Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage
canarymedia.com
canarymedia.com
Zeppelins next!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hydraulic_Power_Company
called line and shaft
"This was a crisis. Without electricity, the Amish couldn’t store milk, and the church was adamant that Amish were not going connect to the local electric company. Finally a solution was found. It was decided that diesel generators could be used to power the refrigerators. This decision allowed the Amish to continue their tradition as dairy farmers without having to use public electricity."
So the Amish are allowed to use electricity, just not from the public grid? Generators seem like a weird loophole to their own rules.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
That depends greatly on the congregation. Each congregation sets its own rules on how to deal with technology. "Not inside the home" is a very common technological limit. Cell phones might be stored in a shed, fed by solar chargers, for use out in the field. A workshop might have electricity from a wind/solar installation or even a diesel generator, but not the attached house.
I remember my apartment in germany had a "Heat" meter on the water line, always wondered how that worked.
That and the old textile industry that directly used steam no longer exists.
> Today, Consolidated Edison operates the largest commercial steam system in the world (larger than the next nine combined).
Lots of the mechanical automations inside some of those warehouses are powered by compressed air in open loop systems. As the conveyor pushes the item off, onto a different lane, there's a distinct hiss of air escaping. The movement of the machine was powered by compressed air.
Out in the parking lot in these facilities, you'll see a huge compressed air tank (or many), constantly being refilled. Tubes from these go into the building like arteries in a body. Often inside the building there will be buffer tanks to help ensure constant pressure.
Source: worked for a few years with guys who maintained these systems. Some of what I learned may be wrong, so feel free to correct me.
For me, I like air powered tools because of their power and reliability. They'll almost always have more torque and power than similar electric tools.
When you start getting into 3/4 and 1" it's not even a comparison.
The cordless is nice to have but it's a luxury/convenience tool, not a replacement.
Pneumatic "muscle pressure" is common in lots of industrial applications, especially those that operate in austere environments. But those are different than the tech being researched in the article in large part because the mechanical compressors in industrial applications are hugely inefficient. Many constant volume compressors have 90%+ of the energy as waste heat.
I believe the article is referencing isobaric (constant pressure) compressed air energy storage (CAES) that have much better efficiencies.
Hydrostor has a thermal management system that captures the heat and stores is during compression. Then it reuses the heat when it is decompressing the air.[1]
This seem extremely promising as a much smaller footprint solution than pumped storage and much more sustainable and lower cost than any other energy storage solution. I just heard about them today, and I'm extremely impressed.
Think of a bag of air under water on the ocean floor. The height of the water column is (relatively) constant, so the pressure in the bag is also constant. The air is being compressed as it goes from sea level into the bag, but inside the bag, the pressure is always the same. If you define the system boundary as the bag, it's an isobaric system. The volume changes, but the pressure is constant. Contrast that to the compressor you might have in your garage where the rigid tank provides a constant volume, but the internal pressure changes.
Pneumatic actuators are relatively inexpensive, have a binary state that is easy to control, and offer a high power density.
Pneumatic systems often use small orifices and valves to control the air flow which would be quickly clogged by any debris, so cleanliness is important.
An aside: PID control was, back in the day, mostly implemented in pneumatic control systems (using a set of levers, bellows springs and nozzles). Pneumatic control systems were (and still are) used a LOT in industrial control systems where e.g. flammable environments where electrical equipment is too much of a risk.
https://control.com/textbook/closed-loop-control/pneumatic-p...
The web of tubes was for messaging. (Just like some bank drive-ins work.) Users would put paper messages in capsules which were put into a pipe. Compressed air would carry the message to a central switching station, where human operators would re-route the message to the proper destination tube.
It was pretty cool, in a steam-punk sort of way.
The London system used water under pressure and was used for power distribution, whereas this one compresses air and is for energy storage.
And the Wikipedia article says the London system used "large vertical pistons" with weights to store energy, whereas this one pressurizes air.
After watching it, I now understand that they aren't flooding the entire borehole, but rather are building a smaller high-pressure chamber at the bottom. The chamber is connected to pipes to a surface reservoir. When air is pumped into the chamber, it displaces water up toward the surface. When generating, the water flows back into the subsurface chambers, forcing out the high pressured air.
all the temperature management here looks to just be counteracting the temperature changes that naturally occur when you compress or expand a gas. i imagine if you compressed it and then pumped hot air into water-filled caverns you'd get some negative effects of thermal shock.
What's the element I'm missing as to why they didn't?
Also, digging (or rather drilling) in bedrock is hard without motorized equipment and good steel.
