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I think in combination with regular thermal power stations it might be a very interesting idea you have the Carbon Capture technology added with this system and added Solar panels on the area and the good thing is if you use decommissioned powerplants blocks you have the necessary infrastructure like turbines generators and the entire power generation infrastructure
LOL....LOL....So they charge the system with MANUFACTURED Co2....well that will fix everything !!!...(sarcasm)....why are you linking climate change with this?
I think the big difficulty that many people have is understanding that renewable energy does not just have a single solution. It will be a mix of generation including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal etc. It will also be a mix of storage including pumped hydro, lithium ion, flow batteries, hydrogen batteries and others. No solution is perfect for every context but together they offer a flexible way to generate and store the energy for the future.
@@fr2ncm9 Problem with it is, that it takes a lot of time to get it up. And you need cooling, which is getting more and more an issue with rising temperatures and low level rivers. New tech is there, but until they are up and running we could invest in renewable and storage in the meantime and it would be far better.
I wonder if there could ever be a situation that too many solar panels are reflecting or absorbing sunlight to the point we damage the environments we hope to preserve through changed local weather or localized average temperatures. Desertification around solar farms? I wonder how much landmass that would require to be covered for such a thing to arise?
I think it's extremely noteworthy that using this for grid storage opposed to batteries has the advantage of freeing up more batteries for things like vehicles.
Every type of energy storage that doesn't degrade over time is a big plus in my mind. That means that it's not a question of if the system is profitable, but when
It's an attractive idea, but EVERYTHING degrades. The membranes, turbines, concrete, etc. in these are likely amortized over about 25 years as with similar construction. Making it last longer faces diminishing returns in the face of present value discounting and further would likely be superseded by much more efficient new technology at that time.
@@Vile_Entity_3545 Define young? I constantly hear negative things about Gen Z and young people, yet I know too many people that are 50+ years old that barely know how to Google something or how to research a topic. Why do people need to perpetuate the us vs them, the older vs the younger? I understand what the person is basically saying above, even if it wasn't written accurately. They are basically just saying that long term storage systems are easier to become profitable over short(er) term storage systems. Stop thinking you're better than someone because of your age. We all have short comings and we all have strong suites. Stop putting each other down.
One possible benefit of using CO2 is that it's somewhat safer than other gases. Small scale leakage would not cause significant damage. Large scale leakage might cause some suffocation risk, but no long lasting hazard once it dilutes in air.
@@6Sparx9 Uh...maybe youre unfamiliar with scuba, but we carry 3000+psi tanks on our backs. All the time. To depths, not just on the surface. Besides, theyre compressing it into liquid. It doesnt require much pressure to keep it in liquid form. Tanker trucks carry liquid gas all the time on the same road you use.
@@maniagokm3186 In all fairness, he's not entirely talking out his ass. Those tanks become missiles when ruptured, and people have been killed by simple 100-150lbs compressor tanks rupturing. Even some vehicle tires can be deadly when punctured. And you just know some jackass in the States will end up shooting one of these things.
@@maniagokm3186 CO2 Does indeed need really high pressure to be kept as a liquid at room temperature (~50 times the atmospheric pressure). Tanker trucks do indeed transport liquid gas but gas as in gasoline or liquefied petroleum gas, not CO2. At the same time I agree that while storing such high pressures might seem difficult, with proper safety precautions it won't cause many problems
This was going to be my question. In the event of a dome rupture or some catastrophe failure of the pressure containers, what would the CO2 do. If it goes straight up in the atmosphere, then probably no big deal. But if it spreads out along ground level, there could be a significant risk of it pushing away breathable air for some distance around the facility. Not poo-pooing this technology, just want to be certain of any risks involved.
This technology seems like one of the most promising ones you have presented. Energy storage is one of the largest obstacles when adapting large scale solar and wind generation.
what do you need large scale solar and wind generation for if you can use the primary emissions from burning fossil fuels into a further energy source?
because the Co2 is a gimmick in this case and its not being scrubbed from atmosphere anyway, it performs WAY worse than refrigerant does especially at higher ambient temps such as where the company proposes to build such plants. Still I get the idea, make 'batteries' that do not use Lithium ion because it totally undermines the argument of the saving the local and foreign environments and still allows the renewable dream to persist. Would like to see the efficacy of this plant.
@@6Sparx9 It also seems like the "Stores heat to reuse on expanding the gas" is a bit of hand waving. holding high heat in a large enough container for extended periods seems like it wouldn't be easy as a square on a flow chart. and if it was that easy why not just store heat from the sun and use heat pump to intensify it and boil some water when you need it.
@@6Sparx9 You misunderstand how it works. This energy storage doesn't need a constant supply of co2, it uses the same volume of co2 over and over again. Fossil fuel use releases way to much co2, we produce enough co2 in a day to fill up millions of these batteries which don't need to be refilled barring leaks/malfunctions Excess electricity from the grid compress the mass of co2 which is later released to produce electricity, this is repeated and the cow is never used up, if the effeciency is right this is a really good technology because all the parts are already used in industry at scale
They won’t, because nothing this guy reports on ever actually gets built. This channel produces more hot air than all CO2 and methane in the atmosphere combined.
Seems cool, wish he would have delved in to why C02 was chosen more.. is it really the most efficient gas possible for this application? I assume it is, but I can't help but be cynical that it may have been chosen purely as a hook for investment and brand. Is Nitrogen really worse? Why?
@@sammadison1172 you don’t make sense at all. If anything it’s an in your face deterrent to use CO2 as most people would think that’s dangerous! Do think about how available it is it’s put in the soda pop you dimwits drink all the time, used in pubs to keep keg bear fresh. Availability dude, cheap!
The only real downside as I see it is the amount of land the CO2 bladder takes up. While that isn't all that much of a downside, I imagine that solar panels could be placed on the top and/or sides of the bladder. Alternatively, they could dig a huge hole, put the bladder in the hole, cover it up and then install the solar energy or wind farm on top. Basically that would allow nearly all the land available for the installation to be used to generate power. I suppose the only problem with building it like that is it would be harder to perform maintenance on the bladder but I don't know how much maintenance would be required.
I had the same thoughts, especially regarding maintenance, but they could simply build an arc structure on top of the "dome" leaving enough space between the solar panel structure and the dome itself. P.S. Ironically enough, here in Italy it might actually be more difficult to use this in large scale because we don't have that much uninhabited flat-surface spaces, but there are places both in Europe (Germany, France and Poland or any other European country other than Italy and Switzerland) and outside europe, especially in Asia, in the Middle East and North&South America where space isn't really that much of a problem if the intention is to use them in large scale.
@@magnumopus1628 The thing is, this looks like it could be scaled down to household size and be just as useful. Multiply that by each house hold that has a "balloon battery" and link them to the grid and you've got lots of capacity....one house at a time.
First of all, congratulations to my Italian cousins for being first off the block with a significant product of this type! It is sure to find a significantly big niche for any energy storage cycle that follows the day-night latency. I would caution, in connection with Sion's observation below, that this sort of practical thermodynamic cycle only works well (i.e., near its peak efficiency) near some such cycle time, as it depends critically on the use of a so-called heat regenerator to recover the energy used in the compression phase. Not an insignificant part of the energy stored is locked up in the regenerators, and any attempt to rush or prolong the storage time means going off-cycle to accomodate, or loss of that heat, respectively. Anyway, any good tech has its optimum operational constraints. Nice report Matt...thank you. Domenico Barillari
There's another company, ESS in the US that developed the iron redux flow battery. Either is effective, I don't know which would be cheaper or take up more space, and neither uses elements that are under high demand for other use cases, other than iron, but that's the most common element so no big deal. Actually after watching the process and efficiency the ESS system is more effective and I'm sure it takes up less space.
