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Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt
- partingshots 8y agoBlog post from the Malta team on their graduation from X with their molten salt battery grid energy storage play. https://blog.x.company/introducing-malta-81bceb559061 https://blog.x.company/introducing-malta-81bceb559061
- bch 8y agoFrom the blog post: > Malta’s solution is to store electricity as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed. The key insight behind Malta is that electricity can be stored as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed. The key insight is an oft forgotten energy storage fundamental called ‘tautology’.
- darawk 8y agoNot sure if you noticed, but the phrase "Key insight" links to a scientific paper: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054
- bch 8y agoYes, and to be clear, I’m interested (enamoured, even) in heat, by my long-running interest in air-cooled engines (VW, BMW, Porsche), and am fascinated with what’s going on here. My citation above was really a cheap shot at bad copy.
- ams6110 8y agoHow can energy be stored as cold? Cold is by definition the absence of energy.
- antidesitter 8y agoTemperature differences are what drive heat engines, i.e. you need a hot and a cold(er) reservoir. A nice demonstration of this is a handheld Stirling engine, which you can power by placing ice at the bottom (since it’s colder than the surrounding environment).
- ams6110 8y agoOkay, but technically you're storing the energy in the environment, not in the cold reservoir. Maybe a distinction not worth making.
- robertelder 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator
- starbeast 8y ago0 - you must play the game 1 - you can never win 2 - you can only break even on a very cold day << f.n. 3 - it never ever gets that cold ---- f.n. >> the maximum efficiency of the work that can be extracted from a heat cycle is dependent on the relative difference between the hot end and the cold end and absolute zero. The closer you can get the cold end to zero relative to the hot, the higher the efficiency. The energy of a heat engine comes from the potential. If everything is equally hot there is no potential energy just as much as if everything is equally cold. If there is a gradient, you can do work.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sahin-boydas 8y agodupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716821
- Retric 8y agoThe rather extreme losses associated with electricity > heat > heat engine > electricity seem like an absolute deal killer. Assuming they are at an extreme 50% round trip efficiency you need to be extremely cheap to have a hope of breaking even. Worse heat has fairly low energy density and cools over time so they can’t really scale the up or down that much. It might be possible if they where starting with heat, but feeding this from wind and solar just seems unlikely.
- partingshots 8y agoA lot of the fundamentals have actually already been researched and at least in academia, the various ideas have all been out there for quite a few decades now. The main impetus has been in getting the funding to kickstart everything, and backing from Alphabet with strong financial support plus an intellectual talent from subsidiaries (Google, X, etc.) to pool from is the killer combination here in my opinion.
- iso1337 8y agoHave any links to share?
- partingshots 8y agohttps://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054 This is the paper the Malta team uses in their blog (https://blog.x.company/introducing-malta-81bceb559061 https://blog.x.company/introducing-malta-81bceb559061) on explaining how the system works at large. It’s a pretty good summary.
- jabl 8y agoAnd in case anyone is wondering, yes, it's the same Bob Laughlin that won the 1998 Nobel prize in physics for the theory behind the fractional quantum Hall effect.
- pytester 8y ago
- lainga 8y agoOh lord, can't you pick less conflicting names? Why don't I just name my company Jeff Bezos LLC?
- tantalor 8y agoWhat are you referring to?
- pizza 8y agoIt's got the same name as a whole country..
- lumberjack 8y agoYeah, I'm wondering. Isn't this trademark infringement? EDIT: Definitely trademarked: EU001566702
- ars 8y agoTrademarked in what industry? Trademarks are not universal, they are only in particular industries.
- QuercusMax 8y agoExactly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta_(soft_drink) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta_(soft_drink)
- pergadad 8y agoIndeed, the tech world seems to be full of people totally oblivious to branding - anything that's short and snappy and sounds vaguely familiar is 'great', no matter the real world or rest of the world. Actually Google seems to be one of the worst at choosing googlable names ('Alphabet').
- kbumsik 8y agoI agree. Why do they have to pick a whole name of a country at the beginning?
- andbberger 8y agoOn a related note - could someone please develop a mass-produced stirling engine for low-temp differential residential use??
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoI’ve dreamed of this too, as it would be very easy to deploy. However I think someone mentioned that low differential sterling systems just don’t have much power in them period. I’m not sure though.
- jfoster 8y ago> Now X designs projects with two primary goals: to become a standalone Alphabet division or spin out into an independent company. The difference being that Alphabet retains 100% vs retaining X%? Presumably they're spinning out whenever the capital required would be much more than they want to put in, or the tech seems promising but perhaps not as profitable as they would like?
- Eridrus 8y agoMaybe they want strategic investors who bring more than just capital.
- dirkgently 8y agoCheap and pointless.
- dannyr 8y agoWhere are the molten salts coming from?