Also, supplying fresh air down there is a problem.
Also, preventing the mine from flooding is usually a huge problem.
Mining is hard and a lot of people lost their lives doing that. That said, if your only intent is to get a bit warmer, you may basically try a good cave. Caves tend to have temperatures above freezing for the whole year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_spelaea
IDK if these lions hibernated, but their bones are definitely found in caves all over Europe. Often with human remains or artifacts nearby.
Not sure about the rate per-mile, but literally it's that hot, yes, but not even 15 miles. Just down 5-7km under the oceans, for example at the Mohorovičić discontinuity the temp ranges from 392 to 752F.
In the Nat Geo article they quote a mine in South Africa reaching up to 55C (131 F) at the bottom and the mine is 4km deep. At a rate 3 degrees Celsius per 100m it should be 120 degrees Celsius over ambient. Which obviously does not add up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurobe_Seny%C5%8D_Railway
Cooled down to 40C since the 60s.
> The heat is transferred from the interior towards the surface mostly by conduction, and this conductive heat flow makes temperature rise with increasing depth in the crust on average 25-30°C/km
Very incorrect.
Everyone who might have shared the same misapprehension learned something and the parent wasn’t being an asshole.
Doesn’t that add to the discussion?
(http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/forum/read.php?14,46717,4671...)
"...but other parts of the mine was very cold you made sure you had plenty to ware it depended where you worked"
(https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Keith-Scott...)
"Underground mines maintain a constant temperature, around 55 degrees Fahrenheit."
(https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Tom-Inghram)
«The temperature on average is in the 50s, but you still sweat an enormous amount when you start laboring.“ - Alan Bates, working in the coal mines of Letcher County, Kentucky.»
(https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-working-in-a-coal-mine/a...)
Yes, a 4000m gold mine is hot. I doubt that's where they're storing their compressed air.
Why was this not built before? I have no idea. Maybe robots are essential, we didn't have deep enough mines that were abandoned, energy was cheaper, no push for no emissions, it's not economical, other risks.
Having nuclear stuff underground requires extremely precise geological surveys, so that the stuff does not wind up in aquifer.
- After a few dozen years, the concrete is expected to breach,
- Radioactive atoms mix up with soil and dissipate both upwards and downwards, mostly thanks to water,
- After 400 years and for thousands of years, they reach the surface, where they should be diluted enough to not be dangerous,
So I guess having badly contained radioactive containers would be much worse.
One thing to remember is that pressure underground is extremely high (stone weighs a lot more than water, and light rock tends to “float” onto denser rock). If a melted reactor were squeezed, it would spread materials into the soil much quicker.
Also nuclear power plants obviously generate an absolutely massive amount of heat that needs to be dissipated, a task that would be difficult and expensive underground.
A report from 1961: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/42910/...
Batteries with a design that can decouple the energy from the power ratings, like this one, will be able to address parts of the market that lithium ion cannot. And if the cost per MWh of additional energy is cheap, and round trip efficiency stays above 50% or so, that sort of battery will have a huge edge in a part of the market that currently has no clear winners.
There are many competitors in the non-lithium ion storage space, but one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has a rust-based battery, and is rumored to have a cost as low as $20/MWh, about a tenth of that of lithium ion.
Form is still in the cell prototyping stage, as best I can tell - maybe not even that. There's zero information on their website about where they are in the development process or really anything substantial about their design.
ESS on the other hand has a design they've had out testing in the field for a couple years ( https://essinc.com/ess-inc-to-deliver-two-energy-warehouse-s... is one such location) and has been shipping actual product: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211115006337/en/ESS... and they've been pretty open about their design, though some of their old whitepapers have been removed from the site.
Competition in the market is certainly a good thing, but Form needs to do more than just have a shiny website, a screengrab of a zoom employee meeting, and a blog with 'industry insight' posts (because they have nothing to show for tech/product.)
Form has no working tech, as evidenced by the total absence of any mention of it. No specs, no pictures, no test installations, no whitepapers, nothing.
it's already a big business
Manufacturing capacity is expected to increase 10x every five years, with roughly 20-30TWh/year production in 2031. I can't think of any fundamental constraints there, could you specify why that can't increase?
Lithium recycling is being planned by nearly all manufacturers and many countries will mandate it. If lithium supplies are short, recycling will be highly profitable. If lithium is super abundant, recycling may be more expensive than recycling, and a program like what we currently use for lead acid batteries might be needed for a circular economy. But the fundamental point is that end of life for the battery does not mean that the lithium is gone, it's not a fuel.
How did you collect this odd set of concerns? Did you think of them or did you find them in the media somewhere?
