I've been surprised by the development honestly. 15 years ago I assumed heavy industry and automotive would make the big decisions about what energy storage tech we go with and the rest of the economy would follow suit and start working with either hydrogen fuels cells, supercapacitors, kinetic storage, or chemical batteries based on the R&D they did.
Instead it's been consumer electronics that led the way and heavy industry is stuck with chemical batteries because that's what worked best on an MP3 player.
http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-nex...
1 it would require building out entirely new infrastructure, running up against severe NIMBYism at this point. It's incredibly hard to even build new power lines right now. Try a highly combustible, very leaky gas.
2 it's far cheaper to just strip H2 from natural gas, which releases carbon (unless you capture it, increasing cost), so not carbon free unless you force using electrolysis from renewable power sources
3 Electrolysis efficiency is ~70%, fuel cell efficiency is ~60%, so round trip efficiency is <50%. Much more waste than a battery (~80%). You're both using essentially the same electricity to create the power, but hydrogen is wasting more of it, so will necessarily be more expensive
4 in vehicles, fuel cells end up charging the battery toi power the motor anyway, so the energy loss from the battery is a wash
The one thing they have is range and speed to refuel, but as batteries get cheaper and better that will be minimized before H2 gets big enough to take over.
There's lots of big companies with smart people who are still pushing for this so hopefully they know what they are doing (mostly in Japan it seems)
The nuclear waste problem seems to be not so severe in the age where everything is tracked every second; and it doesn't need to be solved completely - just raise the cost of (illegal) waste extraction to be considerably higher than getting it from alternative sources, and you're set.
Looking on the bright side, anything that drives Li efficiency/density research is probably a very good thing.
So is a lithium battery explosion. So is a gasoline explosion. So is a flour mill explosion. So is a wind turbine explosion.
Energy is energy, and losing control of energy is never great, no matter where it comes from. So while I catch your meaning, it might be better to phrase it with respect to how controllable that energy is.
From what I know of flywheel storage, the problem mostly comes down to keeping the wheel from coming apart, and containing it when it does. The nice thing about using flywheels for grid storage is that you can bury them and make them large. The earth contains your explosion risk and the lack of jostling means that your bearings don't need to take as much stress and limits that failure risk.
I thought the trend in flywheels was magnetic suspension and removing mechanical linkages? Admittedly I haven't kept up.
What gives you that impression? Seems to me that it explodes if you contain it, and if you don't contain it, it can spout jets of thermal energy at virtually any angle. With flywheels you need to arrest it in bulk heavy objects that don't tend to sustain fire. That seems a lot simpler to me.
The bigger problems with flywheels are cost of manufacture and (depending on the technology used) efficiency for overnight storage.
> I thought the trend in flywheels was magnetic suspension and removing mechanical linkages? Admittedly I haven't kept up.
IIRC flywheels with limited motion gimbals (to reduce the tolerances on the wheel) are becoming more popular, still magnetic bearings.
Insulation is cheap, effective, and very compact. And it's easy to transfer heat quickly, also (either via injecting lots of cold extinguisher or flush lots of hot oxidizing gas)?
Cool, thanks for the update on flywheels. I ... am not trying to create a false dilemna, here. Fuel cells for stranded methane deposits are great. Flywheels have outstanding responsiveness and energy density. Li / compressed air / pumped water et al scale well. They all fit into a more resilient grid storage strategy that permits a transition to periodic sources of input from non-renewable base load.
And anyway, you tried to be too clever. I said "non-renewable" and not "carbon free" just to avoid this conversation. Unless you can start synthesizing utility grade quantities of well-behaved fissile material at a net energy surplus then it's not renewable even if we have decades/centuries of supply.
Someday, even the Sun will run out of fuel. In the long run, we are all dead - unless someone figures out how to reverse entropy.
edit: Love reading that short story, it somehow never gets old.
Humans are plenty smart and the people of tomorrow will be better equipped to solve tomorrow's problems.
It's not even a matter of "ripping off a band aid" and paneling up the planet - solar panels aren't going to last hundreds of years either, we will be lucky to get 30 years out of them. Can we make more, sure, but we could also do nuclear and then make solar panels in 500 years when we're running out of fuel.
The biggest problems are that we need to come up with the political will to reprocess waste (extracting additional usable fuel and compacting the amount of true waste that needs to be disposed of) and then dispose of it in a proper repository rather than just letting it sit around on-site indefinitely Fukushima-style.
Which is itself a good thermal-runaway damper, to speak to the second sentence of your second paragraph.
Having witnesses a corn silo explosion, I was unprepared for the ferocity of that ignition.
>So is a wind turbine explosion
Off to YouTube...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornslet_wind-turbine_collapse
Assuming the flywheel keeps its integrity it's much harder to predict the "blast radius" of where that thing is going to go.
Not AFAIK for the last, though precessional torque bearing load is a nontrivial consideration.
