There are a bunch of pumped storage facilities around [1]. But they work best at massive scale, so suitable locations are somewhat limited. Plus they are expensive to build and often face environmental protests (similar to building dams). Still, it's a solution I'm a fan of.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
Moving 500,000 kg (over 1 million pounds) 7.5 meters (~25 feet aka the height of a house) will give you about 10 kWh of energy. This is equivalent to running a 425W device all day, like a small air conditioner. The relationship is linear. Double the weight or the distance to double the energy. All of the metal at a scrap yard I know of amounts to less than half that weight, for reference.
I'm also a fan because pumped storage is a really interesting storage method, but it is beyond niche. It is very tough to move that kind of weight around efficiently for what you get back. Pumping water to great heights is not easy either. (see also: moving rail-carts up a mountain)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
For something like solar, where we will want to store over half our daily energy production at peak storage (ideally 2-3 days worth I think) - I don't think it holds up. Additionally, it doesnt seem like a good bet as a primary mechanism for either storage or on-demand generation if energy consumption continues to increase due to the rather large coefficients involved for scaling it up.
"The United States generated 4,116 terawatt hours of electricity in 2021"[1]
4,116 TWh/year = 11.2 TWh/day
The storage capacities for the largest items listed on the wiki is on the magnitude of GWh. The scale goes kilo-, Mega-, Giga-, then Terra. So we are talking about a need on the order of a thousand pumped storage facilities per country. The US would need over 50 of them per state (on average) in order to keep everything running without production for 24 hours. Doesnt matter how many solar panels we have, if we get 1 dark day then we would run out of power. If we tried to rely on solar entirely, we'd also still need very roughly half that amount of storage just to get through the night.
lithium batteries are obviously much better suited for overnight storage, but I have no idea what the numbers are on how much lithium is physically available to use as such storage.
If we want to get on the order of monthly to yearly storage to allow, for example, solar panels in alaska to provide enough energy for a resident to get through months of darkness - I have no idea what the leading storage options are, probably lithium still
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/188521/total-us-electric...
For longer scale storage it's a tossup between opportunistic pumped hydro, CAES where geology makes it easy, hydrogen in similar areaswith caverns, ammonia, synthetic hydrocarbons, sodium ion, and one of the emerging molten salt or redox flow battery technogies. Lithium isn't really in the running due to resource limits.
Wires also have a lot of value for decreasing the need for storage. Joining wind and solar 1000s of km apart can greatly reduce downtime. Replacing as much coal and oil with those, and maintaining the OCGT and CCGT fleet is the fastest and most economic way to target x grams of CO2e per kWh where x is some number much smaller than the 400 of pure fossil fuels but bigger than around 50. Surplus renewable power (as adding 3 net watts of solar is presently cheaper than the week of storage to get an isolated area through that one week where capacity is 1/3rd the average) will subsidize initial investments into better storage and electrolysis with no further interventions needed.
Second paragraph is a bit too information dense, I had trouble following some of it. Renewable energy deficiencies will be localized, so i understand how wires help here. A larger connected area produces more stability, makes sense. Agreed with the carbon reduction priority to tackle coal and oil first. Surplus renewable power acting as a subsidy checks out, but that is skirting around the energy storage problem imo. Sounds like you are saying "instead of storing renewable energy, get more than you need and sell it back to the grid and then use those funds to buy the energy back later". This would certainly work for local consumers, but doesnt do too much to help the power grid itself manage what to do with the surplus energy. Sell it to neighboring power grids? Ties in to the first point about connecting a larger area - but what are the limits here? Can we physically connect the sunny side of earth to the dark side? (ignoring that it seems logistically/legally prohibitive)
the question really comes down to what should we be spending money on to get "better storage"? What are the best solutions for long-term local storage?
The solution I'm proposing is basically 'the best place to spend your money on storage is to not spend it on storage yet'
If the goal is to reduce emissions asap, then focusing on the strategy that removes x% of 100% of the emissions rather than 100% of y% of the emissions makes sense unless there are enough resources/money that y% is more than x%. And storage is currently expensive enough that you need many times as much money for this to be true to 99.9% confidence.
Getting a wind + solar system that has at least y watts at least eg. 90% of the time is remarkably affordable already and still going down.
In excellent climates new solar costs less per MWh than fuel for a gas turbine (and is not far off fuel for a nuclear reactor). Wind is not much more. Distribution, dealing with less than ideal sites and oversupply increase the cost, but an ideal mix has very little storage (4-12 hours) which can be delivered by lithium batteries.
By relying on the existing fossil fuel/hydro/nuclear/whatever to pick up the last 10% for now, you can replace more coal/oil more quickly than other strategies. During this build all storage technologies where they make the most sense so that when that last 10% is needed, prices will have dropped. I'm fairly sure some mix of green hydrogen and green ammonia burning in those same turbines will be one of the winners (ammonia in particular has negligible marginal cost of capacity allowing for a strategic reserve, and will be needed to replace fossil fuel derived fertilizer anyway).
