I am still a fan of centrifugal systems. The lifecycle costs of a spinning mass seem more manageable than the complexities of chemical batteries. The mass of a block of concrete and steal isn't going to degrade over time. And bearings/motors are such mature tech that they can last decades, even a century without replacement.
If you're going mechanical, why not pumped water storage instead? Nothing has to spin super fast and hydro has a lot of maturity.
(From a guy who got burned buying stock in a centrifugal system as my first "wicked smaht" investment as a 22yo).
What’s your financial case for pumped hydro?
Lifting an Olympic Swimming Pool (2.5 Mlitres) up 1 metre against gravity needs about 7kWh.
7kWh of Lithium battery is tiny, like three shoeboxes. And apparently costs about $1500 on eBay though I was expecting about $5k-$7k.
Surely it costs a lot more to buy two Olympic pools worth of land, dig it out, line it, and buy the turbines and pipes and stuff?
Dinorwig in Wales moves a lake 3.5km long and 26m deep, cost hundreds of millions to build, stores 9.1 GWh and Wikipedia says it’s questionable whether it’s financially viable in todays energy market, estimating 40 years to a return on investment for just arbitrage night to day electricity costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
I'm not an expert and was a bit surprised by your figures, but my thinking was pumps and turbines last longer. Could be wrong.
Not sure which way you are surprised but I was surprised how low it all is. Originally wondering about lifting a weight at home, on a chain, using solar or wind to winch it up by a house story or two, to store power; then lower it down to generate electricity.
Surely that would store a lot of power, right? Lifting stuff is hard work, I thought. Showing my working so people can poke holes in it:
1000kg is a ton x 5 metres is two storey of a house x 9.8 Earths gravity constant = 49000 Joules is 13.6 Watt hours is …
… not going to power a house very long. it might mostly charge an iPhone 13 mini battery.
Lifting a Ford F-150 at 2.2 tons (5000 lbs) gets to 30 Watt Hours.
A household might use 10kWh in a day, or 660 tons lifted 5 meters to store that and round it up to roughly 1000 tons to give room for conversion losses to get that much electric power out of the system.
So 400+ Ford F-150s lifted up two storeys to store a house’s power for a day.
Convert that to water (1litre weighs 1kg and a cubic meter to a ton) and we are back in the realms of an Olympic swimming pool as a standard size, 40% of one going up 5m this time.
At home, the scaffolding required to take that weight and the space required to lift hundreds of cars or hundreds of tons of water would be immense. We’re talking a town water tower.
And of course you can trade less water going higher but then need more vertical space and if it’s on a hill, more sideways space for the gradient.
The other way I’m amazed is how energy dense LiIon batteries are, fossil fuels are way more dense, and human bodies are very efficient at 2000 Calories/day is about 2.2 Watt-hours.
there are areas where almost all options for pumped hydro are already developed and there's little room for expansion. additionally, the heat waves from the climate catastrophe affects pumped hydro negatively (evaporation and higher water temperature).
Evaporation can be solved by covering the reservoirs, so the water can't evaporate. Geography is the real issue. Costs to build possibly too.
Mostly because we already used all suitable places. It also has a huge environmental impact, large upfront costs that you can only spend in bulk, permissions, lawsuits, protests from the local population and so forth.
Hydro is limited by geography. It cannot scale in the same way. Rather than giant spinning masses at central locations, current thinking is more about smaller masses scattered throughout a grid. There are even a few studies on whether existing air conditioner/heat pump compressors could contribute.
I think geographic dispersion of batteries is going to be a big plus. If the "battery" is a giant lake or a big plant with a spinning mass, the power has to be transmitted from that facility to the end user over the grid
Putting a ton of smaller chemical batteries at distribution substations means when the grid is at the peak, you can cover that peak without transmitting that power over the transmission system. Putting the battery near the consumer will take a big load off of the transmission system which as much of a bottleneck as the lack of generating facilities
> And bearings/motors are such mature tech that they can last decades, even a century without replacement.
This is not true at all for bearings in large industrial systems under constant load. As the mass scales up, the systems become exponentially more sensitive to vibrations from wear of the mechanical parts. Even magnetic bearings max out at about 20 years.
Flywheel systems are more complicated and expensive than simple chemical batteries. Cost also scales much more than batteries as you increase the energy storage. They are also less efficient over time due to friction even with magnetic bearings.
Maintenance on high energy movement hasn't exactly had a great track record either.
There was a giant flywheel company near me about 20 years ago. Maybe it's still there. They had one incident where a flywheel broke.
https://beaconpower.com/stephentown-new-york/
Yup. Esp. when space is available. But thet benefit heavily from low pressure environments though so it's not just an arm and a mass in a fence.
There's a very long waiting list for new synchronous condensers, almost 5 years from order to delivery.
Batteries can serve the same function, while also providing energy arb and additional grid services, so I'm somewhat curious how log the market for syncons continues to exist.
Batteries (and their associated HV switching gear) are slow to react and have very limited lifespans, on the order of a few years. That's why your washing machine uses a capacitor to start its motor rather than a battery. Even capacitors are not as reactive as an already spinning mass.
Both assertions are false. Batteries react within milliseconds [1], and last 10-20 years (depending on chemistry and cycling, lithium at the shorter end, sodium and flow at the longer end) [2] [3] [4]. Australia had to reconfigure its ancillary services market due to how fast battery storage reacts, for example (proven out with the Hornsdale Power Reserve).
Please update priors to current state of the art.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50176
- The most common cited use case for batteries is frequency response. Frequency response is a service that maintains grid frequency as close to 60 hertz (Hz) as reasonably possible. Deviations below 60 Hz can lead to protective generator trips that result in a subsequent decline in system stability. Batteries are particularly well suited for frequency regulation because their output does not require any startup time and batteries can quickly absorb surges. At the end of 2020, 885 MW of battery storage capacity (59% of total utility-scale battery capacity) cited frequency response as a use case.
[2] Smith, J. et al. "Lithium - ion battery degradation mechanisms and mitigation strategies for utility - scale energy storage". Journal of Energy Storage, 2020.
[3] Brown, A. "Lead - acid battery performance and lifespan in utility - scale applications". Power Systems Research, 2018.
[4] Green, C. et al. "Flow batteries for long - term utility - scale energy storage: A review". Energy and Environmental Science, 2019.
Siemens is making a lot of money selling inertial stabilizers. There is ongoing research on how to stabilize grids in the face of decreasing inertial frequency stabilization.
Do you have any resources you can share on how this compares to synthetic inertia battery storage and renewables inverters can provide? I am interested!
How are you defining "slow" in this comment?
My understanding is that batteries are demonstrating longer useful lifetimes than was anticipated.
Ultimately I think diversity in technologies is the best policy, but difficult to set up the incentives to achieve it.
If the washing machine is using an induction moter, the capacitor is for creating the conditions for it to self-start on a single phase system. Three-phase induction motors don't need this.
And in fact, a lot of washing machines these days use a 3 phase motor. BLDC and a controller.