Wikipedia claims flywheel loss rate circa 2013 of 5% per day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system
That compares to recent estimates of Tesla li-ion loss rates at under 5% per month -- 0.16% per day.
Amber Kinetics is one company building fixed flywheel storage products. http://amberkinetics.com/
They have one 32 kWh, 5-ton, 98% steel flywheel installation on Oahu; pictures here: http://amberkinetics.com/hawaiian-electric-and-amber-kinetic...
Angular momentum in 100 kWh - multi MWh rotational systems is large.
No, they're not all the same.
Compressed air, flywheel, flour mill - very dramatic events.
Lithium battery - much more mild, typically.
Gasoline - it depends.
Any tech that falls outside of the growth curve seems to run into issues with production or cost that delay it until it fits under the curve. Something cheaper and easier gets picked first.
The first modern EVs had lead acid batteries. More sophisticated than your starter battery, sure, but lead acid all the same. Which is why Tesla was a big deal. We talked about LiPo for something like fifteen years before it showed up in consumer electronics, and then they started catching on fire.
All of this stuff is painfully slow. The big story in EVs is how crazy efficient the motors can get. A company I used to follow (whose name is escaping me now) had a motor that was 95% efficient in its sweet spot. They had scaled up the design to 100 HP.
The batteries would be called Nickel-Carbon or something like that rather than Lithium-anything, if they were named by the amounts or costs of materials in them.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/its-big-and-...
The big advantage there is independent scaling: peak discharge is tied to the total membrane area / pumping capability while capacity is tied to the amount of reactants that can be stored.
Not the best on technical merits alone, but good enough along with a massive force of investment and wide adoption.
I've noticed this with steel products and plastics.
Brings up one advantage batteries have, they are small. That you need to make a trillion of them works directly towards the cost being a small percentage over material and energy inputs.
So is keeping batteries up to date. Many a failure has been attributed to stuff like:
- batteries gone bad without anyone noticing over the years (lack of acid, crystallization, loose contacts, dust in cooling components, ...)
- switch-over between grid and battery inverters fails somewhere
- some part of the inverters fail when they're idling for years and then have to go into full load suddenly
A huge flywheel only needs bearing lubrication, that's it.
Batteries can and indeed do go bad without warning, but current sophisticated UPS monitoring systems are able to detect failures, track battery ages and raise alerts (whether anyone actually acts on those alerts or not is another matter...). I've also found that lead-acid batteries last longest as long as there is some amount of power continuously trickling through them - I have an APC UPS at home with its original batteries from 2010, and they still provide ~1h of runtime at 20% load. And with most DC-grade UPSen, batteries can be replaced in situ without powering the device or any connected equipment off.
Or would it just make all of the other technologies much more efficient?
On the other hand, used Li-ion from electric vehicles could be so widely available that they also win for stationary storage.
Interesting times.
It reminds me a lot of when people pushed plastic for everything in order to save the trees and reduce paper consumption. Some 40 years later, we're now trying to get off plastic and dealing with massive environmental issues surrounding nearly every kind of plastic.
We have. We've painstakingly analysed the energy and material inputs and the pollution outputs of the entire lifecycle of a lithium battery pack. After considering all these factors, lithium batteries remain an attractive energy storage option.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48768-7_...
>the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness
Recycling lithium battery packs is complex and hazardous, but no more so than a multitude of other industrial processes. There is already substantial recycling capacity, thanks in part to the EU's WEEE directive. Using existing technologies, only 1% of the pack mass goes to landfill. We can't yet recover all of the lithium in a useful form, but we can recover most of the cobalt.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111899197...
Then cars came along and they were all like "Yay! The pollution problem is solved!"
I too wonder what the impact of so many lithium batteries is going to be. I mean, I know they are saying that they are extremely recyclable, and I hope that's true. But I wonder what the unintended consequences of this switch is going to be.
Maybe it's just me, but not a fan of bare links unless the URL is descriptive.
Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process. It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium from slag, or competitive for the OEMs to buy at higher price points from recycling companies. Though lithium is 100% recyclable, currently, recycled lithium reports to the slag and is currently used for non-automotive purposes, such as construction, or sold in the open-markets. However, with the increasing number of EVs entering the market in the future and with a significant supply crunch, recycling is expected to be an important factor for consideration in effective material supply for battery production.
Closed loop recycling, where the recycled materials are sold back to OEMs, is likely to help against potential price fluctuation of metals or compounds. EV battery recycling is expected to play a significant part of the value chain by 2016 when large quantities of EV batteries will come through the waste stream for recycling.
https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...
As someone who follows the energy space closely, Lithium ion batteries now have so much momentum and $$$ pumped into them via R&D work, it's going to be hard for competing energy storage technologies to catch up. Flywheel and hydrogen fuel-cell also often come up but I think we're at a point now where batteries are going to take off simply because of their wide area of applicability. With that economy of scale costs will drive down and even more research and $$$ will flow.