CO2 battery could make wind and solar dispatchable at a lower price
rechargenews.com
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It was previously proposed at Lawerence Livermore.[2] It was apparently tried in China in 2016, at least at pilot plant stage.
It's an obvious idea. There's been lots of interest in compressed air storage, and compressed CO2 storage is in some ways easier, because you can liquify it easily. So why hasn't this come up much before?
[1] https://sco2.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/presentations/2021/Man...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2017/03/26/how-capt...
My guess is volumetric inneficiency. This will be an alternative to pumped hydro, not batteries. But this has none of the conveniences of pumped hydro - nature already built the holding tank and you only need a pump and generator.
Storing all the uncompressed CO2 will require a massive structure for relatively little energy storage.
Long duration general means that the intended target has a long charge cycle, and the longer the charge cycle is, the longer it will take to get an return of the investment. In contrast, lithium-ion batteries (with solar) is used with a daily charge cycle which means that calculating a return of investment is almost trivial. Every day the sun go down, demands goes up, batteries are discharged. Long duration storage tend to be combined with wind, and so you discharge during days of calm weather.
Only if you're in an area with favourable geography, of course...
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Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies.
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You mean this part?
Edit: this is pretty much theoretical Carno cycle and it has moving parts
Nuclear reactions have the highest energy density of any of the technology available to mankind.
Thus, with evergrowing energy needs, nuclear power will always remain the only scalable, carbon-free technology.
In a 100 years you will look back and write Hacker News comments and say 'but they had the technology in the 60s, why were they not using it. It makes no sense'.
But since solar and wind get cheaper from the same effect, it doesn't really help nuclear much.
Batteries, like this system, convert steady base load into variable output by storing energy. Fill up at night, then output when needed during the day.
Batteries make nuclear energy more viable.
Concerning:
> The engineer explains that Energy Dome does not want to build projects itself.
> “We don’t have the capability to grow as fast as the market requires,” he says. “So our model is to license the technology to EPC companies or IPPs, utilities, the final user, because that is the best way for us to expand geographically and by sector.
They are so confident in the economics of this tech that they'd rather someone else invest in it. How generous and not at all suspicious.
However, the key information will be performance numbers actually coming out of it
Do you actually need to refrigerate it to keep it liquid? My SodaStream machine works with room temperature.
So depending where you are you'd need refrigeration
The refrigeration is needed because the process of compression produced huge amount of heat. And because of that, this method of storing energy is twice less efficient than batteries are
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/physics/chapter/13-5-phase...
However, I imagine you could wait for your too-hot-to-condense gas to cool and condense. That would probably be vastly more efficient than adding refrigeration.
It would depend on the materials used for the pressure tank, whether you can add more surface area and the external temperature.
You could even put the CO2 Tank under water in a deep lake/ocean. Then you don't have to have such thick materials to contain the pressure. The CO2 could be dissipating its heat and pressurizing as you pump it down (use a flexible tube so the water is compressing the CO2). For the return journey, use a rigid pipe so it doesn't lose energy pushing outward on a flexible pipe.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide, you can't slosh it.
This is not an entirely uncommon business model, and there are numerous examples of the developers of a technology licensing it for production and distribution. ARM is itself one example of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Business_model
It is entirely valid for a technology inventor to commercialize their invention by partnering with a manufacturer that already has the necessary production capacity, rather than by raising outside money to scale up their company and build new production capacity. The former can often be a lower-risk, higher-reward approach compared to the latter.
The real question is whether the technology actually works. If they can prove it works, the fact that they would license this technology to third parties for manufacturing and distribution is not itself suspicious at all.
I mean, I think this is pretty standard in highly capital intensive industries?
Can someone explain the maximum theoretical efficiency of this process from basic thermodynamic principles?
This is converting electricity into kinetic energy and vice versa. So it'd be the product of those two maximum efficiencies, whatever they are.
Where do you get that from? The article definitely seems to me to be describing a heat engine.
That said plenty of the steps involved here are likely not 100% efficient, and I'm somewhat unsure where they're recovering the energy involved in the gas-liquid phase-transition, if at all.
and here we are
Edit: They claim 75-80%. Is that realistic?
