[HN Gopher] Lifting heavy bricks to store renewable energy
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Lifting heavy bricks to store renewable energy
Author : sieste
Score : 6 points
Date : 2022-03-20 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| ncmncm wrote:
| We have much better storage methods. The most mature is "pumped
| hydro" to a water reservoir up a hill. (Not the same as a
| hydroelectric dam, which needs, and damages, a watershed.) We are
| building liquidified-air storage. (Liquifying air is very mature
| tech.) We are preparing underground hydrogen repositories, in
| places where we had been used to banking natural gas. We are
| building ammonia synthesis factories.
|
| Less mature tech is also ramping up. We are building out
| factories to build out iron-air batteries. A 20,000 ton weight
| suspended on cables in a deep mine shaft. Pumped hydro from a
| deep earth cavity. Pumped hydro out of deep ocean tanks. Methane
| and kerosene synthesis.
|
| The most remarkable quality of energy storage tech is how its
| cost is plummeting even faster than solar and wind generation.
|
| The chemical synthesis and liquified-air tech is interesting in
| that the production apparatus remains useful even after the tanks
| are full, and building out tanks for more storage is very cheap.
| They call attention to the separate qualities of storage that
| will be optimized for each use: (1) How fast can it bank energy,
| (2) how much power can it release when needed, (3) How quickly
| can power output be adjusted, (4) how much of the energy you put
| in do you get back, (5) Is the storage medium or equipment useful
| for more than storage, (6) Is the stored energy transportable?
|
| Places at high latitudes, and in general places where the mix of
| renewables and transmission-line power are not stable enough, can
| still ship in and stockpile chemical storage banked in places
| with reliable power. Equatorial, coastal desert land will be an
| excellent place to site solar collection for this purpose:
| Coastal Peru, Boa Vista in the Cape Verde Islands, coastal Mali
| or Senegal, numerous sites on and near the Arabian peninsula and
| the Horn of Africa, northwestern Australia. Other coastal sites
| with reliable wind, likewise. (Political stability is likely to
| be more important than convenience, though.)
|
| Perhaps the most surprising thing about storage is that, in
| common cases, its round-trip efficiency doesn't matter very much.
| Other things have come to matter more, as raw generating cost
| continues on down. Hydrogen is a good example: it is so useful,
| industrially and as a feedstock for other chemical synthesis,
| that use for storage is just an easy bonus. Ammonia, similarly;
| demand for fertilizer and ship fuel makes production a major
| source of revenue when the storage tanks are full.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You could go inground rather than just up, repurpose old mines,
| and maybe use a very heavy fluid.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Stupid. A complete waste of cement. Would be better to just
| repurpose all the old railroad lines no one uses and use the
| gravity lift that way. Iron > cement
| zugi wrote:
| This is such a clear and obvious way to store energy that I
| assumed it had long ago been analyzed and assessed to fall short
| of other options in terms of energy efficiency, capacity, and
| cost. Those and other numbers are what matters, and the article
| doesn't provide any of them.
|
| Without data on how its efficiency, capacity, and cost compare to
| pumped hydro, batteries, flywheels, and other alternatives, it
| looks like a student science project done at larger scale.
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(page generated 2022-03-20 23:02 UTC)