10 hours of discharge time (20 MW power peak with 200MWh energy storage) is good, but not "long term" to me. It is barely sufficient for storing solar/wind overnight. "Long term energy storage" to me is several days or more at peak power. I'm excited for all these different methods, though, because unlocking energy storage is key to reducing carbon emissions, since most of the base load is from carbon emitting power sources.
Edit: I clarified that I meant the amount of energy stored not how long the gasses themselves can be stored. "Long term energy storage", to me, should be defined as being able to discharge at max power for like a day or more, and this tech is more "medium term" storage, again in my opinion.
I guess depending on the storage mechanism, the length of stored time isn't really an area of concern. I routinely store full propane tanks for months, for example. Its a significantly smaller molecule but I would think similar timescales could be achieved with CO2.
The plant they are building can store 10 hours worth of electricity at maximum delivery power (200MWh @ 20MW). TFA does not say how long they can store the electricity for.
I expect it becomes financially unviable if they end up storing it for long. Daily charge/discharge allows them to amortize their annual cost of capital across 365 cycles. Weekly or seasonal storage is going to be much less cost effective.
> “Long term money storage" should be defined as storing more than $10 000 - yes, no, or irrelevant?
Your example should be more like “a long term emergency savings is 6 months of your budget” vs. “a short term emergency savings is 2 months of your budget”
there's a guy on Twitter that runs sims of Australia's power usage that claims 5 hours of storage is enough for year round use of renewables so 10 hours could be a big deal
Link? Overnight you would need “length of night time” as the minimum capacity for a grid to support zero carbon base generation, assuming all renewables, so he must be using a value with carbon base generation support, I’m assuming we need even more storage when we eliminate carbon base generation.
I have never understood that sentiment. If you define long term energy storage as being able to discharge at max power for a day or a week you are penalizing superior storage technologies for no reason. Let's say that you have two technologies that have the same cost per KWh, the same round-trip efficiencies, etc. Now let's assume one of them has a maximum discharge rate of C/100 so that at maximum power it lasts for 100 hours. Let's assume the other technology has a maximum discharge rate of 1C, so at maximum power it lasts for 1 hour. For the same price, you could have either a system that only works for long term storage or a system that would be considered "short term" storage even though it has the same capacity and the same price as the long term option. There may be some exceptions, but generally whenever you have short term storage you automatically have the option of long term storage as well by just discharging at a lower rate.
> Energy Dome’s novel approach to long-duration energy storage dispenses with batteries altogether. Instead, the company erects enclosures that resemble tennis bubbles and fills them with carbon dioxide gas. Excess electricity can be used to pressurize the gas into liquid form, storing energy; turning the liquid back into a gas releases that energy, turning a turbine and regenerating electricity.
> As detailed in Canary Media’s previous reporting, this approach has a few advantages relative to other long-duration storage attempts:
> It uses off-the-shelf equipment from mature industrial supply chains. That means Energy Dome doesn’t need to build its own factory, a capital-intensive step that other long-duration startups needed to do. It also means Energy Dome doesn’t need to spend years on laboratory science — it just needs to prove that the equipment all works together the way it’s supposed to.
> The dome is supposed to deliver round-trip efficiency of 75 percent, meaning 75 percent of the energy that goes into the process comes back out at the end. That’s less than typical battery efficiency but a lot better than many long-duration storage contenders.
> Carbon dioxide is easier to compress and store at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure compared to other gaseous storage vehicles, like hydrogen or air.
It looks like it's captive in the big bubble even in decompressed form, however I think it is always a bad idea to create more CO2 on purpose (it can be released by accident or for maintenance), which is why I really hope this startup can work hand-in-hand with direct-air-capture facilities.
> however I think it is always a bad idea to create more CO2 on purpose
If the net CO2 generated is reduced significantly, then it's a net good thing. CO2 is a byproduct of all sorts of industrial processes that we depend on, so I don't think they'll have a problem finding a supply.
My solution (to use exclusively DAC for the CO2 supply) looks like that difficult to you? I really think it is the best way to go.
It is different, in my opinion, to emit CO2 to create material goods that will last, and to create CO2 for itself that maybe will be vented for maintenance and will need to be refilled.
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I wish they had data on the estimated cost to build and operate. Best i can guess is that $11M might get them 200Megawatt/hours -> $0.055 per watt hour which would be cheaper than any chemical battery based energy storage, albeit at the cost of reduced efficiency (75% vs 95% for lithium-ion). This is similar to pump storage, but less geographically dependent.