@@alw6589 - “best use case” If it were me, I would use all renewable to compress CO2, send extra renewable to the grid, and increase CO2 power generation when renewable drops. Imagine it as a big capacitor used on a pulsed DC power supply, which fills in the gaps, but on a massive scale.
This system would work well with geothermal generation as it's 24/7. The off peak power could be stored and geothermal plants have a lot of waste heat that could be used in the liquid to gas phase.
Regarding the space requirement of the storage bladder, yes, that uses up quite a bit of surface area as shown here, but that doesn't have to be a problem. See this is a just pilot plant. Once the maximum extent of inflation of the dome is established, one could simply design a solid structure to be built around the dome, which can then be fitted with photovoltaic panels, thereby "reclaiming" some of the surface area for energy production on top of energy storage.
@@HeliophobicRiverman Just practically speaking it seems hard to me, to place solar panels on a large round structure. You'd need to use a crane or something? Or build a permanent stairs and walkway specifically for the panels? Regular solar power facilities are easy to build: just place panels on the ground, all in the same way. Or on roofs, where there is room to walk on too. Even then, the work of placing the panels is like 15% of the cost according to google.
@@kedrednael It seems I misunderstood part of the video, the bladder is already inside a solid shell, probably for protection. Simply adding a framework on the outside of the shell, including walkways and hardpoints for mounting the panels, would work. Yes it would cost more than leaving the solid shell as shown here, but if space is an issue, this would provide more utility per square meter of the ground the bladder is built on.
@@kedrednael not really there are curved panels and panels that can be put on a sheet blanket like material. So there are implications to reclaim some energy of that space.
I'm wondering how far you can scale down: this will never be a household storage option, but it strikes me that a lot of farmers might find it intriguing: the parts are all standard, so there's no magic single source dependency. Wonder if you could retrofit a silo with a bladder.
You've hit on something others have missed. These things don't have to all be above ground and made in this shape. Theres no reason they couldn't be made as tall as skyscrapers, with a tiny footprint, perhaps even topped with wind turbines, with solar panels all up their sides.
I think turbines, heat exchangers, heat storage, and lots of precision balanced moving parts don't scale super small easily. I think traditional batteries will be a better fit for small outfits like homes and farms. Of course a farmer could opt to plop a grid scale dome or two on his land, but then we're not really talking about scaling it down.
@@mpoisot You're neglecting the bottleneck in raw lithium production. If ranchers (who are already leasing their land for wind production) are going to get in on energy storage, the demand for batteries will become prohibitive. The battery industry is already in a lithium crunch; making storage with off the shelf components where the only specialty piece you'll need is the custom bladder to fit your old silo is a massive, massive win when we need rapid adoption of storage to halt climate change. Bear in mind, these silos might be smaller than the demonstration dome, but not by an order of magnitude. Maybe 1/2 or 1/3 the size. You only need a few of them and a rancher whose land has desertified and you have a plant almost ready to go. Brilliant idea Ross Reedstrom!
@@mpoisot This is not heat storage; this is energy stored as PV (pressure-volume) which can be theoretically converted into electricity with 100% efficiency.
@@NotOneToFly It's true there are lithium supply crunches today, but if we just go off the price per MWH quoted in the video then it assumes batteries as a family won't always be in a dire supply crunch. Otherwise we should revise the price per MWH of batteries to be much higher and essentially rule them out of the toolbox of storage options. Going back to the original comment, I can't imagine this stuff scaling down super small. Think of the careful maintenance that happens at power plants and refineries. Those turbines are incredibly expensive and any rotational imbalance or other mechanical issues can mean huge expenses, down time, and expert help needed to bring things back online. I think there's a reason we don't all have micro turbine co-generation units at home supplying both electrical and heat energy to businesses and residences. Those complicated machines and heat driven processes doesn't scale small efficiently. On that topic, I think the heat exchange and heat storage component of pressurized gas storage needs a minimum size to be cost effective. If that processes isn't done right it takes a big dent out of the round trip efficiency and probably limits the power output (the max speed you can convert stored gas into electricity). The bigger the heat system gets, the more efficient it can be, especially for longer term storage like days instead of hours. Matt kind of glossed over how the heat storage works in this system, and I bet that's because they're still actively figuring out how to improve that system and whatever they come up with will be their "secret sauce".
This doesn't do that in the least the CO2 storage even when fully built out is nothing compared to what we put up in the air. This is just a battery although it looks like a much cheaper one for grid storage which is good.
i thought that too and it would be really intersesting to plug in the numbers and see how it would play out. Like How much CO2 is Stored in One Cycle/Storage Plant and how much is that compared to global CO2 Output. It wont be much, but i'd be interested in the numbers
@@miroconzelmann5027 ….he said “ 100 to 200 tons “ at the beginning of the video. Burning one gallon of gasoline, makes 20 pounds of CO2 (climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html) ……. so 20,000 gallons of gas to make 200 tons CO2…… sadly, in 2021, the USA burnt 369 million gallons per day…….still good technology though!
I've been talking about energy storage as the killer technology we need since the 80s. If (and it's a big if) they can get half of what they say then this really could be the killer technology we've needed. I still think we should be building dozens of modern nuclear plants to get us the energy needed now to get us clean water and get us to a time when solar/wind can fill the CO2 batteries.
Nuclear energy has one killer feature not a lot of people mention, 1% of Uranium is useful for energy production, 99% needs to be dumped somewhere and there is not a single (yet) landfill we can store some dangerous stuff for 10k years (or more). It would be a good transition technology 50 years ago but is not a good one today. cost of dealing with the mess of spent fuel or indeed 99% of uranium ore that cannot be used is just too expensive. (Thorium, slow wave reactors and etc probably would make sense 30 years ago with solid founding, but not today with no founding and being 20 years away).
@@drachenfels6782 modern reactors are far more efficient and nuclear waste is tens of thousands of times less volume than coal power. We should have been building more for 50 years we'd be in much better shape
@@Scoots1994 I agree *if* we were building that many nuclear power plants we'd be in a different world. But nuclear has been a disappointment for growth. The first production-ready nuclear power plant was started in 1951 but yet, 72 years later, nuclear only provides 10% of the world's power. Nuclear power was like the promising college grad with all the honors, degrees, extra-curriculars, and praise from all his professors. But, ultimately, he never left his parent's basement nor had a real job and is well past middle age. There's a lot of reasons why this is the way it is.
@@amitgupta25121993 Sure, the Chernobyl was a huge disaster. We also have more recent major incidents like Fukushima Dai-ichi, Japan (2011) which costed between $1.2B to $2.1B. Then before Chernobyl was Three Mile Island, USA (1979) which costed $2.4B to clean up. But consider every other year, there are minor incidents at nuclear power plants all over the world. Some leaked radioactive material into the local waterways too. They resulted in millions of dollar spent for repairs and clean up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country Another factor is the nuclear is an expensive form of energy. Lazard lists the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of nuclear between $131 to $205 per MWh. Similar LCEO for solar farms is between $30 to $41 per MWh and wind farm is $26 to $50 per MWh. Nuclear construction also has a consistently bad track record of being billions over-budget and years over-schedule. Its laughably bad and has become an inside joke in the energy industry.
