management system" and
| how long it could store the heat it captures.
|
| One of the benefits they touting is "Long duration energy
| storage" I would think the limiting factor would be the ability
| of the thermal management system to retain the energy it captured
| to reheat the compressed air. Am I thinking about this correctly?
| danans wrote:
| > One of the benefits they touting is "Long duration energy
| storage"
|
| According to their marketing video [1] "Long duration" is
| relative to current lithium ion battery-based storage. So their
| system can store energy up to 24 hours vs a few hours for
| batteries.
|
| For even longer term storage (weeks, months, seasons), some
| time of chemical storage will be needed. Currently, both
| hydrogen electrolysis and ammonia synthesis [2] are being
| explored for that.
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/cOWjwwKSR78?t=136
|
| 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y_2Z_VwFNc
| themanmaran wrote:
| On that note do you have a good explanation for why the air
| needs to be reheated? I didn't quite understand that from the
| video.
| tristor wrote:
| Air pressure is strongly correlated to temperature. Cooling
| the air after compression reduces pumping effort during
| storage, reheating it increases turbine head pressure during
| generation.
| usrusr wrote:
| In other words: gas compression storage suffers from
| temperature losses. The compressed gas is hot, the heat
| dissipates from storage and that energy won't be coming
| back.
|
| But if you extract that heat during compression you can put
| in a separate storage, one that is much easier to insulate
| than the compression tanks, and "mix it back in" during
| recompression, avoiding a large part of those losses.
| tristor wrote:
| > In other words: gas compression storage suffers from
| temperature losses.
|
| Yes, and you can also compress air further when it's
| cooled (this is why there is an intercooler on
| turbocharged cars, as an example), this means your
| density per volume of storage is higher at a given
| pressure.
|
| The reality though is that this is likely less efficient
| than many other storage mechanisms. Additionally, this
| may require some sort of additional energy input for
| reheating if the heat storage is not capable of holding
| long enough to fully reheat the air on release to get the
| highest turbine efficiency.
| nemacol wrote:
| Warm air takes up more space. If you cool it before pumping
| it into the ground you will not waste time/energy. If you
| pump warm air down it will lose heat into the ground and
| shrink and you would lose capacity - pumping that last x% the
| tanks will be fuller until they cool down.
|
| You warm up the air on the way out to expand it and you get
| more air to spin the turbine. More bang for your buck.
|
| I believe is the thinking.
| danans wrote:
| > Warm air takes up more space. If you cool it before
| pumping it into the ground you will not waste time/energy.
|
| The real masterstroke here might then be to put this system
| in an area with large diurnal temp changes like the desert,
| then charge this system with cool night air, and then
| reheat it and generate electricity during the day with warm
| daytime air. Heat pumps could be used to nudge the temp on
| either end into it's optimal range.
|
| It then becomes a solar thermal hybrid compressed air
| energy storage.
|
| This could pair well with renewables that are more
| available at night like onshore wind.
| samstave wrote:
| Many years ago I was doing shrooms in the Nevada desert
| -- and the epiphany I had was that the desert, and the
| caves all around and throughout the deserts served as
| "the lungs of the earth" -- they would heat and cool and
| would suck air in and out based on this...
|
| I was 17 at the time, and I have been into some of the
| most incredible caves - the best in Ganung Mulu National
| Park in Borneo Malaysia...
|
| As the rains flowed out and carried the guano from 5
| million bats into the forest to fertilize it...
|
| And then I realized it wasnt just the desert - it was the
| caves...
|
| Caves (giant ones) are really important for planet
| health.
| usrusr wrote:
| To the best of my knowledge that thinking is spot on.
|
| A possible component that might be missing (in the thinking
| and/or in the proposed implementation): the stored heat could
| also be utilised separately if needed, so if you have an
| intermittent heat consumer and an intermittent electricity
| consumer you could consume the heat first, then leave the
| remaining compression energy (what you could recover without
| reheating) "forever". Bonus points if you also happen to have a
| coolant consumer to benefit from the temperature delta caused
| heat loss or premature heat consumption.
| samstave wrote:
| After seeing videos of lava pouring into the ocean I have
| fantasized about a power generation system:
|
| Artificial geo-thermal power gen:
|
| Dig a deep enough hole but near the ocean, and let ocean
| water pour into the hole that gets close enough to magma such
| that the magma creates a steam blast back out a tube with a
| bunch of turbines to spin.
| usrusr wrote:
| Heh, and you'd get a molten salt heat storage unit for
| free. Because if you condense that steam you have solved
| desalination as well.
|
| CEO Nwabudike Morgan likes this (reference to Sid Meier's
| Alpha Centauri in case you were wondering)
| jl6 wrote:
| I think the video said the system runs a cycle within a period of
| around 24 hours. What would it take to store energy in compressed
| air for ~6 months? This is what high-latitude dark-winter
| countries need: the ability to over-generate in the summer and
| draw down on stored energy in the winter.
| marvin wrote:
| Pumped hydroelectric storage is an obvious choice for the
| countries that have the geography, in effect meaning that most
| of the infrastructure for doing it is already in place.
| Hydroelectric reservoirs allow storing energy more or less
| indefinitely.
|
| Of course, the capacity will rarely have been dimensioned for
| keeping 6 months of usage on hand, but combining pumped storage
| with over-provisioned wind energy would allow for living
| through months of unfavorable sun, rain or wind conditions.
| axg11 wrote:
| Does this technology only work in select places or are
| underground caverns fairly commonplace?
| nkurz wrote:
| Appropriate natural caverns do exist, but are not common. One
| of the main differentiating factor between this approach and
| others is that they drill a man-made borehole rather than
| depending on finding a pre-existing cavern.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Near where I live there is a large underground natural gas
| storage field using natural caverns.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Just cheeked some levelized utility scale costs for the US:
|
| Advanced Nuclear is of $72/MWh.
|
| Wind onshore $30/Mwh
|
| Solar photovoltaic (PV) $30/Mwh
|
| Lithium-ion battery storage is roughly $180/Mwh.
|
| At the moment, if you want to provide baseload better than
| nuclear using renewables, the cost must of storage must not
| exceed $30-$40/Mwh.
|
| (grid baseload is the minimum level of demand on an electrical
| grid over a span of time, something unvarying power plants are
| best suited for. Renewables require storage and advanced grid to
| provide baseload.)
| robomartin wrote:
| Based on my reading, these systems are, at best, in the order of
| 60% efficient. To state the obvious, this means that fully 40% of
| the energy they pull from the grid will be wasted. Burned. Never
| to be recovered. How is that a good idea?
|
| Solar? Well, solar isn't free energy. What's the comparison to
| grid scale batteries for storage? That process is far more
| favorable, with efficiency exceeding 80%.
|
| I have to admit not understanding how this kind of an investment
| happens. I don't see this as viable technology at scale. We are
| far better off building nuclear power plants (talk about dense
| energy storage!).
|
| Here's a good article on pumped thermal energy storage systems
| and how they compare to alternatives. The authors cover thermal
| storage in some detail.
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0016...
| EricE wrote:
| You are spot on - the real answer is readily available:
| nuclear. We have reactor designs that if the active systems
| fail the reactors shut down naturally instead of running away.
| We have designs that can be burning all that "spent" fuel we
| are currently trying to bury for 10,000 years (!). Modular
| reactor designs in particular have incredible promise to
| provide for infinite scaling (just add more modules as needs
| increase), deal with the inefficient building, maintenance and
| decommissioning costs of todays light water reactor designs,
| and being modular provide far more granularity in power
| delivery further negating the need for energy storage to smooth
| out spikes and troughs in demands; allowing energy producers to
| far better match generation to power requirements.
|
| Sadly I think it will be far more feasible to develop energy
| storage technologies than hope we can ever get enough people to
| be rational about nuclear. I mean how asinine is it for Germany
| to have turned off perfectly working and economically viable
| nuclear plants to then be dependent on RUSSIA for natural gas?
| How dumb do you have to be to be to think that's a REMOTELY
| good idea? Yet here we are (thankfully France seems to be far
| more rational - you don't hear them even suggesting they plan
| to be equally idiotic).
|
| Many battery storage studies don't account for
| replacement/maintenance, or the infrastructure that would be
| required to sustain replacement/maintenance at grid scale, let
| alone the resources required to scale up to handle initial
| deployment of batteries in sufficient quantities to support the
| entire grid. Where are we going to get the manufacturing
| capacity, let alone materials? The scale here is pretty mind
| boggling if you start to do the math.
|
| Our current battery tech is nothing more than a transitory
| technology - they are far from sustainable long term.
| Personally I think super capacitors will be our ultimate
| solution, but in the meantime if these guys really have dealt
| with the seepage issues of compressed air, this is are next
| best bet for MASS energy storage at scale. You only have the
| privilege of worrying about efficiency if you have a working
| system. Wood driven steam sucked, but it drove the industrial
| revolution because there was literally no other viable
| alternative at the time that could have remotely scaled in the
| same way.
|
| Remember grid scale solutions require MASSIVE energy
| capabilities. The scale here is ridiculous compared to home or
| vehicle energy requirements. If you don't think Goldman Sachs
| took all of this into account before they made their investment
| - well, you are grossly mistaken. You don't get to be their
| size by continually placing bad bets.
| mk81 wrote:
| jesperlang wrote:
| There is a great post on compressed air energy storage (CAES)
| over at Low-Tech Magazine:
|
| https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-o...
| tomcooks wrote:
| Finally someone mentioning this, it's a gem of an article in a
| gem of a website
| tonke90 wrote:
| There is already something like this in Germany, it even also
| talks about saving the heat:
| https://www2.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/ep/ausgaben/ep200801/0108_spe...
| (German)
| ck2 wrote:
| Why not use spare energy to lift -really- heavy object(s) and let
| gravity power the generators when there is a shortage?
|
| Million tons of concrete isn't going to suffer any maintenance
| expenses over decades.
| nkurz wrote:
| That's a really popular idea on the internet because it's very
| easy to grasp, but the numbers don't work out well. The weights
| you can actually lift aren't much compared to the volume of a
| reservoir of water, and the heights you can lift them are but a
| fraction of the thousands of meters being discussed here. Yes,
| the concrete isn't going to require much maintenance, but the
| gearboxes needed are a significant engineering challenge.