Cost is central to viability. Cheapest storage wins.
But there are a lot of different costs: capex and opex cost per kWh to store energy, capex and opex cost per kW to bank energy, capex and opex cost per kW to extract energy, cost for conversion losses, cost for banked energy losses, plus extra specific costs and sometimes specific benefits. Some of those costs will change radically with time as circumstances change; cost for conversion losses of all methods will fall as top line generation gets cheaper.
This is why synthetic fuels will be so important, despite low efficiency and high capital cost: the "specific benefits" exceed those.
Operating this thing via captured CO2, and feeding hydrocarbon synthesis and carbon sequestration, might improve its viability.
It would look like a good idea only if they somehow compel their customers to buy only CO2 coming from a direct-air-capture facility.
Or even better, if they attach a small direct-air-capture device to their "bubble". (it would not need to be extremely efficient, as I understand that the CO2 is then captive of the storage [I'd add... in a normal operation mode... because we never know what can happen with incidents and that's why I push for DAC before it's too late and it's already everywhere])
I agree, but wouldn't a partial PSCC (point source carbon capture) also legitimize the polluting industries?
(I'm assuming here that not all of their emitted CO2 is long-term stored, otherwise of course that also solves another problem)
Can we both fight for the disappearance of the chimneys, and depend on them?
At the very least, we need to be ready for the absence of these chimneys as if it could happen overnight, for the simple reason that we really need for it to happen overnight (it won't, but that's bad, and we need to keep thinking it's bad).
(I precise: I would be completely in favor of a total PSCC, it's just that I think that a partial PSCC for any chimney is a bad path)
Try looking at it this way: One CO2 capture is operational at scale, the price of its capture becomes a known quantity, and this can be used as a price point for determining a general carbon tax.
The original comment suggested to use CO2 captured from air for the storage facilities. Yet takes more energy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than to remove it from exhaust. We'd be burning coal to extract CO2 from the air!
Anyone know of a reason why they dont use air? or even Nitrogen.
EDIT I guess compressing to liquid, CO2 can be stable at <31 deg C at 5ATMs which is what they use. Liquid Nitrogen has to be kept very cold, even under pressure.
> Carbon dioxide is easier to compress and store at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure compared to other gaseous storage vehicles, like hydrogen or air.
> Carbon dioxide is easier to compress and store at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure compared to other gaseous storage vehicles, like hydrogen or air.
What happens if the dome ruptures and suddenly releases all its CO2 into the surrounding air? Will it hang around long enough to be dangerous for people (or other living things which like to breathe). Given that they're cycling between gaseous and liquid states, there's presumably quite a bit of CO2 involved.
BLEVE explosions are caused by a positive feedback loop between escaping vapor combusting and then feeding more heat back into a container, causing a further rise in temperature. CO2 isn't combustible, and if it were to vent, it would lower the temperature, not raise it.
sorry to disappoint, but this article glosses over a pretty significant constraint that prevents this from being long-term storage at all: storing the thermal energy from the compression process.
storing thermal energy over long periods of time is a pretty lossy process, and that 75% efficiency number will be out the window if one tried to use this system for seasonal storage. this system fills the same space as battery storage, which it is also marketed for (over night storage for solar power).
citing from this: "In Energy Dome’s system, carbon dioxide is compressed at a pressure of 60 bar which heats the gas to 300°C liquid. The heat is then extracted and stored in “bricks” made of steel shot and quartzite for later use, cooling down the CO2 to an ambient temperature. The gas is then condensed into liquid form and stored in carbon-steel tanks.
‘Our lithium-ion battery will have double the energy density of standard Li-ion for same price’
When electricity is required, the liquid CO2 is run through an evaporator to turn it back to a pressurised gas, which is then warmed up back to 290-300°C causing the stored heat."
A week or two is the longest almost anybody should need to bank energy. Mostly you just need a few hours of high-efficiency storage to maintain local resiliency. Beyond, say, the 4 hours' worth cycled every night, round trip efficiency matters little.
Beyond a week, burning liquified ammonia imported from tropical solar farms wins. Probably you keep a week's worth of that on hand to burn while you wait.
There is no need for storage (beyond use for load-leveling and peak shaving) until after renewable generating capacity is overbuilt enough to charge it from. (The alternative would be to recharge storage by burning NG: You would better burn that NG and deliver the power to users instead of drawing down and then recharging storage from it.) Until then, capital is better spent building more renewable generating capacity itself, displacing more coal, than on storage.