This is probably one of the best electricity storage solutions I've seen so far, which seems to actually work, rather than 'it might work' in the future. However, Thorcon nuclear is promising to generate electricity cheaper than this can store electricity. Nuscale says it will be starting to generate at about 7c kWh, getting down to about 5 c kWh over time which is the same cost as this solution only stores power. I believe the 'silver bullet' you mentioned, is actually 4th gen nuclear.
A marriage between the two technologies. Storage can prevent the requirement for over building a reactor to support the peak demand. If the reactor is stable at over production of say 10% for 70% of its production time and only falls short for 30%....the energy could be stored for later use and supplement times of peak demand. Think of it like peak shaving your home with the use of solar amd batteries, but on a much larger scale. We do the same thing with air compressors in manufacturing. Don't install a giant electric gobling air compressor for leak loads on the system. Install two smaller units, the second unit will supplement the system for peak demand but when you are steady state...you have a much smaller, more efficient unit running.
@@jamesashurst I have to agree, we need solutions now or just around the corner and not promises of what might work in a decade or two. Many companies talk a good deal but it takes forever for them to deliver and in a lot of cases, they don't deliver. It's why the tech that interest me the most is near future tech over the next 5 years and not the promise of tech over decades.
What's the timeline for building such a plant? What's that timeline if you include all of the funding, bureaucratic red tape, public awareness campaigns to turnover opinions on nuclear, and sheer construction lead times? Solar, wind, and storage are ready to go NOW. Although, I do have to give it to nuclear that the supply chains and waste streams are more defined for that tech compared to solar, wind, and storage. Those issues will burden the renewables sector in the next decade, if they haven't already. I don't think Thorium is that silver bullet you're looking for, but I definitely think nuclear is part of the silver buckshot of sustainability. All depends on how fast we can get stuff out so that we can transition from fossils to renewables
I definitely think Physical Batteries like this will be revolutionary for our future. It’ll be interesting to see which one eventually wins out. In the meantime though, I’m all for embracing the intermittency of renewables along with a solid backbone of nuclear and geothermal energy. That’s plenty of clean energy for our very immediate goals so no reason not to build them like crazy!
@@UndecidedMF nuclear is the main solution to greenhouse neutral on-demand power that provides the grid stability solution that renewables' intermittency requires... The main issue in my mind is stigma around nuclear power and it's safety. People know a whole lot more about nuclear disasters than nuclear power, and it informs public discourse in an unfortunately negative way :(
I would challenge that this "solid backbone" is necessary. Renewables rather need flexibility. Nuclear is especially bad in this regard, as it's a hassle to power down. Geothermal is just not viable in many places. In an environmentally friendly way at least, not causing earthquakes or similar problems. Smart grid and sustainable storage should be the main focus right now, not building new nuclear or risky geothermal projects.
@@Triforian Just build nuclear power plants and run them consistently, not intermittently. People are afraid of nuclear in the same way they are afraid if snakes and spiders, irrationally.
@@Triforian You may be overestimating the amount that I mean when I say “backbone”. I’m still editing the video where I fully describe this, but the high level is this: I’m looking for about 10-15% nuclear energy and 2-5% geothermal energy globally. We really don’t need that much in order to keep critical systems running and those seem to be the numbers that experts have coalesced around.
I think the biggest problem with this idea will be safety. It is good news that most renewables are best placed in areas that have low population density. But an accidental release of an industrial quantity of liquid CO2 would result in a ground-level CO2 cloud that would suffocate any animal unfortunate enough to be caught in it. As long as that risk is fully mitigated this seems like a good use of CO2. Goodness knows we have enough of the stuff!
Would be interesting to hear what passive safety features they have in place to deal with catastrophic leaks. Any compressed gas stored at an industrial scale always makes me think about the Bhopal disaster back in the '80s. CO2 isn't THAT dangerous, but a sufficiently large quantity could be a risk. Perhaps having it far enough away from populated areas would be enough mitigation (other than for on-site workers). It would warm up and dissipate into the air fairly quickly.
Genuine question but would putting walls up around the tank storage force the co2 up and away from people? Or maybe enclosing it in a larger box that isnt air tight but slows the expansion of the co2 so less is released into the area at once? Yes anyone in there wouls be dead but it might stop a ton of people dieing
@@graham1034 CO2-detectors, an alarm system and respiratory masks with a small air tank (for several minutes of breathing) would reduce the risk for on-site-workers almost completely.
I really want to see a micro version of this for home / small business use. This looks like a simple enough system that hyper-local energy storage could be more viable that the PowerWall solution.
My thought exactly, erect one of those old water towers that farms have, get some used pressurized canisters to contain it while liquid, and if everything else is commercially available we have a off grid dream possible. Feels like a totally viable battery storage for anyone that might be a bit handy.
If it scales linearly, then eyeballing the bladder, the needed space is ~7cubic feet per kilowatt. If an average house is using 10Kw/day then you need around 70 cuft, or a 5'x5'x5' block of space. Double or triple that footprint for the other component and you have a small out-building less that the size of a guest house. Thats very doable in a lot of locations.
@@EddieGonzalez you still need the pump to generate 70 bars of pressure and the power to do so, etc. Doing this at small scale would bring that entire system out of balance. You'd need the same power for a lot less storage. It won't get small until the pumps and everything get efficient enough to be smaller. But even then, big-scale will yield way more. As I've commented on the other 4930 comments saying this; It'd definitely be better to do this for an entire block or neighbourhood instead of per household.
Tesla switched over to LFP batteries for their Megapacks which use neither nickel nor cobalt. Also, IIRC LAES stores the liquified air at 15 Bar(218 psi) at room temperature.
With the size the system takes it sounds like it would be a good fit for places like the United States that have a lot of land that they could use to store these batteries.
The land use issue could possibly be solved by using smaller dome groups that are hidden under the solar cells themselves. This would also have the advantage of you being able to do maintenance on the dome assemblies without taking the entire system down, simply by using isolation valves. Manufacturing and deployment times may also be quicker as you would have smaller structures to build.
Now this is an intriguing idea. Reminds me of how Dave with Just Have a Think on YT just this year did a video on distributed underwater hydrostorage bladders encased in concrete spheres that operate on the pressure differentials presented at the seafloor. With these membrane bladders for CO2 storage, you could raise the solar panels in the air like 2-4 meters or so and scatter the bladders sparsely to allow working clearance for maintenance and inspection. The only problem here is that these bladders might impede any convection cooling that might be gained from raising the panels, and so the entire solar fleet may run at a lower efficiency as a result. To an environmentalist, reduced efficiency but with greater storage capacity via distributed domes still sounds like a good deal. The problem arises when you consider economists and investors that want to see their ideal rates of return. There's different patterns you could do with this idea, though. You could stagger rows of bladders / solar arrays so that there would be corridors underneath the panels for improved convection cooling. PV plants could reconfigure like this, as well as CSP plants that use parabolic troughs and are already spaced out (although the spaces are there to allow for maintenance and removal of dust/sand that build up on the trough, but I digress). You'd have to calculate what the space savings for distributing the bladders + all of the additional piping, cabling, and equipment needed to operate the bladders (and the inherent losses therein) compared to lumping it all together. I have an idea the calc would have to depend on how much surface area is available, and that distributing the bladders may work better for larger and larger utility-scale farms. Awesome idea though!
