[HN Gopher] 'No-water' hydropower turns England's hills into gre...
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'No-water' hydropower turns England's hills into green and pleasant
batteries
Author : geox
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-08-19 16:51 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rechargenews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rechargenews.com)
| prisoner3986 wrote:
| Before the 'muuuh bro but coal mines' crowd stampedes in:
|
| Disused open-pit mines typically get flooded and re-used as
| leisure areas or nature reserves.
|
| People experience lowered quality of life when living near or
| underneath wind turbines as the very low hum and blade shadow
| washing over houses affects your health.
|
| Solar parks are the ugliest and don't tell me just because you
| read something that each and every one can be turned into an
| orchard underneath.
|
| Besides the obvious environmental impact of having to produce
| solar cells and composite turbine blades.
| prisoner3986 wrote:
| [flagged]
| isoprophlex wrote:
| If only TFA mentioned what is actually in the working fluid...
| cinntaile wrote:
| I found the following quote:
|
| > RheEnergise said it invented the new high-density fluid,
| known as R-19. Chief executive Stephen Crosher told
| Professional Engineering that the liquid is a fine-milled
| suspended solid in water, with low viscosity and low abrasion
| characteristics. The base material is used in oral medication
| applications, in a similar way that chalk is used as a bulking
| agent for pills and tablets. He said the raw materials are
| common and available, including in the UK, and the fluid could
| either be manufactured on-site or at a depot. [0]
|
| Maybe someone knowledgeable about oral medication applications
| has any idea.
|
| [0] https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/high-density-
| pumped...
| Hextinium wrote:
| After looking up mining slurry densities limestone is 2.7x
| the density of water. Calcium carbonate (limestone) is also
| used for filler in some medications. I'm pretty sure its just
| limestone slurry.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Probably just silica? It would be non-toxic and maybe dense
| enough.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Interesting! I wonder how the economics work out wrt aging of
| the liquid, abrasion (low abrasion != no abrasion)... and of
| course how environmentally friendly it is to dispose of.
|
| It seems hardly worth it to use a specialized fluid for
| "only" a 2.5x density multiplier, on first glance.
| gadders wrote:
| I wonder if it's kaolin?
| gorlilla wrote:
| My first guess was some form of alginate.
| pfdietz wrote:
| An organic compound would not have the density.
| kortex wrote:
| Alginate is probably not as dense as a suspension of
| kaolin, and also being an ionic polymer, there's no need
| for a surfactant or dispersant to stabilize it. Also it
| is probably way more expensive.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Kaolin apparently has a specific gravity of 2.16-2.68, so
| it doesn't seem to be dense enough on its own unless the
| ratio of kaolin:water is extremely high? Good guess though!
| waynecochran wrote:
| Essentially pumping a denser-than-water fluid up hill
| underground. OK. Here in the PNW that is what all these ugly
| windmills should be doing in the Columbia Gorge.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| So something worse than water? It's not clear what this liquid
| really is
| jjk166 wrote:
| I have to imagine building 2.5 swimming pools worth of water
| storage is cheaper than filling a single swimming pool with a
| heavy liquid. They typically go for $100-$1000/kg, with the non-
| toxic ones of course being the more expensive.
|
| No idea what the article is talking about wrt being able to
| utilize lower heights, as the amount of power you can get from a
| certain drop is independent of density. Higher density decreases
| the size of the pipes and turbines, so there is a potential
| economic benefit, but it doesn't change what locations are
| viable.
| mike_d wrote:
| The article mentions their plan is to bury the tanks. That is
| stupid expensive, and one of the reasons existing water storage
| tanks are never buried in the US.
| Animats wrote:
| Buried water storage tanks are not rare. The San Francisco
| Water Department has some in their system.[1][2] They're
| basically roofed concrete reservoirs. Those store clean,
| processed water.
|
| Those could have been fully buried or hidden, but, being
| visible only from the air, it wasn't worth it.
|
| [1] https://earth.google.com/web/@37.48236017,-122.3128578,10
| 4.7...
|
| [2] https://earth.google.com/web/@37.53843703,-121.85711496,1
| 26....
| almostnormal wrote:
| That's easy and cheap per volume: Drill a small hole into a
| mountain. Add a nuke.
