There is a bit of work going on in the large storage department....

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acorn

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22/02/18

12:28

Post #: 31255072
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Originally posted by suryo ↑

Yes, storage is definitely the key to harnessing intermittent sources and shifting loads, and you are on to something with the use of spare "standing" battery capacity to contribute to this end and reduce the cost.

The problem I see with pumped hydro are the mechanical losses and big $$ involved butI am sure there are some smaller applications where it would be suitable.

Next best thing to storage would be to have a generation system with enough latency to smooth out the bumps. Kind of like a low-pass filter. The obvious one for this would be solar thermal. Can't see how it could be done with wind or PV.

If we can slow down or shift the heat/cool cycles then it should be possible to achieve a fairly stable base load. Don't know exactly what the engineering solution would be but making the collector big enough might be one approach, another could be to heat exchange it into some big thermal mass e.g. underground rock.

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There is a bit of work going on in the large storage department. Here's an example :

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/07/18/worlds-biggest-grid-scale-battery-will-german-salt-mine/

There is also experimentation going on with compressed air in everything from balloons under water to unused ex underground coal mines . In the end whatever works about to be the cheapest on a large scale will be the winner I guess .

Getting back to standing storage because of evs , I previously questioned my own calculations but I have rechecked them since . It seems to me that after a few years of a 100% electric car fleet , whenever that is , the storage available will be ridiculously big . On top of that it appears that ev batteries have a second life as stationary storage where they retain around 80% of their capacity .

I reckon that after a decade or so of electric vehicles on the mass market we may not need to build any large commercial energy storage as we will have a huge excess of distributed stationary storage in both cars and houses .

The numbers are off the charts.
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