This Energydome is a brilliant idea, it works in a similar way to the old gasometer tanks that rise and fall in a frame - instead a huge "bladder". Thank you, Matt, for another great video.
There is another plus for batteries not mentioned and that is speed. In microseconds, batteries can change their output/input to stabilize the grid. I also question the 75-80% efficiency, but if true, that is pretty good. Not sure why they chose CO2 over other gasses that compress into liquids at reasonable pressure/temps. This thing is sort of a backward air conditioner and as such, you could use any number of refrigerants used in the hvac industry. Perhaps CO2 is just a good choice based on price.
Co2 is unique with its point being so easily accessible, also liquid is accessible at room temperature. Other gasses that behave like this like methane have far worse compression ratios and global warming potentials.
@@varno Not really unique at all. Look at a list of all the hvac refrigerants that exist All of these compounds were specifically designed to have their gas/liquid transitions happen at reasonable pressures/temperatures and to do so with substantial heats of condensation/evaporation. My guess is that they use CO2 because it is cheap.
@@apostolakisl there is actually a big move to use co2 as a refrigerant, as almost all other refrigerants have massive global warming potential. Further other refrigerants tend to be very expensive comparatively, which is a big negative for a storage system.
I consider myself pretty good informed about what is happening in science and equipped with a good general knowledge about science. But your videos leave me standing open-mouthed time and again! Keep up the excellent work! 💐
I drove a hazmat tanker for 2 decades carrying liquid Co2 I learned quite a bit about it . This is a genius idea I think it could turn things around and we can finally shut down the coal plants .
I sure like the fact that no exotic materials are required, meaning that this solution seems to be future proof. At least for quite a while. The production of battery electrode minerals are not exactly environmentally friendly, as I understand it.
If this energy storage solution is actually able to manage a LCOS of $50/MWh, we may have just found the quick and cheap route to solving the problems of intermittency (although nuclear power must be a part of the energy grid for now, unless the situation dramatically changes in the next 50 years and we succeed at making nuclear fusion power into a cost-effective and viable energy solution, thus launching humanity into its next stage of evolution as a species). This technology definitely appears HIGHLY promising. I'm cheering on its success fully and completely.
This is the first time I think one of these new energy storage innovations would work. Why? Because it's simple. This design should be very cheap to make and maintain, and quite efficient.
With all the various bulk energy storage technologies coming out these days, it will be interesting to see which ones end up winning in the market place. Overall complexity, total cost of ownership, best use and permitting issues are all factors.
This is and you are one of the very few people/channels who understands energy as a whole and don't pump up the hype with flashy words. Thanks you for the channel and amazing videos.
Matt, I've watched a number of your videos and just want to say THANK YOU. Always interesting, concise and understandable. You have quite a grasp on how to share information. Your passion for new tech and answers to major problems in our society is enlightening. Major respect for you, and again, thanks for all you do.
You say it's long term energy storage, but it's not really, because you need to store the heat released when compressing the gas which means it's relies on a thermal battery to run at high efficiencies so really you can only store the heat for about 48 hours unless you use a phase change material I suppose, but then you would need a LOT of that phase change material, something that changes phase as 25C or so, well insulate it and you could store the majority of the thermal energy maybe for months depending on the ambient temperature , and with some evacuated solar thermal tubes you could recharge the thermal battery as fast as it could deplete. in the summer you wouldn't even have to worry about it depleting because on average the temp would be 25C in most places people live most of the summer, again the size of the thermal battery would be a problem though because the heat capacity of all the tunable phase change materials I have seen are worse than ice in the amount of energy they store release or store by changing phase, it's not like 1/2 or anything that bad. Although if you just berried the thermal battery 2 or so feet underground you could probably get 25C temps all year round, especially if you tuned the material to start phase changing at 17C, really it would depend on the climate where you are installing it.
I love all the options presented on this channel. The future looks bright thanks to technology innovators & risk takers despite the claims of science deniers and those who want to return us to technology of the 1950's.
It is so funny! I've searched a way to store liquefied CO2, produced during winter, for a later time in order to sell it to the beverage industry and bumped into an energy storage solution that seems the best. No wonder it has the best roundtrip efficiency. Good video, Matt! Keep on the good work!
I have to say that I really enjoy your channel and content. It's nice to see positive presentation of the various options that are being presented. I wonder how well this might scale down? How much space would it consume to store power for a single household? The attic in my house is a large open void. Putting in bladders that could inflate to fill that space would be a great potential solution to localized storage. Powerwalls are interesting, but it's still a lot of metal with all of the negatives associated with it. I also wonder if this technology could help improve grid stability? I live in Ontario and honestly the most expensive part of my hydro bill has become the delivery charge, which is to cover the cost of the grid in Ontario. As capacity increases, the size and capacity of all of the redundant systems goes up as well. Could this be used at grid scale to help reduce demand on the grid in the event of an outage.
We need this now! Especially in countries with a lot of wind, sun and space it can't be that hard. But I'm sure it won't happen that fast as we actually need it.
So, if CO2 and its phase-change can yield this kind of performance, it would be interesting to see how ammonia, or maybe even a fluorocarbon, would do.
Ammonia would facilitate much longer storage period. Weeks and months not just a day or two. To me, that type of solution would truly make wind/solar viable
Removing the fluorocarbons would be even better than co2 at reducing greenhouse gasses. They are responsible for like x4-x6 the amount of warming than co2, at just a fraction of the volume.
I was thinking about ammonia, too. It’s a common refrigerant, so there is a lot of industrial-scale equipment for exactly this purpose already. It may not have the buzzword compliance of CO2, and be more of a problem in case of a leak or accident, but it may be more thermally efficient. I’m sure someone else is working on exactly that, though… this really does seem like an obvious approach.
The problem with anhydrous ammonia is material interactions. It degrades many alloys. CO2 is relatively inert and cheap. HFC are designed for very low pressure phase change for refrigeration. In this case the pressurization is what you want to run turbines.
I recall that the city of Toronto was going to be experimenting with compressed air bladders anchored to the floor of Lake Ontario to use static water pressure to help increase the storage pressure of the bladders while maintaining a reasonably cool temp. The reasoning was that this way they could pump up the bladders during times of low public consumption (i.e. at night), and then use the stored compressed air to run compressors (and the electric motors that power them) in reverse, essentially turning them into a motor powering a generator. I haven't heard anything more of the plan, with the last I've heard of it being at least a year ago, maybe more at this point.
Thanks Matt. The italian Job!. Efficeint and looks simple! One of the culprits that delayed setting wind and solar power was the main critique of land use and the 'change of scenery'. Nobody is nowadys talking about it anymore. Here in Morocco, most of the renewable energy units are set up in remote areas. In short this looks good. I have a question the cost estimate what does it include ? Would it chnage for bigger units?