| Pumping water or compressing air are a lot easier, and
| batteries are going to be hard to beat.
| toss1 wrote:
| Except it is already being done by multiple companies [0],
| Energy Vault in Switzerland [1], Gravitricity in Scotland
| [2], New Energy Lets go [3], and Gravity Power [4]. All have
| raised substantial funds and are building.
|
| Sure, pumped hydro has advantages, but has serious geographic
| limitations - you need a fairly ideal site. The key is that
| these can be built almost anywhere.
|
| [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-will-
| show-i... [1] https://www.energyvault.com/ [2]
| https://www.gravitricity.com/#about [3] https://n-e-l-g.de/
| [4] https://www.gravitypower.net/
| ted_dunning wrote:
| See also the rail-based gravity storage:
| https://aresnorthamerica.com/gravityline/
|
| But the point about little progress by these companies
| still holds. ARES has been around for 11 years now and has
| one 50MWh project to talk about that covers 20 acres.
| nkurz wrote:
| Good point, and good examples. Excited online discussion
| about companies like those are what I mean when I say it's
| popular on the internet. It's not impossible, it's just not
| the technology I would be betting on. To get a sense of
| what one is up against, you can work through the math
| comparing gravitational potential energy to electrical
| potential in typical batteries. I can't find a good link
| right now, but what I remember finding is that (in the
| ideal) a typical lead acid car battery has enough stored
| energy to lift itself into space! Conversely, if you wanted
| to store the same amount of energy as in a typical car
| battery, you'd need to be dropping that amount of weight
| from the top of the atmosphere all the way to the ground.
| aaron695 wrote:
| PBnFlash wrote:
| Air is kind of a shitty working fluid. I always kind of dismiss
| compressed air storage because of that.
|
| I saw a video recently that pumped water into tanks and used used
| the air as a spring. Just dip a pipe down and use the air to move
| the water. Extracting energy from a hyrdo generator.
|
| https://youtu.be/sBF5EnK9MPs
| u320 wrote:
| Isn't that just pumped hydro? You would need similar masses of
| water.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| It is pumped hydro, but you don't have the same mass of water
| because of the dramatically different pressures involved.
| Smaller water mass is the advantage to this, but the problem
| of managing heat is the downside that pumped storage doesn't
| face.
|
| This general technique is known as "liquid piston".
| PBnFlash wrote:
| Thanks for the search term. I am not a huge fan of the
| "advanced polymer" wank of that video but liquid piston
| seems very practical compared most of the "air powered car"
| nonsense compressed air systems that show up.
| PBnFlash wrote:
| I imagine it will get better performance from high pressure
| water instead of the few psi of a small elevation change.
| technicalbard wrote:
| smoyer wrote:
| Curiously there's a second article discussing compressed air
| energy on the front-page of Hacker News at the moment - it's
| about the Amish and their hacker mentality [0]. There's a
| beautiful discontinuity between one of the more tech-savvy old-
| guard banks and the technology-careful Amish adopting the same
| technology.
|
| 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29905288
| mwattsun wrote:
| From another link on the front page the Amish use the term "Amish
| Electricity" so this would be an Amish Battery
|
| Amish Hackers
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29905288
| gjvc wrote:
| "Workers descend to hollow out a cavity, which the company then
| floods."
|
| reminiscent of _The Day Today_
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTGE9153VFE
| ds wrote:
| Can someone explain their revenue to me?
|
| They claim 1m in revenue from their existing product which is:
| "1.75 megawatts (MW) of peak power output; a 2.2 MW charge
| rating; and 10+ megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage capacity"
|
| How does that equal 1m in revenue? You have to pay to charge your
| air-battery during low-cost hours and then discharge it during
| high cost hours to make the difference in revenue.
|
| The issue is, you can buy 2 megawatts of power 24/7 at average
| datacenter energy pricing (~5c/kwh) for $2400/day or 876k/year.
| Who is paying more than that for less energy and only at certain
| hours?
|
| Is there some energy company somewhere that sells power during
| the day at like 50c/kwh and 1c/kwh at night???
| 323 wrote:
| While I don't know about their numbers, having a "grid level
| battery" is definitely something people (or gov subsidies) will
| pay for.
| _delirium wrote:
| These kinds of utility-run storage facilities usually buy and
| sell on the wholesale spot market, which swings much more than
| retail prices do. Somewhat similar economics to gas "peaker"
| plants, which only fire up when supply is tight and prices
| spike, making it economical to run a higher-cost generator.
|
| The Hydrostor plant is in Ontario. Here's an archive of hourly
| spot-market electricity prices there (in dollars per MWh):
| http://reports.ieso.ca/public/PriceHOEPPredispOR/. So far in
| 2022, prices have been as low as $0.00/MWh (during a few hours
| overnight on Jan 5) and as high as $230.87/MWh (during the
| morning of Jan 11). In 2021, hourly average prices even
| exceeded $1000/MWh ($1/kWh) twice, on March 28 and October 10.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Still seems extreme. IF my math is right, they would need to
| buy and sell 10MWh every day at a 27c/KWh markup. Given they
| they deliver at ~2.2 MW, This means that they would have to
| hit this markup for a 4 hour duration, every day.
| ds wrote:
| I would need to see the math, because nothing adds up to even
| 1/10th of their claimed revenue. Best case, they bought 10mwh
| on jan 5th and sold it at the perfect time on jan 11th. This
| would give them 2k in revenue in 6 days.
|
| Wheres the rest? And what about if you cant nostradamus
| predict the best times to buy and sell?
| fenixnuke wrote:
| The other thing that they can be doing is selling standby
| frequency response services to utilities:
|
| https://smartgrid.ieee.org/bulletins/january-2016/energy-
| sto....
|
| Sometimes utilities only need a few minutes of power to
| cover small gaps while ramping up/down powerplants, or if a
| cloud passes over a solar generation facility. Since these
| volumes are very small but critical, the effective price
| per MWH is extremely high.
|
| When Tesla did their grid scale battery installation in
| Australia, this is how they made their money. Not via
| energy arbitrage, but with selling frequency response
| services. I have no idea if this is the same thing, but
| there are other ways to make money with energy storage as
| well.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I agree it does seem like a stretch.
|
| IF 10MWh is their daily cycle, they are selling 3,650,000
| kWh/year. To hit $1M per year, they would need to be selling
| ~27c/KWh above their buying price.
|
| I get that you can have a big spread if you are being paid to
| take power, and paid again to sell it.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I think that's it basically. New England consumers pay
| ~$.22/kWh. We're going to have offshore wind energy in the
| next decade that might conceivably have surplus power quite a
| lot. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that these
| plants could have a deal with the power plants to take extra
| power for free so long as they have guarantees on filling the
| expected gaps or meeting expected spikes in usage. Everyone
| wins.
| fenixnuke wrote:
| They are likely operating on the wholesale markets, which are
| market priced. For the western grid there is a significantly
| wider price range of prices. On peak days in the summer, prices
| can go up above $1,000/mwh in the late afternoon for several
| days. During the late fall/early spring, there are negative
| prices in the late morning (like $20-$50/mwh) due to extremely
| high solar production and low demand, so utilities are
| literally paying you to use electricity. It's not inconceivable
| to get to $1 million a year on 1 mwh of storage.
|
| Take a look at the price maps and historical pricing data if
| you are curious
| https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/prices.html
| ds wrote:
| Im familiar with energy markets. Im also familiar with the
| fact that any serious seller or buyer of energy locks in
| yearly pricing contracts and is unaffected by these swings.
| Any serious datacenter or industrial buyer is not relying on
| spot pricing. These energy markets also dont exist in every
| state.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| If you are familiar with energy markets then by all means
| tell us the percentage breakdown of electricity consumed
| that is covered by long term contracts vs the spot market.
| samstave wrote:
| How can you make a storage system that only slurps power off
| of another grid that "literally pays you to use electricity"?
| during those times?
| fenixnuke wrote:
| There are times where the rooftop solar and base load
| generation for a utility is greater than the total
| electricity demand. Demand and supply for the grid have to
| be balanced, or else you will end up tripping plants and/or
| damaging equipment. Since they can't "turn off" rooftop and
| most grid scale solar generation, and they can't really
| turn off and on their base load plants throughout the day,
| their best option is to try to sell the excess electricity
| on the wholesale market. The problem is that the other
| utilities are in the same situation, and they need to
| offload electricity. Since no one wants the electricity,
| wholesale prices will actually go negative. Basically a
| utility will pay another utility to turn off a base load
| plant and take the excess electricity from them.
|
| This is why grid scale energy storage is such a hyped
| technology - if you can store that energy when supply is
| way too high and dispatch it when renewable generation is
| low (no wind/solar), you can maintain high renewable
| percentage in the generation mix. Without it, you can only
| really go up to a certain percentage of renewables.
| EricE wrote:
| Buy low and sell high. They can find surplus power and buy
| it cheap, then wait until there are unmet demands and sell
| high.
|
| These crazy things called computers make creating and
| automating markets like that pretty easy :)
|
| It's win win - the people with surplus power can at least
| get some money for energy that would otherwise likely go to
| waste (large base load power plants can't ramp up and down
| on a dime) and on the flip side if you have an energy
| provider that only occasionally needs capacity in excess of
| their inherent generation even though the immediate cost is
| higher for spot power, it can still be far cheaper in the
| long term than building more base load generation (often
| fossil fuel because renewable still isn't a viable
| replacement for base loads). And running base load
| generation under capacity is wasteful for emissions and
| overall efficiency.
|
| Once we start to crack the whole energy storage thing
| renewables will be A LOT more valuable since we will be
| able to start to use them for base load. Storage allows you
| to create reliable energy delivery that's predictable -
| that's essential if we ever want to eject fossil fuels from
| the grid. Or we could stop being childish about nuclear
| power - frankly I think we can solve the storage problem
| long before we can convince people to be rational about
| nuclear :p
|
| It probably seems crazy for the uninitiated, but there are
| a lot of efficiencies in markets that occur naturally over
| time. You see distortions in the market from CA's stupid
| and politically motivated choices - what seems crazy to you
| is the market adapting to the model that CA is forcing. Is
| it nuts? Yup. Is it necessary? Nope - these wounds are
| entirely self inflicted. Pretending the world is different
| than it actually is doesn't solve anything and the people
| of CA are paying a hell of a lot more for electricity
| because they are trying to live in a pipe dream for where
| we are today.