But building the factories that will build the storage that will someday be needed should happen now, because we will need a lot, and making automated factories takes a long time. And that is happening. Some of those may end up idle as cheaper methods replace theirs, but for at least a few decades, demand will be insatiable.
It depends how much you overbuild. If you build enough to supply half your needed energy for the worst case week and 3/4 for the worst case month, 4 weeks is probably enough.
You continue building out local generating capacity until its maintenance cost less income from grid and synthetic fuel sales exceeds the cost of imported grid power and synthetic fuel imported. All the costs will be changing continuously. Generally, more generating capacity than you have will be reliably better for a long time.
After things begin to stabilize, you might decommission older installations or devote an increasing fraction of capacity to carbon sequestration.
storing the thermal energy from the compression process.
They're not storing heat. They're dumping the heat, and store liquid CO2 near ambient air temperature. Here's some analysis of CO2 liquefaction cost, from an unrelated project.[1] You can have multiple stages of compression, with heat exchangers between them to get the temperature down. How to set this up is a good homework problem in thermodynamics.
It's not clear if this is profitable, but it's a lot better than some of the other ideas. Ones such as the crane and concrete block thing, or the electric trains full of rocks on a hill thing, or the giant rock cylinder with water underneath thing.
if that were the case, how do you explain this sentence? "The heat is then extracted and stored in “bricks” made of steel shot and quartzite for later use,"?.
or did the source simply explain their process incorrectly?
The crane and block thing, by Energy Vault, is an obvious investment scam, already displaced by an equally impractical "hi-rise condo for blocks, with elevators". Probably they will pivot again to something harder to conclusively demonstrate is stupid, such as one with an orbital component. E.g., "Loft mirrors to reflect and focus sunlight onto solar farms at night".
The mine shaft things are not obvious losers, but suffer by inability to re-use the expensive part for multiple mineshafts. There are undersea methods that do better, sharing the expensive, onshore equipment among as many simple undersea units as you like.
The scheme described in TFA has the advantage that the tankage needed for an unlimited amount of storage is cheap, with only the total wattage rate in and out limited by initial investment. Tankage underground (e.g. in salt domes) could store the CO2 and the heat in the same place, without losses; earth is excellent insulator. They specifically say in TFA they are storing the heat of compression by pumping it into iron.
The Chilean project storing energy in liquified nitrogen is similar. They also say they are banking heat, even though boiling the nitrogen with ambient air on the way out, in a "warming tower", seems to me more practical.
75% round-trip efficiency is absolutely fine. Pumped hydro is not better, that way.
There is an unfortunate habit in the energy sector of promoting ideas in absurdly expensive form, just because that makes it look more "hi-tech", to be taken more seriously by investors attuned to look for that. The form of each idea actually built and used by utilities will be whichever form is cheapest, which will seem too boring for the press to pay it any attention.
Even Energy Vault abandoned the moronic crane thing. It is very easy to show that it stores only a minuscule amount of energy, and does not operate at all anywhere there is wind.
Their hi-rise condo for blocks also stores only a tiny amount of energy, and is furthermore extremely expensive.
Likely they will pivot to something else as foolish, but might use their market cap to buy out something that works. Most likely they would then ruin that.
Anyplace where you mean to use gravity storage, and all the height you can muster is expensive stuff you have to build, will be a non-starter. Lots of other things can make a scheme impractical, but one is always enough.
Pumped hydro is practical because you need only a pipe between upper and lower reservoir, but mainly because in most current uses the lower and/or upper reservoir already existed, and often enough the turbines too.
The problem with any block system is that the weights are too expensive and the storage capacity doesn't scale very well. Concrete is already too expensive to be practical.
Then there is the engineering challenge of building a crane system.
But heat loss improves as the product is scaled up(heat loss is function of surface area, whereas total heat is a function of volume, which grows quicker than surface area), so at a certain point you could make this big enough to let you store energy efficiently on a seasonal basis?
Also the same reason elephants can't have metabolisms as fast as mice, or else they would spontaneously combust.
The trade-off here is these seem to be substantially simpler and cheaper than batteries. No fancy metals, no wear cycles, no risk of spontaneous fire. In fact, the up-front environment impacts seem significantly less than that of battery storage. These are still a good solution when the power supply you're using is in excess - as is common with most natural sources (solar, wind, hydro, etc).