Especially for electric cars - without something like a supercapacitor or hydrogen that can charge quickly and doesn't have massive battery pack replacement costs built in to the total cost of ownership equation, electric cars are not going to become mainstream; they will remain fringe oddities.
FYI if you aren't aware of super capacitors there has been significant progress in bringing them to scale: https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/revisiting-the-supercapacit...
I don't think Lithium is going away tomorrow - but I think it's crazy to bank on it for all our future needs or pitch it for grid storage. If it was so viable for grid storage then where are the really large deployments at scale? As you point out its mature tech. Someone would have scaled up production and done it already if it was such a no brainer. If Elon thought he could make more money at it than cars or space do you not think he would already be there focusing on it vs. those other ventures? Heck at one point Elon was thinking of doing his own candy but didn't since he didn't find anything really revolutionary enough to separate his potential offering from what was already out there. So it's not like he has a super narrow focus only on what he's already working on, and he already has a ton of in-house knowledge about lithium ion batteries.
That a company with as high knowledge of lithium battery tech like Tesla is only tangentially focused on grid power solutions instead of heavily diving in is, I think, one of the larger tells out there. And do you think Tesla would still be as successful if it didn't have substantial tax incentives? That's a distortion that's often overlooked when talking about overall economic viability.
There is far more than just raw resource availability or basic manufacturing capabilities at play here - and grid scale requirements just amplify those issues. I dunno why so many people are so eager to hand wave the limited lifetime of chemical batteries but it's a significant issue; any tech that doesn't have 100% replacement over a short fixed lifetime is going to beat the pants off of chemical batteries over the long haul. It isn't even remotely close. Utilities think in 50 year lifetimes, not 5. These aren't solutions for cars; this is base infrastructure that's COSTLY. There is probably some maintenance with these compressed air solutions, but I'm pretty confident it's no where near that of being forced to replacing the most expensive part of your entire storage solution every X years.
Just look at the value of a used electric cars vs. new. As people are learning about battery pack replacement costs or especially with Tesla, limited options on repair/partial replacement and probably loosing access to supercharging(one of the biggest reasons to pick Tesla right now), used prices on electric cars have steadily declined (and that's being a bit polite). When you have someone blowing up a used Tesla because they feel it's not economically viable to replace the battery pack, that' an issue that shouldn't just be hand waved away https://carbuzz.com/news/fed-up-tesla-owner-blows-up-his-mod...
All of this is in its infancy, but chemical batteries are already in a pretty deep hole from an economics perspective. Unless there is a breakthrough on preventing dendrite formation that dramatically (dramatically!) increases the lifespan of chemical batteries they are a transitory but not long term solution.
Supercapacitors aren't without their issues. You can fill them up instantly (if you have the means to move that much energy that quickly!) but they can also discharge all their energy instantly - which is a great way to also describe a bomb. So things like that will have to be worked out to make them safe - but I see that as far less of a problem than dealing with the perpetual churn of chemical batteries.
Or at least it would, if the overhead for current solar installers wasn't so high. Retail prices for equipment are incredibly low, but the boom-and-bust cycle caused by uncertain regulatory terrain ends up requiring successful biz to have massive marketing costs, which results in really high prices overall.
Would be great to see this technology reach maturity!
In 2018, the tech couldn't compete against lithium ion, and the price of lithium ion continues to fall 10-20% per year.
Compressed air and that concrete-block-stacking nonsense that keeps getting press are just magnets for uneducated investors.
> Compared to traditional batteries, CAES systems can store energy for longer periods of time and have less upkeep.
Sometimes the cost per MW/hr or equivalent is not the only metric worth thinking about.
L1/L2/L3 caches - expensive, small, but fast.
RAM - mid tier, still fast, bigger than cache, less expensive than cache, but limited in capacity compared to disk/flash based storage.
SSDs…
Disks….
You get the point.
Would it be the same with the grid?
Several power sources - nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, hopefully not coal and gas.
Banks of Lithium batteries acting as first level(efficient and immediate but limited capacity storage).
Whatever excess is directed to longer term, non immediate storage - pump up water to generate power later, molten salt, air compression etc.
Even more left? - spin up production of time insensitive materials that would be used anyway later - sea water desalination plants, green hydrogen generation, sewage treatment etc.
At large scale such tiered ecosystems would be very cool and super useful.
(EDIT: I used to do this software!)
Jokes aside though everything has pros and cons. For storing large amounts of energy from the grid, are you sure lithium batteries make sense? Take a look at this, it's not a scientific article but it gives you a basic overview of the problems we'd face when storing energy in lithium batteries at scale: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/lithium-or-vana...