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| A lot of people look at these and think "that doesn't seem
| like it'd be remotely worth it for something that size" but
| it's really hard to explain just how badly California has
| painted itself into a corner on distant generation, huge
| variance between excess renewable capacity and peak load, and
| transmission congestion. The numbers don't make sense to
| people.
|
| Pretty much all the solar plants we're putting in now have
| combined battery storage systems either for voltage support
| or "peaker" sales opportunities. In some places (like literal
| islands) it's about capacity smoothing or resilience, but the
| driving force behind all the investment is the US western
| interconnect with arbitrage opportunism starting to make real
| money and looking to make much, much more over the next
| decade.
|
| If government-sachs is betting on this, they've probably got
| an even more pessimistic take on the CAISO market than I do.
| buryat wrote:
| > it's really hard to explain just how badly California has
| painted itself into a corner on distant generation
|
| source needed if you're making such a bold statement
| EricE wrote:
| Just read the constant stream of news about it? They keep
| shutting down power plants in the name of the
| environment, but just shift the generation outside of the
| state. It's a numbers game that's meaningless as long as
| they still consume power, but it lets them virtue signal
| all over the place to people who don't pay attention to
| details - which sadly is most of us. How many times when
| we are give stats do we really wonder about the context
| around them?
| MPSimmons wrote:
| That sounds dangerous.
| hinkley wrote:
| Dave Borlace (Just Have a Think) has been covering this space a
| bit. There's a whole space in power storage that also overlaps
| with carbon capture that I suspect will probably end up being the
| winning play because cogeneration can often double system
| efficiency, making unprofitable things profitable.
|
| One way we can reduce carbon intensity is to stop using fossil
| fuels to generate industrial CO2.
|
| There's a kind of metal-air battery that actually absorbs CO2
| while charging, and emits it while discharging. There is also air
| liquification as power storage, in which you can separate the
| oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen into different containers.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| In early 20th century in London there was an alternative
| hydraulic "power grid" with plants (aka pumps), storages and an
| underground distribution network of pipes. A building, for
| example, could connect to high pressure water mains and use it to
| power elevators. Electricity eventually won, but it's interesting
| to see an idea coming back.
|
| Zeppelins next!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hydraulic_Power_Company
| samstave wrote:
| There also used to be "central turbines" whereby there was a
| central spinning rod that one could attach belts to in order to
| spin a thing to get work out of it...
|
| called line and shaft
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qt5tltnvF8
| cjrp wrote:
| Really cool, sort of like how an ICE drives ancillaries
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Cool indeed, but pretty dangerous and difficult to
| reconfigure. Electric wires and motors are so much smaller,
| and easier to protect, and more interoperable, so you can
| see why they won out.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| That was one of the reasons behind having factory
| whistles: all workers take their places, the whistle,
| then the whole thing is started. While it's running
| people are not supposed to move around.
| Someone wrote:
| That was normal in the age of steam. Having lots of tiny
| steam engines on the factory floor does not make sense.
| Keeping them running is too labor intensive, they would be
| fire risks, and they're less efficient.
| DuskStar wrote:
| And in the age of water, running shafts to the waterwheel
| was vastly easier than having a wheel at each station.
| DrBoring wrote:
| I once saw this in use at a restaurant to drive ceiling fans.
| I looked up some videos:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uCvwEq3co
|
| https://youtu.be/1IWTM1rNCnw?t=78
| snalty wrote:
| There's a cool working example of this at Kelham Island
| Museum in Sheffield, England.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Hydraulic refers to liquid. Pneumatic refers to compressed air.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| That is an interesting system (which I had never heard of), but
| it seems pretty different from this.
|
| The London system used water under pressure and was used for
| power distribution, whereas this one compresses air and is for
| energy storage.
|
| And the Wikipedia article says the London system used "large
| vertical pistons" with weights to store energy, whereas this
| one pressurizes air.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The University of Iowa campus has a steam system under the
| campus, installed in the last century. Nowadays the steam is
| recovered waste from the electric plant. But it's still in use!
| bumby wrote:
| If you want to find good candidates for saving the campus
| tons of money, go to the roof of one of the tallest buildings
| on a cold day and look for the buildings that are venting
| lots of steam. They likely have a failed steam trap somewhere
| in the building. It's not uncommon for failed steam traps to
| save thousands of dollars a year apiece when fixed.
| javajosh wrote:
| Zeppelins with modern materials and technology would be very,
| very cool. I'd ride in one.
| Melatonic wrote:
| The military is actually doing a ton of work with blimp and
| zeppelin like things currently - you do not hear about it
| much but there is a a ton of testing and research being done.
| xwdv wrote:
| What would be even cooler is zeppelins with swimming pools
| and jacuzzis while you take in the views of the sky.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Made out of transparent material, so you could look down
| too.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Glass-bottomed ballroom, anyone?
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Plane spotting gets a new color with that.
| javajosh wrote:
| I'm picking up what you're putting down.
| freefal wrote:
| A bit tangential, but New York City has an operating steam
| system that's still widely used by commercial customers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system
| dmix wrote:
| The interesting part of the NYC one is the scale
|
| > Today, Consolidated Edison operates the largest commercial
| steam system in the world (larger than the next nine
| combined).
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| San Francisco has one too, used primarily for heating
| buildings
| https://clearwaycommunityenergy.com/system_lists/energy-
| cent...
| antupis wrote:
| District heating is pretty normal at northern Europe altought
| now we use mostly water.
| m4rtink wrote:
| The district heating in Brno here in Czech Republic is in
| the process of converting from steam to hot water, mainly
| due to cost savings. Modern isolated hot water pipes loose
| a negligible ammount of heat in transfer while there was
| green grass growing on top of the old buried steam pipes
| even in winter.
|
| That and the old textile industry that directly used steam
| no longer exists.
| pinot wrote:
| District heating with water is vastly more safe, I imagine
| that's why its used.
|
| I remember my apartment in germany had a "Heat" meter on
| the water line, always wondered how that worked.
| krab wrote:
| We have a calorimeter - it should count volume of hot
| water times the temperature difference. I heard it's not
| very precise.
| Naga wrote:
| Downtown Ottawa has a similar steam system too, although I
| think it's mostly government buildings instead of private,
| commercial buildings that are hooked up to it.
| wefarrell wrote:
| It is funny (if not terrifying) that we have literal geysers
| spring up on crowded city streets every once in a while.
| mderazon wrote:
| Isn't that the concept behind "streampunk" ?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk
| _pmf_ wrote:
| The Amish use compressed air:
| http://www.amishfamilyvalues.com/amish/amish-electricity/
| caseyohara wrote:
| This is interesting:
|
| "This was a crisis. Without electricity, the Amish couldn't
| store milk, and the church was adamant that Amish were not
| going connect to the local electric company. Finally a
| solution was found. It was decided that diesel generators
| could be used to power the refrigerators. This decision
| allowed the Amish to continue their tradition as dairy
| farmers without having to use public electricity."
|
| So the Amish are allowed to use electricity, just not from
| the public grid? Generators seem like a weird loophole to
| their own rules.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > So the Amish are allowed to use electricity, just not
| from the public grid? Generators seem like a weird loophole
| to their own rules.
|
| That depends greatly on the congregation. Each congregation
| sets its own rules on how to deal with technology. "Not
| inside the home" is a very common technological limit. Cell
| phones might be stored in a shed, fed by solar chargers,
| for use out in the field. A workshop might have electricity
| from a wind/solar installation or even a diesel generator,
| but not the attached house.
| s1mon wrote:
| If you think this is weird, wait until you see the
| convoluted/clever things that some Jewish people do to work
| around the sabbath.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-
| enci...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath_mode
| userbinator wrote:
| If they are against centralisation, that makes sense; but
| then, unless you drill your own wells and refine the crude
| yourself, you're still getting fuel from someone else.
| rcurry wrote:
| I once took a tour of the Mabel Tainter theater in Menomonie
| Wisconsin. The original light fixtures had been built to work
| off of both gas and electricity, just in case the whole
| newfangled electricity thing didn't work out.
| mabbo wrote:
| This sort of system is used today in many modern industrial
| facilities. Case in point: Amazon warehouses.
|
| Lots of the mechanical automations inside some of those
| warehouses are powered by compressed air in open loop systems.
| As the conveyor pushes the item off, onto a different lane,
| there's a distinct hiss of air escaping. The movement of the
| machine was powered by compressed air.
|
| Out in the parking lot in these facilities, you'll see a huge
| compressed air tank (or many), constantly being refilled. Tubes
| from these go into the building like arteries in a body. Often
| inside the building there will be buffer tanks to help ensure
| constant pressure.
|
| Source: worked for a few years with guys who maintained these
| systems. Some of what I learned may be wrong, so feel free to
| correct me.
| throw8932894 wrote:
| It is pretty common in regular workshops. Compressed air
| powers drills, riveting machines, sprays guns, jack
| hammers... Tools powered by compressed air are simpler (no
| electronics), more durable and cheaper.
| bin_bash wrote:
| You forgot the most important reason they're used: they're
| far more powerful!
| mnahkies wrote:
| My favourite thing about air tools was not having to worry
| about batteries (most electric hand tools I've used are
| battery only so no opportunity to use an extension lead
| like you use an air hose)
| grawprog wrote:
| Most electric hand tools are usually available for
| cheaper in a corded variety. The only electric hand tool
| I haven't seen come corded are impact drivers and most
| impact drivers I've used will last a day or two using it
| 8 hours a day even off a 2aH battery.
|
| For me, I like air powered tools because of their power
| and reliability. They'll almost always have more torque
| and power than similar electric tools.
