New energy storage system

louis · 2021-09-23 06:59:56

This looks promising...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tEkRRec3NE

It's a heat storage system (used crush rocks, currently basalt).

Utility scale storage up to 7 days.

For some reason, I'm not great a fan of heat storage but this sounds like a real advance.

Uses surplus energy to "charge" the system.

tahanson43206 · 2021-09-23 11:08:13

For Louis re new topic ...

First, thanks for the link to the report on the 60% efficient round trip long duration energy storage system. This seems to me to have a strong economic return for global application at Grid Scale, which is (apparently) the name of process.

It is too late now, but in naming your topic, the word "new" will soon become meaningless, whereas "thermal" would have had long term staying power for those who might search for any topics containing the words "energy" and "storage".

Topic Forum Replies Last post
New energy storage system by louis
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 0 Today 06:59:56 by louis
Power to Ammonia for Energy Storage by kbd512 [ 1 2 ]
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 34 2021-07-18 13:37:39 by tahanson43206
Gravity Energy Storage by tahanson43206 [ 1 2 ]
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 46 2021-01-17 14:48:43 by SpaceNut
Iron fuel energy storage (to support renewables) by louis [ 1 2 ]
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 40 2020-01-27 08:20:14 by SpaceNut
CNT Flywheels vs Batteries for Energy Storage by kbd512
Life support systems 1 2019-07-28 20:29:39 by SpaceNut
Mobile Energy Storage in a Mars Colony by JoshNH4H [ 1 2 3 ]
Life support systems 57 2019-07-14 19:28:00 by kbd512
Pages:1

If you are willing to invest a bit more of your (I understand limited) time in this topic, please consider adding a few excerpts from the video to show a future reader why a visit to the link might be worth their time.

(th)

GW Johnson · 2021-09-23 12:04:03

Let's just say I am extremely skeptical of the "60% efficiency" number. This thing is a heat engine, subject to classical thermodynamics. The hottest point in its cycle is 600 C = 873 K. The coldest point in its cycle is -30 C = 243 K. The upper bound on efficiency, never actually reached, is the Carnot efficiency, which for these temperatures is 0.72 (and the heat engine turbine isn't really operating between those two temperatures). About half that might actually be feasible: around 36%.

1000 MW-scale power plants use heat engines (these days mostly steam or gas turbines) operating at 35-45% efficiency. Smaller-scale, you do worse: an automobile engine could approach 20% in steady cruise, but usually averages closer to 10%.

GW

SpaceNut · 2021-09-23 17:33:05

passive solar needs chamber and insulation to keep thermally isolated to temperatures that sink heat.

louis · 2021-09-23 18:46:18

The video mentioned at some point capturing heat from other energy control installations I think which might be adding to the overall "efficiency". But you don't have to persuade me to be sceptical of heat storage! lol

But, as always, it's less about efficiency and more about cost. Would it be cheaper per unit than chemical battery storage?

GW Johnson wrote:

Let's just say I am extremely skeptical of the "60% efficiency" number. This thing is a heat engine, subject to classical thermodynamics. The hottest point in its cycle is 600 C = 873 K. The coldest point in its cycle is -30 C = 243 K. The upper bound on efficiency, never actually reached, is the Carnot efficiency, which for these temperatures is 0.72 (and the heat engine turbine isn't really operating between those two temperatures). About half that might actually be feasible: around 36%.
1000 MW-scale power plants use heat engines (these days mostly steam or gas turbines) operating at 35-45% efficiency. Smaller-scale, you do worse: an automobile engine could approach 20% in steady cruise, but usually averages closer to 10%.
GW

tahanson43206 · 2021-09-24 06:18:58

For all ...

In Post #3, GW Johnson cites Carnot efficiency, which (I am under the impression) is the efficiency of conversion of thermal energy to work.

That is one thing, and it should (most likely) follow the principles laid out by GW Johnson.

There is another aspect to this system.... how efficient is it as an energy storage medium?

The article describes use of insulation to hold heat for sustained periods.

Aside from the conversion to work aspect, I'm interested in the efficiency of the system for storage of large quantities of thermal energy for extended periods.

The article implies that a week is a practical storage period for this system.

Nature shows us that energy can be stored quite efficiently, for thousands of years.

The article refers to delivery of lost thermal energy to nearby housing blocks. That use would increase the system efficiency to close to 100%, if we accept that thermal energy delivered to a home is useful "work".

If we accept GW Johnson's estimate of 30% efficiency of the system to deliver ** electrical ** energy back to the grid after a week, then (I presume) the 70% thermal energy delivered to nearby homes would increase the overall system efficiency to some higher value.

There must be more thorough analyses of the operation of the system beneath the surface display of the article.