And that isn't to say that flow batteries are the ultimate solution either, we will have to do better because it's still very expensive.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/09/08/interconnection-queue...
And if you check out RV and boat forums, you'll find that small scale lithium ion batteries plus solar are enabling a huge change in power for these mobile applications, because it's just damn cheap these days.
1) li ion cost is at $150-$300/kWh today 2) these are for batteries that have warranties for 5000-7000 cycles, not the small number that the author got from a website 3) actual installation levels on the grid are far higher than the author estimated.
I have nothing against vanadium flow batteries, other than the aren't shipping much. If the can actually hit the $150/kWh mark they say they can in the article, they should be shipping a ton of batteries. And if they are shipping, they should publicize a bit more! California and other states are looking for non-lithium ion batteries with 8 hour+ duration, so there's a market for vanadium even if it can't compete on price.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-o...
ETA: Just saw the video. Looks like they store the heat to boost generation on the return trip. This [1] says they get ~60% efficiency.
[1] https://www.inceptivemind.com/hydrostor-build-largest-compre...
LiIon grid scale batteries are still very expensive as a long term energy storage solution, they are sized to provide higher value grid ancillary services, like frequence regulation.
> Bloomberg March 5, 2021
> Goldman Sachs Group Inc. could gain more than $200 million from the physical sale of power and natural gas and from financial hedges after spot prices surged across much of the U.S., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Morgan Stanley’s gains could come in under $200 million, according to a person with familiar with the matter, and Bank of America Corp. stands to rake in profits as well...
> The historic cold that battered the central U.S. last month led to sweeping blackouts as ice formed on wind turbines and pipelines froze, forcing oil and gas wells to shut. As traders and power suppliers struggled to find fuel to meet obligations, prices skyrocketed. In Oklahoma, gas traded at more than 300 times normal levels, while electricity in Texas surged to $9,000 per megawatt-hour.
Full article: [1] https://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=5028&mn=126049&p...
I understand that people don't like when others profit from a crisis, but this is also how we solve these problems. Having more generation capacity than we otherwise would have is a good thing, even if Goldman make money on the back of it.
I'm not arguing there isn't more to be done, but when people say "greed is good" this is what they mean.
Batteries are the Swiss Army knife of the grid, they can fix all sorts of problems, from inadequate transmission capacity, to frequency regulations, to peaking needs.
However, if we had sufficient energy storage capacity, they we could indeed fully transition to renewable energy once and for all!
The project mentioned in the article seems particularly safe to me as they seem to run it with constant pressure, defined by the hydrostatic head of their deeply dug cavities. They don't really have a pressure vessel, they have a flooded cavern where they create a bubble by pushing in air. If you pop off a seal from the pipes connecting compressors/turbines to the bubble could still hurt yourself a lot shooting parts through the room, but that should be all.
The cavity they build is 2000 feet deep, which equates to the pressure of a CO2 cartridge that you'd use for e.g. carbonating a beverage. Not coincidentally at all I think, they either aim for the deepest cavity were hydrostatic pressure isn't enough to liquefy parts of the air, or for the least deep dig that gives them liquefication, where the air "boils off" as they open the valves.
It's not perfect, of course. Accidents still happen, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_... although fortunately nobody was killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur
So I'm picturing water leaking into a salt mine full of pressurized air. Naively it makes a hole, and a hole is just a leak. But if the water starts dissolving the salt in a process that runs away, then it is more like popping a balloon, but on a grand scale.
They claim 1m in revenue from their existing product which is: "1.75 megawatts (MW) of peak power output; a 2.2 MW charge rating; and 10+ megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage capacity"
How does that equal 1m in revenue? You have to pay to charge your air-battery during low-cost hours and then discharge it during high cost hours to make the difference in revenue.
The issue is, you can buy 2 megawatts of power 24/7 at average datacenter energy pricing (~5c/kwh) for $2400/day or 876k/year. Who is paying more than that for less energy and only at certain hours?
Is there some energy company somewhere that sells power during the day at like 50c/kwh and 1c/kwh at night???
The Hydrostor plant is in Ontario. Here's an archive of hourly spot-market electricity prices there (in dollars per MWh): http://reports.ieso.ca/public/PriceHOEPPredispOR/. So far in 2022, prices have been as low as $0.00/MWh (during a few hours overnight on Jan 5) and as high as $230.87/MWh (during the morning of Jan 11). In 2021, hourly average prices even exceeded $1000/MWh ($1/kWh) twice, on March 28 and October 10.