| WheatM wrote:
| Air tools defintely don't have more torque than electric
| tools, they rely on speed to overcome their shortcomings
| in torque. The main high torque application in air tools
| is in impact wrenches, which use very fast hammering
| action. Modern battery impact wrenches can match the
| performance of the best air wrenches.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| The motor also doesn't create sparks so they are more
| useful in flamable atmospheres.
| bumby wrote:
| They aren't really the same types of systems.
|
| Pneumatic "muscle pressure" is common in lots of industrial
| applications, especially those that operate in austere
| environments. But those are different than the tech being
| researched in the article in large part because the
| mechanical compressors in industrial applications are hugely
| inefficient. Many constant volume compressors have 90%+ of
| the energy as waste heat.
|
| I believe the article is referencing isobaric (constant
| pressure) compressed air energy storage (CAES) that have much
| better efficiencies.
| cinntaile wrote:
| How does this work? How can you compress air without
| raising the pressure? Are you sure you don't mean
| adiabatic?
| bumby wrote:
| An external pressure (usually water) keeps it at a
| constant pressure.
|
| Think of a bag of air under water on the ocean floor. The
| height of the water column is (relatively) constant, so
| the pressure in the bag is also constant.
| ryan_j_naughton wrote:
| According to PV=nRT (ideal gas law), no you cannot in a
| closed system!!! But Hydrostor isn't violating any laws
| of physics -- they are simply capturing that heat so that
| it doesn't become waste heat!
|
| Hydrostor has a thermal management system that captures
| the heat and stores is during compression. Then it reuses
| the heat when it is decompressing the air.[1]
|
| This seem extremely promising as a much smaller footprint
| solution than pumped storage and much more sustainable
| and lower cost than any other energy storage solution. I
| just heard about them today, and I'm extremely impressed.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWjwwKSR78
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| Oh I agree it's not quite the same as in the article. I was
| comparing to what the parent comment was saying about large
| pneumatic tube networks in ages past.
| enginoor wrote:
| The common term is "pneumatics" and the components are
| prevalent in all automation and manufacturing. The air
| required is typically compressed on site.
|
| Pneumatic actuators are relatively inexpensive, have a binary
| state that is easy to control, and offer a high power
| density.
| laurent92 wrote:
| How do they avoid bacteria/mould from growing in tanks and
| flocking the pipes and releasing in the room? Do such
| systems ever get cleaned up?
| [deleted]
| HPsquared wrote:
| The air in industrial pneumatic systems is filtered and
| dried, which would prevent these issues.
|
| Pneumatic systems often use small orifices and valves to
| control the air flow which would be quickly clogged by
| any debris, so cleanliness is important.
|
| An aside: PID control was, back in the day, mostly
| implemented in pneumatic control systems (using a set of
| levers, bellows springs and nozzles). Pneumatic control
| systems were (and still are) used a LOT in industrial
| control systems where e.g. flammable environments where
| electrical equipment is too much of a risk.
|
| https://control.com/textbook/closed-loop-
| control/pneumatic-p...
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| There was an article on here earlier about Amish tech and they
| also make use of a lot of pneumatic machines for daily tasks.
| dylanz wrote:
| Is this similar to a trompe?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe
| rdtwo wrote:
| In the 80s my grandfather used to do this for the former Soviet
| Union. Long story short they were pressuring a salt mine at night
| for energy storage and somebody failed to report a water leak
| during the day. They tried to depressurize the mine but it ended
| up blowing up anyway killing a couple people in The process. This
| shit can be really dangerous if done incorrectly.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| How did the situation go from a water leak to an explosion?
| alan-crowe wrote:
| The Lake Peigneur Drilling Accident is a tale of water
| getting into a salt mine from the lake above, due to drilling
| for oil in the wrong place. As the water dissolved the salt,
| the hole grew bigger and bigger, exponentially. The lake
| emptied into the salt mine, turning it into brine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur
|
| So I'm picturing water leaking into a salt mine full of
| pressurized air. Naively it makes a hole, and a hole is just
| a leak. But if the water starts dissolving the salt in a
| process that runs away, then it is more like popping a
| balloon, but on a grand scale.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Exactly this. Popped a balloon that just happened to be the
| size of a mountain
| slingnow wrote:
| Can you name a method of large scale energy storage that isn't
| dangerous if done incorrectly?
| karmakaze wrote:
| I think the comment is more about being easy to do
| incorrectly/dangerously. Pumping water up into a reservoir
| seems easier/safer.
| thehappypm wrote:
| You've picked the one that probably has the highest death
| toll worldwide!
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Read up on the Johnstown Flood.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood
| WJW wrote:
| Lots of water in a reservoir is not particularly safe in
| itself. For example, in December 2000 at the Grande Dixence
| a high-pressure pipeline from the dam burst, causing a
| landslide that wiped out a small hamlet and killed three
| people. It's also not hard to find reports of massive
| amounts of casualties and/or property damage from dams that
| just outright fail.
| Choco31415 wrote:
| An underground reservoir of water though should still be
| safer. Only the operator(s) on site might be impacted by
| a failure.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yeah a large pressure vessel is basically a bomb. No matter
| how many layers of protection you add on the technology
| always wants to go too a rapid critical failure. Using
| statistics and layers of protection you can always show it
| to be safe to handle anything but when you get to such low
| probability your models be always be off and variables that
| you think are independent are actually linked (bad
| maintenance practices being one)
| usrusr wrote:
| Water reservoirs for energy generation/storage have gone
| through accidents killing thousands. I suggest looking up
| Vajont on Wikipedia.
|
| The project mentioned in the article seems particularly
| safe to me as they seem to run it with constant pressure,
| defined by the hydrostatic head of their deeply dug
| cavities. They don't really have a pressure vessel, they
| have a flooded cavern where they create a bubble by pushing
| in air. If you pop off a seal from the pipes connecting
| compressors/turbines to the bubble could still hurt
| yourself a lot shooting parts through the room, but that
| should be all.
|
| The cavity they build is 2000 feet deep, which equates to
| the pressure of a CO2 cartridge that you'd use for e.g.
| carbonating a beverage. Not coincidentally at all I think,
| they either aim for the deepest cavity were hydrostatic
| pressure isn't enough to liquefy parts of the air, or for
| the least deep dig that gives them liquefication, where the
| air "boils off" as they open the valves.
| rpeden wrote:
| Pumped storage is a bit different than an ordinary
| reservoir with a dam, though. You have more opportunity
| to build it in a place where it's less likely to cause
| harm is something goes wrong. It has been used pretty
| effectively on both sides of the border near Niagara
| Falls for 60+ years.
|
| It's not perfect, of course. Accidents still happen, for
| example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroele
| ctric_Power_... although fortunately nobody was killed.
| 0898 wrote:
| This brings to mind the other post about the Amish that's on
| today's front page. I believe the Amish sometimes use compressed
| air as an alternative form of power.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Also quite popular in mines because it doesn't create sparks.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I read an article in a woodworking magazine about how one Amish
| woodworking shop was built to avoid using electricity. The
| whole shop ran off a stationary diesel engine driving a shaft
| in a floor trench and belt drove the larger stationary
| machinery like band saws, table saws, planers, drill presses,
| joiners and so on. But what about hand tools? A large belt
| driven air compressor off the diesel engine handled a myriad of
| air power tools like drills, orbital sanders, buffers and all
| that. Really neat setup.
| blincoln wrote:
| My father once told me that a lot of machine shops used to be
| set up that way, except that the powered shaft ran along the
| ceiling instead of in a floor trench. "Just throw a belt up
| over the shaft" and attach it to the machine you want to use,
| was how he described it.
|
| I don't know if it's still there, but there used to be a
| fancy restaurant in the Eastlake part of Seattle that had
| started out that way, and still had the old Art Deco-ish
| drive shaft running around the ceiling. It was a neat touch
| point when I saw it and remembered my dad's description from
| years before.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Yes, the industrial revolution was powered this way. Water
| wheels and steam engines as central power plants, with
| power distributed mechanically.
| bootlooped wrote:
| My understanding is that this paradigm was incredibly
| dangerous, with a lot of workers losing hands and arms in
| accidents. Turning on or off a given machine involved
| physically putting the belt on or pulling it off, and you
| could easily get caught in it. A very clever system for
| the technology of the day, but it's good we don't use it
| anymore, at least without more advanced safety mechanisms
| and practices.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I would have assumed they would have clutches so that
| individual machines could be disengaged. The large open
| belts running up to the drive shaft on the ceiling were
| dangerous regardless.
| noselasd wrote:
| This is basically how most indistrial setups was before
| engines and motors became a commodity. You had water wheels
| as your main power source, from which other tools was driven
| via belts and gears.
|
| Later the waterwheel was replaced by an electric motor or a
| fuel powered engine - but still built around just one source
| of power, with elaborate setups to drive different tools.
| With the added benefits you could build factories and
| workshops outside main water sources.
| MisterTea wrote:
| There is a wonderful museum in Windsor Vermont called
| American Precision Museum which still has the original
| overhead shaft and pulley system along with machinery. Went
| there in the early 90's as a kid and they did mention that
| it was converted to electric and the motors were still
| working supposedly.
|
| The Edison museum in Orange NJ also has such a preserved
| shop setup but electric driven by one or two big motors on
| an elevated platform.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I thought the whole schtick of the Amish was that they don't
| allow themselves to become reliant on technology, electricity
| just being an example. I doubt that Amish guy knows how to
| rebuild that engine should it fail.
| a2tech wrote:
| They don't believe in having technology in the home. Most
| Amish are perfectly willing to work with modern equipment
| for their shops and businesses. Go by an Amish milking shed
| anywhere in the country--as my dad would say 'they're lit
| up like a shit house in the fog'. Electric lights from one
| end to the other with modern milkers inside.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The Amish only allow technology that they think will
| improve their lives. Many have cell phones, but don't use
| Facebook for example. I'd also bet he could repair the
| engine if he needed to.
| yetihehe wrote:
| There was a comment somewhere where they used modern cnc
| machines to make parts for their air tools.