Lastly, it's worth remembering that not everything is competing against an "optimal" solution. This may be a _very_ viable system for infrastructure that simply sheds excess energy. Shedding of excess energy results in 0% efficiency gains. Additionally, this type of storage potentially offsets the need to run a secondary system for peak/off-cycle loads. That in itself can be a massive energy savings.
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Finally, it seems that power plants are actually terribly inefficient at converting an energy source to electric. Coal - 33%, gas - 42%, and combined cycle - 60%.
Batteries do, and will, provide grid scale power for short periods. Beyond that, they cost more than other methods. New battery chemistries might bring costs down, but it is hard to compete with tankage for cost per stored kWh.
Pumped hydro mostly just needs a hill. But building the dikes might cost more than building liquid CO2 tankage, for a given storage capacity.
It will all come down to what is cheapest, overall. That will take time to learn. If opex is cheap, a more expensive will remain equally useful as a method that turns out, eventually, to be cheaper to build.
They are already viable. This thing will displace NG turbine back-up.
Or, in volume, whatever turns out cheapest will. Zero opex will beat mined and transported NG pretty quickly once enough renewables + storage is built out.
They are only viable when paired with other systems to make up for the times when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing within spec.
A system like this makes a nice pairing, but then you need double the capacity of intermittent since when it is working it needs to not only feed the load, it also needs to feed the storage.
It's not long term storage, though, like diesel, gas, coal. Those can sit around for a really long time.
EDIT
Actually, since the system is 75% efficient, you will need more than double the intermittents.
No, they are viable right now: they are deployed right now, and are in use right now. During times that they do not produce, other methods will continue to be used. NG will be decreasingly viable as it becomes unable to compete with local storage, transmission lines, and finally imported synthetics.
Nukes will be wholly unable to compete. They will all be mothballed, even the new ones, anywhere that government has not mandated that they be kept operating, and coerced funding for that from a captive market or taxes (as now). Such coercion will become increasingly unpopular.
It is not clear whether geothermal will be able to compete. If so, and if with new technology it becomes practical in more areas, it will be in the mix with everything else. Geothermal is very unlikely ever to become as cheap as solar, but might not be displaced by imported synthetic ammonia.
There will of course be plenty of overbuild, in places. But with the transportability of synthetic fuel and grid power, that need not be anywhere close to what you would need for a wholly independent site. Long-distance transmission lines will favor overbuild where capacity factors are higher, but falling cost will favor local overbuild.
Anhydrous ammonia stored at a few atmospheres keeps indefinitely. Hydrogen stored underground keeps indefinitely.
"It was designed according to ancient ziggurat mound proportions used in votive worship. Like the mounds it collects energy and recirculates it. In this case the Dome collects the Orgone energy that escapes from the crown of the human head and pushes it back into the Medulla Oblongata for increased mental energy. It's very important that you use the foam insert...or better yet, get a plastic hardhat liner, adjust it to your head size and affix it with duct tape or Super Glue to the inside of the Dome. This allows the Dome to "float" just above the cranium and thus do its job. Unfortunately, sans foam insert or hardhat liner, the recirculation of energy WILL NOT occur."
Yep, it's a quote describing the Energy Dome hat worn by members of the visionary/weird music group Devo. It's not completely unrelated -- they do have the same name.
It's not perfect, it it's not a scam, and has a reasonable round-trip efficiency at scale big enough to be useful. This will be helpful in our transition away from liquid fossil fuels.
Because by definition, any long term storage solution will be able to sell energy and make a profit only a few number of times, and won't be able to recoup its CAPEX expenditure.
Let's say that by long term you mean 6 months (the typical period envisioned, i.e. you charge during the Summer months, and sell during the Winter months). Then you'll be able to sell energy once a year. If your system has a lifetime of 20 years, then you need the CAPEX to be only 20 times higher than the annual profit.
Let's further say you charge during Summer at zero cost, and sell during Winter at 40 cents/kWh (this is about 3 times the average cost of electricity in the US for 2021). Then the cost of this system should not be more than $8/kWh. For comparison the cost of a Tesla Powerpack is about $700 /kWh [1].
So for any system to have any hope to be "long term storage solution" it needs to be 100 times cheaper than the Tesla Powerpack.
In reality it needs to be about 1000 times cheaper, due to numerous other factors: less than 100% round-trip efficiency, the high cost of financing (driven by the significant risk of the project, which is driven by the huge uncertainty regarding future potential competing technologies, such as Hydrogen), operating and insurance costs, etc.