Wheres the rest? And what about if you cant nostradamus predict the best times to buy and sell?
https://smartgrid.ieee.org/bulletins/january-2016/energy-sto....
Sometimes utilities only need a few minutes of power to cover small gaps while ramping up/down powerplants, or if a cloud passes over a solar generation facility. Since these volumes are very small but critical, the effective price per MWH is extremely high.
When Tesla did their grid scale battery installation in Australia, this is how they made their money. Not via energy arbitrage, but with selling frequency response services. I have no idea if this is the same thing, but there are other ways to make money with energy storage as well.
Take a look at the price maps and historical pricing data if you are curious https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/prices.html
Pretty much all the solar plants we're putting in now have combined battery storage systems either for voltage support or "peaker" sales opportunities. In some places (like literal islands) it's about capacity smoothing or resilience, but the driving force behind all the investment is the US western interconnect with arbitrage opportunism starting to make real money and looking to make much, much more over the next decade.
If government-sachs is betting on this, they've probably got an even more pessimistic take on the CAISO market than I do.
source needed if you're making such a bold statement
These crazy things called computers make creating and automating markets like that pretty easy :)
It's win win - the people with surplus power can at least get some money for energy that would otherwise likely go to waste (large base load power plants can't ramp up and down on a dime) and on the flip side if you have an energy provider that only occasionally needs capacity in excess of their inherent generation even though the immediate cost is higher for spot power, it can still be far cheaper in the long term than building more base load generation (often fossil fuel because renewable still isn't a viable replacement for base loads). And running base load generation under capacity is wasteful for emissions and overall efficiency.
Once we start to crack the whole energy storage thing renewables will be A LOT more valuable since we will be able to start to use them for base load. Storage allows you to create reliable energy delivery that's predictable - that's essential if we ever want to eject fossil fuels from the grid. Or we could stop being childish about nuclear power - frankly I think we can solve the storage problem long before we can convince people to be rational about nuclear :p
It probably seems crazy for the uninitiated, but there are a lot of efficiencies in markets that occur naturally over time. You see distortions in the market from CA's stupid and politically motivated choices - what seems crazy to you is the market adapting to the model that CA is forcing. Is it nuts? Yup. Is it necessary? Nope - these wounds are entirely self inflicted. Pretending the world is different than it actually is doesn't solve anything and the people of CA are paying a hell of a lot more for electricity because they are trying to live in a pipe dream for where we are today.
This is why grid scale energy storage is such a hyped technology - if you can store that energy when supply is way too high and dispatch it when renewable generation is low (no wind/solar), you can maintain high renewable percentage in the generation mix. Without it, you can only really go up to a certain percentage of renewables.
IF 10MWh is their daily cycle, they are selling 3,650,000 kWh/year. To hit $1M per year, they would need to be selling ~27c/KWh above their buying price.
I get that you can have a big spread if you are being paid to take power, and paid again to sell it.
Air tools can also be lighter and no worries abt damaging the cord or carrying the battery.
Many good air tools can also have a better feel, especially if you can control the air flow trigger.
(I don't have a bias either way, use both in my shop, but just wanted to point out that both have advantages)
My complaint, really, is just how selfish it is to go out of your way to use a dirty energy source as a workaround for limits in your personal belief system.
And yes, using diesel to power your compressor on a regular (non-emergency) is more than a bit wasteful.
I totally get their insistence on staying off-grid, and it is good to read that they seem to be positive towards solar, so we can hope that takes over soon! From the bits I've read about their ethos, it certainly should have the advantage of further reduced dependency on outside systems, in this case, a one-off purchase of solar panels & kit will eliminate ongoing dependence on the entire fossil fuel supply chain.
I don't know if it's still there, but there used to be a fancy restaurant in the Eastlake part of Seattle that had started out that way, and still had the old Art Deco-ish drive shaft running around the ceiling. It was a neat touch point when I saw it and remembered my dad's description from years before.
Later the waterwheel was replaced by an electric motor or a fuel powered engine - but still built around just one source of power, with elaborate setups to drive different tools. With the added benefits you could build factories and workshops outside main water sources.
The Edison museum in Orange NJ also has such a preserved shop setup but electric driven by one or two big motors on an elevated platform.
The article seem to mostly describe this as a technology project to test the technology at scale, but they do also mention profits. Is the basic premise of buy low sell high, exclusively on renewables, enough to offset the cost from energy conversion, building, staff and other costs, and if so, by what degree compared to other method to produce energy? When is it estimated to have paid its initial investment?