One problem in the way of longer term storage is the financial model. If the price of energy varies according to supply and demand throughout the day, a short term storage results in several buy/sell transactions per day. If your cost per MWh is similar but you provide long term storage, you might get one transaction per week or month even, giving a far lower return. We need long term storage for energy security, so we have to find a way to provide a return for the security the service provides, not just the transaction. Of course as more storage solutions and flexible usage schemes, international grids and diversity of sustainable generation schemes come on-line the daily fluctuation in value will decrease. Schemes to guarantee returns for energy security, are being applied to the nuclear industry, but need to be extended to long term storage. It is similar to buying insurance.
Additionally, they can harvest BOTH Heat & Cold from the system (not at the same time). When the CO2 compresses, heat can be harvested, when un-compressing then cooling can be harvested.
I wonder if this aspect was already calculated into energy storage efficiency or not? If not then this system combined with heating and cooling plants can reach even higher efficiency levels.
NOPE NOPE NOPE! You seem to have ignored a major part of the system. When they compress the CO2, it gets hot, so they store that heat in a local Thermal Energy Storage System. They do not provide that heat for other system. They store it for their own future use. When energy is needed, they use that stored heat in order to convert the liquid CO2 into a gas that they can extract energy from. If they were harvesting heat and cooling, they would lose the energy they're storing.
That wouldn't sort anything, since the CO2 inside the bladder is basically the same for 30 years... So it wouldn't even pinch the CO2 level in the atmosphere.
Thank you for the new video! This sounds like a pretty neat idea for grid-scale electrical storage. It has some nice advantages: it's made from already existing technologies, and they store the CO2 at ambient pressure and temperature. The less you have to fight nature, the cheaper and easier the technology becomes. Also there's that 30 year lifetime. But considering how it's made from easily replaceable parts, you could probably keep the battery going for longer than 30 years.
This CO2 storage technology is ticking all the right boxes for me: off the shelf components, ambient air temperatures (no cryogenics), simple energy transitions (compression and evaporation), low cost/low impact storage medium (CO2), long life span with no degredation in storage capacity over time, acceptable round trip efficiency, no energy loss during storage, low supply chain risk. I was already intrigued by compressed air and liquified air storage, and this just kicked it up a notch for me. Thank you, Matt!
@@mth469 Energy storage can be used in lots of ways, including storing excess, or possibly cheaper power, overnight, and then selling it back to the grid when it's more expensive, or most needed because other power sources have failed. It's just a question of who owns the cheap electricity, and how you, as the owner of the energy storage unit, want to make your money. If you own your own solar panels, then the cheapest power will be at noon. Similarly, if you own a wind farm then the cheapest power will probably be overnight. Otherwise you need to buy the electricity from someone else and you can't control the price as much.
I know what would make a good battery. Using CO2 to create gasoline. I think that would store a lot of energy for a very long time and be pretty easy to handle and transport.
I think there are several problems you have to take in consideration: 1 - A very inefficient process. 2 - If you burn fuel you produce NOx (Catalytic converters only converts NO to NO2). 3 - Produce of ultra fine particles. It is just soot, even if it is invisible to the naked eye. And no, there is no safe limit. The only pro, unregarded the source, is ease of use.
@@janjager2906 There are more pros. Existing infrastructure, highest energy density after hydrogen. And the ease of use advantage is a pretty big pro, because ease of storage and transportation also has an environmental impact.
I gotta say, this is quite an attractive cycle from a mechanical perspective. It's a relatively benign process; not too corrosive, not toxic, not terribly hot or cold, readily available. I think they're vastly overestimating how easy it is to keep a large gaseous system closed over time, and the implication that they're not using customized components is unrealistic. Additionally, environmental planning will be tricky as they'll need to plan for what happens in the event that the whole system pumps liquid CO2 to atmosphere. (They'll likely need to avoid being up-wind and uphill of any inhabited area.) But those are all solvable problems that are much easier to solve than the problems inherent to other energy storage.
I miss a point, which might be helpful for understanding: When the compressor sucks the CO2 out of the bladder (electricity consumption), air flows into the dome to replace the volume of CO2. When the bladder gets filled (electricity production), air flows out of the dome. And you could have adressed the risks of a sudden massive release of CO2 by accident.
It's exciting that so many ideas are getting tried. It's far more likely to find a few that work well with many options to pick from, and even the ones that don't work teach us lessons.
This is very promising, if only due to the already streamlined supply chain. Using this as a future middle step between Carbon Capture Systems and CO2 Storage Systems could also be interesting: capturing CO2 from the air or exhausts, and sending it rather than CO2 stored in "The Dome" directly to the compressor, and when It gets used to produce energy, it can be sent to the long-term CO2 storage solution rather than returning it to "The Dome". Maybe even tewak the system to have CO2 leave the motor in a more favorable condition for long-term storage?
The biggest problem I see with this is thermal expansion in the high pressure tanks. Anyone who’s ever played with airsoft guns or paintball knows that CO2 loses its expansion capabilities drastically in cold temperatures. If the temperature outside becomes cold enough the storage tanks of high pressure CO2 will not be delivering the energy that they are designed to deliver as the pressure will drop significantly. The only way I see it possible to avoid this completely is to bury the tanks far enough underground so that they are below the 55°F barrier. This however creates another substantial problem in the event of a leak, or a tank rupture causing serious affects to the landscape and therefore the climate
It would also take less energy to compress it, so it's not really an issue. It's meant for energy storage, not as an energy source like it is for airsoft.
@@audikid89 and it's just as likely to go the other way... Except the tanks will be well insulated, not to mention massive enough to ignore daily swings in temperature.
Closed loop phase change energy storage seems like the ideal solution to storing excess energy. The fact that this solution uses established and available technology is a huge advantage. Space isn't a big concern in the US and high energy density storage is best reserved for uses that need it like transportation. I hope they ramp up smoothly and are able to deploy all around the world quickly.
Sounds like a good option for all the places where pumped hydro is not realistic. However, marketing talk is cheap. Lets wait is see what there full size plants numbers are.
I’d like to see how day-to-day maintenance compares to other systems. And I’d like to see how the efficiency stacks up against gravity batteries. I prefer this over most other grid level battery systems. The system could last indefinitely with only minor replacements needed to sustain its continual use. That is a big advantage over the cost of recycling lithium ion batteries. I’m excited to see how the test plant performs.
Yes AC and refrigerator are closed loops, but still has leaks and can break down. It seems for "cost cutting" they would generate new co2 rather then extracting it.
Modification of the storage building, covering it with a solar collector medium, and paying attention to it's solar alignment when building, could minimize the negativity of its space requirements. I think.
I like this system, its simple, and in future installations possibly half the dome could be covered with flexible solar panels, as the flexible panel technology improves and becomes cheaper
2:29 One question I was wondering about, during charging process, while the CO2 is removed from the dome, is there a gas that's being pumped into the dome to neutralize pressure, or is it being sucked into a vacuum? I find it a bit hard to believe that a dome that large can withstand being in vacuum repeatedly, if even once. Or alternatively, I imagine the pressure can be dropped down to just near to the dome's breaking point.
That looks interesting and promising. The air-compressed systems were my favourites so far, as they are based on long lasting simple mechanic - this CO2 solution is simply step above! Well done Italians!
