Groundbreaking technology stores wind power in salt caverns
In the Lloydminster area, a Calgary company is ready to carve out large underground salt caverns to store excess wind energy — the first use of the technology in Canada.
Rocky Mountain Power president Jan van Egteren says the storage sites could be ready in five years.
Salt caverns have been used to store natural gas for years, but only two other projects in North America are using them for compressed air that is turned into electricity.
The caverns are carved out by pumping water deep down to dissolve the underground salt layer peculiar to the Lloydminster area.
Excess wind electricity would be used to pump compressed air into caverns about the size of a 60-storey building. The salt walls allow very little to escape. Then, when the wind dies, the compressed air is released and used to turn a generator to make electricity.
The cavern could store enough compressed air to provide electricity for five days to a city the size of Red Deer, says van Egteren.
“It could really help stabilize the grid by taking off power when the wind is really blowing.”
The Fuel Cell Industry Review 2014
The Fuel Cell Industry Review 2014 offers data and analysis by region, application, and fuel cell type, and includes objective commentary on key events in the industry over the past year.
Toyota Launches the Mirai Fuel Cell Electric Car
ITM Power, the energy storage and clean fuel company, is pleased to note that the world's largest carmaker, Toyota, announced that it will begin selling fuel-cell electric cars in Japan on 15 December, 2014, and in the US and Europe in mid-2015.
The Business Case for Fuel Cells 2014: Powering the Bottom Line for Business and Communities
From high efficiency to scalability, fuel cells provide a distinct advantage over incumbent energy generation technologies, which is why top companies, governments, and the military are adopting fuel cells for everyday use.
Siemens developing thermal energy storage system
Siemens is developing a system of storing thermal energy in rocks with the aim of using it to harness excess power from wind turbines.
A spokesperson told Windpower Monthly that the project is in the early stages of development and there is no specific timescale for the construction of a prototype of the system.
He said the system would be scaleable for use on site at different projects.
The company was unwilling to reveal specific technical details about the process, but said it relied on established technology.
The storage of heat in rocks has been used as a method of energy retention for some time. But Siemens' system will transform the stored thermal energy back into electricity rather than use it for heating.
This would be done in a "conventional manner" the spokesperson said. The captured heat would be used to create steam to generate electricity through steam turbines.
How Solar is Going Mainstream (Batteries!)
The Enphase system intelligently integrates the critical technologies needed to solve solar energy challenges at scale: smart grid intelligence, communications, big data analytics and storage.
California Electric Car Owners Can Get Cheaper Car Insurance
California could be at the forefront of these car insurance savings because it is one of the earliest adopters of clean cars (including Hybrids, Plug Ins & electric cars) in the nation.
Sunrun, OutBack Power Pilot Renewable Energy Storage Systems For Homeowners
Sunrun, the largest dedicated residential solar company in the United States, today announced a partnership with OutBack Power Technologies, Inc. to pilot renewable energy storage-based systems for a select group of Sunrun solar customers. OutBack Power is a designer and manufacturer of power conversion systems incorporating energy storage for off-grid and grid-connected renewable energy applications. As part of the pilot, Sunrun will combine and test OutBack Power's technology consisting of weather-resistant batteries and inverters with home solar systems in both indoor and outdoor environments.
"It is now more affordable than ever for consumers to run their homes with clean power, and we strongly believe that the next evolution of solar as a service for our customers is home solar paired with energy storage," said Sunrun's chief operating officer, Paul Winnowski. "With OutBack Power, we will further our commitment to providing customized and affordable home solar that allows customers to be a part of the solution for building a clean, modern grid that provides power when it is needed the most."
Battery Backup for Rooftop Solar Power Systems Too Costly
Using batteries to retain energy from rooftop solar systems will be too expensive for at least two years, according to industry executives.
That means homeowners who add solar panels to save money on utility bills will continue to lose electricity during blackouts, even after an 80 percent decline in battery costs over the past decade.
Residential solar systems typically send power to the grid, not directly to the house, and don’t run the home during a blackout. For batteries to save consumers money, stored energy must be drained daily, said Jamie Evans, who runs the U.S. Eco Solutions unit for Panasonic Corp., which supplies lithium-ion cells for Tesla Motors Inc.