(th)

kbd512 · 2021-09-24 11:25:17

Even if this process was only 30% efficient overall, 30% of something is still 30% more than nothing, which is precisely what you get right now since there is no such thing as a grid scale battery and probably never will be.

Hot rocks and hot gas flowing over rocks that retain heat well has the following benefits:

1. It requires no new technology the might exist "one day", because all real engineering is based on technology that we have, not technology that we wished we had.

2. A steel tank filled hot gas like CO2 and heated rock truly is cheap and durable. All materials used are infinitely recyclable using existing technology, unlike Lithium-ion batteries.

3. Spectacular total efficiency is far less important than spectacularly low total cost, as it relates to energy storage. If the cost of losing 100% of the generated energy that you can't immediately put to good use is higher than the cost of storing it for later use, then this is a winner.

The salient questions are as follows:

1. How cheap and fast is it to implement (what are the hurdles to implementation)?

2. What is the dollar figure attached to losing 100% of what we're losing now?

3. Can we store that otherwise lost energy (and money) at a profit?

Louis can scoff at thermal energy storage and GW can scoff at overall efficiency, but the theoretical Carnot efficiency with a cold reservoir of -30C and a hot reservoir of 600C is 72.15%. They're claiming 60% efficiency, so that falls within the realm of feasibility. Is that realistically achievable or have they neglected to mention something important? Maybe, maybe not, and yes, they probably did leave out something germane to realistically achievable overall efficiency, because they're trying to sell their invention. That doesn't mean their invention won't work, merely that it may not achieve the efficiency touted. It's a closed loop system, and looks like it uses re-injection of heat to increase efficiency with a multi-stage turbine, same as NREL does with their Supercritical CO2 gas turbines for solar thermal power plants.

If they're correct, then 60% of something is still a lot more energy than 0% of anything. When I consider what we have now, I think of that as a significant improvement.

All schemes that use extreme temperatures (50% efficient SCO2 gas turbines operating at 715C), extreme materials (Lithium, Platinum, etc), or rely upon extreme efficiency (all batteries), are typically expensive, finnicky to operate, and strictly service life limited.

You know what's good about this new technology Louis has brought attention to?

It's none of those things. It's a "middle-of-the-road" solution that could actually be practical. I get the impression that most people don't truly understand the meaning of that word. Practicality trumps all other considerations in the long run. If you can run a boiler, then you can run this energy storage plant. Humans know how to do that, because that's how our civilization is powered.

tahanson43206 · 2021-09-24 11:35:24

SearchTerm:Thermal Energy Storage with debate: Louis, GW Johnson and kbd512

Round #3: Hot Rocks concept is ahead by a whisker, given a resounding push by kbd512

(th)

louis · 2021-09-24 14:53:44

kbd512 wrote:

Even if this process was only 30% efficient overall, 30% of something is still 30% more than nothing, which is precisely what you get right now since there is no such thing as a grid scale battery and probably never will be.
Hot rocks and hot gas flowing over rocks that retain heat well has the following benefits:
1. It requires no new technology the might exist "one day", because all real engineering is based on technology that we have, not technology that we wished we had.

A truism but re iron-air batteries, all the technology is there, it's only a question of whether the system can be operated cost-effectively.

2. A steel tank filled hot gas like CO2 and heated rock truly is cheap and durable. All materials used are infinitely recyclable using existing technology, unlike Lithium-ion batteries.

Agreed these are massive pluses - but so is having iron and air as your basic battery materials.

3. Spectacular total efficiency is far less important than spectacularly low total cost, as it relates to energy storage. If the cost of losing 100% of the generated energy that you can't immediately put to good use is higher than the cost of storing it for later use, then this is a winner.

Totally agree that these technology advances are basically cost driven. If you can find a cheap way of storing cheap solar and wind, then you have hit the jackpot.

The salient questions are as follows:
1. How cheap and fast is it to implement (what are the hurdles to implementation)?
2. What is the dollar figure attached to losing 100% of what we're losing now?
3. Can we store that otherwise lost energy (and money) at a profit?

You might add another salient issue - risk factors. Pumped hydro is a pretty good storage technique, especially once you have paid back your initial investment. However dams can fail - there is a significant risk factor, especially if populated areas lie below the dam.

Louis can scoff at thermal energy storage and GW can scoff at overall efficiency, but the theoretical Carnot efficiency with a cold reservoir of -30C and a hot reservoir of 600C is 72.15%. They're claiming 60% efficiency, so that falls within the realm of feasibility. Is that realistically achievable or have they neglected to mention something important? Maybe, maybe not, and yes, they probably did leave out something germane to realistically achievable overall efficiency, because they're trying to sell their invention. That doesn't mean their invention won't work, merely that it may not achieve the efficiency touted. It's a closed loop system, and looks like it uses re-injection of heat to increase efficiency with a multi-stage turbine, same as NREL does with their Supercritical CO2 gas turbines for solar thermal power plants.