| lostapathy wrote:
| Also adds a ton of pollution from using (often old and poorly
| maintained) Diesel engines in the name of avoiding the
| electric grid. Adding to that, compressed air is a much less
| efficient source of power than using electricity directly.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, but air tools can be really nice to use,esp for
| grinding, cutting, sanding operations. For one, you can
| press/dig hard enough to bog or stop the tool and nothing
| hapoens - you just pick it uo and it speeds back uo again -
| do that with an electric tool and you'll have a dead motor
| paperweight real soon.
|
| Air tools can also be lighter and no worries abt damaging
| the cord or carrying the battery.
|
| Many good air tools can also have a better feel, especially
| if you can control the air flow trigger.
|
| (I don't have a bias either way, use both in my shop, but
| just wanted to point out that both have advantages)
| lostapathy wrote:
| I agree - air tools are awesome in some cases, although
| modern brushless tools are often competitive if not
| superior to air tools compared to how things were a
| decade ago.
|
| My complaint, really, is just how selfish it is to go out
| of your way to use a dirty energy source as a workaround
| for limits in your personal belief system.
| CarbonCycles wrote:
| This isn't new...I recall grad students working on this as far
| back as 2010.
|
| Some citations from an article: "Bottled wind could be as
| constant as coal." Wired Magazine. Retrieved 7/15/2010, 2010,
| from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/compressedair-
| plan... 59
|
| Cavallo, A. (2005). Controllable and affordable utility-scale
| electricity from intermittent wind resources and compressed air
| energy storage (CAES). Science Direct.
| rplnt wrote:
| > This isn't new...
|
| Well, yeah, this is in the opening of the article:
|
| > It updates a long-standing technology that never took off for
| electrical storage.
|
| There is/was plant operational since 1970s in Germany[1], which
| looks similar to the Wired article, but different from some
| other solutions posted in comments. Missing some parts perhaps
| to be viable.
|
| 1. PDF: http://www.fze.uni-
| saarland.de/AKE_Archiv/AKE2003H/AKE2003H_...
| NotChina wrote:
| belorn wrote:
| How does the economics of this look like, and how do they
| intended to get back the investment. If its to buy low when
| wind/solar production is high and sell when production is low,
| what will the cost per watt be? If its subsidies, how much will
| this cost the government?
|
| The article seem to mostly describe this as a technology project
| to test the technology at scale, but they do also mention
| profits. Is the basic premise of buy low sell high, exclusively
| on renewables, enough to offset the cost from energy conversion,
| building, staff and other costs, and if so, by what degree
| compared to other method to produce energy? When is it estimated
| to have paid its initial investment?
| EricE wrote:
| Energy storage if you want to rely solely on renewable energy
| sources is THE KEY to making that even remotely feasible.
|
| Current solar and wind renewables are NOT predictable nor
| reliable for sustained power generation. With Coal, Natural
| Gas, Nuclear and Hydro you can generate power on demand, no
| matter what the environment is doing. Well, Hydro in the west
| is getting dicey with the drought - but even that is far more
| stable than wind/sun which can vary wildly week to week, day to
| day or even hour to hour.
|
| That's why technology like this is so exciting. If you can look
| at the average production of a renewable over a month, then
| within a year the peak month, then look at the worst months,
| then have enough storage to cover a percentage of a peak month
| based off the hedge of the worst month then you are getting to
| a point where a solar farm isn't just an opportunistic source
| of power based on how much the sun is shining, but a reliable
| energy source that can be counted on whether the sun is shining
| or not.
|
| Same for wind farms.
|
| Energy storage is crucial if we seriously want to transition to
| renewables and hence the investment from Goldman Sachs.
|
| If this company is even remotely successful in actually
| delivering then $250M is a pittance to what they will receive
| back in the long term.
|
| There are also a lot of unused/abandoned underground structures
| - from various wells that are now dry of the resource they were
| originally drilled for to mines that are no longer productive.
| The problem has been sealing them from seepage so you don't
| loose your stored air - this article was light on details but
| that seems to be this companies claim to fame. They seem to
| have found economical ways to deal with those issues - enough
| to convince the boffins at Goldman Sachs they are worthy of
| investment. I guarantee you Goldman is not just tossing out
| money willy-nilley without performing some significant due
| diligence!
| belorn wrote:
| The question is still economics. At minimum the cost per
| watt/h need to be cheaper than to build a nuclear plant and
| have it run when demand exceed supply from renewables. Is
| this true for compressed air?
|
| When people discuss green hydro as a storage solution the
| numbers so far, from what I have managed to interpret, is
| around 3-5 times that off nuclear for the same amount of
| energy delivered. It is still technically possible to make a
| profit given enough subsidies and time, and it get much more
| economically if the hydrogen can be used directly in the
| production chain like steel and fertilizer. Right now there
| are a steel foundry in Sweden testing the technology and
| economics doing that, through I don't know how much subsidies
| and tax reductions were involved.
|
| Which all means the question about economics remains. There
| are many alternatives to fossil fuels but the primary
| question everyone debates is the issue of price. Without a
| price per watt/h or a time frame for when the investment get
| repaid its impossible to separate the practical from
| impractical, and the subsidy question is very relevant when
| discussing this on a national level.
| sauwan wrote:
| The round trip efficiencies for these compressed air storage have
| typically been terrible (<50%). That's mostly because compressing
| air is super inefficient (lots of wasted heat). Are they able to
| harness that waste heat in some productive way?
|
| ETA: Just saw the video. Looks like they store the heat to boost
| generation on the return trip. This [1] says they get ~60%
| efficiency.
|
| [1] https://www.inceptivemind.com/hydrostor-build-largest-
| compre...
| arnaudsm wrote:
| 60% is great! That's much better than hydrogen, but still far
| from lithium. Let's hope the $/kWh is decent.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Especially when you consider that the use case here is
| surplus energy, like when the wind is blowing harder than can
| be consumed. Efficiency might not be so important if you're
| buying free wind or solar energy, as long as it's above some
| minimum threshold. 60% feels pretty good.
| danans wrote:
| It's not quite lithium ion efficiency, but it serves a
| different duration energy storage market (up to 24 hours vs
| single hours for lithium ion battery storage), and it has a
| much longer service life (50 years), so the levelized cost of
| storage might be lower than lithium ion battery storage.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The lithium ion batteries in my car store energy for weeks
| on end with losses around 1-2% per week (after an initial
| couple percent rapid drop).
| danans wrote:
| What I meant is that current grid scale lithium ion
| battery storage projects are designed for at maximum a
| few hours between charge and discharge. They are mostly
| for shorter window grid stabilization, not to store
| energy for days or weeks.
|
| LiIon grid scale batteries are still very expensive as a
| long term energy storage solution, they are sized to
| provide higher value grid ancillary services, like
| frequence regulation.
| smm11 wrote:
| I had a huge burrito last night, and I am as I type, a massive
| compressed air storage device.
| nkurz wrote:
| Interesting. There's a good video describing the operation here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWjwwKSR78
|
| After watching it, I now understand that they aren't flooding the
| entire borehole, but rather are building a smaller high-pressure
| chamber at the bottom. The chamber is connected to pipes to a
| surface reservoir. When air is pumped into the chamber, it
| displaces water up toward the surface. When generating, the water
| flows back into the subsurface chambers, forcing out the high
| pressured air.
| keewee7 wrote:
| What goes into building and burying large scale underground
| structures like those air caverns?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Not much, technologically this is a conventional mine
| project, only that you mine air volume instead of rock and
| have to take care of the cavern being reasonably airtight
| afterwards.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Also you could do it underwater if you live near a coast.
| Basically an upside down cup with a pipe in it, sunk as
| deep as possible.
| buryat wrote:
| you don't have to build those caverns as they already exist
| and we have extracted gas and liquids from them, also the
| volume should be already known as we know how much we pumped
| out (unless it's an old site)
| srcmap wrote:
| Isn't the complexities related to making those caverns air
| and water tight for long period of time for long term
| energy storage requirements?
| count wrote:
| They don't need to be air/water tight for long term, just
| tight enough with a known leakage factor.
| edzillion wrote:
| But how cheap is it to determine the leakage factor? I
| suppose they can just pour in the equivalent water and
| see if it leaks?
| flyinghamster wrote:
| A similar thing is done for natural gas storage. A well will be
| drilled into a rock dome that lies atop a layer of saltwater-
| saturated sandstone. Gas is then pumped into it, displacing the
| water, and then can be withdrawn later.
|
| A report from 1961:
| https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/42910/...
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I wonder what is the loss/recovery %age.
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't have specific numbers, but in other batteries of this
| type, the length of storage time before discharge affects the
| efficiency. Heat stored from compression is lost over time.
| ehnto wrote:
| I was curious about that as well. I think it's best
| application would be to compensate for large amounts of
| rising and falling generation from solar grids, that way
| the cycle is daily. Being quick to come online and meet
| demand makes it good for maintaining grid stability at a
| much lower cost as well, like the Hornsdale Power Reserve
| facility https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| Totally out of my depth here, but does cooling the gas down
| have the added benefit that it'll be heated by the earth whilst
| stored?
| JohnL4 wrote:
| I'm guessing not. Earth's heat is way lower down. Think of a
| cave: always cold. I think what's going on is they're taking
| the heat out and storing it more efficiently than just
| dumping it down the ground, where (1) it would leak away,
| representing energy loss, and (2) as it leaks away, the air
| would lose pressure. (It would leak away b/c it's harder to
| insulate an entire mine, basically.) So, they pull it out
| ahead of time and put it back in when they decompress the air
| (which I think would add pressure back in due to heating a
| gas and maybe reduce problems caused by super-chilling other
| plant hardware? Anyway, seems fitting to add back what you
| took out if you're shooting for a closed system.)