|
| It's not for water suitable for consumption, but it doesn't
| have to be.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I'm imagining two connected olympic swimming pools, at the base
| and on top of a mountain, filled with liquid mercury...
| theragra wrote:
| https://www.bing.com/images/create/two-connected-olympic-
| swi...
| thombat wrote:
| Voila! Three connected pools, none of them Olympic or at
| the top :-)
| lostlogin wrote:
| That's not to far off something you'd see in Zelda, Zora's
| domain.
| ragebol wrote:
| The equation for potential energy is U = m [?] g [?] h, so
| higher density factors into higher mass (per unit volume) so
| directly into higher energy storage capacity.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Which generates more energy, dropping 1000 tons of water 100
| meters, or dropping 1000 tons of steel 100 meters?
|
| Volume matters for the sizing of components, it doesn't
| matter for the amount of energy you can extract from a height
| differential.
| nine_k wrote:
| Storage tanks are limited by volume, not mass.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Which falls under the category of component sizing. But
| assuming you have however much mass at a given height, a
| denser fluid won't let you extract the same amount of
| energy from a lower height, which is what the company is
| claiming.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| But as they stated it translates into higher energy storage
| capacity (per unit volume). This translates into smaller
| footprints as volumes go down, but that's it. Now, mercury is
| almost 14 times more dense than water so that's nothing to
| sneeze at.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _heavy liquid. They typically go for $100-$1000 /kg_
|
| This company has their own proprietary heavy fluid called R-19.
| Their formula isn't public, but presumably they understand the
| success of their company depends on it being affordable.
|
| > _No idea what the article is talking about wrt being able to
| utilize lower heights_
|
| It means that, if pumped storage starts to look worth it to you
| (given budget, etc.) with tanks of size V and a height
| difference of H, then with their system it might be worth it if
| the tallest hill available to you is H/2.5.
|
| Or you can keep the height the same and reduce the volume. Or
| keep both the same and increase the storage. The point is that
| they claim to offer a better trade-off.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| They _claim_ they have a fluid. The patent says "minerals",
| water, and "surfactant." Translation: mud/sand.
|
| I can't help but notice that the name they're using is the
| same as an insulation material; seems almost purposeful to
| make looking up anything about it very difficult.
|
| I don't think they have anything and this is just a patent
| troll or someone trying to pull a fast one on investors. I'd
| be willing to bet they have a long list of reasons why they
| can't come up with demonstration unit that is room or
| building-sized...
| fbdab103 wrote:
| >They typically go for $100-$1000/kg...
|
| I was doing some searching, but was unable to pin down precise
| numbers for industrial water rates, but I am seeing something
| in the single dollars ($3-8) per thousand gallons.
|
| Assuming I did not bork my conversions, at $5/1000 gallons,
| that would be roughly $0.001/kg for water. So, a novel heavy
| liquid priced at the whole dollars per kg sounds like an
| enormous capex for a large installation when it could use water
| instead.
| dwheeler wrote:
| Much depends on the fluid. Is it toxic? What happens when (not
| if) it leaks?
| ajb wrote:
| Given they only need to specify two properties of the material
| (density, and ability to be suspended in water), they should be
| spoilt for choice; and would be pretty stupid if they didn't
| pick something inert. This is not like semiconductor
| manufacturing or something where they need to find a material
| with obscure properties.
|
| My guess is the main reason for not specifying the material is
| that they will pick whatever is cheapest locally to each
| development.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The surfactant might be a problem, but the mineral particles
| are almost certainly something very cheap and common, like
| clay.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Question is how abrasive it is and how does that affect the
| turbines and pumps
| pfdietz wrote:
| The particles would have to be extremely small to not
| fall out of suspension, so I don't think they'd be very
| abrasive.
|
| The thickness of the viscous part of the boundary layer
| in water is maybe 0.1 microns (if the water is moving at
| 10 m/s). Particles smaller than this would be slowed
| before striking the surface. If the particles are making
| the liquid more viscous the viscous part of the boundary
| layer will be proportionally thicker.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" 100MW in storage capacity"_
|
| Sigh. A MW is not a measure of storage capacity, it's a measure
| of momentary power. Do they mean it can store 100 MWh of energy?
| Or do they mean it can generate up to 100 MW of power?
|
| Journalists always seem to get confused by this[1], but it's
| surprising to see "Recharge News", of all people, making such a
| mistake!
|
| [1] _The Times_ once famously published an entire headline anti-
| EV article that claimed the UK would need to build dozens of new
| nuclear power plants to power them. But it quickly turned out
| they had just gotten GW and GWh confused!