“Solar will need storage for grid stability,” Evans said yesterday in an interview at the Solar Power International convention in Las Vegas. “Battery costs need to come down and regulatory structures have to change to really scale up.”
As residential solar become more common from California to New York, utility grids will increasingly become stressed without storage to ease supply and demand imbalances, he said.
For now, that means battery storage only makes economic sense for large businesses that get hit with extra fees when their power usage exceeds utility expectations.
PV with batteries: a threat to CSP?
Looking to 10 years from now, if energy storage achieves its full potential then the whole landscape for power generation and distribution could change drastically.
Safer Fuel Cell Powered Automobiles
While an electric vehicle may go 200 or 250 miles without a charge a combination of fuel cell and fuel together with a balance of system could travel 500 or even 800 miles depending upon the specific requirements and design.
SCE Unveils Largest Battery Energy Storage Project in North America
For Southern California Edison (SCE), building a smarter grid started many years ago with smart meters and upgrades in distribution equipment. Today, the company takes another leap forward with the opening of the largest battery energy storage project in North America — the Tehachapi Energy Storage Project — to modernize the grid to integrate more clean energy.
The demonstration project is funded by SCE and federal stimulus money awarded by the Department of Energy as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The 32 megawatt-hours battery energy storage system features lithium-ion batteries housed inside a 6,300 square-foot facility at SCE's Monolith substation in Tehachapi, Calif. The project is strategically located in the Tehachapi Wind Resource Area that is projected to generate up to 4,500 MW of wind energy by 2016.
"This installation will allow us to take a serious look at the technological capabilities of energy storage on the electric grid," said Dr. Imre Gyuk, energy storage program manager in the energy department's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. "It will also help us to gain a better understanding of the value and benefit of battery energy storage."
The project costs about $50 million with matching funds from SCE and the energy department. Over a two-year period, the project will demonstrate the performance of the lithium-ion batteries in actual system conditions and the capability to automate the operations of the battery energy storage system and integrate its use into the utility grid.
Why The Debate Over Energy Storage Utterly Misses The Point
The quest for "The Holy Grail of Energy Storage" is doomed to fail.
AES Betting On Lithium-Ion Batteries for Long-Duration Energy Storage
When it comes to storing energy at the scale of the power grid, lithium-ion batteries have a lot of advantages -- and, critics say, some significant drawbacks.
Sure, lithium-ion is the dominant battery chemistry for consumer electronics and electric vehicles, which helps drive down costs and improve bankability for grid projects (see Tesla’s Giga factory for an example of how this future could unfold). And yes, they’ve been proven in many grid-tied projects around the world.
But there are two questions that continue to dog the potential for lithium-ion batteries at grid scale. Can they provide hours of energy at a time to serve grid needs, and can they last for the decade or more required for cost-effective grid use when they’re being discharged so deeply, over and over, day after day? Cont'd...
Renewable Energy Expert: We Don't Need Power Storage, Just Dance Lessons
It's a truism among renewable energy wonks that in order to run our society on renewable energy, we'll need a revolution in energy storage technology.
The reason? Solar and wind are intermittent power sources. The sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, but we don't ever stop using electricity. That means, so the thinking goes, that either we need to get most of our power from something other than solar and wind, or we need to store electrical power generated on bright windy days for use on calm nights. Problem is, storing enough power to supply an energy demand the size of California's would be mind-bogglingly expensive.
But an expert who just might be the world's foremost renewable energy wonk says the truism is wrong, and that society can be kept fully powered entirely on renewables, using minimal storage. There will be no technological revolutions required; just a bit of choreography.
Amory Lovins, who's been a widely respected renewable energy expert since the 1970s, offers a persuasive argument that we need not worry about the intermittent nature of wind and solar power. The grid can handle it, he says, using current technology to forecast both power production and demand, shifting from one solar plant or wind turbine to another as wind and sunshine vary from region to region.
Instead of relying on expensive base-load power plants to generate most of our supply, which usually means natural-gas-fired plants in California, that carefully choreographed use of energy from renewable sources over a wide region can supply almost all of the power an industrial society needs. Cont'd..
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