4 ms·

Theres gunna be big money to the company that can figure out how to store huge masses of energy for months, but no doubt thats decades away. However, is there

Theres gunna be big money to the company that can figure out how to store huge masses of energy for months, but no doubt thats decades away. However, is there a more simple solution to this problem, like approaching an industry that already uses masses of energy and seeing if they can encourage them to use the energy when there is overloading? I'm unsure what that industry would be. Surely using an overabundance of energy is a solvable problem? It seems bizarre to me that it wouldnt be.

ck2 14y ago
I think the working theory is heating molten salt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
- tvladeck 14y ago
  There are a bunch of competing technologies: flywheels, water pumps, electric arcs, etc. It's a really interesting space.
  - jivatmanx 14y ago
    Also Pneumatic, which is becoming a big one for cars
    - thedrbrian 14y ago
      The energy density of pneumatic storage are pathetic
- Danieru 14y ago
  Producing electricity from heat is a high loss operation. Storing heat is only logical when the source energy is heat. This is what wikipedia means by 1% loss per year. Meanwhile kinetic storage has no loss over time. As a bonus converting kinetic energy to electricity is rather efficient. So far Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is our best method for large scale electricity-to-electricity storage.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
celticjames 14y ago
There's a great sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a post-oil world where tightly wound springs are used to store energy, as we do now with clocks. One of the subplots deals with a character trying to develop a material that can be wound tighter and more compactly without breaking. Or explosively unwinding. I'm not an engineer or physicist, so I've wondered, what is the theoretical limit for storing energy in a spring. Sci-fi stories usually do a bit of handwaving with nano/bio/quantum-tech to make magic materials, but what is the real science? Cars and laptops powered by springs sounds plausible (and awesomely steam punk) to me.
- wisty 14y ago
  Mechanical storage has safety issues when it's used for transport. Unlike gasoline (in real life, not movies) mechanical storage does tend to release all its energy at once in a crash.
- Anechoic 14y ago
  what is the theoretical limit for storing energy in a spring. I spring is a material (usually a metal, but could be a plastic as well) that is under stress, typically tension, torsion or compression (depending on type of spring). The limit is basically the yield strength of the material, which is the point where the stress vs strain curve goes nonlinear and the material begins to plastically deform. Obviously the fracture limit represents catastrophic failure of the material, but that is higher than the yield limit. Basically, it's a material strength and elasticity problem.
- Gravityloss 14y ago
  spring suck in energy density, compared to batteries
- mikeash 14y ago
  The Windup Girl was a good novel but its science was poor, at least when it came to energy. The posited system of generating energy by using large animals to wind up springs is completely ridiculous, even in the semi-post-apocalyptic, heavily bio-engineered future it's set in.
JimmyL 14y ago
There was a successful experiment doing something very similar to this - although I can't find the article - with cold storage facilities in the Netherlands. Cold storage is apparently a pretty big industry there, and all those buildings are designed to be highly thermally-efficient anyways. There's also a huge segment of the cold storage market where the exact temperature of the storage doesn't matter, it just needs to stay within a specific band. So what happened? The experiment (which was successful) effectively turned the freezers into batteries. The control systems were set to lower the temperature to two or three degrees lower than usual during the night (which made the cooling plants run longer then), and the plants were scaled back to maintenance power-levels during the day, when demand was higher. The grid was happy, since it moved the load to a low-usage time. The storage owners were happy, since they got a deal on the evening electricity. And the things being stored didn't care, since they were all so far frozen anyways. I wonder if you could do a similar program to get them to cool down further when there's excess power on the grid? Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. All the windmills in my community have setting that when the wind is too high, the blades on the windmills pivot to the zero lift axis, and they don't spin.
- uvdiv 14y ago
  Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. Because the subsidies in Germany are tied to the amount of electricity sold. That's why they're selling even at negative market price -- to collect the feed-in tariff.
  - rainysunday 14y ago
    There are two ways to sell, fixed price (difference to real price is in the end payed by comsumers) or trading it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tvladeck 14y ago
This is also one of the main environmental premises behind electric vehicles. They charge themselves overnight, soaking up excess baseload power that is producing emissions but is not really going to productive uses. That is, the power they consume is not "additional", or just marginally so. Then during the day many of them will also be plugged in and they could serve as a distributed "soak or supply" asset for the grid.
yxhuvud 14y ago
Aluminium smelters would really love free energy. Yes, the problem is solvable - improve the grid so that too much energy in one place can be distributed around to where it is needed. The simplest way to achieve that is probably reasonably sized energy trading areas - that will make the cost for transporting the energy baked into the price in a much better way that how it works in big unified trading area.