The company I work for has been supplying evaporators, condensers and compressors on co2 for the supermarket cooling for over 10 years here in the Netherlands.
The dome takes up a lot of space, but is there any reason they couldn't cover it in solar panels? And I wonder if this is something that could be scaled down to be useful in smaller industrial installations, or even in the home as an alternative to Powerwalls.
You could get by the cryo-costs by using chalk-water. Heat releases the CO2 for S-CO2 and recombined for cold storage. Heatpumps run during sunlight hours, and wind as available and feedback from the system when they're not.
I'm a fan of these kinds of solutions. On the issue of storage space, I wonder if solutions like this could be adapted as offshore systems. It would also be interesting to see if the dome structure is strong enough to host lightweight renewables of its own. That could potentially provide some excess generation that makes up for the efficiency loss, which I'm assuming is in the form of fugitive heat in the thermal store.
I really like that they are not trying to change the world with fringe tech. Seems like they are just trying to do something in a different way. Even just one small step forward is better than no step at all.
That's what I'm talking about. Using existing tech to whip up something that's a good addtiion to the many solutions for energy storage. It does sound a bit too good to be true, but the advantage this tech has over the other mineral batteries is that added cost of mining and social order. I also like the idea that there's no refirgeration needed for C02 to be compressed. Getting 30 years out of this isn't bad. Make it so! Great video explaining this, thanks Matt!
How much oil is required to design, manufacture, install and maintain it? Maybe start adding that info to all your videos. Cause all this stuff required massive amounts of oil to construct.
That Italian guy looked like Mattia Binotto from Scuderia Ferrari. I thought he was just eccentric looking but maybe that’s just the style in Italy 🤷🏻♂️
Any time you can turn a waste product into a resource, you have my interest. The process is simple and seems fairly scalable. If they can figure out ways to improve their utilization of the land they're using and keep things maintained well to prevent leaks, they'll be a very good solution. The downside is what happens in the event of a total storage failure. The CO² could suffocate everyone in a certain area if it was attacked. That's the biggest concern I have, honestly.
Leave it to the ancestors of Davinci to do it with off the shelf tech. Was back in the early 80’s when a friends US Navy ship snaps a main drive shaft in two. Told me they were all stoked for three to five weeks of liberty when the Italians in Napoli said they could fix it, the Americans did not believe it was possible but saw no harm in letting them try. Imagine how huge that drive shaft was. They welded it back together but who knows how they got it to be balanced? Friend said the moral on the boat was dead 5 days latter when they were all recalled and back out 6 or 7 days after being towed into port!
Promising but massive in scale and it's uncertain how well it will work. So far we have the concept and it looks like they're building a prototype. That's helpful because one of the things that need to be determined is are the failure points. Based on the illustrations it looks like the storage is the size of several large warehouses, but inside that dome it looks like they plan to use some type of impermeable flexible membrane, basically a big balloon which will have to be assembled from a number of smaller sheets and bonded to each other to form the CO2 "bag". So what happens when the bag springs a leak? How easy will it be to locate the leak and repair it? Like I said, promising and I will be interested in seeing how it develops.
It seems like all these physical compressed/liquid batteries are worth trying and should be scaling just as fast as possible so we can quickly establish which ones work as well as we'd like them to.
I hope this takes off. It sounds very safe since it isn't flammable, doesn't reach high temperatures, and even if the bubble bursts there is pretty much no harm done. Its efficiency is great and it also looks fairly easy to maintain and deploy all around the world. Maybe the dome could be build on top of a building that contains all of the other parts of the system. That could maybe reduce its footprint a bit. I am curious how the dome holds out in heavy weather. How well can it handle hurricane winds and potentially flying debris? Other than that it looks like a golden ticket
Cost and time to market are EVERYTHING for energy storage. This looks like it has incredible potential. Off the shelf components, no exotic materials, extremely well understood and simple technology. And it can be installed on-site anywhere wind/solar is installed. It just begs for economy-of-scale construction. If they can really get the LCOE where they say (and that seems plausible), this could be the breakthrough energy storage we’ve been needing. Once solar+storage gets to be cheaper than natural gas, it’s game over for the fossil fuel power industry.
Sounds plausible. I'm optimistic that some set of storage options will emerge that will be adequate for 100% renewable energy in electrifiable applications.
Matt, I believe that peaker plants are one of the most pollution intense energy generating facilities in the US. If we could replace those plants with this solution it would go a long way in evening out the solar and wind intermittency and providing more continuous and reliable energy flow in communities around the states. Could a miniaturized version of the storage be built for homeowners. If all the components are widely available maybe miniaturization and mass distribution would be possible. Just a thought.
THe fact that this uses no complex proprietary technology or rare elements makes it the most convincing energy storage solution Ive seen so far. Just common, off the shelf parts and well researched processes.
Is there something special about using CO2 as the working fluid vs nitrogen or just air? Just wondering if that dome is necessary. I get the CO2 angle from an environmental perspective, but from a thermodynamic perspective, what are the numbers vs using other gasses?
Nothing really special. In a nutshell, they want a substance that can be either a gas or a liquid reasonable temperatures (-40C to 40C or thereabouts), depending upon pressure. CO2 works, most refrigerants work, etc. Off hand I can think of Freon, propane, butane, ammonia, etc. But CO2 has the nice advantage of being fairly non-toxic and cheap.
I think the interesting comparison for size is with pumped hidro. Everyone would build hidro, if they had the conditions. This does not need the water or the elevation change.
I'd just like to know, have any projects you've discussed over the years actudlly went to market? And met claims? Or need their aims? No pun intended that's your job Matt.
This is a very promising energy storage solution, and with its simplicity and utility of design it looks like there will be few technical obstacles to getting it up and running. After compressed air and liquid air took off, I did wonder if other gases would be utilised in a similar way, and CO2 is a very effective choice. Without the extra energy cost and technical issues that occur with super-cooling, it could be very effective and scalable. Really the only issue - as was mentioned - is the land space taken up to store the CO2 at low-pressure. The best option would be to stick the bladder it in any underground holes that are available - which is also storage reservoirs that can be used for compressed air or pumped hydro - but the CO2 bladder doesn't have any specific location requirements, so really you could stick it anywhere you had space. For solar plants that are located out in deserted rural locations, this isn't a big issue, but for energy storage in urbanised locations, the company might have to come up with some new designs for their bladder. Another modification for gas-based energy solutions that might become popular in the future is to bind the gas to another molecule, causing it to precipitate, (or binding the gas to a solid/liquid that takes it out of solution), so it can either be stored in a compact form or the chemical equilibrium can be used to do work (e.g. powering a turbine down an energy differential). An example of this that Matt mentioned in another episode is a system that binds the gas to rocks, and heating and cooling the rocks allows for transfer of energy.
asuming the stated stats are at least close to factual, i can only see this as being a great way to store power. i think often people get a bit too hung up on effeciency, and while that is important, there are other important factors. the only thing i don't understand, is if space is a problem, why not dig the dome down? yes it will make the construction cost higher, but i doubt it will so much, that the space saved will be less valuable. another thing i think is great, is that the dome can be buildt as big as needed, meaning for big scale applications, this could be one of, if not the greatest alternative power storage solution, you have covered so far, IMO.
