'No-water' hydropower turns England's hills into green and pleasant batteries
rechargenews.com
rechargenews.com
> the working fluid is a slurry comprising a suspension of mineral particles and a surfactant in water
[1] - https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c5/20/54/6005371...
There's no specification for what kind of minerals or surfactant, or what kind of properties they'd need to have. No discussion of how to pump an abrasive mixture without lots of expensive maintenance. It, frankly, sounds like they're saying "sand!" What happens if the surfactant leaks or there's a dam break? The scale of disaster from something like this is pretty insane; they're proposing what amounts to a ready-made mudslide behind a dam.
There's also discussion of using the water to cool the generators, like that's somehow novel...and for some strange reason, heat pumps and geothermal heatsinking?
This feels like patent trolling. It reminds me of crazy-board-of-string-and-photos meme guy. "OK, so we have a hydropower plant! BUT, BUT, we put SAND in the water! And and we need some things to stir the water to keep the sand in suspension. We can tack on this geothermal well! And cool the pumps with the water!"
Wouldn't that require that the patent is not only trivial but also useful? Whom would they want to troll with something that is useless?
Might just be looking for an investor to throw money at them, a patent probably helps with that.
No idea what the article is talking about wrt being able to utilize lower heights, as the amount of power you can get from a certain drop is independent of density. Higher density decreases the size of the pipes and turbines, so there is a potential economic benefit, but it doesn't change what locations are viable.
I was doing some searching, but was unable to pin down precise numbers for industrial water rates, but I am seeing something in the single dollars ($3-8) per thousand gallons.
Assuming I did not bork my conversions, at $5/1000 gallons, that would be roughly $0.001/kg for water. So, a novel heavy liquid priced at the whole dollars per kg sounds like an enormous capex for a large installation when it could use water instead.
Those could have been fully buried or hidden, but, being visible only from the air, it wasn't worth it.
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@37.48236017,-122.3128578,104.7...
[2] https://earth.google.com/web/@37.53843703,-121.85711496,126....
It's not for water suitable for consumption, but it doesn't have to be.
This company has their own proprietary heavy fluid called R-19. Their formula isn't public, but presumably they understand the success of their company depends on it being affordable.
> No idea what the article is talking about wrt being able to utilize lower heights
It means that, if pumped storage starts to look worth it to you (given budget, etc.) with tanks of size V and a height difference of H, then with their system it might be worth it if the tallest hill available to you is H/2.5.
Or you can keep the height the same and reduce the volume. Or keep both the same and increase the storage. The point is that they claim to offer a better trade-off.
That assumes they plan to ever deliver anything real. There are very few substances cheaper per unit mass than water, and I would not take on faith that something that isn't even being mass produced yet could ever possibly compete.
> It means that, if pumped storage starts to look worth it to you (given budget, etc.) with tanks of size V and a height difference of H, then with their system it might be worth it if the tallest hill available to you is H/2.5.
That's not how turbines work. Pressure head is independent of volume.
> Or you can keep the height the same and reduce the volume. Or keep both the same and increase the storage. The point is that they claim to offer a better trade-off.
And I am saying that I do not believe their claim that they offer a better trade off.
I'm not talking about pressure head. I'm talking about energy storage. If everything is held constant (reservoir volume, height difference) but the density of the fluid changes, then the energy stored changes. Because gravitational potential energy is E = mgh. And m = volume * density.
But since you mentioned pressure head, if volume changes, it doesn't affect pressure. But if the fluid density changes (and all else is equal), then that DOES affect pressure. That's why if you measure pressure in mmHg you will get a different number than if you measure it in mmH2O. So if you took a pumped hydro storage system and drained the water out and replaced it with denser fluid, the fluid would press harder on the turbine.
I can't help but notice that the name they're using is the same as an insulation material; seems almost purposeful to make looking up anything about it very difficult.
I don't think they have anything and this is just a patent troll or someone trying to pull a fast one on investors. I'd be willing to bet they have a long list of reasons why they can't come up with demonstration unit that is room or building-sized...
The generic idea behind these supposedly high efficiency reservoirs is to have something that is at the same time liquid enough and much heavier than water, most probably the actual formulation will be a compromise.
Volume matters for the sizing of components, it doesn't matter for the amount of energy you can extract from a height differential.
A small drop means you don’t need a mountain to build the facility.
See also [1]
Short Vimeo video [2]
I'm very curious about the longevity of such a fluid, wouldn't there be issues with evaporation and particles falling to the bottom of the downstream station?
My guess is the main reason for not specifying the material is that they will pick whatever is cheapest locally to each development.
The thickness of the viscous part of the boundary layer in water is maybe 0.1 microns (if the water is moving at 10 m/s). Particles smaller than this would be slowed before striking the surface. If the particles are making the liquid more viscous the viscous part of the boundary layer will be proportionally thicker.
Sigh. A MW is not a measure of storage capacity, it's a measure of momentary power. Do they mean it can store 100 MWh of energy? Or do they mean it can generate up to 100 MW of power?
Journalists always seem to get confused by this[1], but it's surprising to see "Recharge News", of all people, making such a mistake!
[1] The Times once famously published an entire headline anti-EV article that claimed the UK would need to build dozens of new nuclear power plants to power them. But it quickly turned out they had just gotten GW and GWh confused!
An analogy to motion: joules are distance, watts are speed, and watt-hours are like light-years.