Current solar and wind renewables are NOT predictable nor reliable for sustained power generation. With Coal, Natural Gas, Nuclear and Hydro you can generate power on demand, no matter what the environment is doing. Well, Hydro in the west is getting dicey with the drought - but even that is far more stable than wind/sun which can vary wildly week to week, day to day or even hour to hour.
That's why technology like this is so exciting. If you can look at the average production of a renewable over a month, then within a year the peak month, then look at the worst months, then have enough storage to cover a percentage of a peak month based off the hedge of the worst month then you are getting to a point where a solar farm isn't just an opportunistic source of power based on how much the sun is shining, but a reliable energy source that can be counted on whether the sun is shining or not.
Same for wind farms.
Energy storage is crucial if we seriously want to transition to renewables and hence the investment from Goldman Sachs.
If this company is even remotely successful in actually delivering then $250M is a pittance to what they will receive back in the long term.
There are also a lot of unused/abandoned underground structures - from various wells that are now dry of the resource they were originally drilled for to mines that are no longer productive. The problem has been sealing them from seepage so you don't loose your stored air - this article was light on details but that seems to be this companies claim to fame. They seem to have found economical ways to deal with those issues - enough to convince the boffins at Goldman Sachs they are worthy of investment. I guarantee you Goldman is not just tossing out money willy-nilley without performing some significant due diligence!
When people discuss green hydro as a storage solution the numbers so far, from what I have managed to interpret, is around 3-5 times that off nuclear for the same amount of energy delivered. It is still technically possible to make a profit given enough subsidies and time, and it get much more economically if the hydrogen can be used directly in the production chain like steel and fertilizer. Right now there are a steel foundry in Sweden testing the technology and economics doing that, through I don't know how much subsidies and tax reductions were involved.
Which all means the question about economics remains. There are many alternatives to fossil fuels but the primary question everyone debates is the issue of price. Without a price per watt/h or a time frame for when the investment get repaid its impossible to separate the practical from impractical, and the subsidy question is very relevant when discussing this on a national level.
One of the benefits they touting is "Long duration energy storage" I would think the limiting factor would be the ability of the thermal management system to retain the energy it captured to reheat the compressed air. Am I thinking about this correctly?
But if you extract that heat during compression you can put in a separate storage, one that is much easier to insulate than the compression tanks, and "mix it back in" during recompression, avoiding a large part of those losses.
Yes, and you can also compress air further when it's cooled (this is why there is an intercooler on turbocharged cars, as an example), this means your density per volume of storage is higher at a given pressure.
The reality though is that this is likely less efficient than many other storage mechanisms. Additionally, this may require some sort of additional energy input for reheating if the heat storage is not capable of holding long enough to fully reheat the air on release to get the highest turbine efficiency.
You warm up the air on the way out to expand it and you get more air to spin the turbine. More bang for your buck.
I believe is the thinking.
The real masterstroke here might then be to put this system in an area with large diurnal temp changes like the desert, then charge this system with cool night air, and then reheat it and generate electricity during the day with warm daytime air. Heat pumps could be used to nudge the temp on either end into it's optimal range.
It then becomes a solar thermal hybrid compressed air energy storage.
This could pair well with renewables that are more available at night like onshore wind.
I was 17 at the time, and I have been into some of the most incredible caves - the best in Ganung Mulu National Park in Borneo Malaysia...
As the rains flowed out and carried the guano from 5 million bats into the forest to fertilize it...
And then I realized it wasnt just the desert - it was the caves...
Caves (giant ones) are really important for planet health.
A possible component that might be missing (in the thinking and/or in the proposed implementation): the stored heat could also be utilised separately if needed, so if you have an intermittent heat consumer and an intermittent electricity consumer you could consume the heat first, then leave the remaining compression energy (what you could recover without reheating) "forever". Bonus points if you also happen to have a coolant consumer to benefit from the temperature delta caused heat loss or premature heat consumption.
Artificial geo-thermal power gen:
Dig a deep enough hole but near the ocean, and let ocean water pour into the hole that gets close enough to magma such that the magma creates a steam blast back out a tube with a bunch of turbines to spin.
CEO Nwabudike Morgan likes this (reference to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in case you were wondering)
According to their marketing video [1] "Long duration" is relative to current lithium ion battery-based storage. So their system can store energy up to 24 hours vs a few hours for batteries.
For even longer term storage (weeks, months, seasons), some time of chemical storage will be needed. Currently, both hydrogen electrolysis and ammonia synthesis [2] are being explored for that.
One way we can reduce carbon intensity is to stop using fossil fuels to generate industrial CO2.