I wasn't scoffing so much as confessing my own prejudices. These prejudices are not irrational. There have been quite a few solar-thermal interface systems that have failed abysmally. This technology appears more robust.

If they're correct, then 60% of something is still a lot more energy than 0% of anything. When I consider what we have now, I think of that as a significant improvement.
All schemes that use extreme temperatures (50% efficient SCO2 gas turbines operating at 715C), extreme materials (Lithium, Platinum, etc), or rely upon extreme efficiency (all batteries), are typically expensive, finnicky to operate, and strictly service life limited.
You know what's good about this new technology Louis has brought attention to?
It's none of those things. It's a "middle-of-the-road" solution that could actually be practical. I get the impression that most people don't truly understand the meaning of that word. Practicality trumps all other considerations in the long run. If you can run a boiler, then you can run this energy storage plant. Humans know how to do that, because that's how our civilization is powered.

The guy behind it has a good record in developing wind turbines, so his pragmatic approach may well be what we are looking for. I do have a lot of respect for the Danes who are often in the van of green energy developments but in a way that provides practical solutions. Their latest approach - creating green energy islands out at sea is another example.

tahanson43206 · 2021-09-24 15:07:05

For Louis re new topic and many other topics created over the years ...

Your time is valuable and we (forum readers) are fortunate when you invest some of it here.

Therefore, it is with some recognition this may be an imposition, never-the-less I am pressing ahead in hopes of a favorable outcome ...

Could you possibly dig a little deeper into the people and organizations behind this venture?

There are plenty of commercial outfits that earn a living supplying data about finances and many other aspects of public (or private when possible) corporations, but many of us (perhaps most) don't have resources to subscribe.

It would be a donation of your time and energy to follow some of the many promising technologies you've discovered over the time you've been posting here. Your interest (in the past) seems strong at first, and then it fades out.

What I'm asking you to consider is the potential value of re-visiting some of the topics you've created, to see how they are coming along.

What we don't need is a "discovery" of a "new" technology you've already reported.

What (I at least) think is needed is a series of reports on the progress of various enterprises competing in the real world to address problems of our time.

The "Hot Rocks" storage method seems (to me at least) to be a strong candidate for energy storage at Mars, where every btu of "lost" energy is not lost at all, but instead helps to keep the habitats warm against the constant tug of space to claim whatever thermal energy might show up.

SearchTerm:Hot Rocks Thermal energy storage system
SearchTerm:Rocks Hot
SearchTerm:HotRocks

(th)

louis · 2021-09-24 17:13:58

What was that song by Michael Jackson...? No, not Thriller...not Billy Jean...what was that other big hit...didn't Van Halen play a guitar solo on it...just can't bring it to mind...

tahanson43206 wrote:

For Louis re new topic and many other topics created over the years ...
Your time is valuable and we (forum readers) are fortunate when you invest some of it here.
Therefore, it is with some recognition this may be an imposition, never-the-less I am pressing ahead in hopes of a favorable outcome ...
Could you possibly dig a little deeper into the people and organizations behind this venture?
There are plenty of commercial outfits that earn a living supplying data about finances and many other aspects of public (or private when possible) corporations, but many of us (perhaps most) don't have resources to subscribe.
It would be a donation of your time and energy to follow some of the many promising technologies you've discovered over the time you've been posting here. Your interest (in the past) seems strong at first, and then it fades out.
What I'm asking you to consider is the potential value of re-visiting some of the topics you've created, to see how they are coming along.
What we don't need is a "discovery" of a "new" technology you've already reported.
What (I at least) think is needed is a series of reports on the progress of various enterprises competing in the real world to address problems of our time.
The "Hot Rocks" storage method seems (to me at least) to be a strong candidate for energy storage at Mars, where every btu of "lost" energy is not lost at all, but instead helps to keep the habitats warm against the constant tug of space to claim whatever thermal energy might show up.
SearchTerm:Hot Rocks Thermal energy storage system
SearchTerm:Rocks Hot
SearchTerm:HotRocks
(th)

SpaceNut · 2021-09-24 19:26:16

Temperature and sink isolation are the issues for rock storage...
Barrels of water inside a greenhouse and other such tricks have been employed for centuries as a means to control an internal environment.

The geo thermal loops are usually burried in a layer of sand for heat pumps...

louis · 2021-09-24 19:32:24

If "sink isolation" is what I'm guessing it is (the heat retentive material coalescing at the bottom of the cylinder). I think they said in the video they've resolved that issue (basically by pumping air through I think).