- virtualwhys 8y agoI believe they're sourced from John McAfee
- hwillis 8y agoTypical mixtures use eg potassium nitrate, sodium nitrate, and calcium nitrate. Salts are one of the most produced substances on earth. For instance, potassium nitrate is in virtually every fertilizer. I couldn't find how much is used annually, but it's made from potash, and US reserves of that are ~270 million tons[1]. At 40 to 110 kWh/ton[2] that's a minimum of 10.8 billion kWh (10.8 TWh), or a full day of storage. [1]: https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/potash/mcs-2017-potas.pdf https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/potash/mcs... [2]: https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/molten-salt-storage-33-times-cheaper-lithium-ion-batteries https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/molten-salt-storag...
- tkahnoski 8y agoThis is interesting from a sustainability model. Both lower tech to manufacturer and I'd assume less damaging to the environment than a lithium mine.
- londons_explore 8y agoThis design also needs almost double the amount of hexane... Not so environmentally friendly... Neither are used up though, and probably won't devalue with time, so the financial cost of them is just interest payments, and the environmental cost is zero.
- macawfish 8y agoThis is extremely exciting technology! Any energy science aficionado worth their salt knows that molten salt can have very high energy density.
- ElijahLynn 8y agoDo you have to keep the salt molten?
- macawfish 8y agoI believe it melts when it gets hot. Not sure if you need to keep it hot enough to stay molten... By the way, this is not new tech! What excited me here is the prospect of bringing these batteries into large scale production. Imo, this is the kind of thing that could transform how we heat and cool homes and other buildings. But right now it's quite niche and hard to access. Here's Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery?wprov=sf...
- bayesian_horse 8y agoYou should take it with a grain of salt, tho.
- macawfish 8y agoHow can you even distinguish one grain from another once the molten situation kicks in?
- londons_explore 8y agoThe paper says that at around 600C, nearly all materials have the same energy density. Molten salt was chosen because it is a liquid, cheap, safe, and stable. The paper also considers using rocks, but they're tricky to pump...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ElijahLynn 8y agoHow does this compare with Energy Vault? https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris... https://energyvault.ch/ https://energyvault.ch/
- ramblerman 8y agoThe neat little graph showing the rise in global yearly investments up to 2040 is amusing. Nassim Taleb has made me very wary of these things. what's even the calculation behind a projection like that, it even has a little spike in 2035!
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoWell 2035 was the year they discovered the catalyst that made the reaction hold for months instead of hours. It took years to commercialize though.
- codeisawesome 8y agoHaha what reference is this? I have such an odd feeling I’ve heard this in dystopian sci fi
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoHah I made it up! I do a bit of sci if writing though. http://tlalexander.com/sanctuary/ http://tlalexander.com/sanctuary/
- theDoug 8y agoReading the article beyond the neat little graph tells you of California's plans. Governments and companies make long term investments in their own structure over multiple years. This is also the basis of the bond market.
- ramblerman 8y agoThe graph is projecting global yearly investments not just California. And even if it was just California I would be doubtful of a projection 20 years into the future.
- MacroAffairs 8y agoTake it with a grain of salt.
- beaner 8y agoI'm pretty naive about this stuff, but wouldn't an easy solution for storing energy to be, just use energy to lift something very heavy into the air, and then extract energy when it's lowered?
- lkb2k 8y agoThat is one of the ideas being explored: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
- wyattpeak 8y agoThat's an avenue that's also being pursued, but it's not obviously superior to other storage plans. You've got lots of moving parts under high load, you need enough structural support to ensure that the top-heavy structure is stable. It also doesn't contain a huge amount of energy - 1 ton of liquid NaCl contains about 700MJ of usable energy, you'd have to lift 700 tons of material 100m to contain the same in gravitational potential.
- calebbrown 8y agoDinorwig Power Station in the UK pumps water to store 9.1Gwh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
- digitalmango 8y agoMost of the Concentrated Solar Power plants uses molten salt to store energy. First was installed in 1995 (Solar ttwo) in Spain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project#Solar_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project#Solar_Two
- iagovar 8y agoTorresol and other spanish companies have some experience with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torresol_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torresol_Energy Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_st...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- occamrazor 8y agoMy memories of thermodynamics theory are old and full of gaps, but from what I remember both steps, if performed at "normal” temperatures, necessarily produce a waste of energy. The first step, i.e. using electricity to drive a heat pump, is efficient only if the temperature differential between the cold body and the hot one is small. On the other side, conversion of thermal energy into electricity is efficient only if the temperature differential is large. How does Malta overcome this problem?
- londons_explore 8y agoYour memories are wrong... An ideal heat pump is fully reversible with no energy loss.
- occamrazor 8y agoMaybe, but I clearly remember that it is not possible to have a reversible process wich only transfers heat from a colder body to a warmer one. The third law also gives quantitative bounds to the reversibility of such processes. Heat pumps with efficiency above 1 rely on heat transfer between external bodies (e.g. from a subterranean water source to the atmosphere forhome heating systems), but this does not seem to be the system described by Malta.
