Why energy storage is a solvable problem

That Hydrostor set-up sounds pretty awesome. The upfront costs are probably a bit high, but if they can offer super-cheap storage after that then it would be worth it.

Basically any storage has to be capable of being deployed and produced en masse and over a wide area, and probably down around the $20-40/kW-hr price-point. Otherwise, Lithium-Ion batteries might steal their lunch – especially if they can get the latter down to below $100/kW-hr.

I don’t know where they’re drawing the estimate from, but the US EIA already has “solar photovoltaic plus storage” below $2000/kW in overnight construction costs. Cheaper than even the cheapest nuclear power plant in South Korea, although still pricy compared to natural gas. But getting closer.

For Australia, only hours of energy storage are required to meet electricity demand. Rather than go to the expense of building days or months of energy storage, it will be a lot cheaper to just to add more solar generating capacity. Wind capacity is also an option. This means we’ll have so much solar capacity the wholesale price of electricity will often be zero in the middle of the day, but this is a good thing. If anyone thinks high electricity prices are a good, I am quite happy to personally supply you with electricity that costs a fortune.

Another thing that gets overlooked is we are going to end up with a lot of energy storage on wheels in the form of electric vehicles. This applies whether we stick to private cars or end up with robot taxis. Charging road transport is something that can be done when renewable output is high and electricity prices low. This storage can also supply energy to the grid when it’s required. The wholesale price of electricity briefly hit $13 per kilowatt-hour in NSW this morning. I’m sure if EV owners were able, many would be happy to supply some energy from their vehicles for that amount.

Estimates vary, but the Australian Household consumes about 30% of its energy heating water, and many have ways of storing hot water.
If a house has a swimming pool, about 10% of its energy pumps water through the pool. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter when we pump the water.
To take advantage of building heat and changing the time of energy use, we need regulations to allow 5-minute metering in the homes to match the 5-minute wholesale electricity market.
Such a system will also make more efficient use of batteries and other storage technologies.
It is an example of a relatively small change in regulations that allows markets to do their magic.
If we apply the same principle of capital flows to individuals over their lifetime, we can make adjustments and remove the need to charge rent for the use of money. A good example is the original HECS system.

Capital storage as ownership of assets is a costly way to store capital. We can learn from electricity storage and find cheap ways to store capital. For example, rather than giving a return on the use of the money, we give investors lower-priced goods and services for the use of their capital.

Reversible process in a thermodynamic sense? Like you state later in the post, efficiency is still important. There are no real life reversible processes in the thermodynamics sense. For any unit of energy we store in as physical system we will only recover s fraction. I guess I don’t understand the point of the bold sentence.

Jim @2 and Ronald @3.
Jim; During the period you were observing, storage was seen by utilities as an incremental improvement in operating costs. Now its becoming an essential, so the incentive is now orders of magnitude greater.

Ronald is right, that a system that is cost balanced, won’t have the sort of storage scale that the naysayers are always saying is impossible. With very cheap wind and solar, large solar/wind overbuild reduces the net cost of the system. Even on cloudy days, solar still delivers something, and say 3 times the solar capacity means decent supply even on cloudy days -that greatly reduces the draw on storage, as well as allowing rapid recharge when conditions improve. Its really a systems cost optimization problem. And not mentioned here, long distance transmission is another important way to reduce storage needs.

Any mechanical energy storage system suffers large inefficiencies. In other words it takes a lot of energy to store energy. That is on strictly a thermodynamic basis. It is also a money problem and this solution like every energy solution being touted out there assumes if enough money is created we can fix the energy/warming problems.

The energy problem won’t be solved with more and more and more money. It’s a beautiful myth and seductive myth and I get why people sign on to it.

Here’s a fun new storage system:

“The Ocean Batteryis a new bladder-based energy storage system for offshore wind farms, which garnered a “Best of Innovation” award at CES 2022.”

Just to throw my £0.02 out there quickly (lack of time precludes too much analysis atm.), my speculation (and this is considerable conjecture on my part) is that there are three areas of storage which will be increasingly important: electrical (e.g. batteries, supercapacitors, and supercapatteries), green hydrogen, and thermal.

Now this is strong generalisation (a lot is dependent on the transmission and generation that you have), but assuming there is a “sensible mix” (e.g. of VRE/nuclear/hydro/geothermal/etc.), then the main issues seem to me to be increasing efficiency, load levelling, and transportation. Batteries and supercapacitors can deal with electricity directly, and can offer very rapid charge/discharge and ca. hours storage. Green hydrogen (assuming electrolysers become sufficiently cheap and viable) will be very flexible, and can offer long term storage (as well as, potentially, key transport solutions). Thermal storage could be important, as it offers a way to recapture energy (making systems more efficient) as well as additional storage options (I do sometimes wonder if thermal storage will see a bump when the geophysicists/geologists/etc. from oil companies start putting their knowledge to different uses). I think pumped hydro will also be important and that there will be niches for other technologies too – there are some more speculative things out there (I for one would be very interested to see at scale demonstration data of Star’s HERO catalyst, for example), after all. But this would be my guess for now (again, very speculative).

