The U.S. has a power diet of about 3×1012 W, or 3 TW. If in fact we need “65,000 square kilometers of PV panel” has anyone (winking at you) ever measured the area of southern exposure roof tops on home across America? It is a non starter in any application that does not require a high graveametric energy density. Interesting look at this. Tom – thanks for your response – and also for your many fine articles that have been both informative and a pleasure to read. In addition, Canada and Alaska have immense untapped hydro potential. If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. Click image for the largest view. Really, we’re talking tens of trillions. It is worth also comparing to the area of a photovoltaic system providing the 2 TW of average power. The nominal voltage of the generator used in the pumped hydro system. Thanks for another excellent article. Replacing current electricity demands with 100% nuclear does not address oil depletion, for instance. ), at an average efficiency of 30%, delivering 0.6 TW of useful work in the bargain. This is the same amount of tubular excavation as a subway tunnel that would criss-cross the U.S. about 250 times, or go three times the distance to the Moon. Very educational applied physics. Hydro-Québec’s 26 large reservoirs can store up to 170 TWh of energy (one year’s worth of electricity). Their cores do sour the same as the reactors we currently use so peak power is difficult but for a system it is not an issue that can not be managed. For the remaining six ‘days’ or so, use a lower efficiency chemical fuel storage system where the low efficiency costs little because it is seldom used, nor are concerned with depleting a finite resource if the fuel is produced by solar or other renewable sources. For many pumped hydro systems, the Idealized Storage Model is the most applicable in HOMER. French do ramp the power of their NPPs up and down and that is the reason why their capacity factors are lower than in US, for example. A more reasonable scenario is to meet all US electricity needs with 450 GW of nuclear, storing the excess at night in pumped storage and using it during the day. If that worked, would we re-enter the stone age? There are some further considerations on your findings on which I’d be glad of your thoughts. They can run on our current nuclear wastes plus thorium which is rather plentiful and their wastes products do not last anywhere as long. I haven’t seen methane as a means of storing energy from electricity mentioned here. This is irrespective of the actual need for products and services, so a lot of “demand” must be artificially created. The author is not interested in realistic solutions – which do exist. Hi Tom, I am convinced that with a highly distributed, “all of the above” approach to both generation and storage, we can take some big steps in the right direction. Each dam then contains as much concrete as exists in the Three Gorges and Grand Coulee dams combined! There is plenty of gravel in the world, it occupies a fraction of the space of a pumped storage system and it can be put anywhere. More typically, flow rates are measured in the 1000 m³/s range, so that our 100 m dam would produce 1 GW at this scale. I say mountains because we need a significant height differential for pumped storage to make much sense. The other 1 TW is direct heat (lots of this in industrial process heat), and electricity from nuclear and hydro sources. Experience tells me that these comments will launch a full-on debate on nuclear pros/cons. http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/05/pumped-hydro-system-cost/#comment-86108. “Wind takes substantially more land (about 50 times) than solar, so the pumped storage lakes would not rival the area dedicated to wind farms.”, Though OTOH wind is far lower impact on the land it uses than anything else; you can still use the land as farmland or preserve. wouldn´t be large for amounts of energy typically requiring to be stored, and evaporation would help you with pumping the water back. Their special feature: They are an energy store and a hydroelectric power plant in one. Right now, synthetic chemical storage is being discounted due to low efficiency of conversion (I believe 25% was quoted above as an optimistic estimate). volume flow (m 3 /s) head (m) The theoretically power available from falling water can be expressed as . Resulting in a price proportional to 1/r², this means, you can build infinit cheap storage as low as 1$/kWh! The largest pumped hydro installation in the U.S. (in terms of energy, not power) is at Raccoon Mountain, in Tennessee. I wonder what would be the energy cost of draining rocks instead of building dams. [shortened by moderator; full comment visible here]. I guess the next topic should/could be doing the math on large scale compressed air/gas storage. this turbine has the benefit of being small and (hopefully) cheap, but you can get a normal turbine for about $10,000. I hope You write articles on other methods of storing energy. I owe much of my air-conditioned comfort as a kid to this facility. From a math standpoint, does anyone have an idea what percentage of power would actually be considered tier 1 and tier 3? Total water volume needed just follows the inverse height of the dams. But our pretexts are different. But as the lakes drain, the surface area shrinks, so that my ten meter estimate is too low. (The NH3 truck is a mild steel shell, the liquid hydrogen truck has a cryogenic rated inner vessel, superinsulation, and an outer shell, thus cutting way down on the liquid payload rate). So if we’re talking about 4hours of storage instead of a week, this can actually make a difference. And, when you start thinking at that scale, you realize that you really don’t need to worry much about local cloud cover or calm conditions. A Pumped Hydro System builds potential energy by storing water in a reservoir at a