The amount of energy consumed, if you have one watt of power for a certain amount of time, is the confusingly-named Watt-hour, or Watt-year, etc. 1 Watt-second is 1 Joule. 1 Watt-minute is 60 J. 1 Watt-hour is 3600 J.
I'm not really sure why the Wh exists, other than to let you easily estimate how much it costs to run an appliance for once hour. It tends to confuse.
It never really clicked for me how silly this is until you said it, so I went and looked it up.
It turns out it's kind of the other way around; the watt came first: It was originally defined as "the power conveyed by a current of an Ampère through the difference of potential of a Volt".
Watt-hour seems to come around in the 1890s as utilities explore ways to bill customers for electricity use, originally "ampere-hour meters" and then "watt-hour meters".
Joule shows up about the same time, in like 1880 or so, and was defined in terms of the watt, rather than the watt defined in terms of the joule, if I skim Wikipedia correctly.. So that'd mean Joule and Wh are both kind of competing units of energy - one used by GE and Westinghouse and all those people, and the other used by scientists(?)
The watt then gets redefined in terms of a joule much later, in 1948.
Makes sense kwh is an accounting unit of energy not a science unit. I feel that's 'fine'. Tell the accountant that the pump that drains the east shaft runs 12 hours a day at 53kw and they can figure the monthly cost using a ten key.
Hat tip the parent. It's really annoying that Journalists understand neither science nor accounting.
That last "/s" should not be there.
Great idea. How?
Even China, which regularly builds new nuclear power plants, can't do it at a pace sufficient to keep up with wind power, not to mention renewables as a whole.
I talking here in terms of reported TWh delivered.
Small modular reactors https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why...
> "“Small modular reactors won't achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won't be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won't be cheaper, aren't suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.”
The problem is not so much the waste, but the "black swan": each plant has a failure probability that's low - perhaps 1/10,000 or less - of a disaster that contaminates a very large area around it. The UK was tracking after effects of Chernobyl, two thousand miles away, for two decades after the incident. That has a negative effect on people's willingness to build new plants.
The real issues are quite different. Environmentalists may have pointed out some of them, but they're just the messenger in that case.
https://www.rheenergise.com/how-it-works
https://www.rheenergise.com/faq
They have their own denser-than-water fluid called R-19. The formula isn't public. They say it's "environmentally benign" and the ingredients are "common and available".
The viscosity is comparable to milk. They believe they can make mechanical parts (pumps, turbines, etc.) that can handle the denser fluid.
They say the cost is "broadly similar" to regular pumped hydro.
Simple physics says that gravity is actually a pretty poor energy storage mechanism (see other fanciful ideas about stacking heavy blocks). Pumped water storage is about the only form that actually makes sense from a cost/energy storage perspective because (a) in nearly all those cases the reservoirs already exist, and (b) you're pumping a lot more than a couple Olympic-swimming pools worth of water. And even then the costs can be giant - LA was looking into a $3 billion project to use pumped storage behind the Hoover Dam a few years ago, not sure what happened with that.
There is just so much "green washing" going on these days, I think it's more important to focus on things we know will work, or improvements to ideas that already work.
The stacking of heavy blocks you mention is actually a very decent idea. No, it’s not going to compete with pumped hydro for seasonal storage. But that was never the point. It’s about shifting load a few hours a couple of times every day. Perhaps with some spare capacity to help with a day or two with less power.
We need both solutions. Pumped hydro is not that great for cycling often and rapid response and it’s much harder to find good sites to build it. Big water reservoirs are extremely damaging to the environment. They obviously destroy all land based life on the land they claim, and the constant cycling up and down of the water lever means the conditions for life in the water is atrocious as well.
A fun fact is that for hydro power plants it’s becoming viable to install battery energy storage on site. Wouldn’t think that makes sense would you? By putting some of the power regulation loads on the battery they can run the hydro power plant production more evenly, reducing pressure variations that causes more wear and tear, which increases long term maintenance costs.
Don’t watch those YouTube “debunkers” for insight into these kinds of topic. They rarely do more than 10 min of research. (I know one of them did a video on Energy Vault that always gets shared in these conversations, despite the fact that there’s not a single valid point in the video)
At Niagara Falls, the falls can be diverted through the plants, nearly shutting the falls off. It isn't normally done, for both ecological and sightseeing reasons, but when power was needed after the 2003 blackout, the falls were reduced to about 15% flow: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-the-power-...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a4889/433775...
The total energy stored is relatively tiny, but devices want a smooth electrical signal not just energy from a wire.
Ideally you want an instant response time and GWh of energy storage on the cheap, but that instead grid operators use many different systems to simulate that.
> RheEnergise said it invented the new high-density fluid, known as R-19. Chief executive Stephen Crosher told Professional Engineering that the liquid is a fine-milled suspended solid in water, with low viscosity and low abrasion characteristics. The base material is used in oral medication applications, in a similar way that chalk is used as a bulking agent for pills and tablets. He said the raw materials are common and available, including in the UK, and the fluid could either be manufactured on-site or at a depot. [0]
Maybe someone knowledgeable about oral medication applications has any idea.
[0] https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/high-density-pumped...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drilling_mud
Bentonite is also used in medicine (dermatology).
It seems hardly worth it to use a specialized fluid for "only" a 2.5x density multiplier, on first glance.