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Either way, "building dozens of nuclear power plants" is
| something that should have been done decades ago. Yes, waste
| handling is a concern for the local environment of a specific
| area and needs to be taken seriously. But given that climate
| change is a GLOBAL concern, how much better off would we as a
| planet have been doing prudent risk management and pressing
| forward with nuclear power as opposed to listening to the
| hysterical FUD of people who call themselves
| "environmentalists?"
| antonvs wrote:
| Your chosen scapegoat isn't plausible. If the issue was just
| "people who call themselves environmentalists", we'd be awash
| in nuclear power plants, because societies globally are
| pretty notorious for not paying much attention to
| environmentalists.
|
| The real issues are quite different. Environmentalists may
| have pointed out some of them, but they're just the messenger
| in that case.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| Waste handling is only a problem because of non proliferation
| laws it's not a mandatory outcome
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Either way, "building dozens of nuclear power plants" is
| something that should have been done decades ago.
|
| Great idea. How?
|
| Even China, which regularly builds new nuclear power plants,
| can't do it at a pace sufficient to keep up with wind power,
| not to mention renewables as a whole.
|
| I talking here in terms of reported TWh delivered.
| okeuro49 wrote:
| > Great idea. How?
|
| Small modular reactors https://www.rolls-
| royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
| antonvs wrote:
| "The Nuclear Fallacy: Why Small Modular Reactors Can't
| Compete With Renewable Energy":
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-
| why...
|
| > ""Small modular reactors won't achieve economies of
| manufacturing scale, won't be faster to construct, forego
| efficiency of vertical scaling, won't be cheaper, aren't
| suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face
| very large security costs, will still be costly and slow
| to decommission, and still require liability insurance
| caps. They don't solve any of the problems that they
| purport to while intentionally choosing to be less
| efficient than they could be. They've existed since the
| 1950s and they aren't any better now than they were
| then."
| pjc50 wrote:
| Hinkley Point C is still not finished.
|
| The problem is not so much the waste, but the "black swan":
| each plant has a failure probability that's low - perhaps
| 1/10,000 or less - of a disaster that contaminates a very
| large area around it. The UK was tracking after effects of
| Chernobyl, two thousand miles away, for two decades after the
| incident. That has a negative effect on people's willingness
| to build new plants.
| nurettin wrote:
| I think it is talking about power capacity, not the discharge
| rate.
| kwk1 wrote:
| A watt has dimensions of energy over time. It cannot be used
| to express a measure of energy unless you multiply it by
| time, as in a watt-hour.
| ishtanbul wrote:
| I work in energy storage. This is not totally wrong, its just
| omitting the duration. 100MW only describes the rate at which
| the battery can discharge. The duration would be expressed in
| MWhours (mwh) so a 100MW/200MWh system would be able to
| discharge its full tank in 2 hours. You need to know the MWh
| to know how physically large the system is.
| retrac wrote:
| Most here probably won't need this but: the Watt is a unit of
| power. Power is the rate of energy consumption. An amount of
| energy, over an amount of time. 1 Watt is 1 Joule per second.
| The "over time" is literal: 1 W = 1 J/s = 1 V*A/s. 1 watt, is 1
| joule per second, is 1 volt-ampere per second.
|
| An analogy to motion: joules are distance, watts are speed, and
| watt-hours are like light-years.
|
| The amount of energy consumed, if you have one watt of power
| for a certain amount of time, is the confusingly-named Watt-
| hour, or Watt-year, etc. 1 Watt-second is 1 Joule. 1 Watt-
| minute is 60 J. 1 Watt-hour is 3600 J.
|
| I'm not really sure why the Wh exists, other than to let you
| easily estimate how much it costs to run an appliance for once
| hour. It tends to confuse.