SpaceNut wrote:

Temperature and sink isolation are the issues for rock storage...
Barrels of water inside a greenhouse and other such tricks have been employed for centuries as a means to control an internal environment.
The geo thermal loops are usually burried in a layer of sand for heat pumps...

SpaceNut · 2021-09-25 16:06:00

This boils down to energy quality of temperature source hours of input -- minus energy used to circulation or flow through the storage media capture that is = saved as an isolated volume of stored temperature.

Then to do work requires again a minus to create flow through the convertor which in turn makes the energy type we desire.

SpaceNut · 2021-09-26 16:33:58

transcript
https://www.justhaveathink.com/gridscal … n-storage/

The essential principle is the movement of heat energy in air from one large storage cylinder to another and back again, with a method of intercepting the energy at some point as an output that can do some useful work.
So, lets jump into the system at the start of the charging process. What we’ve got here is two cylinders containing crushed rocks, usually basalt, but other materials could be used depending on what’s available in any given geographical location.
At this stage of the process the air and crushed rocks in the first cylinder are at a temperature of 385 degrees Celsius and the air and crushed rocks in the second cylinder are at a temperature of 75 degrees Celsius.
The hot air comes out of the top of the first cylinder and goes through a compressor which super heats it all the way up to 600 degrees Celsius. That super-heated air is then pumped into the second storage cylinder where it transfers its heat energy into the crushed rocks. At the same time, the cooler, 75 degrees Celsius air is being drawn off from the bottom of the second cylinder and run through a heat exchanger to reduce its temperature to about 25C. That air then goes through a turbo expander which drops the temperature right down to minus 30 degrees Celsius.
Gridscale are aiming to cover both the 12-to-18 hour discharge duration and the 3-to-7 day discharge duration, depending on the number of storage tanks in any given configuration.

louis · 2021-09-28 18:18:32

Yet another interesting energy storage system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edVjYofLYc4

Seems to me like we are seeing a whole host of energy storage systems coming through now.

I am optimistic that a combination of these new storage technologies and reduced battery cost will mean we have reliable green energy systems within a few years.

kbd512 · 2021-09-29 07:04:46

Louis,

You don't need an abandoned coal-fired power plant to heat up a block of metal- at all, or ever, really. If this little device fits inside a shipping container, then it can be set up inside a... wait for it... shipping container. No abandoned structures of any kind are necessary.

I am very optimistic that we will continue squander absurd amounts of money on technologies that are utterly incapable of scaling to the degree required and don't offer any tangible advantages over anything that came before them, because PT Barnum knew who he was selling his snake oil to. Paranoid hysterics can be convinced to hand their money over to absolutely anyone, for absolutely any scheme, in order to soothe their paranoia-driven hysteria.

louis · 2021-09-29 16:38:40

Personally I am betting on the iron-air battery system. I have a good feeling about that. Also I think green hydrogen will also have a role to play at utility scale. Heat storage I remain sceptical about but we shall see.

I think we'll see a full solution to intermittency within 5 years and then it will be a case of moving from existing energy technologies as contracts come up for renewal because I am of the view that the green energy plus storage is going to be cheaper than all the alternatives.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
You don't need an abandoned coal-fired power plant to heat up a block of metal- at all, or ever, really. If this little device fits inside a shipping container, then it can be set up inside a... wait for it... shipping container. No abandoned structures of any kind are necessary.
I am very optimistic that we will continue squander absurd amounts of money on technologies that are utterly incapable of scaling to the degree required and don't offer any tangible advantages over anything that came before them, because PT Barnum knew who he was selling his snake oil to. Paranoid hysterics can be convinced to hand their money over to absolutely anyone, for absolutely any scheme, in order to soothe their paranoia-driven hysteria.

Calliban · 2021-09-30 15:27:41

Good find Louis. I found an article on the same technology here.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/02/ho … city-grid/

This energy storage technology does hold a great deal of promise in my opinion, probably the most promising that Louis has introduced us to so far. The energy storage medium, crushed rock, could hardly be cheaper. Its cost and embodied energy are close to zero. One cubic metre of rock, heated across a temperature difference of 500K, will store up to 1MWh of heat. That is as good a storage density as most batteries. In something that is almost free, aside from the insulated tank that it is stored in.

The low cost and very low embodied energy, makes this an option that can be scaled up to provide days of energy storage without bankrupting the utility supplier. There is no free lunch of course, you need a reversible heat engine, or a heat pump and heat engine, to charge and discharge the thermal store. But thermodynamic machines like this are made from steel and are much more sustainable than batteries made from exotic chemicals. Grid energy storage based on this technology, is essentially a set of thermal power stations, using hot rock energy stores, instead of boilers. It is not a new idea and there is nothing unprecedented or technically difficult about doing this. I sometimes think that people ignore what should be the most obvious ideas, because they don't find them exciting.

