3 ms·

Wind pioneer and former CTO of Siemens Wind Power is currently working on energy storage using rocks instead of a molten salt - he's blogging about it in the Da

by olau 11y ago

Wind pioneer and former CTO of Siemens Wind Power is currently working on energy storage using rocks instead of a molten salt - he's blogging about it in the Danish engineering news site ing.dk. Molten salt is efficient because of the phase change, but also much more difficult and expensive to handle than a big (well enormous) bunch of hot rocks. Last thing I heard, he's currently trying to get demonstration plant up and running - it sounded like they'd already done some experiments at Siemens before he left. Anyway, nowhere near ready, but just to show that there are still low-tech options out there being examined. Another low-tech option is biomass, either wood chips/pills or other stuff processed into methane. Yeah, it's not as cheap as coal, but with good grid connections we need less storage than people seem to think, at least according to the research papers I've seen.

kaybe 11y ago
We had research show that you can offset storage with capacity to some degree. [0] Some numbers: 100% renewable energy with a capacity of 340% would require 8% storage just for Germany, 3.8% for Europe (due to larger area which means more diverse weather). Also 8% for Europe using no solar and more wind instead. The 340% capacity is needed to get to the 100% coverage since there is more downtime compared to old energy which had 180% in 2007. If we go to 390% capacity (which corresponds to 170 GW additional production as calculated for Germany) we only need 0.9% storage. Depending on the relative pricing of additional capacity and storage, the price for building the whole infrastructure can go down by half. (The upper limit given in numbers is of the same order of magnitude as Europe's GDP in 2009, 12·10^12 €) [0] (German) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/piuz.201201301/abstract;jsessionid=6DA58A33516AF34DC77811097ABDA1C8.f04t03 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/piuz.201201301/ab...

by olau 11y ago

kaybe 11y ago

We had research show that you can offset storage with capacity to some degree. [0] Some numbers: 100% renewable energy with a capacity of 340% would require 8% storage just for Germany, 3.8% for Europe (due to larger area which means more diverse weather). Also 8% for Europe using no solar and more wind instead. The 340% capacity is needed to get to the 100% coverage since there is more downtime compared to old energy which had 180% in 2007. If we go to 390% capacity (which corresponds to 170 GW additional production as calculated for Germany) we only need 0.9% storage. Depending on the relative pricing of additional capacity and storage, the price for building the whole infrastructure can go down by half. (The upper limit given in numbers is of the same order of magnitude as Europe's GDP in 2009, 12·10^12 €) [0] (German) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/piuz.201201301/abstract;jsessionid=6DA58A33516AF34DC77811097ABDA1C8.f04t03 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/piuz.201201301/ab...