There is a way to solve the long term storage system. You need to solve the apparent paradox that if your system is designed to be long term, then you can't buy and sell very frequently. Here's how you solve it: you buy and sell in different markets. You buy (solar) electricity in Morocco pretty much all year long, convert it to Hydrogen, or some other form of chemical storage (ammonia, hydrogen peroxide, methanol, synfuel), and ship that to Germany, where it is converted to electricity, again all year long.
This way, you buy every single day and sell every single day. You are able to recoup your CAPEX costs, and make a handsome profit.
There are no other ways to solve the long term storage problem.
The EU knows that, and this is why it is betting so heavily on Hydrogen.
Storage beyond a week or two will not be needed, most places. But storage for between four hours' peak usage and there needs to be cheaper than batteries. That is where schemes like this will compete.
A pure storage play using does not need to be viable. Utilities will integrate generating capacity and storage to deliver on service level agreements.
But synthetic hydrogen and ammonia shipped around will be a huge market, not least because they are massively useful for other than for banking energy.
> Storage beyond a week or two will not be needed, most places.
Here's [1] the solar electricity production by month in Germany. It's about 6 times higher in the Summer compared to Winter. The situation is the same everywhere on the planet at similar latitudes. It's worse at higher latitudes. Unfortunately, a lot of the world's population lives exactly at those latitudes.
You could say that you supplement with wind, since wind does not have the same seasonality problem. But then why build solar at all? If you build solar, then you will have a winter deficit, and you will need a Summer to Winter storage solution.
You will not need a lot of local storage because if your local storage looks likely to get low, you will order a shipment of that same ammonia or hydrogen just discussed.
You install lots of solar because it is cheap and still getting cheaper faster than wind is. When you have an excess, you synthesize ammonia and hydrogen for sale. Other people will be doing that, too, but there will be insatiable demand for both. In particular, fertilizer is demanded mainly in warmer months, and farm equipment need their fuel then.
When tankage is full and generating capacity exceeds your fuel synthesis capacity, you might use the excess to capture and sequester atmospheric carbon.
If you have geology compatible with underground storage, you can put any excess hydrogen synthesized down there to draw upon later. Extracting that is just like extracting NG. Some places, it will be where NG used to be got from, for uses where you don't mind some mixed in.
Anyone who does not want to install solar and/or wind may import all their ammonia and hydrogen, from the tropics when not from local producers.
If you have a solution that includes battery for daily storage and hydrogen for long term, it's not clear where you can fit intermediate term storage. That intermediate term storage will need to be more economical than just increasing a bit the hydrogen capacity. Right now we smooth the peaks using "peaker plants", i.e. turbine engines that burn natural gas. Those can be converted to burn hydrogen. You then need the intermediate term storage to be cheaper than the cost of storing some extra hydrogen, but that seems to be extremely unlikely.
There are plenty of storage options besides batteries and hydrogen. Almost all will be cheaper than hydrogen, one way or another.
Hydrogen is expensive but has unique virtues for specific cases. E.g., liquified, it is perfect aviation fuel. It is necessary input for synthesizing ammonia and hydrocarbons, and numerous other chemicals and industrial processes. But it is expensive, difficult, and dangerous to handle, so you don't when you can avoid it.
Over the longer term tho there's a long-term trend that winter heating needs will decline while summer cooling requirements will rise (and probably skyrocket).
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadEdit: I clarified that I meant the amount of energy stored not how long the gasses themselves can be stored. "Long term energy storage", to me, should be defined as being able to discharge at max power for like a day or more, and this tech is more "medium term" storage, again in my opinion.
From the article: "many hours up to many days"
> "Long term energy storage", to me, should be defined as being able to discharge at max power for like a day or more,
"Long term money storage" should be defined as storing more than $10 000 - yes, no, or irrelevant?
Your example should be more like “a long term emergency savings is 6 months of your budget” vs. “a short term emergency savings is 2 months of your budget”
https://www.svcleanenergy.org/joint-lds-rfo/
> Energy Dome’s novel approach to long-duration energy storage dispenses with batteries altogether. Instead, the company erects enclosures that resemble tennis bubbles and fills them with carbon dioxide gas. Excess electricity can be used to pressurize the gas into liquid form, storing energy; turning the liquid back into a gas releases that energy, turning a turbine and regenerating electricity.