The sixty percent round trip efficiency is actually a technical stretch. Large heat engines based on Brayton cycles get around 70% carnot efficiency, so realistically, storage efficiency will be 50%, unless you can find a use for waste heat. If you can, then exergy efficiency will be better. Round trip efficiency needs to be balanced against capital and operating cost. It is whole system reliability vs whole system cost that matters. The economics of a battery depends heavily on how many charge-discharge cycles it provides per year. This is why Li-ion batteries provide hours worth of storage and are used for grid frequency control. You couldn't afford to scale them to provide weeks of power, they just aren't suited for that. For long term storage, providing days worth of capacity, you might get only a a couple dozen full charge-discharge cycles per year. So the store itself needs to be very cheap, as you are going to be leaving it sitting there doing nothing for a lot of the time. What could be cheaper than a steel tank full of stones? For those very long-term lulls, as we saw this summer, you could charge the thermal store using a furnace burning coal or charcoal. This would be an acceptable situation, because you would only need to use the fuel occasionally and the average amount used is small. But it is cheap to keep coal in a heap, for insurance against the unpredictability of the weather.

There are a lot of other possible applications aside from just grid electric storage.

(1) You could use this technology to absorb excess electric power to store heat for large buildings. When the building needs heat, you run the heat engine, use the waste heat to heat the building and sell power back to the grid. You are getting more than 60% efficiency that way, because the waste heat has local value. In smaller buildings, you could just use the heat pump to charge up the gravel tank for direct heating applications. A house could store a few days worth of heat in an insulated gravel tank.

(2) Industrial activities require a lot of process heat at various temperatures. For low temperature heat, this technology could absorb electricity when it is cheap and run the generator constantly, selling baseload power to the grid and low grade heat to the industrial use. For high temperatures, you would use the heat directly, without the generator.

(3) Large vehicles could make use of stored heat engines for propulsive power. I'm thinking trains and ships. In a ship, the thermal stores provide ballast in the keel. You would run the ship between coastal ports, charging it with electricity at each port. You could also provide offshore mooring points, which are connected to grids by undersea cable, where the ship could dock and plug in for recharging. Trains would use the thermal store to generate electric power to run electric propulsion. A hydraulic cylinder would provide regenerative braking.

(4) Could this work for trucks? I haven't looked into it. It wouldn't have anything like the range of a diesel powered truck. But when oil gets expensive and even unavailable, we may be forced to examine less ideal options. This is something that is at least relatively cheap in terms of capital cost and easy to build.

Thermal energy storage like this would definitely make living on intermittent energy a lot easier.

There are iterations of this thermal energy storage that could work in a lot of niche applications. I am quite fond of the idea of a heat pump that charges an underground ice store in winter and a hot water store in summer. A heat engine would run continuously between them, generating baseload power. The whole system power density would be crap, but its still a cool idea, especially if you can build it once and have the stores last a century or more. Exploiting seasonal temperature differences to generate power, for a large offgrid house, say. On Mars, one could do this far more easily, taking advantage of diurnal temperature differences to generate power.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-09-30 16:22:08)

louis · 2021-10-01 12:43:22

Re 1, it could certainly be used on Mars to provide hot water for heating. hygiene, or clothes and dish washing as required on a one-sol cycle. That could be useful for a solar power system, since the heat will last till the following morning when a lot of hot water is being used again.

Calliban wrote:

Good find Louis. I found an article on the same technology here.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/02/ho … city-grid/
This energy storage technology does hold a great deal of promise in my opinion, probably the most promising that Louis has introduced us to so far. The energy storage medium, crushed rock, could hardly be cheaper. Its cost and embodied energy are close to zero. One cubic metre of rock, heated across a temperature difference of 500K, will store up to 1MWh of heat. That is as good a storage density as most batteries. In something that is almost free, aside from the insulated tank that it is stored in.
The low cost and very low embodied energy, makes this an option that can be scaled up to provide days of energy storage without bankrupting the utility supplier. There is no free lunch of course, you need a reversible heat engine, or a heat pump and heat engine, to charge and discharge the thermal store. But thermodynamic machines like this are made from steel and are much more sustainable than batteries made from exotic chemicals. Grid energy storage based on this technology, is essentially a set of thermal power stations, using hot rock energy stores, instead of boilers. It is not a new idea and there is nothing unprecedented or technically difficult about doing this. I sometimes think that people ignore what should be the most obvious ideas, because they don't find them exciting.
The sixty percent round trip efficiency is actually a technical stretch. Large heat engines based on Brayton cycles get around 70% carnot efficiency, so realistically, storage efficiency will be 50%, unless you can find a use for waste heat. If you can, then exergy efficiency will be better. Round trip efficiency needs to be balanced against capital and operating cost. It is whole system reliability vs whole system cost that matters. The economics of a battery depends heavily on how many charge-discharge cycles it provides per year. This is why Li-ion batteries provide hours worth of storage and are used for grid frequency control. You couldn't afford to scale them to provide weeks of power, they just aren't suited for that. For long term storage, providing days worth of capacity, you might get only a a couple dozen full charge-discharge cycles per year. So the store itself needs to be very cheap, as you are going to be leaving it sitting there doing nothing for a lot of the time. What could be cheaper than a steel tank full of stones? For those very long-term lulls, as we saw this summer, you could charge the thermal store using a furnace burning coal or charcoal. This would be an acceptable situation, because you would only need to use the fuel occasionally and the average amount used is small. But it is cheap to keep coal in a heap, for insurance against the unpredictability of the weather.
There are a lot of other possible applications aside from just grid electric storage.
(1) You could use this technology to absorb excess electric power to store heat for large buildings. When the building needs heat, you run the heat engine, use the waste heat to heat the building and sell power back to the grid. You are getting more than 60% efficiency that way, because the waste heat has local value. In smaller buildings, you could just use the heat pump to charge up the gravel tank for direct heating applications. A house could store a few days worth of heat in an insulated gravel tank.
(2) Industrial activities require a lot of process heat at various temperatures. For low temperature heat, this technology could absorb electricity when it is cheap and run the generator constantly, selling baseload power to the grid and low grade heat to the industrial use. For high temperatures, you would use the heat directly, without the generator.
(3) Large vehicles could make use of stored heat engines for propulsive power. I'm thinking trains and ships. In a ship, the thermal stores provide ballast in the keel. You would run the ship between coastal ports, charging it with electricity at each port. You could also provide offshore mooring points, which are connected to grids by undersea cable, where the ship could dock and plug in for recharging. Trains would use the thermal store to generate electric power to run electric propulsion. A hydraulic cylinder would provide regenerative braking.
(4) Could this work for trucks? I haven't looked into it. It wouldn't have anything like the range of a diesel powered truck. But when oil gets expensive and even unavailable, we may be forced to examine less ideal options. This is something that is at least relatively cheap in terms of capital cost and easy to build.
Thermal energy storage like this would definitely make living on intermittent energy a lot easier.
There are iterations of this thermal energy storage that could work in a lot of niche applications. I am quite fond of the idea of a heat pump that charges an underground ice store in winter and a hot water store in summer. A heat engine would run continuously between them, generating baseload power. The whole system power density would be crap, but its still a cool idea, especially if you can build it once and have the stores last a century or more. Exploiting seasonal temperature differences to generate power, for a large offgrid house, say. On Mars, one could do this far more easily, taking advantage of diurnal temperature differences to generate power.

SpaceNut · 2021-10-01 21:38:10

430 watts per meter at 60% means an effective heating would be only 258 watts or 880 BTU/hr that we get from high noon hours of the day.

https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/pow … o_BTU.html

Thermal temperature change
https://sciencing.com/how-8643971-conve … grees.html

wattage * time (sec) = joules

joules / grams of whats heated = unknown number

unknown number / specific heat value = temperature rise c'
For instance, if you are calculating the temperature rise in water, which has a specific heat capacity of 4.186 j/g K:
This is the number of degrees Celsius by which the object's temperature rises.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/spec … d_154.html

Sand, dry 0.19 Btu/lbmoF or kcal/kgoC 0.80 kJ/kg K
weighs 1.631 gram per cubic centimeter or 1,631 kilogram per cubic meter,

258 w x 3hr x 60 x 60 = 2,786,400 joules

We will want a large surface area for the sand to spread out so depending on the depth we then make sure to multiply the joules by that same sqare meter change

tahanson43206 · 2022-04-15 17:11:21

There are numerous topics that contain the word "storage" ... this one seemed (to me at least) to be closest to a good fit for this article...

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/liq … 00329.html

New liquid system could revolutionize solar energy
Joshua Hawkins
Fri, April 15, 2022, 4:08 PM

A group of researchers has created a liquid solar energy storage system that can create electricity on demand. The system can store solar energy for up to 18 years, allowing them to release it when and where it is needed. The system has been in the works for over a decade, and new advancement allows them to repurpose the stored solar energy using a small chip.