certain height when there is excess energy. Pumped-hydro is a mature technology and is generally the least cost option for large scale energy storage. At least we know for sure they DO smoke weed in Amsterdam…. Step three is to figure out the storage mechanisms. (Varies slowly with the latter option, but effectively flows without interruption). You are successfully demonstrating how doable some schemes are. I appreciate all the work that has gone into this estimate, but I think this report evaluates pumped storage for a use regime that is not currently economical and will likely never be economic. Navigation: Design > Components Tab > Storage. The scale of fossil fuel replacement is so daunting that we very quickly get into trouble when putting numbers to proposed solutions. I got flak for this choice, but I use it again here because A) it is not all that unreasonable, B) it allows side-by-side comparison to the national battery calculation, and C) you’ll see it does not make or break the case: even one day of storage is super-hard. Might it not be better to generate when needed rather than store. The U.S. estimated resources (12% of world total) is only twice this in ore, and half this in actual iron content. The problem with chemical storage, is that it requires TWO energy conversions: first converting electrical energy to chemical energy (synthesizing ammonia or some other combustible); and then converting the combustible back into electricity when needed, using turbines or something similar. That’s more than 3,300 times the global cement output in 2010. Step one would be to cut the problem down to size. We have a supply-based grid now because fossil-fuel powered generating station worked well with that model. The first step is always to assess the potential of a solution relative to the full-scale demand. David MacKay is a hero to me. Hoped-for cost $1/watt ($1000/kW) for 4h storage (all this is on the video linked above). http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/energy-futurist/crowdsourcing-the-energy-revolution/192?tag=content;roto-fd-feature, “Second, the town develops local storage. I can already hear people howling that this isn’t acceptable because, ah, um, because it’s different than the way things are now. That approach isn’t prescriptive, it’s just a useful way of estimating a given technology’s capacity within an order of magnitude. Pumped Hydro Storage System Interpretation. IHA estimates that pumped storage hydropower (PSH) projects now store up to … Vres is the volume of the reservoir in cubic meters. To reverse those is effectively begging the question, and will sharply limit the persuasive power of your argument for people who do not already agree with it. Self-malleable. I did a rough calculation a while ago and came out with about $1/W for a 12 hour system. Nuclear is a good stable baseline, but can’t follow demand fluctuations and does not represent a storage solution for the renewables that we will no doubt continue to incorporate. Nuclear power plants are already consuming more uranium/year then what can be mined. The following image and table contain information about the nominal voltage, nominal capacity, and maximum charge and discharge current of the idealized storage. Add local farmer’s markets and industries and you’ve just about made the transition to a post-oil world. First – Build super-insulated, tight homes that use much less energy. You can of course just ignore the whole section about the concrete… I work at a pump hydro called Blenheim Gilboa in the Catskills region of New York. I have a 300 foot elevation difference on my rural property. Currently Japan is the worldwide leader but China expands quickly and expected to surpass Japan in 2018. )than land based pumped storage and your volume scales well with wall circumference, but a massive initial investment. The rated power of the project needs to be available 95% of the time to get funded. Ammonia and hydrogen synthesis can be used almost anywhere. But the cost of getting it into space is many many orders of magnitude greater (and you’ve got to maintain it). Given that the goal is a reliable energy supply with very high carbon efficiency, and given that pumped-hydro is easily the cheapest energy storage option currently available, the carbon debt of the immense 250m facility you posit warrants evaluation, particularly given its economies of scale. My take-away: a global grid is technically and financially feasible (just). if u assume something like 1500m or so u drastically alter the issue As the height scale is X^4 that minimizes our requirement by a factor of 81. Lake Superior offers excellant potential for about 75% of its shoreline -from Sault St Marie north all the way back to near Marquette, Mich. And you could also do more with the Michigan sand dunesalong Lake Michigan. I know that (in theory) power from renewable energy could be converted into chemical storage. My sense is that this still falls far short of what we would really need to preserve our current activities in a renewable infrastructure (which has to ultimately pick up the other 60% of energy). Using the volume reported behind each dam, I find that draining all reservoirs over a 7-day period delivers a power of 500 GW. For a dam serving the energy storage needs of just 600MW of Wind & PV plant even the latter period, in addition to the plants’ own payback periods, appears wholly untenable given the urgency of cutting fossil fuel emissions. This becomes more significant where there is less topographic relief and we can not get the large head differences we’d like. The result is that one 500 m dam replaces 16 250 m dams, while taking only half the total amount of concrete. This indeed is what reverability means. Divide by 3.6 x 106 to convert to kWh. Concept Study Knowledge sharing report 2 April 2018 Contents 1.0 Executive summary 5 2.0 Introduction 8 2.1 Purpose of