There's a kind of metal-air battery that actually absorbs CO2 while charging, and emits it while discharging. There is also air liquification as power storage, in which you can separate the oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen into different containers.
Compressed air still seems like a promising idea to help solve the scale of energy storage we need, so I’m happy to see more companies taking a crack at it.
Would love to see DC to DC grids become a thing again and it looks like they may - crazy to think that SF still has a fully operating DC grid powering all kinds of stuff.
Maybe they're referring to Goldman Sachs Capital partners which has 39.9B[0] under management which means this is 0.62% of their portfolio. In a totally chalk and cheese comparison that would be having 200k in your 401k and taking a $1,250 position in a stock, which isn't nothing but is a pretty small bet, I agree. Curious though if I'm guessing the part of GS correctly; I have no idea how they're structured and just spent like three minutes searching.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_Capital_Partners
Some citations from an article: “Bottled wind could be as constant as coal.” Wired Magazine. Retrieved 7/15/2010, 2010, from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/compressedair-plan... 59
Cavallo, A. (2005). Controllable and affordable utility-scale electricity from intermittent wind resources and compressed air energy storage (CAES). Science Direct.
Well, yeah, this is in the opening of the article:
> It updates a long-standing technology that never took off for electrical storage.
There is/was plant operational since 1970s in Germany[1], which looks similar to the Wired article, but different from some other solutions posted in comments. Missing some parts perhaps to be viable.
1. PDF: http://www.fze.uni-saarland.de/AKE_Archiv/AKE2003H/AKE2003H_...
The German energy company RWE has announced a while ago that they want to build a compressed air storage facility. However the project went nowhere and was silently buried at some point.
Apparently these guys have found an economical way to deal with it. If true then I can easily see why Goldman jumped on them.Advanced Nuclear is of $72/MWh.
Wind onshore $30/Mwh
Solar photovoltaic (PV) $30/Mwh
Lithium-ion battery storage is roughly $180/Mwh.
At the moment, if you want to provide baseload better than nuclear using renewables, the cost must of storage must not exceed $30-$40/Mwh.
(grid baseload is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, something unvarying power plants are best suited for. Renewables require storage and advanced grid to provide baseload.)
Pumped water storage is very efficient and an established technology, so when it's possible it's a good choice, but it's not possible everywhere.
The energy is reclaimed when the pressure is released (i.e. water can fall back and fill the container).
How is the energy density different that what is provided by the water's static energy due to gravity?
I saw a video recently that pumped water into tanks and used used the air as a spring. Just dip a pipe down and use the air to move the water. Extracting energy from a hyrdo generator.
This general technique is known as "liquid piston".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
there is no rule that water+ turbines is more efficiency than Solid mass + alternators.
If you can't build it where you need it, then efficiency doesn't really matter now, does it?
Of course, the capacity will rarely have been dimensioned for keeping 6 months of usage on hand, but combining pumped storage with over-provisioned wind energy would allow for living through months of unfavorable sun, rain or wind conditions.
Even if you use natural gas as a reheating element, the compressed air stores a significant amount of energy and is doing the majority of the work.
Efficiency / cost
I am worried that the cost is the driving factor here...
Goldman wouldn't be making that kind of an investment if they didn't have a handle on both parts of the equation. Indeed efficiency (dealing with losses from seepage) have been the nut that hasn't been cracked with compressed air storage; these guys seem to have an economical (efficient) way to deal with that problem. If true, then they really are worthy of Goldman's investment.
Amish Hackers
reminiscent of The Day Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTGE9153VFE
Solar? Well, solar isn't free energy. What's the comparison to grid scale batteries for storage? That process is far more favorable, with efficiency exceeding 80%.
I have to admit not understanding how this kind of an investment happens. I don't see this as viable technology at scale. We are far better off building nuclear power plants (talk about dense energy storage!).
Here's a good article on pumped thermal energy storage systems and how they compare to alternatives. The authors cover thermal storage in some detail.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0016...
Sadly I think it will be far more feasible to develop energy storage technologies than hope we can ever get enough people to be rational about nuclear. I mean how asinine is it for Germany to have turned off perfectly working and economically viable nuclear plants to then be dependent on RUSSIA for natural gas? How dumb do you have to be to be to think that's a REMOTELY good idea? Yet here we are (thankfully France seems to be far more rational - you don't hear them even suggesting they plan to be equally idiotic).
Many battery storage studies don't account for replacement/maintenance, or the infrastructure that would be required to sustain replacement/maintenance at grid scale, let alone the resources required to scale up to handle initial deployment of batteries in sufficient quantities to support the entire grid. Where are we going to get the manufacturing capacity, let alone materials? The scale here is pretty mind boggling if you start to do the math.
