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Construction begins on world’s biggest liquid air battery
- d_silin 6y agoI wonder what is the round-trip efficiency for this cycle. I read that you can improve it by matching with large scale but low-grade heat source.
- swebs 6y agoThe article says 25%.
- luma 6y agoThat’s a pretty tough sell versus pumped hydro which is generally 70%+
- timerol 6y agoThe manufacturer claims 60-75%, with a lifespan of 30-40 years https://highviewpower.com/technology/ https://highviewpower.com/technology/
- taneq 6y agoThat's not increasing the efficiency of the storage, though. It's just using otherwise wasted heat from a different process (which could probably be otherwise used for cogeneration or something). In hot countries it might be efficient if the chilled exhaust is used for air conditioning or something, I guess.
- Faaak 6y agoPer https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1216213/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1216213/FULLTEXT... , the theoretical maximum seems to be ~70%. Which is not bad but not great either if you compare it to Pumped hydro storage.
- mywacaday 6y agoWhat kind of pressure is required to do this?
- adammunich 6y agoThis cannot possibly be more efficient than lithium batteries...
- worldsayshi 6y agoMaybe cost efficient?
- rumanator 6y ago> This cannot possibly be more efficient than lithium batteries... It really depends on what you perceive to be efficiency.
- adammunich 6y agoLifepo4 has 99% coulombic efficiency
- CrI0gen 6y agoThere's probably a much greater amount of energy lost from conversion to liquid form and stored and converted back into usable electricity from steam generators. I believe the article mentions it but it likely has better long term storage than batteries as well. The equipment required for the 'air' battery would have a longer lifespan and be cheaper to repair then a massive battery bank. On top of that batteries aren't exactly the most 'green' thing to produce, so from a carbon footprint perspective, I imagine the air battery is much more efficient.
- Mvandenbergh 6y agoIt's not of course but for long term storage the capital costs of the storage are more important than the the round trip efficiency.
- arussellsaw 6y agoCompressed air storage seems like a really appealing method, especially considering the low carbon footprint and massively longer lifetime than lithium batteries. This post covers it quite well https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batterie... , I’d be really keen to see if compressed air can also be successful for independent households looking to go off grid or reduce dependence on the grid.
- sandworm101 6y agoIt has its own issues, not the least of which is safety. There is lots of energy in compressed air, that's the point. I would look heavily into the risks of structural fatigue. A lithium ion battery might catch fire, but an "air battery" can go boom.
- verelo 6y agoIsn’t this the issue with any large battery? Water in large volumes can cause a lot of damage too. I suspect it’s hard to find a large battery that isn’t scary when mishandled.
- learc83 6y agoCompressed air is much more dangerous than most other storage methods though. The failure mode tends to release stored energy very quickly.
- sandworm101 6y agoYes. Look for the vids of scuba tanks gone wrong. I'd rather drive around with a propane tank in my trunk than a 5000psi air tank.
- csharptwdec19 6y agoDepends on the materials... TBF I'm pretty comfortable with a proper steel tank. But, nowadays I'd be afraid to use any of the fiber wrapped ones. I remember in the middle of the 2000s when a lot of new companies jumped into the Fiber-wrapped tank market... and shortly thereafter there were a notable number of recalls in/around the bonding between the fiber and metal layers of the tanks. And, mind you, this was all in the paintball industry, which was a field where many did not have an understanding of the dangers of a piece of fiberglass with 800-5000PSI pushing it somewhere. Happened more than once: phone rings Boss working at field nearby: "Hey, someone might be coming across the street to try to fill a tank that we refused to fill because it was (damaged/out of hydro)" Me: "Yeah, I turned them away 5 minutes ago." Customer walks in Customer: "Hey the field said they were out of air but otherwise they would fill this."
- nayuki 6y agoI mistakenly interpreted the headline as a battery with some kind of liquid electrolyte and outside air as a reactant. Kind of like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc%E2%80%93air_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc%E2%80%93air_battery . But nope, it's just the liquefaction of air, no chemical reactions involved.
- sandworm101 6y agoYes. The term "battery" is being thrown around too much. Are hydroelectric dams to be called "rain batteries"?
- vikramkr 6y agoYep. A lot of people call pumped storage "water batteries" or the like[0]. It baffles me as well, but now that language is evolving to redefine a battery as pretty much anything that generates electrical power than can be recharged with electrical power, I guess that's the world we're walking into and I should get used to that. [0] https://www.hydropower.org/sites/default/files/publications-docs/the_worlds_water_battery_-_pumped_storage_and_the_clean_energy_transition_2.pdf https://www.hydropower.org/sites/default/files/publications-...