> As detailed in Canary Media’s previous reporting, this approach has a few advantages relative to other long-duration storage attempts:
> It uses off-the-shelf equipment from mature industrial supply chains. That means Energy Dome doesn’t need to build its own factory, a capital-intensive step that other long-duration startups needed to do. It also means Energy Dome doesn’t need to spend years on laboratory science — it just needs to prove that the equipment all works together the way it’s supposed to.
> The dome is supposed to deliver round-trip efficiency of 75 percent, meaning 75 percent of the energy that goes into the process comes back out at the end. That’s less than typical battery efficiency but a lot better than many long-duration storage contenders.
> Carbon dioxide is easier to compress and store at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure compared to other gaseous storage vehicles, like hydrogen or air.
If the net CO2 generated is reduced significantly, then it's a net good thing. CO2 is a byproduct of all sorts of industrial processes that we depend on, so I don't think they'll have a problem finding a supply.
It is different, in my opinion, to emit CO2 to create material goods that will last, and to create CO2 for itself that maybe will be vented for maintenance and will need to be refilled.
That's what the dome is for, storing the uncompressed gas. Presumably there is a much smaller metal pressure vessel for storing the liquid CO2.
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When people make up stats, they use numbers like 63% or 87%, not 75%.
But there are a lot of different costs: capex and opex cost per kWh to store energy, capex and opex cost per kW to bank energy, capex and opex cost per kW to extract energy, cost for conversion losses, cost for banked energy losses, plus extra specific costs and sometimes specific benefits. Some of those costs will change radically with time as circumstances change; cost for conversion losses of all methods will fall as top line generation gets cheaper.
This is why synthetic fuels will be so important, despite low efficiency and high capital cost: the "specific benefits" exceed those.
Operating this thing via captured CO2, and feeding hydrocarbon synthesis and carbon sequestration, might improve its viability.
It would look like a good idea only if they somehow compel their customers to buy only CO2 coming from a direct-air-capture facility.
Or even better, if they attach a small direct-air-capture device to their "bubble". (it would not need to be extremely efficient, as I understand that the CO2 is then captive of the storage [I'd add... in a normal operation mode... because we never know what can happen with incidents and that's why I push for DAC before it's too late and it's already everywhere])
(I'm assuming here that not all of their emitted CO2 is long-term stored, otherwise of course that also solves another problem)
Can we both fight for the disappearance of the chimneys, and depend on them?
At the very least, we need to be ready for the absence of these chimneys as if it could happen overnight, for the simple reason that we really need for it to happen overnight (it won't, but that's bad, and we need to keep thinking it's bad).
(I precise: I would be completely in favor of a total PSCC, it's just that I think that a partial PSCC for any chimney is a bad path)
EDIT I guess compressing to liquid, CO2 can be stable at <31 deg C at 5ATMs which is what they use. Liquid Nitrogen has to be kept very cold, even under pressure.
CO2 phase diagram: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=co2+phase+diagram
Nitrogen phase diagram: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nitrogen+phase+diagram
You can see that CO2 is way more reasonable to store liquid at ambient temps.
Insulated low-pressure tankage is cheap.
It will be interesting which will turn out more practical.
Also, I would guess that regulations mean these are built in remote locations.
storing thermal energy over long periods of time is a pretty lossy process, and that 75% efficiency number will be out the window if one tried to use this system for seasonal storage. this system fills the same space as battery storage, which it is also marketed for (over night storage for solar power).
here is a more detailed post on the matter: https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/new-co2-batte...
citing from this: "In Energy Dome’s system, carbon dioxide is compressed at a pressure of 60 bar which heats the gas to 300°C liquid. The heat is then extracted and stored in “bricks” made of steel shot and quartzite for later use, cooling down the CO2 to an ambient temperature. The gas is then condensed into liquid form and stored in carbon-steel tanks.
‘Our lithium-ion battery will have double the energy density of standard Li-ion for same price’
When electricity is required, the liquid CO2 is run through an evaporator to turn it back to a pressurised gas, which is then warmed up back to 290-300°C causing the stored heat."
Beyond a week, burning liquified ammonia imported from tropical solar farms wins. Probably you keep a week's worth of that on hand to burn while you wait.
There is no need for storage (beyond use for load-leveling and peak shaving) until after renewable generating capacity is overbuilt enough to charge it from. (The alternative would be to recharge storage by burning NG: You would better burn that NG and deliver the power to users instead of drawing down and then recharging storage from it.) Until then, capital is better spent building more renewable generating capacity itself, displacing more coal, than on storage.
