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Is large-scale energy storage dead?

April 8, 2016

Is large-scale energy storage dead?

Many countries have committed to filling large percentages of their future electricity demand with intermittent renewable energy, and to do so they will need long-term energy storage in the terawatt-hours range. But the modules they are now installing store only megawatt-hours of energy. Why are they doing this? This post concludes that they are either conveniently ignoring the long-term energy storage problem or are unaware of its magnitude and the near-impossibility of solving it.

The graphic below compares some recent Energy Matters estimates of the storage capacity needed to convert intermittent wind and solar generation into usable dispatchable generation over different lengths of time in different places. The details of the scenarios aren’t important; the key point is the enormous differences between the red bars, which show estimated future storage requirements, and the blue bars, which show existing global storage capacity (data from Wikipedia). It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the amount of energy storage capacity needed to support a 100% renewable world exceeds installed energy storage capacity by a factor of many thousands. Another way of looking at it is that installed world battery + CAES + flywheel + thermal + other storage capacity amounts to only about 12 GWh, enough to fill global electricity demand for all of fifteen seconds. Total global storage capacity with pumped hydro added works out to about 500 only GWh, enough to fill global electricity demand for all of ten minutes.

Yet microscopic additions to installed capacity are apparently considered a cause for rejoicing. Greentechmedia recently waxed lyrical about the progress made by energy storage projects in 2015 . “Last year will likely be remembered as the year that energy storage got serious …. projects of all sizes were installed in record numbers ….” But when it goes on to list “the Biggest Energy Storage Projects Built Around the World in the Last Year” we find they’re all 98-pound weaklings:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who Killed the Electric Car?

March 23, 2016

Who Killed the Electric Car?

[ Who cares about electric CARS?  Civilization ends when trucks stop running, and trucks can’t run on batteries because they’re too heavy (93% of the cargo weight, 25% of the cargo space), and an all-electric truck fleet would require thousands of new power plants, mostly running on finite fossil fuels. Although Wall street can endlessly come up with new financial products to skim the wealth of the middle class, scientists have to work within the laws of physics and thermodynamics. This is the main reason why even a car battery is not likely to ever pan out, as I explain below.  A more up-to-date version of this post on batteries, and electrifying trucks and locomotives can be found in my book, which also explains why it may be impossible to have an 80 to 100 percent electric grid depending on renewables.  We face not just a fossil fuel shortage, but an electricity shortage in the future, which will strike once natural gas declines to the point it can’t keep the grid balanced. Since natural gas is very local because the USA has few LNG terminals, this may come sooner than expected.  Despite the hype about 100 to 200 years of energy independence promised by many economic pundits, Patzek in his lifeitself blog makes the case that there may be only 3 to 7 years of shale gas in the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville and Marcellus shales.  The decline of conventional natural gas was at a crisis point in 2004 and conventional gas has continued to decline since then. ]

The battery did it.  Batteries are far too expensive for the average consumer, $600-1700 per kwh (Service). And they aren’t likely to get better any time soon.

“The big advances in battery technology happen rarely. It’s been more than 200 years and we have maybe 5 different successful rechargeable batteries,” said George Blomgren, a former senior technology researcher at Eveready (Borenstein).

And yet hope springs eternal. A better battery is always just around the corner:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

For Storing Electricity, Utilities Are Turning to Pumped Hydro

November 25, 2015

For Storing Electricity, Utilities Are Turning to Pumped Hydro

High-tech batteries may be garnering the headlines. But utilities from Spain to China are increasingly relying on pumped storage hydroelectricity – first used in the 1890s – to overcome the intermittent nature of wind and solar power. 

In the past decade, wind energy production has soared in Spain, rising from 6 percent of the country’s electricity generation in 2004 to about 20 percent today. While that is certainly good news for boosters of clean energy, the surge in renewables has come with the challenge of ensuring that electric power is available when customers want it, not just when the wind blows.

Iberdrola–Spain’s Cortes-La Muela project, which uses pumped hydro storage to produce electricity.

To help accommodate the increased supply of wind, Spain’s utilities have turned not to high-tech, 21st-century batteries, but rather to a time-tested 19th-century technology — pumped storage hydroelectricity. Pumped storage facilities are typically equipped with pumps and generators that move water between upper and lower reservoirs. A basic setup uses excess electricity — generated, say, from wind turbines during a blustery night — to pump water from a lower reservoir, such as behind a dam, to a reservoir at a higher elevation. Then, when the wind ceases to blow or electricity demand spikes, the water from on high is released to spin hydroelectric turbines.

That’s precisely what the giant Spanish utility Iberdrola has done with the expansion to its $1.3 billion Cortes-La Muela hydroelectric scheme, completed in 2013. The company uses surplus electricity to pump water from the Júcar River to a large reservoir on a bluff 1,700 feet above the river. When demand rises, the water is released to generate electricity. The 1,762-megawatt pumped storage generating capacity is Europe’s largest and is part of a hydroelectric complex capable of powering about 500,000 homes a year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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