- londons_explore 8y agoYou are thinking of the carnot limit. >It provides an upper limit on the efficiency that any classical thermodynamic engine can achieve during the conversion of heat into work The word 'efficiency' here is misleading... If one reverses the process, converting work back into heat, you get back all the original energy in an ideal machine (and real machines, for example gas turbines, are within ~15% of ideal for the temperature & pressure change between input and output)
- occamrazor 8y agoThanks for the clarification. I still have issues understanding the intermediate stage, where the world is entirely and reversibly converted into a temperature differential. I might have to go back to drawing T-S diagrams.
- fierro 8y agoloving all these armchair scientists thinking they've found "the" flaw in a company they read one article about
- anonuser123456 8y agoTo be fair, for every 1000 claimed energy breakthroughs, 1 succeeds. Being skeptical of any claim before it scales in the market is somewhat rational.
- iainmerrick 8y agoSimilar technology already in production in the UK: https://www.sunamp.com https://www.sunamp.com They make a molten salt heat battery for homes and businesses. You store excess heat or electricity in the battery, and use it for central heating and hot water. Since you’re not trying to convert it back to electricity it’s very efficient. It basically replaces a large expensive water cylinder with a smallish box. PS: I have no connection with or investment in Sunamp, I just think it’s a terrific idea. I am a potential customer, though!
- ogrisel 8y agoAre you sure sunamp is molten salt? To me, molten salt is to store energy at a very high temperature in insulated containers. I thought sunamp is some kind of room temperature phase change material that does not require heavy insulation.
- iainmerrick 8y agoI’m not at all sure, you’re almost certainly right. (Not knowing much about the chemistry, I’m naively conflating the two) Edit to add: Sunamp has non-zero heat loss, so it must be stored hot rather than room temperature, but it might not be very hot.
- ogrisel 8y agoThere are other alternative technologies to store energy as heat, in particular molten silicon: - https://reneweconomy.com.au/mit-team-gains-ground-on-molten-silicon-energy-storage-concept-23077/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/mit-team-gains-ground-on-molten-... - https://1414degrees.com.au/ https://1414degrees.com.au/ (which looks like a competitor for malta)
- dangravell 8y agoWas going to mention Sunamp. It does use a PCM, and that is described as a salt so maybe it's where the confusion comes from. It also has far better insulation than equivalent devices (hot water cylinders). Typically VIPs, although I've read a few reports about the casing being compromised recently and that wouldn't play nicely with the panel.
- moltensalt 8y agoMolten salt nuclear reactor technology documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8iRl1CkuK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8iRl1CkuK8
- ogrisel 8y agoI believe the molten salt technology used for thermal energy storage is not directly related to molten salt nuclear reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Molten_salt_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Molten_... (sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate and calcium nitrate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Fused_salt_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Fused_salt...
- Steve44 8y agoMany years ago when you could visit Dounreay nuclear power station I remember leaning they used liquid sodium as the main coolant. It was used to transfer heat our of the reactor from what I recall.
- Bombthecat 8y agoJust a question: why does a sub from Google need to raise money? I would question the confidence if a super big company starts something and is like: uh you know. We collect money from someone else.
- nopinsight 8y agoFor partnerships in an industry with powerful entrenched interests? An analogous example is the Amazon/Buffett/JP Morgan partnership in healthcare.
- cityzen 8y agoSo just rich people being rich?
- godelmachine 8y agoSame question - $26M is a small amount for Alphabet.
- gomox 8y ago$26M from Alphabet for a power storage company is not "smart money", it's just a pile of cash. See my other comment sibling to yours.
- gomox 8y agoFor these industry-disruptor things you need some degree of support from the industry you're disrupting (i.e. you need to sell to utility companies that have strong business relationships with the large generation technology providers in the space). In practice this means raising money from, or partnering with, the right people that can leverage industry connections. It is easier to get the right investors and partners if you are not controlled by Alphabet, because investors and partners have more assurances of the governance leverage they get for their money/effort. If you are Sergey's pet project, you are very vulnerable to mood swings on his (or Google's) behalf.
- stvswn 8y ago
- FiatLuxDave 8y agoDoes anyone have any information about what kind of heat pump they are using (e.g. multi-stage hydrocarbon, supercritical CO2, etc)? Making a heat pump which can handle a difference of 175+ C and a high side of 200+ C may be straightforward in theory, but it is a non-trivial engineering challenge. I am unaware of any commercial off-the-shelf device which can meet these specs. I'm guessing this is what they need based upon the description. I happen to be in the market for a heat pump like this for my own research, so I am highly interested if anyone has any information.
- PaulHoule 8y agoI have been thinking of ways a "new nuclear" company could have a business plan that gives them an exit in case they run into regulatory or other roadblocks and molten salt handling was one of the ones that seemed most promising. (Too bad there doesn't seem to be any non-nuclear market for Brayton cycle turbines.)
- hinkley 8y agoHas anyone looked at waste heat recovery for these sorts of things? If you already have a heat engine on premises I could see industrial applications for energy efficiency.