this report 8 2.2 Glossary 9 3.0 Pumped Hydro Energy Storage 10 3.1 Description of asset … Enclosed is our final report discussing various aspects of pumped storage hydro development and integration with wind energy in the Pacific Northwest. Some parts of the country are not well suited for PH (Great Plains, for example), but there is lots of wind and not many people there. That logic assumes the upper lake is drained *once* and the plant mothballed. The most local you can get is your own home. I have seen the 50% exploited number in a few places now. I shied away from the 500 m mega project, you ran the other way! The scenario here focuses on the supply side, but what if we looked at it as a demand side problem? http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/11/13/idINIndia-60496820111113. The nominal voltage of the generator used in the pumped hydro system. But interestingly, the total volume (and therefore energy) required for concrete only depends on the hollow floor slope divided by the height of the dam. Divide all my scale numbers by 7 if you wish that I had used one day of storage, for instance. Here is where I think pumped hydro may work in many areas. I look forward to your evaluation of the other energy supply options, and would hope that, this being a critically global issue, you’d consider options’ merits including their applicability to the resources of simple developing societies that are currently increasing their fossil fuel dependency. This limits it to rockets and related uses. We need a water volume of 88 cubic km, which is 8 times smaller than our 250 meter dams require, or 5 times smaller than the 10,000 Raccoon Mountain installations. – heating can easily be done by methan (about 50% of all homes over here are heated with natural gas) Meanwhile alternative chemical storage sources like energy density king hydrogen could be gradually brought up to scale. I once calculated that I’d need a chunk of concrete the size of my two-car detached garage, lifted to a height of 130 feet to supply reliable power to my house from the wind and solar resources available. Scaling therefore favors the big projects over the dinky. What scale would this amount of storage require if we did a pumped-hydro scheme? You can store up one quarter or so of our pumped hydro needs this way -minimal concrete neededacreage needed, adjacent to ocean water. You get a multiplier from the density, as you point out, and also might find it a lot easier to find suitable sites. Stone doesn’t float, so if the piston doesn’t seal perfectly, you end up pushing a ring of water upwards. Their wealth and power is premised on treating energy demand as a non-issue. Our traditional hydro capacity could not be scaled up by even a factor of two—since the premier river sites have been plucked already. The Okinawa Yanbaru Seawater Pumped Storage Power Station (Japan) was commissioned in 1999. Now take a look at this for a change: http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/. I have renewables for all our current energy needs: thus the “mixing” of electricity with total energy—I’m looking to the larger problem. 3) Tier 1: Critical Energy Use. IF pumped storage could meet the reserve capacity needs of a 10% reliance on PV & Wind (big IF) that implies the need of 90% being met by the four scaleable baseload sustainable energies above (with minor contributions from Micro-hydro, etc). If extremely low activity is occuring, we cut tier 2. Minor ommission. That was the promise of thin film PV. Pumped-storage hydropower from Norwegian water reservoirs can secure Europe's power supply in the future. Surely tidal power offers a huge potential source of energy from flowing water, without all the expense and problems of building massive dams? So the cost (in 1985 $) is about $60/kWh. “Tom presented a thought experiment to determine if just one storage technology, pumped hydro, could support the entirety of US energy demand if supplied by renewables. Also, in any compressed solution, charging slowly enough prevents heat-up-loss from being a serious loss. You should study the history of why ammonia was dropped from use as those reasons are still relevant even more so if one thinks about shipping the stuff in quantity around the world. [22][2] 1. (as a note, politically it is far easier to build supply side solutions, but lets continue on the “can it be done” model). We will still need all the hydro we got and some PV farms in the desert and wind farms in the midwest. Fissionable material is also a finite non-renewable resource. And then when activity is so critically low that tier 1 is affected….we go to the batteries. b. Now combine that with the -33F atmospheric pressure liquid ammonia tanks.. and you’ve got a *seasonal* wind energy storage mechanism. So those rivers are—for all intents and purposes—fully exploited. And a much expanded pumped storage (say x10 existing to x20 existing) is very doable and very valuable in matching daily supply with daily demand. And this just gets us to 1% of our need (or 7% if you still bristle at a 7-day battery). This provides a simple cost estimate of wind power with PHES compared with nuclear. I think only after I have defined the box we’re in will I have the foundation to start talking about ways out of the box, or redefining our box (and no, the box I picture is not a dank cave). By having homeowners energy self-sufficient, brownouts and blackouts become an historical footnote. Leaving a waste product far more scarier than CO2…. Not a solution to the problems of liquid fuels for transportation or steam for electricity, which together I believe account for about two thirds of our energy use in the wealthy industrialized nations. That’s the difficulty with energy storage. You mention losses in stored hydro energy is evaporation. Some queries regarding people getting excited over wind and PV having potential to supply the full