This sounds like an incredibly promising idea. Industrial scale liquid C02 storage is already a thing that exists, so the hardware (tanks and pipes) for that is probably already available at large scale/low prices, as is the compressor that you mentioned. I would somewhat expect the heat exchangers are readily available too. I think the only novel thing here is the dome. I think this idea has huge potential.
I also think these domes are readily available off the shelf. They are using them on bio gas generation plants in Denmark (gas generation from manure). But they seem to be fully inflated all the time. Don't know if they can sustain the repeated inflation and deflation cycles.
Nothing novel about the equipment. It's a beautiful concept that uses current, off-the-shelf technology. That makes it economical to build and maintain. Super idea!
Not mentioned is the fact that a large leak in the bladder would be very dangerous to humans since it is heavier than air and will therefore hover near the ground.
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Makes sense, that's more than can be said for all the global warming hysteria. Remember when Al Gore said NYC would be under water by 2012?
I think in combination with regular thermal power stations it might be a very interesting idea you have the Carbon Capture technology added with this system and added Solar panels on the area and the good thing is if you use decommissioned powerplants blocks you have the necessary infrastructure like turbines generators and the entire power generation infrastructure
Can you please say " Am I not Turtley enough for the Turtle Club. "
LOL....LOL....So they charge the system with MANUFACTURED Co2....well that will fix everything !!!...(sarcasm)....why are you linking climate change with this?
Great video but put the sponsor at the end to the video wont get interrupted and I would still pay attention
I think the big difficulty that many people have is understanding that renewable energy does not just have a single solution. It will be a mix of generation including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal etc. It will also be a mix of storage including pumped hydro, lithium ion, flow batteries, hydrogen batteries and others. No solution is perfect for every context but together they offer a flexible way to generate and store the energy for the future.
And, lots and lots of nuclear.
@@float32 Nuclear is the best option to get to net zero. There are many new designs out there that are far safer than traditional reactors.
@@fr2ncm9 Problem with it is, that it takes a lot of time to get it up. And you need cooling, which is getting more and more an issue with rising temperatures and low level rivers. New tech is there, but until they are up and running we could invest in renewable and storage in the meantime and it would be far better.
I wonder if there could ever be a situation that too many solar panels are reflecting or absorbing sunlight to the point we damage the environments we hope to preserve through changed local weather or localized average temperatures. Desertification around solar farms? I wonder how much landmass that would require to be covered for such a thing to arise?
@@fr2ncm9 I'm pretty sure this is going to be a big thing in the coming years.
I think it's extremely noteworthy that using this for grid storage opposed to batteries has the advantage of freeing up more batteries for things like vehicles.
My future electric truck won't need batteries, as the energy will come from CO2 evaporation, with the storage bladder towed behind in a huge trailer.
lol no
You can’t forget your rooftop wind turbines to charge your co2 bladder
Every type of energy storage that doesn't degrade over time is a big plus in my mind. That means that it's not a question of if the system is profitable, but when
What do you mean if profitable????? If it's not no one would ever build It ffs
@@willvanderhorst9072 most young people do not have the ability to think. Some do but most do not.
It's an attractive idea, but EVERYTHING degrades. The membranes, turbines, concrete, etc. in these are likely amortized over about 25 years as with similar construction. Making it last longer faces diminishing returns in the face of present value discounting and further would likely be superseded by much more efficient new technology at that time.
@@dtacto We need solutions NOW, not in 25 years.
@@Vile_Entity_3545 Define young? I constantly hear negative things about Gen Z and young people, yet I know too many people that are 50+ years old that barely know how to Google something or how to research a topic. Why do people need to perpetuate the us vs them, the older vs the younger? I understand what the person is basically saying above, even if it wasn't written accurately. They are basically just saying that long term storage systems are easier to become profitable over short(er) term storage systems. Stop thinking you're better than someone because of your age. We all have short comings and we all have strong suites. Stop putting each other down.
One possible benefit of using CO2 is that it's somewhat safer than other gases. Small scale leakage would not cause significant damage. Large scale leakage might cause some suffocation risk, but no long lasting hazard once it dilutes in air.
look up what a 1000PSI exploding in a catastrophic failure of the containment medium will do.
@@6Sparx9 Uh...maybe youre unfamiliar with scuba, but we carry 3000+psi tanks on our backs. All the time. To depths, not just on the surface. Besides, theyre compressing it into liquid. It doesnt require much pressure to keep it in liquid form. Tanker trucks carry liquid gas all the time on the same road you use.
@@maniagokm3186 In all fairness, he's not entirely talking out his ass. Those tanks become missiles when ruptured, and people have been killed by simple 100-150lbs compressor tanks rupturing. Even some vehicle tires can be deadly when punctured. And you just know some jackass in the States will end up shooting one of these things.
@@maniagokm3186 CO2 Does indeed need really high pressure to be kept as a liquid at room temperature (~50 times the atmospheric pressure). Tanker trucks do indeed transport liquid gas but gas as in gasoline or liquefied petroleum gas, not CO2. At the same time I agree that while storing such high pressures might seem difficult, with proper safety precautions it won't cause many problems
This was going to be my question. In the event of a dome rupture or some catastrophe failure of the pressure containers, what would the CO2 do. If it goes straight up in the atmosphere, then probably no big deal. But if it spreads out along ground level, there could be a significant risk of it pushing away breathable air for some distance around the facility. Not poo-pooing this technology, just want to be certain of any risks involved.
This technology seems like one of the most promising ones you have presented. Energy storage is one of the largest obstacles when adapting large scale solar and wind generation.
what do you need large scale solar and wind generation for if you can use the primary emissions from burning fossil fuels into a further energy source?
Yea, I wonder how it compares to flywheels
because the Co2 is a gimmick in this case and its not being scrubbed from atmosphere anyway, it performs WAY worse than refrigerant does especially at higher ambient temps such as where the company proposes to build such plants.
Still I get the idea, make 'batteries' that do not use Lithium ion because it totally undermines the argument of the saving the local and foreign environments and still allows the renewable dream to persist. Would like to see the efficacy of this plant.
@@6Sparx9 It also seems like the "Stores heat to reuse on expanding the gas" is a bit of hand waving. holding high heat in a large enough container for extended periods seems like it wouldn't be easy as a square on a flow chart. and if it was that easy why not just store heat from the sun and use heat pump to intensify it and boil some water when you need it.
@@6Sparx9 You misunderstand how it works. This energy storage doesn't need a constant supply of co2, it uses the same volume of co2 over and over again. Fossil fuel use releases way to much co2, we produce enough co2 in a day to fill up millions of these batteries which don't need to be refilled barring leaks/malfunctions
Excess electricity from the grid compress the mass of co2 which is later released to produce electricity, this is repeated and the cow is never used up, if the effeciency is right this is a really good technology because all the parts are already used in industry at scale
Clever setup using already standard parts, enhancing the ability to build fast. I like it and hope they are successful!!
They won’t, because nothing this guy reports on ever actually gets built. This channel produces more hot air than all CO2 and methane in the atmosphere combined.
Seems cool, wish he would have delved in to why C02 was chosen more.. is it really the most efficient gas possible for this application? I assume it is, but I can't help but be cynical that it may have been chosen purely as a hook for investment and brand. Is Nitrogen really worse? Why?
@@sammadison1172 I suppose, you would need extremely high pressure to get liquid nitrogen at room temperature. Wouldn't work with this concept.