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| > Earth's heat is way lower down
|
| Very incorrect.
| Raidion wrote:
| This isn't correct. Deep mines are notoriously hot, because
| you're digging towards magma. Google says temps increase by
| 3deg C for every 100m.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Naive question but couldn't our forerunners who otherwise
| succumbed to cold in harsher climates have exploited this
| fact to dig subterranean villages and towns?
|
| What's the element I'm missing as to why they didn't?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Pre-industrial holes may collapse long before you reach
| -100 meters. Even -5 meters is a challenge in certain
| places.
|
| Also, digging (or rather drilling) in bedrock is hard
| without motorized equipment and good steel.
|
| Also, supplying fresh air down there is a problem.
|
| Also, preventing the mine from flooding is usually a huge
| problem.
|
| Mining is hard and a lot of people lost their lives doing
| that. That said, if your only intent is to get a bit
| warmer, you may basically try a good cave. Caves tend to
| have temperatures above freezing for the whole year.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| And of course the difficulty with caves is hibernating
| predator(s) (bear is the one I can think of maybe more?)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| And lions:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_spelaea
|
| IDK if these lions hibernated, but their bones are
| definitely found in caves all over Europe. Often with
| human remains or artifacts nearby.
| WiseWeasel wrote:
| Difficulty of digging with the tools they had, inability
| to stabilize the structure to prevent cave-ins, lack of
| pumps to remove accumulating water, insufficient
| ventilation and filtration technology/unable to deal with
| poison gases, inability to light their environment
| without contributing to the poor air quality, difficulty
| accessing resources like food and clean water, lack of
| desire to live in a damp, dusty hole.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also for example Finland can be at least in north
| considered harsh climate. But these are also areas that
| suffered of ice age that scrapped most of the softer
| rocks away leaving only the tougher stuff like granite.
| Which makes digging very difficult, specially pre-
| industrial times.
| sulZ wrote:
| Digging 100m down is difficult and dangerous
| PixelOfDeath wrote:
| Ever tried to dig down a few 100m in your garden?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Try 390m, by hand:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodingdean_Water_Well
| mikewave wrote:
| More like, ever tried to dig down more than a foot or
| two? Unless you have really soft ground, even a good
| steel spade and shovel aren't any guarantee of success.
| Powered augers are often needed to make holes for fence
| posts, etc.
| cortesoft wrote:
| That it is really hard to dig down 100m without modern
| digging equipment.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Do you have a source for that increase? I was not able to
| find it. Seems very suspect considering that the earths
| outer crust is approximately 20 to 30 miles thick. Are
| you suggesting that if we go approximately halfway
| through the outer crust, say 15 miles, the temperature is
| going to be 725 degrees warmer than surface temp?
| wcoenen wrote:
| Page 62 of https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/supporting-
| material/proc-renewab...
|
| > _The heat is transferred from the interior towards the
| surface mostly by conduction, and this conductive heat
| flow makes temperature rise with increasing depth in the
| crust on average 25-30degC /km_
| count wrote:
| https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/crust/
|
| Not sure about the rate per-mile, but literally it's that
| hot, yes, but not even 15 miles. Just down 5-7km under
| the oceans, for example at the Mohorovicic discontinuity
| the temp ranges from 392 to 752F.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Under the ocean is already much, MUCH closer however to
| the mantle. Oceanic crust is drastically thinner than the
| land we walk on.
|
| In the Nat Geo article they quote a mine in South Africa
| reaching up to 55C (131 F) at the bottom and the mine is
| 4km deep. At a rate 3 degrees Celsius per 100m it should
| be 120 degrees Celsius over ambient. Which obviously does
| not add up.
| m4rtink wrote:
| They reached 160C rock when building an industrial
| railway in Japan:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurobe_Seny%C5%8D_Railway
|
| Cooled down to 40C since the 60s.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Have you been in a cave? They're chilly, usually around
| 50F, year round. IIRC those "deep mines" are a LOT deeper
| than any compressed air storage system is likely to be.
| JohnL4 wrote:
| "Looked the temp gradients up, after 50ft, temp of the
| earth is 50F, and raises one degree F every 60ft." (So, at
| 300 feet, 54 degrees; at 500, 57.5 degrees.)
|
| (http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/forum/read.php?14,46717,46
| 71...)
|
| "...but other parts of the mine was very cold you made sure
| you had plenty to ware it depended where you worked"
|
| (https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Keith-
| Scott...)
|
| "Underground mines maintain a constant temperature, around
| 55 degrees Fahrenheit."
|
| (https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Tom-
| Inghram)
|
| <<The temperature on average is in the 50s, but you still
| sweat an enormous amount when you start laboring." - Alan
| Bates, working in the coal mines of Letcher County,
| Kentucky.>>
|
| (https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-working-in-a-coal-
| mine/a...)
|
| Yes, a 4000m gold mine is hot. I doubt that's where they're
| storing their compressed air.
| benreesman wrote:
| This comment is an example of why I've become skeptical of
| the downvote button. It sounds like people read it, knew
| better, and politely pointed out that it was incorrect.
|
| Everyone who might have shared the same misapprehension
| learned something and the parent wasn't being an asshole.
|
| Doesn't that add to the discussion?
| ndm000 wrote:
| Side question - do you need to reach a certain level of
| membership with HN to see the downvote button? I may be
| missing something, but seems that's only allowed for
| certain individuals.
| nkurz wrote:
| Yes, there's a minimum number of points required to
| downvote. I think it's currently 500. Here's an
| unofficial FAQ that give more information about the
| thresholds: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented/blob/m...
| nautilius wrote:
| Didn't downvote, but I am not a big fan of simply making
| stuff up on the fly as response. I've met my share of
| people who rather go this route than put in a 5sec Google
| search or simply admit they don't know something, and I
| try to avoid them.
| nkurz wrote:
| Yes, when considered along with the corrective responses,
| it adds to the discussion. This is why it shouldn't be
| flagged and removed. On the other hand, it's factually
| wrong and would be misleading if people were to trust the
| claims uncritically, which I think justifies a downvote.
| Keeping it visible but lower on the page and showing it
| in gray seems like a pretty good compromise. Can you
| suggest a better way of giving more prominence to correct
| information? Or do you think that's not the right
| priority for the site?
| [deleted]
| notatoad wrote:
| what would be the benefit to it being heated by the earth
| during storage?
|
| all the temperature management here looks to just be
| counteracting the temperature changes that naturally occur
| when you compress or expand a gas. i imagine if you
| compressed it and then pumped hot air into water-filled
| caverns you'd get some negative effects of thermal shock.
| locuscoeruleus wrote:
| Wouldn't the cooled down gas expand when heated leading to
| higher pressure, so you need to pump gas down?
| halpert wrote:
| Hot air should have higher pressure, so theoretically you
| could get more displacement. But your pumps also have to
| work harder to create a pressure differential. Hard to say
| which effect would be bigger.
| sauwan wrote:
| Is the voice in that video AI generated?
| laputan_machine wrote:
| The big question is how on earth are they digging out these
| caverns? That seems like a huge challenge, given that they're
| so far underground. Everything else seems relatively
| straightforward
| [deleted]
| rplnt wrote:
| It says repurposing old mining operations. Not sure how
| feasible that is.
| ed_balls wrote:
| I had a similar idea for repurposing an old mining
| operation. You take a closed gold, uranium or copper mine
| which is 1000-2000 meters deep. You create a nuclear rector
| at the bottom with "fire and forget" design. Only robots
| can do the maintenance. After 60 years you disable it, pour
| concrete into the shaft and move to the next location. If
| it melts, who cares? It's not gonna poison water supply.
|
| Why was this not built before? I have no idea. Maybe robots
| are essential, we didn't have deep enough mines that were
| abandoned, energy was cheaper, no push for no emissions,
| it's not economical, other risks.
| deeviant wrote:
| The footprint of a nuclear power plant is pretty huge.
| That machinery is generally not optional even if doing a
| "fire and forget" design. Underground space would come at
| a premium cost, likely far more than could be saved on
| reactor design.
|
| Also nuclear power plants obviously generate an
| absolutely massive amount of heat that needs to be
| dissipated, a task that would be difficult and expensive
| underground.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| inb4: not a specialist. AFAIR remote control robots were
| tried when Chernobyl disaster was being cleared up, and
| the radiation destroyed the electronics. But perhaps the
| shielding technologies progressed enough to mitigate
| that.
|
| Having nuclear stuff underground requires extremely
| precise geological surveys, so that the stuff does not
| wind up in aquifer.
| creato wrote:
| You need a hot _and_ cold reservoir to generate power.
| Where is the heat going to go? This is why power plants
| are often built on rivers or near the ocean.
| ed_balls wrote:
| you need to pump water, probably flooding 80% of the
| mine. Since there are no humans involved 70+ celsius is
| not a problem.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| The heat still has to be managed, otherwise Kyshtym[1]
| happens. 160 tons of flying concrete is no joke.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
| laurent92 wrote:
| In France we're storing highly radioactive items
| underground. Here is how dissipation works:
|
| - After a few dozen years, the concrete is expected to
| breach,
|
| - Radioactive atoms mix up with soil and dissipate both
| upwards and downwards, mostly thanks to water,
|
| - After 400 years and for thousands of years, they reach
| the surface, where they should be diluted enough to not
| be dangerous,
|
| So I guess having badly contained radioactive containers
| would be much worse.
|
| One thing to remember is that pressure underground is
| extremely high (stone weighs a lot more than water, and
| light rock tends to "float" onto denser rock). If a
| melted reactor were squeezed, it would spread materials
| into the soil much quicker.
| crunchyfrog wrote:
| Shaft mining is often used to reach underground deposits of
| iron, coal, etc. I believe they'd use the same process here.
| buryat wrote:
| lots of mining caverns already had pressurized gas that was
| extracted, so those caverns are pretty tight to pump back
| some air
| seedragons wrote:
| Not a single "hot air" joke? Not sure to be impressed everyone's
| more mature than me or disappointed.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Given it's GS, $250m is peanuts.
| 1-more wrote:
| > Goldman Sachs agreed and invested $250 million from its
| private equity division.
|
| Maybe they're referring to Goldman Sachs Capital partners which
| has 39.9B[0] under management which means this is 0.62% of
| their portfolio. In a totally chalk and cheese comparison that
| would be having 200k in your 401k and taking a $1,250 position
| in a stock, which isn't nothing but is a pretty small bet, I
| agree. Curious though if I'm guessing the part of GS correctly;
| I have no idea how they're structured and just spent like three
| minutes searching.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_Capital_Partners
| woofcat wrote:
| I see that you've been down-voted however they have 40 billion
| in assets under management.