In the unlikely case that there's an overnight $2 trillion investment in new wind/solar/powerlines and production capacity to match in the US then choosing a dispatchable power source from some or all of: expensive green hydrogen, expensive abundant existing batteries, expensive pumped hydro, and expensive nuclear or immediately going all in on commercialising every vaguely promising electrolyser tech becomes the priority.
> During this build all storage technologies where they make the most sense so that when that last 10% is needed, prices will have dropped
this is kind of the point of what I'm getting at. Without any investment, none of the storage technologies are going to make much progress. If not financial investment, then at least a time investment from research/science teams. then again, maybe opportunism/free market will take care of this and we can assume any progress that can be made will be made by people trying to make a name for themselves or be first to market. I'm still curious to size up what that progress might look like for discussion/entertainment purposes in any case
Good storage solutions would immediately pay dividends through arbitrage, which would keep electric prices stable, and then anywhere renewable energy generation is more than demand and storage is sufficient, that stable price point could come down below the cost of using coal/oil as well as any other continuous production method. We would be able to consolidate power generation over time, not just space, and realize gains from that. As in, use massive bursts of energy production to top off storage and use them to exactly meet demand. Maybe this opens the door for more alternative energy production methods as well (that are better suited for burst than steady)
Thermal storage concepts include:
Molten salt thermal. short/medium for high grade heat. Most high grade heat is dispatchable (fire) and so doesn't make sense to store, or expensive (solar thermal, nuclear) and so isn't worth pursuing.
Sand thermal batteries. Low grade heat for medium/long term. Only useful for heating and some industrial purposes. Has a minimum size (neighborhood). Literally dirt cheap.
Thermochemical. I guess this is kind of a fuel? Use case is for low grade heat so it can go here. Phase change materials like sodium acetate or reversible solution like NaOH seem really appealing for heating. Back of envelope says it's close to competitive with electric heating, so I'd expect more attention as it's cheaper than any technology that stores work. No idea why it isn't being rolled out. You could even charge it with heat pumps for extremely high efficiency if needed.
Kinetic:
Lifting stuff. Only really works for water without large subsidies and only if you already have at least one handy reservoir like a watershed or cavern. No reason to expect it would suddenly get cheaper as digging holes and moving big things is already something lots of industries try to do cheaply. Great addition to existing hydro.
Sinking stuff (using buoys to store energy). I can't comprehend how this can be viable. I have seen it espoused, but it doesn't pass back of the envelope test unless I did a dumb.
Squashing stuff. Compressed air energy storage. Tanks are just barely competitive with last gen batteries capacity-wise, efficiency isn't great. There are concepts for underwater bladders (let the watter do the holding) or cavern based storage that seem viable at current rates. Achievable with abundant materials so worst case scenario we nut up and spend$500/kWh. Key word CAES, cavern or underwater energy storage
Battery/fuel cell:
Lithium ion: One of the best options currently. Will be heavily subsidised by car buyers. Has hit limits of current mining production which puts a floor on price and is ecologically devistating.
X ion where x is probably sodium: Great slot in replacement. Barring large surprises will expect it to replace LiFePO4 very soon for most uses. Expect the learning rate of lithium ion manufacturing to continue resulting in a sharp jump to $60/kWh in 2021 dollars and eventual batteries around $30/kWh. Key word natron (have just brought their first product to market and are working with other parts of the supply chain to scale up)
Flow batteries, air batteries and fuel cells. These are almost the same concept. You have a chemical reaction that makes electricity with a circular resource like hydrogen, methane, ammonia, or electrolyte. Downside is most versions require a prohibitive amount of some metal like rutheneum or vanadium or something. Not a fundamental limit, but not sure it will be a great avenue as research goes back a fair ways. Aluminum-air batteries are one interesting concept. Essentially turning Al smelters into fuel production facilities. Keywords iron-air aluminum-air, redox-flow, direct methane fuel cell, ammonia fuel cell, ammonia cracking, nickel fuel cell.
Molten salt batteries. Incredibly simple, cheap and scalable concept that has no problems with dendrites (and so theoretically no cycle limit) with one limitation on portability (they must be hot, sloshing is bad) and one as yet insurmountable deal breaking flaw (incredibly corrosive material next to an airtight insulating seal). Look up Ambri for details of an attempt which has presumably failed by now. There is a more recent attempt using a much lower temperature salt and sodium sulfur which shows promise. Keywords ambri, sodium sulfur battery.
Thermochemical:
Any variation on burning stuff you didn't dig up.