Edit: Does this include the assumption that the compression heat can be used? „The heat is then extracted and stored in “bricks” made of steel shot and quartzite for later use, cooling down the CO2 to an ambient temperature.“
Seems very doubtful, based on the reported temperature differential and the formula for the theoretical maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine.
While Carnot-cycle engines are reversible, the losses don't cancel out. You just lose the energy to entropy on both ends.
Yes, you don't have a Carnot-cycle in practice, and the thermal buffer likely won't offer isotherm storage, either. But you still can't use Carnot-cycle efficiency to determine some sort of round-trip efficiency of this thermal-based storage device with mechanical input/output ports.
Personally, I've rather just seen an increase in deception and questionable investments (of money and other resources), compared to more traditional approaches. I'd even go as far as to call most of the startup based industry "Smoke and Mirrors Inc", but that might be a bit on the cynical side.
Still, securing more investments for "potential" solutions (more like regardless of actual feasibility) appears to have become a higher priority than actually showing/proving that something is an improvement (by any measure besides the financials gains for early investors).
EDIT: While this sure does not rule out the possibility of true innovation and progress, I can't say I'm impressed with the actually success ratio. Combined with the amount of downright deception I've seen, usually without legal consequences (let alone penal ones), I wonder if the net sum is even a move in the positive direction.
"Spadacini explains that Energy Dome uses CO2 because it can be converted into liquid under pressure at 30°C, compared to minus 150°C for air. Highview Power’s liquid-air battery therefore has to use cryogenic technology to liquefy air, but the Energy Dome system requires far less power, resulting in cheaper costs and a higher round-trip efficiency, the company says."
It is not : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
> By volume, dry air contains 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases
When hot it rises up into the atmosphere. When cool it comes down. That is why co2 concentrates on ground in cool forests but floats high in urban places.
Spadacini adds: “The system is totally closed. We don’t consume any CO2, it’s just the working fluid that goes back and forth… for the life of the system, over 25 years. So we have no emissions in the atmosphere.”
So yes, it's a closed system
It's a closed loop system, so it doesn't seem particularly dirty to me, presuming the energy to run it will come from the renewable source that it's storing. The materials used to make it (steel, quartzite, PVC) don't seem too troubling.
Seems a bit cleaner than chemical batteries at first glance.
However when you continue reading:
In addition to electricity, fuel cells produce water, heat and, depending on the fuel source, very small amounts of nitrogen dioxide and other emissions. The energy efficiency of a fuel cell is generally between 40 and 60%; however, if waste heat is captured in a cogeneration scheme, efficiencies of up to 85% can be obtained.[1]
In electrical terms, the energy density of hydrogen is equal to 33.6 kWh of usable energy per kg, versus diesel which only holds about 12–14 kWh per kg. What this really means is that 1 kg of hydrogen, used in a fuel cell to power an electric motor, contains approximately the same energy as a gallon of diesel.[2]
The ability of higher efficiency technologies to perform many more profitable trades in a given year has a significant impact on ROI.
What does it matter you lose 20% if the alternative is selling at a loss?
Another way to say this is that there is a real economical value for storage because of the increase in renewables
[1] https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche
The alternative isn't selling at a loss, it's using technology with higher round trip efficiency.
Say you have two batteries, both 1MW/4H systems, one lithium at 95% efficiency, one this CO2 thing at 80% effiency. In the highly volatile SE4 spot region in the Scandinavian grid, if you traded in 2019 you'd have made $80K USD with the CO2 battery, $155K USD with the Lithium one (assuming you traded perfectly).
A tigher efficiency envelope lets you exploit many smaller 10-20% cost gaps, rather than having to sit for many days to wait for gaps in the 30-40% range.
Not to say that Lithium would have a higher ROI over all than this technology, just to say that round trip efficiencies have significant impact on revenues here.
Such short bursts of energy are typical for Li-Ion batteries, but quite atypical for other forms of energy. It's the same principle as with the flow batteries.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341393321/figure/fi...
What we should be doing though is building this smart charging and dispatch functionality into cars, so that we don't make our existing electricity peaks even peakier when people get home from work and immediately plug in and charge their EVs.
Ideally people would charge their cars at work, during the day. I guess we need to lean on employers with huge parking lots to provide EV charging.