- icegreentea2 6y agoHave you seen where "battery" comes from? Electrical batteries are called that since they were made of sets of electrical cells working together, analogously to a battery of artillery.
- vikramkr 6y agoYes I'm aware of that - good point. I could have included that in my post above to highlight that this word itself has gone through plenty of language change already, from meaning "a number of pieces of artillery used together" to "electrochemical energy storage" to "energy storage." While it keeps most of those original definitions as well - including "to strike" etc. The only definition I don't think has really survived to the current day that I see when looking at its etymology is "metal articles wrought by hammering." Wonderful word.
- imposterr 6y ago>The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. Is it just they're expecting many leaks in the system? I don't see why they couldn't just store things for years basically.
- icegreentea2 6y agoLiquid air is cryogenic - they'll have to either bleed off or spend energy to keep it cooled. The "many weeks" measurements is probably some measurement of bleed off rate assuming no top offs (but I'm just guessing - the company website https://www.highviewpower.com/technology/ https://www.highviewpower.com/technology/ doesn't seem to call it out clearly).
- imposterr 6y agoIf the tanks are strong enough, is cooling required? My understanding is that you'd only need to cool the liquid if the structure holding it wasn't sufficiently strong enough to handle the pressures.
- icegreentea2 6y agoApproximating air as nitrogen... nitrogen cannot exist as liquid phase at room temperature - it can exist as a supercritical fluid though at 5MPa (so 50 atm). At that point it has a density of roughly 56 kg/m^3. At ~1 atm, nitrogen becomes liquid at -194C and has a density of roughly 800 kg/m^3. So your mass density of the system is like 14 times better with liquid nitrogen, and the pressure loading requirements are stupidly lower.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- woodandsteel 6y agoMaking the tanks strong enough to handle the pressure if the liquid turns to gas is very expensive. It is much cheaper to make a tank that just holds a liquid.
- jcims 6y agoWondered what they were doing with the thermal energy from the process. The manufacturer has a video here that helps explain the technology a little bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDvlh_aG7iA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDvlh_aG7iA
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 6y agoThe "air" gets stored in liquid form... but what I don't understand is what parts of the air? The gasses in air mix as gasses, no so much when liquid. Will the tanks include a layer of liquid oxygen? What prevents those layers vaporize selectively as the tank temperature is raised again? That would seem very dangerous. Or am I misreading this and they are only liquefying nitrogen and aren't playing around with liquid O2?
- robocat 6y agoThis article says they remove CO2 and water because they freeze solid, and it implies oxygen remains in the mix: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19785689 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19785689 I am guessing they pump the liquid air and then “boil” it, so there is no risk of selective vapourisation as they are not boiling the bulk liquid within the tank.
- sandworm101 6y agoThe "concrete battery". Or, because it runs on gravity, the "earth-powered"... relativity-powered "Hawking battery". https://newatlas.com/energy-vault-concrete-tower-battery/57164/ https://newatlas.com/energy-vault-concrete-tower-battery/571... (It stores energy by stacking rocks.)
- zamalek 6y agoIf they did something with that CO2, the whole setup could be carbon negative.
- trickstra 6y agoDry ice is actually a precious commodity among algae growers - another alternative energy source - algae diesel. Or any frozen food dealers - and sometimes they run into shortages: https://www.marken.com/alerts/dry-ice-shortage/ https://www.marken.com/alerts/dry-ice-shortage/
- 6y ago
- robocat 6y agoHere’s an article with some of the technical details of chilling the air to liquify it: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19785689 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19785689 “IMechE says this process is only 25% efficient but it is massively improved by co-siting the cryo-generator next to an industrial plant or power station producing low-grade heat.“ “More energy is saved by taking the waste cool air when the air has finished chilling, and passing it through three tanks containing gravel“ as a thermal store. “their kits could be up to 70% efficient, and IMechE agrees this figure is realistic.”
- gizmodo59 6y agoSorry for the rant but this is just so poorly designed that I don't see any relevant content when I open the link without scrolling right away: With adblocker: https://imgur.com/a/fWuoJEi https://imgur.com/a/fWuoJEi Without adblocker: https://imgur.com/a/cvmu3dm https://imgur.com/a/cvmu3dm Plus ublock origin says it blocked 30% of requests. I'm all up for paying for good journalism but part of me wonders their paid customers aren't getting a great experience either.