But building the factories that will build the storage that will someday be needed should happen now, because we will need a lot, and making automated factories takes a long time. And that is happening. Some of those may end up idle as cheaper methods replace theirs, but for at least a few decades, demand will be insatiable.
After things begin to stabilize, you might decommission older installations or devote an increasing fraction of capacity to carbon sequestration.
They're not storing heat. They're dumping the heat, and store liquid CO2 near ambient air temperature. Here's some analysis of CO2 liquefaction cost, from an unrelated project.[1] You can have multiple stages of compression, with heat exchangers between them to get the temperature down. How to set this up is a good homework problem in thermodynamics.
It's not clear if this is profitable, but it's a lot better than some of the other ideas. Ones such as the crane and concrete block thing, or the electric trains full of rocks on a hill thing, or the giant rock cylinder with water underneath thing.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293044124_Simulatio...
or did the source simply explain their process incorrectly?
The mine shaft things are not obvious losers, but suffer by inability to re-use the expensive part for multiple mineshafts. There are undersea methods that do better, sharing the expensive, onshore equipment among as many simple undersea units as you like.
The scheme described in TFA has the advantage that the tankage needed for an unlimited amount of storage is cheap, with only the total wattage rate in and out limited by initial investment. Tankage underground (e.g. in salt domes) could store the CO2 and the heat in the same place, without losses; earth is excellent insulator. They specifically say in TFA they are storing the heat of compression by pumping it into iron.
The Chilean project storing energy in liquified nitrogen is similar. They also say they are banking heat, even though boiling the nitrogen with ambient air on the way out, in a "warming tower", seems to me more practical.
75% round-trip efficiency is absolutely fine. Pumped hydro is not better, that way.
There is an unfortunate habit in the energy sector of promoting ideas in absurdly expensive form, just because that makes it look more "hi-tech", to be taken more seriously by investors attuned to look for that. The form of each idea actually built and used by utilities will be whichever form is cheapest, which will seem too boring for the press to pay it any attention.
Their hi-rise condo for blocks also stores only a tiny amount of energy, and is furthermore extremely expensive.
Likely they will pivot to something else as foolish, but might use their market cap to buy out something that works. Most likely they would then ruin that.
Anyplace where you mean to use gravity storage, and all the height you can muster is expensive stuff you have to build, will be a non-starter. Lots of other things can make a scheme impractical, but one is always enough.
Pumped hydro is practical because you need only a pipe between upper and lower reservoir, but mainly because in most current uses the lower and/or upper reservoir already existed, and often enough the turbines too.
Then there is the engineering challenge of building a crane system.
It just doesn't get better.
Also the same reason elephants can't have metabolisms as fast as mice, or else they would spontaneously combust.
Lastly, it's worth remembering that not everything is competing against an "optimal" solution. This may be a _very_ viable system for infrastructure that simply sheds excess energy. Shedding of excess energy results in 0% efficiency gains. Additionally, this type of storage potentially offsets the need to run a secondary system for peak/off-cycle loads. That in itself can be a massive energy savings.
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Finally, it seems that power plants are actually terribly inefficient at converting an energy source to electric. Coal - 33%, gas - 42%, and combined cycle - 60%.
http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-sources/fossil-fuels....
I mean, the process is simple, clean, does not require special materials, provides lots of jobs and really seems long term.
The holy grail of energy storage will ultimately be a similar form (compressed gas, fuel generated with solar power, heat reservoirs, etc).
No matter how much you root for batteries, they will not provide grid scale power.
Many places don't have a lower and higher reservior needed for pumped hydro. This can be sited almost anywhere.
It will all come down to what is cheapest, overall. That will take time to learn. If opex is cheap, a more expensive will remain equally useful as a method that turns out, eventually, to be cheaper to build.
Hydraulic hybrid vehicles recapture 75% to 80% of braking energy for reuse, which compares very favorably to electric batteries.
Something like this paired with intermittent sources like solar and wind could make them viable.
Or, in volume, whatever turns out cheapest will. Zero opex will beat mined and transported NG pretty quickly once enough renewables + storage is built out.
A system like this makes a nice pairing, but then you need double the capacity of intermittent since when it is working it needs to not only feed the load, it also needs to feed the storage.
It's not long term storage, though, like diesel, gas, coal. Those can sit around for a really long time.
EDIT
Actually, since the system is 75% efficient, you will need more than double the intermittents.