This liquid solar energy storage solution could revolutionize solar power
Back in 2017, researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology unveiled a system that allows them to store solar energy. The system, called the Molecular Solar Thermal (MOST) system, was revolutionary for the time. However, the researchers have since teamed up with scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University to create a compact thermoelectric generator capable of re-harnessing the stored solar energy.
It’s yet another revolutionary step in the process to make liquid solar energy storage more viable. And, once perfected, it could open entirely new avenues for how we work with solar power. Using the MOST system, the researchers were able to store solar energy in a liquid form. That form can be held for up to 18 years before it loses its effectiveness.
Carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen make up the specially designed molecule the system uses. When sunlight interacts with the molecule, the atoms within it rearrange and change shape. This allows the molecule to turn into an energy-rich isomer. That isomer acts as a liquid solar energy storage solution.
The researchers published a study on their latest findings in Cell Reports Physical Science.
Harnessing the stored power
By combining the liquid solar energy storage solution with a thermoelectric generator, the researchers were able to re-harness the power. The generator is an ultra-thin chip. Researcher Zhihang Wang says that they can integrate the system into electronics like smartwatches and headphones.
So far, the researchers have only used the liquid solar energy storage solution to create small amounts of electricity. However, they say the results show that the concept works and so far, it looks extremely promising. Next, they can focus on streamlining the system. That should allow them to increase how much energy we can extract.
This is, of course, just one way that researchers and engineers have found to revolutionize solar energy. Previously we saw engineers creating thin film-like panels that could add solar power collection to almost any surface.
If they can streamline the process and make a liquid solar energy storage solution that’s useable in real world environments, it could make solar energy much easier to use. This kind of system would open the door to using solar power even when the sun isn’t out, or the weather is bad. It would also make solar power possible in places where constant rainy weather and overcast skies block out the sun quite a bit.
Click here to read the full article.
See the original version of this article on BGR.com

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tahanson43206 · 2023-01-19 19:32:06

This topic was created by Louis to report on Form Energy, which uses iron as a component of an energy storage system.

The article at the link below reports on a new(er) concept (tested on Mars) and it mentions Form Energy as a competitor.

This NASA spin-off looks like it has possibility on Earth as well as Mars ...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/noon-energy- … 00451.html

Please note the reference to competitor Form Energy, which uses iron.

This battery technology splits CO2 into O2 and Carbon powder.

Canary Media
Noon Energy raises $28M for a whole new kind of long-duration storage
Julian Spector
Wed, January 18, 2023 at 7:00 AM EST
A former NASA scientist wants to break through the barriers to cheap long-duration energy storage. And he’s doing it with ingredients as basic as carbon and oxygen.
Chris Graves co-founded Noon Energy in 2018 after working on a tool for NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover that snatches carbon dioxide out of the red planet’s atmosphere and converts it into oxygen. Along the way, Graves realized that this process could be tweaked to store clean energy very cheaply for longer periods of time than what’s commercially viable with today’s lithium-ion batteries.
The 10-person team at Noon successfully scaled up a lab prototype's storage capacity by a factor of 50 in the last 14 months, which gave them confidence that the core technology will work at the scale of a grid power plant. With that in hand, the company raised $28 million Series A financing announced Wednesday. It had previously raised a $3 million seed round while remaining coy about what its technology entailed.
Clean Energy Ventures led the new round with Aramco Ventures’ Sustainability Fund (yes, that Aramco). Other investors included Emerson Collective, At One Ventures, Mistletoe and Doral Energy-Tech Ventures.
“The scientific risk is fully behind us,” Graves said. “It’s a very low-cost and high-energy-density solution.”
The next big goal is to build demonstration projects to test the technology in the field, Graves told Canary Media. To get there, he wants to triple headcount, hiring engineers, business development pros, product developers and HR staff.
This makes for a relatively new entrant into the increasingly well-funded field of long-duration energy-storage startups. They serve a market that doesn’t exactly exist yet, but which anticipates the needs of the grid as renewables deliver more and more of the electricity supply. Something needs to be able to take the bursts of clean power and make them available when they’re actually needed.
The phrase “long-duration energy storage,” however, is a term of art that can mean whatever the speaker desires. Some entrepreneurs use it to hawk newfangled batteries that serve the exact same functions as lithium-ion, just without the track record or the manufacturing scale. Noon occupies a more rigorously defined space: It’s building batteries that can deliver a desired amount of power for 100 hours or more.
That range, also called multiday storage, would allow a Noon-supplied power plant to store clean energy and deliver it through a prolonged period without sun or wind. It would take over a role typically served by fossil-gas plants, providing on-demand power that ramps up quickly when needed and can run for days.
Wags on Twitter often dismiss long-duration attempts as slow batteries; you could take any battery and let out a trickle of power for a long time, but that’s not useful. What Noon is building would deliver a useful amount of capacity (determined by the customer’s needs), affordably, for days on end without running out of juice. The lithium-ion batteries that run the grid-storage show today can’t go for ultra-long duration without becoming prohibitively expensive.
If Noon delivers on that promise, it won’t have much competition. The leading contender for 100-plus-hour storage is the iron-air battery being developed by Form Energy, helmed by former Tesla storage exec Mateo Jaramillo. That startup has raised a staggering $650 million in the last two years alone, locked down a utility contract for its first deployment, and is building a factory in the West Virginia steel town of Weirton. (Incidentally, Aramco also went in on Form’s Series A in the long-ago days of 2018.)
Form picked iron as its key ingredient because it’s cheap and abundant compared to conventional battery materials. Noon similarly wanted cheap and abundant; it starts with a tank of carbon dioxide. Noon’s battery stores energy by using electricity to split the CO2 into solid carbon and oxygen gas; to discharge, it reverses the operation, oxidizing the powdery solid carbon. The active ingredients are so cheap that Noon pays more for the tanks to store them in, Graves said.
Using something cheaper than lithium-ion batteries is table stakes for long-duration storage. But Noon has two qualities that few competitors in the space claim: energy density and high round-trip efficiency.
Long-duration technologies are almost always expected to be less energy-dense than lithium-ion. They aren’t trying to power sports cars, so they can sprawl out a bit and take up space in a field somewhere. But Graves says his carbon-based storage is in fact three times as energy-dense as lithium-ion. He theorizes it could one day power clean marine shipping or long-distance trucking, two applications where even lithium-ion isn’t energy-dense enough for the job.
Long-duration storage technologies, due to various laws of physics, tend to lose more power than typical batteries do in the round-trip conversion to storage and back. The refrain from the companies producing them is that losing half the energy you put into the device doesn’t really matter if the bulk storage is cheap enough. That could prove correct, but nobody’s had a chance to confirm that this isn’t wishful thinking. In any case, energy losses are a bug, not a feature.
Noon differs from the pack in that it purports to have “near lithium-ion levels” of round-trip efficiency.
“We’re not in the camp of saying efficiency is not important,” Graves said.
As for the question of serving a market demand for multiday storage that doesn’t palpably exist yet, Graves said it’s a matter of picking the places where the futuristic conditions are starting to materialize.
“At the moment, the grid broadly is not asking for it,” he noted. “Of course, the grid is not homogenous, and some locations need it sooner than others.”
He thinks it will make a good fit for places like Hawaii, which has nation-leading rooftop solar penetration, shut down its last coal plant last year, and is building a renewables-only grid without any gas to keep the lights on after dark. Early markets could include other islands as well as remote microgrids, where cheap renewables with long-term storage can compete with pricey imported fossil fuels.