| WHA8m wrote:
| I didn't dv, but that'd be .63%. That's not peanuts I'd
| say...
| epistasis wrote:
| Grid storage is going to be big business in the future, on the
| order of size of storage for electrical vehicles. (And these will
| certainly not be mutually exclusive markets! Vehicle to grid tech
| will become widespread, as is already seen in the new F150
| Lightning truck). Lithium ion will dominate for the foreseeable
| future, as the industry has scaled to massive sizes and already,
| and has the advantage of being currently unstoppable in the EV
| space.
|
| Batteries with a design that can decouple the energy from the
| power ratings, like this one, will be able to address parts of
| the market that lithium ion cannot. And if the cost per MWh of
| additional energy is cheap, and round trip efficiency stays above
| 50% or so, that sort of battery will have a huge edge in a part
| of the market that currently has no clear winners.
|
| There are many competitors in the non-lithium ion storage space,
| but one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has
| a rust-based battery, and is rumored to have a cost as low as
| $20/MWh, about a tenth of that of lithium ion.
| buryat wrote:
| > Grid storage is going to be big business in the future
|
| it's already a big business
| octo_t wrote:
| Seems like everyone wants to make everything in Rust these
| days! /s
| samstave wrote:
| Isn't Afghanistan known to be sitting on top of ~1 trillion$
| worth of lithium, and also Bolivia?
| czbond wrote:
| I still believe that's why the U.S. invaded anyway. We didn't
| care about overtaking a country for some silly resistance
| leader. You do it for big money to bilk - like Iraq and oil.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Like others I don't think that that's why the US invaded,
| but I do think it had something to do with the enormous
| shit-fit thrown by the DC foreign policy / national
| security / defense commentariat when we pulled out of
| Afghanistan last summer.
| nradov wrote:
| Unlikely. When the USA invaded Afghanistan in 2001 no one
| was really sure whether lithium batteries would be the
| right technology.
| abakker wrote:
| But we left without taking any lithium. At some point
| second and third order hypotheticals are just conspiracy
| theories. There is no evidence we invaded Afghanistan to
| get lithium, and at the time (2001), we were not worried
| about lithium shortages or grid storage.
| EricE wrote:
| Lithium Ion is not sustainable for the long term - we have
| neither the materials nor the manufacturing to not only keep up
| what would be required for full scale car and grid uses, but
| don't forget Lithium Ion batteries have a finite lifespan and
| need to be replaced. The more you put into service, the more
| you have to manufacture beyond just the batteries needed for
| new requirements.
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm not sure that your predictions will hold here. More
| lithium is discovered as demand grows, and there have been
| huge additions to known reserves in just the past few years.
| Looking at current numbers and saying "that's it" is clearly
| wrong, and given its overall abundance and lack of demand
| until now, it's a really strong prediction to say that we
| won't have enough for at least 500TWh of storage, if not
| more.
|
| Manufacturing capacity is expected to increase 10x every five
| years, with roughly 20-30TWh/year production in 2031. I can't
| think of any fundamental constraints there, could you specify
| why that can't increase?
|
| Lithium recycling is being planned by nearly all
| manufacturers and many countries will mandate it. If lithium
| supplies are short, recycling will be highly profitable. If
| lithium is super abundant, recycling may be more expensive
| than recycling, and a program like what we currently use for
| lead acid batteries might be needed for a circular economy.
| But the fundamental point is that end of life for the battery
| does not mean that the lithium is gone, it's not a fuel.
|
| How did you collect this odd set of concerns? Did you think
| of them or did you find them in the media somewhere?
| EricE wrote:
| It's all a question of economics. I think technologies like
| the one in this article, or the one I think holds the best
| long term promise - super capacitors - are far more likely
| to displace lithium ion batteries before all that
| infrastructure you describe scales out. Recycling a battery
| pack out of a car like a Tesla is far different than
| recycling a traditional led acid battery from a car.
| Recycling the quantity of batteries required to support the
| grid at scale is even more of a non-trivial problem. And if
| recycling isn't economically viable because lithium is so
| abundant what do you do with the spent batteries? Bury
| them?
|
| Especially for electric cars - without something like a
| supercapacitor or hydrogen that can charge quickly and
| doesn't have massive battery pack replacement costs built
| in to the total cost of ownership equation, electric cars
| are not going to become mainstream; they will remain fringe
| oddities.
|
| FYI if you aren't aware of super capacitors there has been
| significant progress in bringing them to scale:
| https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/revisiting-the-
| supercapacit...
|
| I don't think Lithium is going away tomorrow - but I think
| it's crazy to bank on it for all our future needs or pitch
| it for grid storage. If it was so viable for grid storage
| then where are the really large deployments at scale? As
| you point out its mature tech. Someone would have scaled up
| production and done it already if it was such a no brainer.
| If Elon thought he could make more money at it than cars or
| space do you not think he would already be there focusing
| on it vs. those other ventures? Heck at one point Elon was
| thinking of doing his own candy but didn't since he didn't
| find anything really revolutionary enough to separate his
| potential offering from what was already out there. So it's
| not like he has a super narrow focus only on what he's
| already working on, and he already has a ton of in-house
| knowledge about lithium ion batteries.
|
| That a company with as high knowledge of lithium battery
| tech like Tesla is only tangentially focused on grid power
| solutions instead of heavily diving in is, I think, one of
| the larger tells out there. And do you think Tesla would
| still be as successful if it didn't have substantial tax
| incentives? That's a distortion that's often overlooked
| when talking about overall economic viability.
|
| There is far more than just raw resource availability or
| basic manufacturing capabilities at play here - and grid
| scale requirements just amplify those issues. I dunno why
| so many people are so eager to hand wave the limited
| lifetime of chemical batteries but it's a significant
| issue; any tech that doesn't have 100% replacement over a
| short fixed lifetime is going to beat the pants off of
| chemical batteries over the long haul. It isn't even
| remotely close. Utilities think in 50 year lifetimes, not
| 5. These aren't solutions for cars; this is base
| infrastructure that's COSTLY. There is probably some
| maintenance with these compressed air solutions, but I'm
| pretty confident it's no where near that of being forced to
| replacing the most expensive part of your entire storage
| solution every X years.
|
| Just look at the value of a used electric cars vs. new. As
| people are learning about battery pack replacement costs or
| especially with Tesla, limited options on repair/partial
| replacement and probably loosing access to
| supercharging(one of the biggest reasons to pick Tesla
| right now), used prices on electric cars have steadily
| declined (and that's being a bit polite). When you have
| someone blowing up a used Tesla because they feel it's not
| economically viable to replace the battery pack, that' an
| issue that shouldn't just be hand waved away
| https://carbuzz.com/news/fed-up-tesla-owner-blows-up-his-
| mod...
|
| All of this is in its infancy, but chemical batteries are
| already in a pretty deep hole from an economics
| perspective. Unless there is a breakthrough on preventing
| dendrite formation that dramatically (dramatically!)
| increases the lifespan of chemical batteries they are a
| transitory but not long term solution.
|
| Supercapacitors aren't without their issues. You can fill
| them up instantly (if you have the means to move that much
| energy that quickly!) but they can also discharge all their
| energy instantly - which is a great way to also describe a
| bomb. So things like that will have to be worked out to
| make them safe - but I see that as far less of a problem
| than dealing with the perpetual churn of chemical
| batteries.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has
| a rust-based battery.
|
| Form is still in the cell prototyping stage, as best I can tell
| - maybe not even that. There's zero information on their
| website about where they are in the development process or
| really anything substantial about their design.
|
| ESS on the other hand has a design they've had out testing in
| the field for a couple years ( https://essinc.com/ess-inc-to-
| deliver-two-energy-warehouse-s... is one such location) and has
| been shipping actual product:
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211115006337/en/ESS...
| and they've been pretty open about their design, though some of
| their old whitepapers have been removed from the site.
|
| Competition in the market is certainly a good thing, but Form
| needs to do more than just have a shiny website, a screengrab
| of a zoom employee meeting, and a blog with 'industry insight'
| posts (because they have nothing to show for tech/product.)
| epistasis wrote:
| Agreed that Form has lots of hype, but that's one thing that
| can be needed in addition to working tech. Utility decision
| makers are not the best at adding new tech to the grid or
| dealing with innovation. Having some big industry names and
| the support of the business press that the utility execs and
| shareholders read is it's own form of currency when dealing
| with such archaic businesses.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I have been saying for years that we should have a windmill
| system you could place on top of a building or home that powers
| a larger, highspeed flywheel buried underground below the
| house. Ideally with the flywheel in vacuum and balanced by
| magnets for reduced friction. This ensures no loss converting
| energy types (mechanical to mechanical) and it can be used
| later for electricity or other energy in small, large bursts
| (sort of like a capacitor). You would still want batteries for
| energy storage but this would drastically increase the lifespan
| of those batteries by reducing stress on their chemistry.
| Batteries really do not like to discharge in short, high
| intensity bursts. There are flywheel based UPS systems that
| work sort of in a similar principle and they have much longer
| maintenance intervals vs a battery type UPS>
| epistasis wrote:
| I think both battery and solar tech has advanced to the point
| that solar plus batteries undercut a lot of grid supplied
| energy in costs.
|
| Or at least it would, if the overhead for current solar
| installers wasn't so high. Retail prices for equipment are
| incredibly low, but the boom-and-bust cycle caused by
| uncertain regulatory terrain ends up requiring successful biz
| to have massive marketing costs, which results in really high
| prices overall.
| WheatM wrote:
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Has anybody considered building flywheels into each wind turbine?
| toss1 wrote:
| Interesting question, but seems unlikely.
|
| If you're thinking of a direct mechanical linkage, you wouldn't
| want to put it up on the tower because the mass to effectively
| store megawatt-scale power is way more than you'd want to
| support up high. Also, since the wind blade usually swivels to
| the wind, you'd want to avoid the rotational inertia. So, you'd
| need a mechanical linkage to transmit the power to the ground,
| maybe installing it under the tower base.
|
| You would not want to use a direct mechanical attachment, i.e.,
| resembling a combustion engine - transmission flywheel, because
| this would impair the ability of the wind turbine to start.
| Generally, turbines are designed for minimum inertia to easily
| start in low-wind conditions. A direct connection would impede
| that.
|
| Now, we're adding a clutch-sort of mechanism, and that has its
| own additional complexity, weight, and energy.
|
| Moreover, considering that we're trying to store megawatt-scale
| energies, we are at a large mass spinning very fast, and
| probably spun up with an electric motor.
|
| So, it would seem the best way to do that would be to make a
| flywheel farm, with the flywheels below ground to contain
| failures. At this point, why locate it in the probably
| inconvenient location where the wind turbines are located, and
| instead put it somewhere more convenient, such as nearer to the
| consumption areas?
| buryat wrote:
| flywheels storing a lot of energy are very dangerous, if
| something happens it's a flying thing that destroys everything
| on its way
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Like a giant rotating wind turbine?