| jakewins wrote:
| > I'm not really sure why the Wh exists
|
| It never really clicked for me how silly this is until you
| said it, so I went and looked it up.
|
| It turns out it's kind of the other way around; the watt came
| first: It was originally defined as "the power conveyed by a
| current of an Ampere through the difference of potential of a
| Volt".
|
| Watt-hour seems to come around in the 1890s as utilities
| explore ways to bill customers for electricity use,
| originally "ampere-hour meters" and then "watt-hour meters".
|
| Joule shows up about the same time, in like 1880 or so, and
| was defined in terms of the watt, rather than the watt
| defined in terms of the joule, if I skim Wikipedia
| correctly.. So that'd mean Joule and Wh are both kind of
| competing units of energy - one used by GE and Westinghouse
| and all those people, and the other used by scientists(?)
|
| The watt then gets redefined in terms of a joule much later,
| in 1948.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > Watt-hour seems to come around in the 1890s as utilities
| explore ways to bill customers for electricity use
|
| Makes sense kwh is an accounting unit of energy not a
| science unit. I feel that's 'fine'. Tell the accountant
| that the pump that drains the east shaft runs 12 hours a
| day at 53kw and they can figure the monthly cost using a
| ten key.
|
| Hat tip the parent. It's really annoying that Journalists
| understand neither science nor accounting.
| jgamman wrote:
| it's a nice human scale unit - a bit like some countries
| still cling to inches as a length measure.
| danjc wrote:
| Came here to say the same
| gardenfelder wrote:
| Best to open in a private window since they do not let you
| control cookies.
|
| See also [1]
|
| Short Vimeo video [2]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26062698
|
| [2] https://vimeo.com/495158864
| Sayrus wrote:
| They do actually open a pop-up to allow selected cookies,
| although you need two clicks to say No and only one to say Yes
| to all. The Vimeo video is not rated which requires login.
|
| I'm very curious about the longevity of such a fluid, wouldn't
| there be issues with evaporation and particles falling to the
| bottom of the downstream station?
| djmips wrote:
| Didn't work for me
| _joel wrote:
| The state of the UK's waterways is atrocious. I'm not really keen
| on them filling the hills with "fluid", personally.
| lostlogin wrote:
| If the dense fluid is sewage sludge, they may be into
| something.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm super sceptical of these types of approaches, to the point
| that I often question some of the weird financial incentives that
| can cause money to be put into stuff like this in the first
| place.
|
| Simple physics says that gravity is actually a pretty poor energy
| storage mechanism (see other fanciful ideas about stacking heavy
| blocks). Pumped water storage is about the only form that
| actually makes sense from a cost/energy storage perspective
| because (a) in nearly all those cases the reservoirs already
| exist, and (b) you're pumping a lot more than a couple Olympic-
| swimming pools worth of water. And even then the costs can be
| giant - LA was looking into a $3 billion project to use pumped
| storage behind the Hoover Dam a few years ago, not sure what
| happened with that.
|
| There is just so much "green washing" going on these days, I
| think it's more important to focus on things we _know_ will work,
| or improvements to ideas that already work.
| Retric wrote:
| The grid needs more than just big batteries it also needs
| extremely responsive ones. This is why you see flywheels
| attached to the grid.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a4889/433775...
|
| The total energy stored is relatively tiny, but devices want a
| smooth electrical signal not just energy from a wire.
|
| Ideally you want an instant response time and GWh of energy
| storage on the cheap, but that instead grid operators use many
| different systems to simulate that.
| audunw wrote:
| People don't understand the grid energy storage market. Some
| think it's only about storing as much energy as possible over
| as much time as possible. That's not the full picture. Response
| time and ability to handle several cycles a day is also very
| important for many grid energy storage applications.
|
| The stacking of heavy blocks you mention is actually a very
| decent idea. No, it's not going to compete with pumped hydro
| for seasonal storage. But that was never the point. It's about
| shifting load a few hours a couple of times every day. Perhaps
| with some spare capacity to help with a day or two with less
| power.
|
| We need both solutions. Pumped hydro is not that great for
| cycling often and rapid response and it's much harder to find
| good sites to build it. Big water reservoirs are extremely
| damaging to the environment. They obviously destroy all land
| based life on the land they claim, and the constant cycling up
| and down of the water lever means the conditions for life in
| the water is atrocious as well.