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tahanson43206 · 2024-02-14 19:48:07

Since we have a lot of topics that include the word "storage" in the title, I thought that this topic of Louis might be a reasonable fit for this report, since the size of the storage system is what is "new"

This is a closed storage system, that uses CO2. What is interesting is the scale...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/d … 121a&ei=31

This project will be the largest energy storage system of its kind in the world.
© Provided by The Cool Down
A first-of-its-kind project for the United States has received a grant of up to $30 million from the government, the project’s developers announced.
Alliant Energy and WEC Energy Group, co-owners of Wisconsin’s Columbia Energy Center, will use the funding from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations to create the country’s first compressed carbon dioxide long-duration energy storage system.
The idea of the system is that it can turn carbon dioxide gas into a liquid for easier storage when energy is abundant. When energy is needed, it turns the carbon dioxide back into gas, which then powers an electricity-generating turbine.
Crucially, the setup operates as a closed-loop system, meaning that it should release no carbon dioxide and require no additional carbon dioxide after it is built out.
In addition to being first in the U.S., the Columbia Energy Storage Project will be the largest compressed carbon dioxide long-duration energy storage system in the world. A much smaller version of the same project is already operational in Sardinia, Italy. The two projects were designed by the same company, Energy Dome, which is based in Italy.
The Sardinia system has achieved an enviable 75% efficiency rate — which the much larger Wisconsin one will hope to match.
Currently, the Columbia Energy Center is Wisconsin’s largest remaining coal plant. It was supposed to be retired in 2024, but that date was pushed back to mid-2026. Its eventual transition into a much more sustainable battery storage system is good news for Wisconsinites and the planet.
“The expansion of energy storage infrastructure is key to accelerating the transition to cleaner, more sustainable renewable energy,” a spokesperson for Alliant said. “As we retire older fossil fuel facilities and add additional renewable resources to our generation portfolio, energy storage solutions help to ensure system reliability and meet customer needs.”

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SpaceNut · 2024-02-15 19:02:18

Sort of the design for mars since we want the co2 to be in a liquid form such that we can heat to make high pressure to turn turbines and other applications. It is also the start to making methane fuel as well.

New Mars Forums

Announcement

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