Hydrogen is hard to store more than a few days worth, but underground caverns could help. I expect a massive scandal about fugitive hydrogen, toxicity and greenhouse effect in the 2030s sometime. It's borderline competitive to make now. Main limitation is cost of energy (solved by more wind and solar and more 4 hour storage) and cost of capital (platinum/palladium/rutheneum/nickel are usually required). Lots of work going on to reduce the latter and to increase power density and efficiency. If you were directing a billion dollars of public funds this would probably be the place to put it. Keywords $200/kw electrolyser, hysata 95% efficient.
Methane, ammonia, dimethyl ether, methanol, etc. These are all far easier to store than hydrogen. Production needs large scale but is borderline viable already if you have cheap hydrogen. Keywords ammonia energy storage, synthetic fuels, efuels, green ammonia, direct ammonia electrolysis.
Then there's virtual batteries.
Many loads like aluminum smelting can be much more variable than they are now. Rearranging workflows such that they can scale up or down by 50% and change worker tasks to suit has the same function as storage during any period where consumption isn't zero. EV's can kinda fit here too and kinda fit actual storage (especially if they power other things)
Biofuels. Not technically storage, more dispatchable, but it serves a similarfunction. Bagasse is an option for a few percent of power. Waste stream methane is a possibility for a couple % of power. Limited by the extremely low efficiency of photosynthesis so something PV based will likely be a better way of making hydrocarbons from air and sunlight. Most other 'biofuels' are either fossil fuels with extra steps or ways of getting paid green energy credits for burning native forests. Some grad student might surprise us by creating a super-algae that's 10% efficient and doesn't all get eaten if there's a single bacterium in the room. Detangling it all is hard, but I wouldn't be surprised if wind + solar + biofuels + reigning in the waste was enough -- it certainly works for some people doing off grid.
I'd expect a system based on sodium ion (or even lithium) batteries and synthetic fuels to render any fossil fuel mix unviable in the next decade or two. More scalable batteries or scalable fuel cells would hasten this somewhat.
One potential technogy https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-31/wave-power-generator-...
New thing I just learned. The tidal stream industry seem confident they can beat nuclear at shockingly low investment. https://interregtiger.com/understanding-tidal-stream-energy/
If they're not lying, that's your high return investment for the future (if you're a policy maker...if you are a private investor then what happened to the solar industry when panels got cheap could happen again).
* uncorrellated variable sources need less storage when combined There are already regions that can work on wind, solar, and a small percentage of existing hydro with no storage for this reason. Tidal isn't completely uncorrelated -- roughly once a month your peaks will line up with solar peak production, and the trough will line up with peak demand for a few days -- but attaching two systems at distance will help with this and it reduces the load on hydro.
"Compressed air storage vs. lead-acid batteries" (2022) https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/21/compressed-air-storag... :
> Researchers in the United Arab Emirates have compared the performance of compressed air storage and lead-acid batteries in terms of energy stored per cubic meter, costs, and payback period. They found the former has a considerably lower CAPEX and a payback time of only two years.
FWIU China has the first 100MW CAES plant; and it uses some external energy - not a trompe or geothermal (?) - to help compress air on a FWIU currently ~one-floor facility.
Couldn't CAES tanks be filled with CO2/air to fight battery fires?
A local CO2 capture unit should be able to fill the tanks with extra CO2 if that's safe?
Should there be a poured concrete/hempcrete cask to set over burning batteries? Maybe a preassembled scaffold and "grid crane"?
How much CO2 is it safe to flood a battery farm with with and without oxygen tanks after the buzzer due to detected fire/leak? There could be infrared on posts and drones surrounding the facility.
Would it be cost-advisable to have many smaller tanks and compressors; each in a forkable, stackable, individually-maintainable IDK 40ft shipping container? Due to: pump curves for many smaller pumps, resilience to node failure?
If CAES is cheaper than the cheapest existing barriers, it can probably be made better with new-gen ultralight hydrogen tanks for aviation, but for air ballast instead?
Do submarines already generate electricity from releasing ballast?
(FWIW, like all modern locomotives - which are already diesel-electric generators - do not yet have regenerative braking.)
That's not a great reference point when you're trying to visualize to pumped storage, as water is 1t/m3 while steel is up around 7 or 8. Also, 500t of steel at a scrapyard seems very small - 70m3?
A better reference might be a back yard pool, which might be in the 30-40t range - so like lifting 15 back yard pools the height of your house to power a tiny AC.
There's little to no water use in the storage or discharge of pumped hydro, water goes from one reservoir into another. The limiting factor is how much water can be pumped/discharged, not how much water is available in storage (which tends to be significantly more than the amount pumped around). So there's little reason why they wouldn't currently be fully utilized.
It's true that it requires specific geography (water and a place to put water), but it turns out population centers tend to be developed near water sources, already store water for the sake of storing water, and water can feasibly be stored in large quantities underground as well. Which means there's practically many viable large capacity sites near the places that use electricity.