- luma 6y agoI've found the Fanboy Annoyance List to be pretty effective vs the sort of GDPR cookie acceptance things you see in your blocked version: https://easylist.to/easylist/fanboy-annoyance.txt https://easylist.to/easylist/fanboy-annoyance.txt
- exabrial 6y agoWhen you compress air it produces quite a bit of heat that is usually cooled off... anyone that has an air compressor can attest. Help me understand the thermodynamics, are they storing the heat too?
- paledot 6y agoThe technology sounds fantastic. The synergy with heat power plants is particularly cool (heh). The same goes for desalination: waste heat can be reduced by recycling heat between the processes, increasing the overall efficiency of the system. Now for the rant: reputable news organizations need to stop enabling "creates x jobs" propaganda through repetition. It doesn't create 200 jobs, it briefly employs 200 to build the thing. Maybe 5-10 full-time jobs will be "created" to maintain a giant mechanical battery. This lie is particularly popular around pipeline projects. "You don't think we should spend billions of dollars on this pipeline? Do you want tens of thousands of imaginary people to lose their imaginary jobs?" End rant.
- newyankee 6y agoI wonder in an era where clean energy costs fall more than 10x whether it is possible to channel surplus energy into desalination and pumping water into deserts near the coasts. Like a slow geo engineering project. Combined with future developments in vertical farming, it may make sustainable cities possible in places like Middle east, parts of South Asia and Africa
- Consultant32452 6y agoI recall reading about a proposed solution to global warming that included digging a channel from the Atlantic into the Sahara. Big sections are below sea level. So we'd create a new ocean/sea effectively, cool the local climate, and significantly reduce hurricanes on the East coat of America.
- adwn 6y agoThe Amazon rainforest relies on annual global sandstorms transporting nutrient-rich (phosphorus) sand from the Sahara to South America. If you flood significant parts of this desert, you'll disrupt this process. A source: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...
- ryanwaggoner 6y ago
- blackrock 6y agoAt first, I thought this was interesting. And then I read the part about the battery only lasting for a few weeks, before it must be recharged. This sounds terribly inefficient. I recall reading about a spring type of battery made of diamond nano fibers a few weeks ago. They were saying this was even more efficient than lithium ions, since it was a physical process of releasing its energy, instead of a chemical process. It behaves like a child’s wind up toy, but at the molecular level. Would it be better instead to have a physical battery, instead of a chemical battery? Perhaps something like a big wind up spring can be built. Then it can hold its charge indefinitely. And you stack thousands of these together, and they can just sit there for a long time, until they are needed. Or even that idea to use large cement blocks stacked into skyscrapers. Each block holds potential energy, and when released, it can glide down a magnetic track and generate electrical energy. This is also a concept of a physical battery. Even a hydroelectric dam is physical energy. You’re moving the water uphill.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. Is that really right? It's not just green energy sources that benefit from energy-storage. Fossil-fuel plants and nuclear plants prefer to run at a constant output, but demand varies depending on the time of day. See the 'Duck curve' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
- pjc50 6y agoThis seems like useless pedantry on the word "green", no? The electric field is not coloured, you can't really attribute grid power to a specific source sensibly. Coal is almost entirely gone from the UK. Nuclear does indeed prefer to run at constant output, but almost all the remaining fossil generation in the UK is CCGT which can ramp up and down fairly quickly.
- Mvandenbergh 6y agoCool. Technology like liquid air, compressed air, electrolysed hydrogen etc. has a very different use case to lithium ion batteries. Batteries are good for short cycle times, if you need to balance your grid and even to some extent if you need to correct for diurnal patterns, you want batteries. The high capital cost is compensated for by the high round-trip efficiency. For seasonal storage or even inter-year storage, batteries do not work. You spend a fortune on them and then cycle the system once a year or less. The advantage of these other systems is you can decouple three elements: The conversion in The storage The conversion out and match the capacity of each to what you need. For long term storage of hydrogen for instance, you want relatively small electrolysers with fast response times so that you can use excess electricity during sunny windy periods, a massive geological storage that can hold a year+ of production, and modestly sized fuel cells to turn it back into electricity in the winter (in Europe anyway) with good heat recovery. In the case of this technology, you can again size the charging, discharging, and storage separately. The scaling for tanks is much cheaper than batteries. Flow batteries use a similar idea by separating out the charging/discharging membrane and the electrolyte tanks but I don't think anyone has gotten satisfactory performance from them yet. You can't build a lithium ion battery where you specify the storage capacity separately from the charge and discharge rates with anything like that kind of freedom. You can adjust the battery chemistry of course but nothing like the same.