Our current battery tech is nothing more than a transitory technology - they are far from sustainable long term. Personally I think super capacitors will be our ultimate solution, but in the meantime if these guys really have dealt with the seepage issues of compressed air, this is are next best bet for MASS energy storage at scale. You only have the privilege of worrying about efficiency if you have a working system. Wood driven steam sucked, but it drove the industrial revolution because there was literally no other viable alternative at the time that could have remotely scaled in the same way.
Remember grid scale solutions require MASSIVE energy capabilities. The scale here is ridiculous compared to home or vehicle energy requirements. If you don't think Goldman Sachs took all of this into account before they made their investment - well, you are grossly mistaken. You don't get to be their size by continually placing bad bets.
Nuclear is probably the only path to long term clean energy. I hope people eventually wake up to that reality. Sadly, we are going to burn lots of time, money and resources before we get to that moment.
Million tons of concrete isn't going to suffer any maintenance expenses over decades.
Sure, pumped hydro has advantages, but has serious geographic limitations - you need a fairly ideal site. The key is that these can be built almost anywhere.
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-will-show-i... [1] https://www.energyvault.com/ [2] https://www.gravitricity.com/#about [3] https://n-e-l-g.de/ [4] https://www.gravitypower.net/
But the point about little progress by these companies still holds. ARES has been around for 11 years now and has one 50MWh project to talk about that covers 20 acres.
Also, any flywheel that would add significant difference would probably weigh hundreds of tonnes, which would make construction massively more expensive and difficult.
"What if a 5MW flywheel broke it's spindle?"
Wind turbine blades are engineered for minimum mass and inertia, are manufactured primarily from fiberglass and/or carbon fiber, are hollow, and the largest mass is in the center.
In contrast, flywheels are engineered for the highest practical inertia, are manufactured from the highest density material that works, and concentrate that mass as far out as possible.
When a wind blade fails catastrophically, it makes a mess of splinters right around the tower, as shown in [0] and [1].
In contrast, just a small automotive flywheel explosion, contained in a legally mandated scattershield, is almost as spectacular [2], [3]. Now, magnify that from a flywheel just designed to smooth the power from a 375kW (500HP) engine to the scale of a flywheel to STORE the energy of a megawatt-scale wind turbine.
So, no, the danger of a megawatt-scale energy storage flywheel is NOT like the danger of a "giant rotating wind turbine".
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-o-4yYb59g [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbCs7ZQDKoM&t=40s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPat3akDiek [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4oxoBKRZgA
If you're thinking of a direct mechanical linkage, you wouldn't want to put it up on the tower because the mass to effectively store megawatt-scale power is way more than you'd want to support up high. Also, since the wind blade usually swivels to the wind, you'd want to avoid the rotational inertia. So, you'd need a mechanical linkage to transmit the power to the ground, maybe installing it under the tower base.
You would not want to use a direct mechanical attachment, i.e., resembling a combustion engine - transmission flywheel, because this would impair the ability of the wind turbine to start. Generally, turbines are designed for minimum inertia to easily start in low-wind conditions. A direct connection would impede that.
Now, we're adding a clutch-sort of mechanism, and that has its own additional complexity, weight, and energy.
Moreover, considering that we're trying to store megawatt-scale energies, we are at a large mass spinning very fast, and probably spun up with an electric motor.
So, it would seem the best way to do that would be to make a flywheel farm, with the flywheels below ground to contain failures. At this point, why locate it in the probably inconvenient location where the wind turbines are located, and instead put it somewhere more convenient, such as nearer to the consumption areas?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-01/goldman-s...
But Goldman Sachs can blow their money however they wish. Although no doubt governments will also throw bad money into this, but I guess if people want their government to fake their lives, so be it. It seems that's living in The Jetsons future HN idolises.
Why it is fake - "Why is adiabatic compressed air energy storage yet to become a viable energy storage option?" - https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(21)00408-9.pdf
The Australian project has no go ahead -
Hydrostor seeks clarity over compressed air-energy storage facility in Broken Hill - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-12/hyrdostor-seeks-clari...
And yes as part of this fake world, Goldman Sachs has not put 250M into this company, it's in tranches. Fake worlds built on top of fake worlds.
Having had GS invest in companies in the energy tech space in the past and having not particularly great success - I wouldn't think this is a strong signal. More that the financial heavyweights think there is action and they want to get in.
Its small money on a broad industry bet thats all in an economy with very few quality investments available. Don't read too much into it.
Seriously?