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, except with several orders of magnitude more energy
| and rotating mass.
|
| Wind turbine blades are engineered for minimum mass and
| inertia, are manufactured primarily from fiberglass and/or
| carbon fiber, are hollow, and the largest mass is in the
| center.
|
| In contrast, flywheels are engineered for the highest
| practical inertia, are manufactured from the highest
| density material that works, and concentrate that mass as
| far out as possible.
|
| When a wind blade fails catastrophically, it makes a mess
| of splinters right around the tower, as shown in [0] and
| [1].
|
| In contrast, just a small automotive flywheel explosion,
| contained in a legally mandated scattershield, is almost as
| spectacular [2], [3]. Now, magnify that from a flywheel
| just designed to smooth the power from a 375kW (500HP)
| engine to the scale of a flywheel to STORE the energy of a
| megawatt-scale wind turbine.
|
| So, no, the danger of a megawatt-scale energy storage
| flywheel is NOT like the danger of a "giant rotating wind
| turbine".
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-o-4yYb59g [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbCs7ZQDKoM&t=40s [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPat3akDiek [3]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4oxoBKRZgA
| mygoodaccount wrote:
| [0] is a doctored video. Go frame by frame just before
| explosion and watch tracking of horses. [1],[2],[3] is
| real
| buryat wrote:
| i agree, wind turbines do rotate but not at high speeds,
| disintegration of one doesn't lead to catastrophic
| outcomes. Flywheels on the other hand are meant to rotate
| at high speeds and hold lots of energy, so destruction of
| the spindle would lead to some pretty big bad results
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This sounds like a perfect question for Randall "XKCD"
| Munroe's "What If" column:
|
| " _What if_ a 5MW flywheel broke it 's spindle?"
| lbriner wrote:
| I'm not sure how that would help? If you had a flywheel and you
| didn't need the energy, what do you do with it? At least
| without a flywheel, you can easily stop the turbine.
|
| Also, any flywheel that would add significant difference would
| probably weigh hundreds of tonnes, which would make
| construction massively more expensive and difficult.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| If you don't need the energy you just let the flywheel spin
| freely. It's a mechanical battery. I agree with your second
| point though- it would add considerable mass to the hub
| assembly of the wind turbine and there is no clear way to
| transmit the mechanical energy to ground level.
| Murkin wrote:
| Can someone explain why this is better than just using pumps to
| pump water up from the reservoir and extract the energy with when
| the water returned back?
| buryat wrote:
| not a lot of places have enough terrain to create a lake, plus
| in some places there's already shortage of water so removing it
| from usage would be pretty bad
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| It's not, but it doesn't require a giant reservoir next to a
| 100m+ elevation change. Almost all of the really good locations
| for dams already have them, and their water discharge rates are
| driven by a lot more than just power generation.
| tristor wrote:
| It requires less surface area, both due to compressibility and
| due to hydrodynamics. Additionally, water is a strong erosion
| source, air is not, so this can make use of existing
| excavations much easier and deep excavation is very very
| expensive.
| hannob wrote:
| Pumped water only works if you have the right conditions. I.e.
| you need a certain altitude difference and enough space to have
| an upper and a lower water storage facility.
|
| Pumped water storage is very efficient and an established
| technology, so when it's possible it's a good choice, but it's
| not possible everywhere.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's probably some kind of hedge strategy for energy crises like
| the recent Texas disaster (which appears to have been very
| profitable for GS [1]). Having this capacity around when other
| sources go down means they'll be able to provide power in similar
| situations and so reap massive profits. Climate chaos == $$$ I
| guess.
|
| > Bloomberg March 5, 2021
|
| > Goldman Sachs Group Inc. could gain more than $200 million from
| the physical sale of power and natural gas and from financial
| hedges after spot prices surged across much of the U.S.,
| according to people with knowledge of the matter. Morgan
| Stanley's gains could come in under $200 million, according to a
| person with familiar with the matter, and Bank of America Corp.
| stands to rake in profits as well...
|
| > The historic cold that battered the central U.S. last month led
| to sweeping blackouts as ice formed on wind turbines and
| pipelines froze, forcing oil and gas wells to shut. As traders
| and power suppliers struggled to find fuel to meet obligations,
| prices skyrocketed. In Oklahoma, gas traded at more than 300
| times normal levels, while electricity in Texas surged to $9,000
| per megawatt-hour.
|
| Full article: [1]
| https://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=5028&mn=126049&p...
| qeternity wrote:
| > Having this capacity around when other sources go down means
| they'll be able to provide power in similar situations and so
| reap massive profits. Climate chaos == $$$ I guess.
|
| I understand that people don't like when others profit from a
| crisis, but this is also how we solve these problems. Having
| more generation capacity than we otherwise would have is a good
| thing, even if Goldman make money on the back of it.
|
| I'm not arguing there isn't more to be done, but when people
| say "greed is good" this is what they mean.
| igammarays wrote:
| This is where capitalism goes off the rails. Instead of
| investing $250m into making the power grid more secure and
| reliable, they choose to invest in profiting off disaster.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| providing instant-on, scalable energy capacity to the grid is
| _both_ potentially profiting off disaster _and_ investing
| 250m into making the grid more reliable and secure.
| EricE wrote:
| As others said, energy storage technology is going to be the
| only thing that makes renewable energy more than a curiosity.
| Renewable energy is neither reliable nor predictable which is
| why it can not replace base load requirements.
|
| However, if we had sufficient energy storage capacity, they
| we could indeed fully transition to renewable energy once and
| for all!
| epistasis wrote:
| You are sorely mistaken, this sort of battery is _exactly_
| what makes the grid more reliable and secure. Especially on
| grids like Texas, which have massive amounts of renewables.
|
| Batteries are the Swiss Army knife of the grid, they can fix
| all sorts of problems, from inadequate transmission capacity,
| to frequency regulations, to peaking needs.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Heh. This ties in with the "Amish Hackers" article here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29905288, which states that
| the Amish use compressed air to store electricity.
| hannob wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| The German energy company RWE has announced a while ago that they
| want to build a compressed air storage facility. However the
| project went nowhere and was silently buried at some point.
| EricE wrote:
| Preventing air leakage is frightfully hard - air molecules are
| a lot smaller than liquid molecules :)
| Apparently these guys have found an economical way to deal with
| it. If true then I can easily see why Goldman jumped on them.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| Ah, FartTech
| surfmike wrote:
| This made me wonder what happened with LightSail energy, and
| found this takedown:
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/squared/letter-from-sand-hill...
|
| Compressed air still seems like a promising idea to help solve
| the scale of energy storage we need, so I'm happy to see more
| companies taking a crack at it.
| [deleted]
| boringg wrote:
| GS isn't known for their scientific prowess - signal that they
| believe there is money in large scale ESS. Not sure if it's
| validating the technology at all though. Compressed air has been
| around for a long time at this point.
| objektif wrote:
| Who is known for their scientific prowess? A16z and with
| sprawling investments in web3? Capital is capital. We should be
| cheering on these types of investments regardless. Electric
| motors have been around for a looong time as well..
| boringg wrote:
| The VC and investment world in energy technology is quite
| different then the A16z and traditional VC world or financial
| heavyweights.
|
| Having had GS invest in companies in the energy tech space in
| the past and having not particularly great success - I
| wouldn't think this is a strong signal. More that the
| financial heavyweights think there is action and they want to
| get in.
| objektif wrote:
| Goldman has army of analysts that are covering the field.
| Many many more than Even VCs that specialize in it. I would
| definitely write them off when it comes to smart investing.
| boringg wrote:
| Financial analysts != energy technologists with a
| scientific background.
|
| Its small money on a broad industry bet thats all in an
| economy with very few quality investments available.
| Don't read too much into it.
| EricE wrote:
| So you think it's in GS's best interest to make
| uninformed decisions on a continual basis?
|
| Seriously?
| boringg wrote:
| Never said it was uninformed. I was implying that this
| really isn't a big deal except for the company who got
| invested in.
| boringg wrote:
| Put another way it sounds like a corporate investor or VC
| into an industry they know a little about but have heard
| good things. Goldman Sachs is not known to be a good
| energy investor. Who knows maybe now they are.
| buryat wrote:
| the governments should invest instead i agree but it doesn't
| hurt if a private venture can help us all
| Giorgi wrote:
| I really enjoy learning about quirky ways to "store" energy,
| there is also one case that allows "storing" of energy by pushing
| massive concrete blocks uphill and when energy is needed, blocks
| simply slide down and generate energy. Not sure if this can be
| called "Storing" though.
| konschubert wrote:
| The more efficient version of this idea looks like this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
| EricE wrote:
| It's only efficient if you have the right environment for it
| to work (enough space, enough of an elevation gradient,
| etc.).
|
| If you can't build it where you need it, then efficiency
| doesn't really matter now, does it?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't know that this is always the case. I think that solid
| mass gravity storage projects have quite high efficiency.
|
| there is no rule that water+ turbines is more efficiency than
| Solid mass + alternators.
| trembonator wrote:
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