ck2 14y ago

I think the working theory is heating molten salt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

tvladeck 14y ago
There are a bunch of competing technologies: flywheels, water pumps, electric arcs, etc. It's a really interesting space.
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  Also Pneumatic, which is becoming a big one for cars
  - thedrbrian 14y ago
    The energy density of pneumatic storage are pathetic
Danieru 14y ago
Producing electricity from heat is a high loss operation. Storing heat is only logical when the source energy is heat. This is what wikipedia means by 1% loss per year. Meanwhile kinetic storage has no loss over time. As a bonus converting kinetic energy to electricity is rather efficient. So far Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is our best method for large scale electricity-to-electricity storage.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

celticjames 14y ago

There's a great sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a post-oil world where tightly wound springs are used to store energy, as we do now with clocks. One of the subplots deals with a character trying to develop a material that can be wound tighter and more compactly without breaking. Or explosively unwinding. I'm not an engineer or physicist, so I've wondered, what is the theoretical limit for storing energy in a spring. Sci-fi stories usually do a bit of handwaving with nano/bio/quantum-tech to make magic materials, but what is the real science? Cars and laptops powered by springs sounds plausible (and awesomely steam punk) to me.

wisty 14y ago
Mechanical storage has safety issues when it's used for transport. Unlike gasoline (in real life, not movies) mechanical storage does tend to release all its energy at once in a crash.
Anechoic 14y ago
what is the theoretical limit for storing energy in a spring. I spring is a material (usually a metal, but could be a plastic as well) that is under stress, typically tension, torsion or compression (depending on type of spring). The limit is basically the yield strength of the material, which is the point where the stress vs strain curve goes nonlinear and the material begins to plastically deform. Obviously the fracture limit represents catastrophic failure of the material, but that is higher than the yield limit. Basically, it's a material strength and elasticity problem.
Gravityloss 14y ago
spring suck in energy density, compared to batteries
mikeash 14y ago
The Windup Girl was a good novel but its science was poor, at least when it came to energy. The posited system of generating energy by using large animals to wind up springs is completely ridiculous, even in the semi-post-apocalyptic, heavily bio-engineered future it's set in.

JimmyL 14y ago

There was a successful experiment doing something very similar to this - although I can't find the article - with cold storage facilities in the Netherlands. Cold storage is apparently a pretty big industry there, and all those buildings are designed to be highly thermally-efficient anyways. There's also a huge segment of the cold storage market where the exact temperature of the storage doesn't matter, it just needs to stay within a specific band. So what happened? The experiment (which was successful) effectively turned the freezers into batteries. The control systems were set to lower the temperature to two or three degrees lower than usual during the night (which made the cooling plants run longer then), and the plants were scaled back to maintenance power-levels during the day, when demand was higher. The grid was happy, since it moved the load to a low-usage time. The storage owners were happy, since they got a deal on the evening electricity. And the things being stored didn't care, since they were all so far frozen anyways. I wonder if you could do a similar program to get them to cool down further when there's excess power on the grid? Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. All the windmills in my community have setting that when the wind is too high, the blades on the windmills pivot to the zero lift axis, and they don't spin.

uvdiv 14y ago
Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. Because the subsidies in Germany are tied to the amount of electricity sold. That's why they're selling even at negative market price -- to collect the feed-in tariff.
- rainysunday 14y ago
  There are two ways to sell, fixed price (difference to real price is in the end payed by comsumers) or trading it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

tvladeck 14y ago

This is also one of the main environmental premises behind electric vehicles. They charge themselves overnight, soaking up excess baseload power that is producing emissions but is not really going to productive uses. That is, the power they consume is not "additional", or just marginally so. Then during the day many of them will also be plugged in and they could serve as a distributed "soak or supply" asset for the grid.

yxhuvud 14y ago

Aluminium smelters would really love free energy. Yes, the problem is solvable - improve the grid so that too much energy in one place can be distributed around to where it is needed. The simplest way to achieve that is probably reasonably sized energy trading areas - that will make the cost for transporting the energy baked into the price in a much better way that how it works in big unified trading area.