The biggest problems I see are less technological (though certainly problems there still exist), but more socio-political – namely a) lack of investment (not just more money, though that might help, but also in messaging and concrete political action and commitments) and b) objections to deployment (it would be a bit unfairly dismissive to attribute this soley to NIMBYism, but certainly that would seem to be part of it). I certainly could be wrong (a lot is outside my area of expertise and research focus), but this is just my general impression.

As someone who TA’d freshman chemistry once, JQ’s on solid ground.

There’s always going to be some loss, of course; nothing’s free. Get over it.

But the devil’s in the details. How much loss, scalability, how much energy can you actually get out. I’m personally pessimistic, but could be wrong. For example, the last time I checked, H2 was hard to store and handle: known methods all leaked something fierce. But that was 5 or 10 years ago (there was an overview section in Science), and things change. The other day, Elon Musk was badmouthing H2 for cars. That means he’s worried about it eating his lunch, so I’m more hopeful for H2 than I was a couple of months ago. And I rode an H2 fuel cell powered bus here (Tokyo) when I went on an errand somewhat off my usual beaten track the other day.

Seems to me this is a hard issue to generalise about. It is quite a different problem in Australia (where you need to store energy for 16 hours of so) compared to Russia or Scandinavia where you need to store it for 6 months. By my concern – is how quickly these solutions lose efficiency and what resource constraints you might get when you try to scale them up.

Some forms of storage have been around for ages. On a rainy afternoon about fifty years ago my parents took me around Dinorwig Power Station in North Wales and I was right impressed. It pumps water up to a reservoir at off-peak times and lets it out again during peak times. It seems odd that storage is still seen as a problem.

+1 Rapier at 20.
Reading some of the background and ‘funded’ Hydrostor projects, ROI was between 100%, and -20% when replacing / augmenting mining production.

Initial tech & IP funded by Canadian government. Profit to capital. It seems the race to ‘unmeterable’ will, as always, disproportionately effect the poor. Technological improvements seem easy as compared with fixng inequality.

I love the idea of Hydrostor, big bladders etc, yet I still can’t see how inequality will be ameliorated. Unless governments fund scale up and production and retain returns.

Tim@26
If storage is at the same site as solar gen, then some parts of the solar infrastructure don’t need to be overbuilt. These include inverters, and the tie-in to the grid. I’ve heard of solar farms being built
with 50% more panels than needed for full design output, which means significant curtailment under ideal conditions, but 50% better output during mediocre conditions. This is being done to optimize profits for the farm, rather than provide better grid services. Change the incentive structure and this overbuild ration should increase. Panels are cheap, and getting cheaper, so the raw cost may not be great.

“Tim@12
Green hydrogen isn’t a slam dunk.”

I agree. I was putting forward merely an opinion as to where I think it might end up. I’m also with you @27, and with D2 @28. If that initial ‘leccie production is cheap enough then many of these varied storage options become viable. “If”. Of them I think that H2 solves more problems than near any of the others therefore it’s the one we’ll finally end up with.

I will admit to a bias. I’ve worked on (do not now, so this is an emotional bias perhaps, not a current financial one) the weirder rare earths for many years, scandium particularly. And solid oxide fuels cells, which would be a vital part of the H2 cycle, preferentially use scandium (Bloom and their boxes is the world’s major consumer). Even to the point that an Sc/Y doped SOFC would be a “better” car powering fuel cell than the more usual PEM type.

I’ve long mused – and no more than that, technically minded I’m not – that a viable system could/would be constructed around solar and SOFCs. Solar, as prices have shown this past few decades, are subject to something akin to Moore’s Law at least concerning their price, perovskites might well push that out another decade or more. There’s nothing inherently expensive about silicon after all (yes, I have visited factories that make the ingots, one of the problems overcome was to make those ingots “less” pure than those used for computer chips, another was to upgrade the size of them, there being a cost per kg and also a cost per ingot, larger kg ingots being cheaper overall). The same is true of SOFCs, they’re also subject to something akin to Moore’s. Early Bloom boxes had the rare earths hand painted onto them – replacing that with thin film deposition would likely work and while I’m a decade out of date not done so far I think. For an SOFC really is just zirconia (cheap as, umm, chips) with your choice of rare earths and some circuitry traced upon it.

So, solar for ‘leccie, when not being used run that through an SOFC and collect the H2. When dispatchable power required, run the H2 back through the SOFC (or another one) to get ‘leccie.

Yes, H2 storage is a problem, so is kablooie, and yet petrol and natural gas also have similar problems. If, and it is if, solar panels/cells and SOFCs become cheap enough then that is a viable system. Would almost certainly be a highly decentralised system given H2 transport problems but so what, it is viable. Well, OK, maybe viable.

The longer term storage and transport problems of H2 might well be solved through chimstry. Once you’ve got cheap H2 then making say, jet fuel, isn’t difficult, in fact it’s well known. That might be cheaper than trying to change the globe’s air fleet. But that’s becoming more speculative….