Pumped storage is great at what it does, no denying that. And what it does is allow energy production to remain near average while demand varies, and consequently allows energy production levels to be adjusted a bit slower. You aren't addressing the raw numbers though. It serves best as a compliment to a continuous energy production system. As an actual battery/storage solution, it is weak. So it will not be the solution used to store a massive amount of energy generated over a short period of time in order to be used over a longer period of time.
I agree they should be fully utilized, but I am trying to explain that if you fully utilize pumped storage you are still going to have an incomplete energy storage problem. Of course the water levels dont get near max or min capacity - it is designed to take out exactly what you put in as soon as possible or else there is too much risk. The raw storage capacity is small to medium sized - about 10 hours at max discharge (and max discharge might not be enough to keep up with demand entirely on its own).
Basically, the more energy you need to draw the faster you need to drain it and the more energy you want to store, the more massive your reservoir needs to be.
These things cannot be made 100 to 1000 times bigger, nor is there capacity to make 100 to 1000 times more of them. We are better off having them vs not having them but it isnt enough, and if we find a better solution it may become obsolete
They also don't have issue with storing energy quickly, they can all store energy at a significantly faster rate than they can discharge. We can run pumps as quickly as possible and install as many as you'd like, but the discharge has to be controlled (thus limited) because releasing massive amounts of water at once. So their main use case today is storing massive amounts of energy generated in a short amount of time and releasing slowly across a long period of time.
What the grid actually needs is faster discharge than charging, because that more accurately matches summer energy use patterns. This is what chemical batteries excel at which pumped hydro cannot easily do.
So it's unlikely we'll be able to make them 100-1000x bigger, but they're already 100-1000x bigger than other battery solutions. We should be able to make 100x more of them because the reservoirs already exist and very few of them currently are used as both power sources and energy storage, we simply need to add pumping capability to them in most cases.
We seem to disagree on the storage numbers. Genuinely curious if my math is wrong on this. I did research a bit more about recent advancements in pumped storage since my first comment and found that my original numbers were almost an order of magnitude smaller than what would likely be built today since I had referenced older tech. So admittedly, pumped storage is much more feasible than my original attitude suggested - which is great because id love for it to be all we need. However, I'm still not sold on it's ability to act as sufficient storage, and I do not see in any way how it could possibly keep things running for multiple days, let alone years of energy as you suggest.
There is a reason we only talk about pumped storage in terms of its discharge rate rather than its storage. We dont really use it for storage. We use it to store the difference between peak and average energy demand, not the total actual demand. You keep the generators running near average all the time, fill the reservoir during the demand valleys and drain the reservoir during demand peaks. Discharge effects ability to actually reach the peak demand, while storage effects how long you can sustain the demand. My point is even if we could discharge as fast as we need to, the reservoirs would empty in less than a day if we needed to rely upon them while energy production was down.
There is a new project (snowy 2.0) in Australia that will have a notable storage capacity of 350,000 MWh .
Current energy usage in the US is over 10 TWh per day. 350,000 MWh = 350 GWh = .35 TWh. So we would need 28 of this brand new top-end pumped hydro stations to hold 1 days worth of US energy demand in reserve. It's ballpark feasible, but lets keep in mind that this plant is costing Australia ~$5-10 billion and is working with two dams that already exist. Very much still in short-term load balancing territory.
This would also lock up 500,000 liters of water per 10kWh. 1 days worth of storage for US: 10TWh / 10kWh = 1 x 10^9; then x 500,000 liters = 5 x 10^14 liters of water = 100 cubic kilometers* (26 trillion gallons). Storing 1 years worth of energy would be 100 km^3 * 365 = 36,500 km^3; which is 3 times the size of Lake Superior (12,000 km^3). I still dont see this as an energy storage solution. MAYBE if use seawater and find a cost-effective way to build facilities into the coastline?
*(1 x 10^12 liter = 1 km^3)
Also to keep in mind that all of this is assuming CURRENT demand, which excludes the incoming energy demand increase for electric vehicle adoption. that's about 2-4 kWh per gallon of gasoline. US uses about 369 million gallons of gasoline on vehicles per day. We can add almost another 1 TWh for that, and then still whatever is necessary for increased usage in general.
In dollar terms, 10kWh is worth around $1. 1 million pounds is the weight of 2-5 residential homes, depending on size. Think about it: the cost to lift a couple of entire houses three stories up into the air is literally just one dollar. That’s why gravity energy storage only makes sense at a massive scale.
There was 1 design I saw where they have a large cylinder cut out of the ground but left in place (so it is loose). Pump water underneath it to raise the cylinder up, then flip the valve and the cylinder squeezes the water back out for power through gravity. I am not sure how the sealing works on that, probably similar to hydraulics