- sitkack 6y agoThis is why pumped hydro using existing dams is so nice. I think constructing enough storage to handle months of lower solar output will be difficult. Phase locking human activity, including economic to the energy cycle would obviate the need for many technical solutions. We should just hibernate.
- Mvandenbergh 6y agoPumped hydro using existing dams is brilliant and should be maximally exploited but we already have dams on all the really good sites. We can improve by adding the pump-up stage to many of them but there is simply no scope for massive expansion in total reservoir / energy storage capacity.
- lmilcin 6y agoThe question is, would it be possible to use large scale liquid air storage to speed up removing CO2 from atmosphere? I have no idea if removing CO2 is easier in liquid form but if it is feasible then ff we already had huge infrastructure to store energy that requires pumping astronomical amounts of air back and forth, it might make sense make sense to add a bit to it to remove CO2 while in liquid form.
- pjc50 6y agoHmm. This actually has legs - CO2 can't be present in liquid air, because it freezes at only about -80 rather than the -200ish for air. So at some point CO2 "snow" will collect in the system. Unfortunately it's ~0.04% of the air, so this will take a long time to collect much. But if it's removed anyway, sure. Then you have to work out where to put it.
- Tade0 6y agoThe energy required to liquefy air is probably too large. Say we have 400pm CO2 in air - that's ~630mg of CO2 per kilogram of air. Given that the specific heat of air sits at around 1kJ/kg[0], you'd have to spend over 125kJ of heat energy to get just one gram of CO2 - that's 35Wh. If you used wind power(14g CO2/kWh) and a heat pump with a coefficient of performance of 1 (not sure how possible at these gradients) you'd "emit" 0.5g of CO2 in the process. [0] https://www.ohio.edu/mechanical/thermo/property_tables/air/air_Cp_Cv.html https://www.ohio.edu/mechanical/thermo/property_tables/air/a...
- lmilcin 6y agoWell, you missed the fact that the plan is already to liquefy the air. So the air will already be in liquid form. Also I don't think they are going to cool it but rather compress it. Cooling would require constant expenditure of energy to keep it cool whereas you can compress it and leave it in the vessel at room temperature. It takes 33 atmospheres to liquefy nitrogen and 50 for oxygen.
- Mvandenbergh 6y agoThe power cycle used here is quite an interesting one. The heat from the compression cycle and cold from the expansion cycle are stored separately and re-used which substantially increases storage efficiency. Waste heat from co-located industrial plants is used to further boost expansion performance. A lot of "low grade" industrial heat is available but when you're re-heating from cryogenic temperatures, 100 C is actually high grade heat. I suspect that the time over which it's efficient to store is limited by losses from the temperature stores.
- jhayward 6y ago> Waste heat from co-located industrial plants is used to further boost expansion performance. Let's not greenwash this. The "waste heat" is fossil fueled.
- Mvandenbergh 6y agoThat's not "greenwashing" because it's obvious. Thermal input in industrial processes is essentially all fossil fuel, high temperature input is 100% fossil fuel. To the extent that we need these processes, we may as well get as much bang for our CO2e buck as we can. Even if and when these processes can be driven using hydrogen combustion or other heat sources, there will still be low grade waste heat to use.
- jhayward 6y agoIt's greenwashing because it's not obvious, and the wording is deliberately deceptive. An accurate description would give readers the relevant facts, not assume they can figure out the hidden catch.
- yowlingcat 6y agoI was looking into this briefly when I was investigating molten salt batteries. Can anyone who has expertise in this field tell me a bit about why molten salt batteries aren't more common? From what I can tell, the materials used are more renewable than Lithium Ion batteries, and with comparable (potentially higher) density. I can see why molten salt isn't as common in the more portable form factor, but it seems like it would be a great fit for large energy reservoir/grid type applications.
- alexpotato 6y agoI believe the main use of molten salt batteries is for high heat applications e.g. in solar collectors The heat is essentially "free" which makes the molten salt heat retention properties perfect for storing energy overnight.
- marcosdumay 6y agoStationary batteries in general aren't common. We don't have enough transient power generation for them to be very lucrative. (What, is very obviously going to change in the near future.) Added to that, for molten salt batteries, there are old designs with bad cost and density properties and new ones with dangerous materials and patent minefields. I don't think anybody was ever able to sell a Na-S design without being destroyed in some court.