power requirement, and these options’ nearing cost parity with fossil supply –. Two-thirds of this feeds heat engines (power plants, cars, etc. The efficient methods (like batteries, pumped storage, and flywheels) retrieve 90% of the energy, but are very limited in terms of how much energy they can store. I think you’re an outlier saying that storage will not be necessary for a renewable future. They are distinctly not very bowl-like. (however, you could use the same tower for the turbine and to hoist the counterweight…). Pumped storage units can be incorporated into natural lakes, rivers, or reservoirs, as an open loop system, or it can be constructed independent of existing natural features, as a closed-loop system, with fewer environmental impacts. The advantages in being in space are energy generation factors of perhaps 2-5 at most I guess. For scale, we currently have 24 hydroelectric installations in the U.S. rated at > 600 MW capacity. silver, lead, and thorium. The company is just prototyping now, proposing commercial systems in 2014. those days. Someone else can do the math if they like. And if you personally need power any time regardless of weather, there are always lead-acid batteries. Call it $100/kWh in today’s dollars. A survey of dam construction suggests that the base thickness is approximately 65–90% the height of the dam. Owners without a handy water head could use a grid-tied system (or compressed air or something else) to store their excess. Barring drought this might make more sense. Work is defined as force times distance, so lifting an object of mass m a height h results in an energy (work) investment of mgh. Currently the grid is demand-based in the sense that users demand power from the grid, at any time and in any amount, and the generating infrastructure does whatever is necessary to meet that demand. But it’s far more daunting than almost anyone realizes. (Note in particular the reviewer’s comments at the end of the article.). I’ll have to dedicated a post to nuclear sometime soon. It has not worked out so far but it may be possible with three layer films. Tom – A custom-made super-grid cuts, but doesn’t remove, the need for a weeks-worth of reserve power capacity, which pumped storage evidently cannot get near providing, even in the mountainous USA. See my response to J Anthony below, which addresses this concept. This being so, carbon efficient energy supply appears a secondary concern compared to the priority of achieving the treaty. Pumped storage hydropower is the world's largest battery technology, accounting for over 94 per cent of installed energy storage capacity, well ahead of lithium-ion and other battery types. http://www.eureka.gme.usherbrooke.ca/memslab/docs/PowerMEMS-Rankine-Review-paper-final.pdf. But what will continue? You have 100% nuclear for electricity only. Could you write an article about the sustainability of nuclear power? Each weight is 210,000 tons, which I assume to be half concrete and half iron ore by mass. Round trip efficiency of 72% to 80%. The logic of your proposal – that extant coal-plant capacity equal to the entire output of Wind and PV should be maintained as back-up for their intermittency – seems rather perverse. I guess i question the total size, requirements based on your 500m assumption. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CujxJFXwOns For instance, the U.S. hydroelectric plants produce about 270 billion kWh each year, which is only 40% what would be delivered if all dams ran at 100% capacity all year round. Still a factor of 200 off. ps. My company owns dams. Then use the heat pump in reverse as a heat engine to recover the heat and generate electricity. This is because known storage media such as batteries, pumped storage, gravity storage or compressed air have very different prices and efficiencies. I have not seen this 3% figure, but I strongly suspect that the number would not apply to large dams (large head, large flow). Pumped-Hydro Energy Storage – Tantangara-Blowering Cost Estimate. Generators are not being added because this opens licensing proceedings and environmentalists have successfully demonized hydro to the point that dams are being removed. However, this approach could be used for storage at some island locations that couldn’t be part of a larger grid and don’t have the land area for pumped water storage. To first approximation, we can imagine mountains as lumps. We already generate something close to 50% of our power with nuclear in some areas of the country. Instead of fussing over topographical maps, I am using the simple “hollow” model informed by my time in the mountains and staring at relief maps. No one would build a facility in the way you describe. Concrete is safer, though. So, naturally, broader shallower lakes will be more evident from space. Well bad new: there is no doubt that in the near future things are going to be very different than they are now; the only question is about the nature of the difference. Where the costs arise. I hear that the hard part of building the cavern is just drilling through the cap rock. http://www.slideshare.net/amenning/. Calculates the power of a hydroelectric turbine from height and volumetric flow rate. If anyone knows of a place where the discussion focuses on sociological aspects of our energy future, fire off a comment and I’ll post (or possibly consolidate) links here. Checkout GravityPower.net they are boring holes for a pumped storage solution with a smaller footprint. If you give up too much height, you run out of natural walls and vertical relief, demanding a very large flooded area to catch the water. A company that is developing this technology claim a 70%+ operating efficiency. We have a *seasonal* electrical energy storage mechanism in which the storage has *already* been deployed across the upper midwest agricultural belt.
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