|
| A fun fact is that for hydro power plants it's becoming viable
| to install battery energy storage on site. Wouldn't think that
| makes sense would you? By putting some of the power regulation
| loads on the battery they can run the hydro power plant
| production more evenly, reducing pressure variations that
| causes more wear and tear, which increases long term
| maintenance costs.
|
| Don't watch those YouTube "debunkers" for insight into these
| kinds of topic. They rarely do more than 10 min of research. (I
| know one of them did a video on Energy Vault that always gets
| shared in these conversations, despite the fact that there's
| not a single valid point in the video)
| retrac wrote:
| Many hydroelectric plants with a reservoir are already energy
| storage systems. They can adjust their power output up and
| down. They can, for short periods, drain the reservoir faster
| than it is being filled. The seasonal patterns of rainfall,
| and energy demand, influence how much power a plant can
| output in terms of peak and average, both short and long-
| term.
|
| At Niagara Falls, the falls can be diverted through the
| plants, nearly shutting the falls off. It isn't normally
| done, for both ecological and sightseeing reasons, but when
| power was needed after the 2003 blackout, the falls were
| reduced to about 15% flow:
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-the-
| power-...
| adrianmonk wrote:
| More direct / detailed info here:
|
| https://www.rheenergise.com/how-it-works
|
| https://www.rheenergise.com/faq
|
| They have their own denser-than-water fluid called R-19. The
| formula isn't public. They say it's "environmentally benign" and
| the ingredients are "common and available".
|
| The viscosity is comparable to milk. They believe they can make
| mechanical parts (pumps, turbines, etc.) that can handle the
| denser fluid.
|
| They say the cost is "broadly similar" to regular pumped hydro.
| coolspot wrote:
| From their patent [1]:
|
| > the working fluid is a slurry comprising a suspension of
| mineral particles and a surfactant in water
|
| [1] -
| https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c5/20/54/6005371...
| fasterik wrote:
| So the article is wrong in multiple ways. Not only is "no-water
| hydropower" a contradiction in terms, but when you look into
| it, it is in fact using water. This is the status quo for
| science journalism, unfortunately.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| There's discussion of something to stir both reservoirs to
| keep the mineral particles from settling. Which seems rather
| energy-intensive and wasteful.
|
| There's no specification for what kind of minerals or
| surfactant, or what kind of properties they'd need to have.
| No discussion of how to pump an abrasive mixture without lots
| of expensive maintenance. It, frankly, sounds like they're
| saying "sand!" What happens if the surfactant leaks or
| there's a dam break? The scale of disaster from something
| like this is pretty insane; they're proposing what amounts to
| a ready-made mudslide behind a dam.
|
| There's also discussion of using the water to cool the
| generators, like that's somehow novel...and for some strange
| reason, heat pumps and geothermal heatsinking?
|
| This feels like patent trolling. It reminds me of crazy-
| board-of-string-and-photos meme guy. "OK, so we have a
| hydropower plant! BUT, BUT, we put SAND in the water! And and
| we need some things to stir the water to keep the sand in
| suspension. We can tack on this geothermal well! And cool the
| pumps with the water!"
| almostnormal wrote:
| > This feels like patent trolling.
|
| Wouldn't that require that the patent is not only trivial
| but also useful? Whom would they want to troll with
| something that is useless?
|
| Might just be looking for an investor to throw money at
| them, a patent probably helps with that.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It's the status quo for any kind of journalism. Read anything
| you either do for a living or have life knowledge or
| education about, and the credulous BS just leaps off the
| page. Pick any controversial issue, do some research on it,
| and you'll realize how much "common knowledge" is
| misinformation due to crap media coverage.
| fasterik wrote:
| I think good journalism still exists, you just need to pay
| for it. I don't see the Economist getting basic facts
| wrong, even in topics I'm familiar with. The main problem
| is that there is far more money in ad-driven content than
| high quality subscriber content.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I wonder how stable that suspension is? I can imagine it would
| be quite disappointing to try and make power and to have some
| water come down, leaving you with a silted up storage tank.
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