Nukes will be wholly unable to compete. They will all be mothballed, even the new ones, anywhere that government has not mandated that they be kept operating, and coerced funding for that from a captive market or taxes (as now). Such coercion will become increasingly unpopular.
It is not clear whether geothermal will be able to compete. If so, and if with new technology it becomes practical in more areas, it will be in the mix with everything else. Geothermal is very unlikely ever to become as cheap as solar, but might not be displaced by imported synthetic ammonia.
There will of course be plenty of overbuild, in places. But with the transportability of synthetic fuel and grid power, that need not be anywhere close to what you would need for a wholly independent site. Long-distance transmission lines will favor overbuild where capacity factors are higher, but falling cost will favor local overbuild.
Anhydrous ammonia stored at a few atmospheres keeps indefinitely. Hydrogen stored underground keeps indefinitely.
https://weburbanist.com/2013/06/30/ziggurat-hat-deconstructi...
The headwear and the energy storage company appear completely unrelated aside from the name chosen.
Because by definition, any long term storage solution will be able to sell energy and make a profit only a few number of times, and won't be able to recoup its CAPEX expenditure.
Let's say that by long term you mean 6 months (the typical period envisioned, i.e. you charge during the Summer months, and sell during the Winter months). Then you'll be able to sell energy once a year. If your system has a lifetime of 20 years, then you need the CAPEX to be only 20 times higher than the annual profit.
Let's further say you charge during Summer at zero cost, and sell during Winter at 40 cents/kWh (this is about 3 times the average cost of electricity in the US for 2021). Then the cost of this system should not be more than $8/kWh. For comparison the cost of a Tesla Powerpack is about $700 /kWh [1].
So for any system to have any hope to be "long term storage solution" it needs to be 100 times cheaper than the Tesla Powerpack.
In reality it needs to be about 1000 times cheaper, due to numerous other factors: less than 100% round-trip efficiency, the high cost of financing (driven by the significant risk of the project, which is driven by the huge uncertainty regarding future potential competing technologies, such as Hydrogen), operating and insurance costs, etc.
There is a way to solve the long term storage system. You need to solve the apparent paradox that if your system is designed to be long term, then you can't buy and sell very frequently. Here's how you solve it: you buy and sell in different markets. You buy (solar) electricity in Morocco pretty much all year long, convert it to Hydrogen, or some other form of chemical storage (ammonia, hydrogen peroxide, methanol, synfuel), and ship that to Germany, where it is converted to electricity, again all year long.
This way, you buy every single day and sell every single day. You are able to recoup your CAPEX costs, and make a handsome profit.
There are no other ways to solve the long term storage problem.
The EU knows that, and this is why it is betting so heavily on Hydrogen.
[1] https://electrek.co/2020/03/31/tesla-powerpack-price-commerc...
A pure storage play using does not need to be viable. Utilities will integrate generating capacity and storage to deliver on service level agreements.
But synthetic hydrogen and ammonia shipped around will be a huge market, not least because they are massively useful for other than for banking energy.
Here's [1] the solar electricity production by month in Germany. It's about 6 times higher in the Summer compared to Winter. The situation is the same everywhere on the planet at similar latitudes. It's worse at higher latitudes. Unfortunately, a lot of the world's population lives exactly at those latitudes.
You could say that you supplement with wind, since wind does not have the same seasonality problem. But then why build solar at all? If you build solar, then you will have a winter deficit, and you will need a Summer to Winter storage solution.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-gener...
You install lots of solar because it is cheap and still getting cheaper faster than wind is. When you have an excess, you synthesize ammonia and hydrogen for sale. Other people will be doing that, too, but there will be insatiable demand for both. In particular, fertilizer is demanded mainly in warmer months, and farm equipment need their fuel then.
When tankage is full and generating capacity exceeds your fuel synthesis capacity, you might use the excess to capture and sequester atmospheric carbon.
If you have geology compatible with underground storage, you can put any excess hydrogen synthesized down there to draw upon later. Extracting that is just like extracting NG. Some places, it will be where NG used to be got from, for uses where you don't mind some mixed in.
Anyone who does not want to install solar and/or wind may import all their ammonia and hydrogen, from the tropics when not from local producers.
Hydrogen is expensive but has unique virtues for specific cases. E.g., liquified, it is perfect aviation fuel. It is necessary input for synthesizing ammonia and hydrocarbons, and numerous other chemicals and industrial processes. But it is expensive, difficult, and dangerous to handle, so you don't when you can avoid it.