@@sammadison1172 you don’t make sense at all. If anything it’s an in your face deterrent to use CO2 as most people would think that’s dangerous! Do think about how available it is it’s put in the soda pop you dimwits drink all the time, used in pubs to keep keg bear fresh. Availability dude, cheap!
@@sammadison1172 If I had to guess I'd say it's low toxicity and its very cheap
The only real downside as I see it is the amount of land the CO2 bladder takes up. While that isn't all that much of a downside, I imagine that solar panels could be placed on the top and/or sides of the bladder. Alternatively, they could dig a huge hole, put the bladder in the hole, cover it up and then install the solar energy or wind farm on top. Basically that would allow nearly all the land available for the installation to be used to generate power. I suppose the only problem with building it like that is it would be harder to perform maintenance on the bladder but I don't know how much maintenance would be required.
there is quite a lot of unused space in any wind farm for instance, and with how unreliable they are, you could use the extra capacity lmao.
I had the same thoughts, especially regarding maintenance, but they could simply build an arc structure on top of the "dome" leaving enough space between the solar panel structure and the dome itself.
P.S.
Ironically enough, here in Italy it might actually be more difficult to use this in large scale because we don't have that much uninhabited flat-surface spaces, but there are places both in Europe (Germany, France and Poland or any other European country other than Italy and Switzerland) and outside europe, especially in Asia, in the Middle East and North&South America where space isn't really that much of a problem if the intention is to use them in large scale.
@@magnumopus1628 The thing is, this looks like it could be scaled down to household size and be just as useful. Multiply that by each house hold that has a "balloon battery" and link them to the grid and you've got lots of capacity....one house at a time.
@@maniagokm3186 good idea
@@maniagokm3186 that'd require too much maintenance.
Probably better to put a central 'battery' on every block or so.
First of all, congratulations to my Italian cousins for being first off the block with a significant product of this type! It is sure to find a significantly big niche for any energy storage cycle that follows the day-night latency. I would caution, in connection with Sion's observation below, that this sort of practical thermodynamic cycle only works well (i.e., near its peak efficiency) near some such cycle time, as it depends critically on the use of a so-called heat regenerator to recover the energy used in the compression phase. Not an insignificant part of the energy stored is locked up in the regenerators, and any attempt to rush or prolong the storage time means going off-cycle to accomodate, or loss of that heat, respectively. Anyway, any good tech has its optimum operational constraints. Nice report Matt...thank you. Domenico Barillari
What would be the best use case for this technology? Does it just need a window daily to recharge?
There's another company, ESS in the US that developed the iron redux flow battery. Either is effective, I don't know which would be cheaper or take up more space, and neither uses elements that are under high demand for other use cases, other than iron, but that's the most common element so no big deal.
Actually after watching the process and efficiency the ESS system is more effective and I'm sure it takes up less space.
its a lie, everything on this channel is bs
@@alw6589 - “best use case”
If it were me, I would use all renewable to compress CO2, send extra renewable to the grid, and increase CO2 power generation when renewable drops.
Imagine it as a big capacitor used on a pulsed DC power supply, which fills in the gaps, but on a massive scale.
This system would work well with geothermal generation as it's 24/7. The off peak power could be stored and geothermal plants have a lot of waste heat that could be used in the liquid to gas phase.
Regarding the space requirement of the storage bladder, yes, that uses up quite a bit of surface area as shown here, but that doesn't have to be a problem. See this is a just pilot plant.
Once the maximum extent of inflation of the dome is established, one could simply design a solid structure to be built around the dome, which can then be fitted with photovoltaic panels, thereby "reclaiming" some of the surface area for energy production on top of energy storage.
Though the structure is round so that's quite akward to place solar panels on I imagine.
@@kedrednael How so?
@@HeliophobicRiverman Just practically speaking it seems hard to me, to place solar panels on a large round structure. You'd need to use a crane or something? Or build a permanent stairs and walkway specifically for the panels?
Regular solar power facilities are easy to build: just place panels on the ground, all in the same way. Or on roofs, where there is room to walk on too. Even then, the work of placing the panels is like 15% of the cost according to google.
@@kedrednael It seems I misunderstood part of the video, the bladder is already inside a solid shell, probably for protection. Simply adding a framework on the outside of the shell, including walkways and hardpoints for mounting the panels, would work.
Yes it would cost more than leaving the solid shell as shown here, but if space is an issue, this would provide more utility per square meter of the ground the bladder is built on.
@@kedrednael not really there are curved panels and panels that can be put on a sheet blanket like material. So there are implications to reclaim some energy of that space.
I'm wondering how far you can scale down: this will never be a household storage option, but it strikes me that a lot of farmers might find it intriguing: the parts are all standard, so there's no magic single source dependency. Wonder if you could retrofit a silo with a bladder.
You've hit on something others have missed. These things don't have to all be above ground and made in this shape. Theres no reason they couldn't be made as tall as skyscrapers, with a tiny footprint, perhaps even topped with wind turbines, with solar panels all up their sides.
I think turbines, heat exchangers, heat storage, and lots of precision balanced moving parts don't scale super small easily. I think traditional batteries will be a better fit for small outfits like homes and farms. Of course a farmer could opt to plop a grid scale dome or two on his land, but then we're not really talking about scaling it down.
@@mpoisot You're neglecting the bottleneck in raw lithium production. If ranchers (who are already leasing their land for wind production) are going to get in on energy storage, the demand for batteries will become prohibitive. The battery industry is already in a lithium crunch; making storage with off the shelf components where the only specialty piece you'll need is the custom bladder to fit your old silo is a massive, massive win when we need rapid adoption of storage to halt climate change. Bear in mind, these silos might be smaller than the demonstration dome, but not by an order of magnitude. Maybe 1/2 or 1/3 the size. You only need a few of them and a rancher whose land has desertified and you have a plant almost ready to go. Brilliant idea Ross Reedstrom!
@@mpoisot This is not heat storage; this is energy stored as PV (pressure-volume) which can be theoretically converted into electricity with 100% efficiency.
@@NotOneToFly It's true there are lithium supply crunches today, but if we just go off the price per MWH quoted in the video then it assumes batteries as a family won't always be in a dire supply crunch. Otherwise we should revise the price per MWH of batteries to be much higher and essentially rule them out of the toolbox of storage options. Going back to the original comment, I can't imagine this stuff scaling down super small. Think of the careful maintenance that happens at power plants and refineries. Those turbines are incredibly expensive and any rotational imbalance or other mechanical issues can mean huge expenses, down time, and expert help needed to bring things back online. I think there's a reason we don't all have micro turbine co-generation units at home supplying both electrical and heat energy to businesses and residences. Those complicated machines and heat driven processes doesn't scale small efficiently. On that topic, I think the heat exchange and heat storage component of pressurized gas storage needs a minimum size to be cost effective. If that processes isn't done right it takes a big dent out of the round trip efficiency and probably limits the power output (the max speed you can convert stored gas into electricity). The bigger the heat system gets, the more efficient it can be, especially for longer term storage like days instead of hours. Matt kind of glossed over how the heat storage works in this system, and I bet that's because they're still actively figuring out how to improve that system and whatever they come up with will be their "secret sauce".
HVAC tech here, I’ve seen a few CO2 systems and this idea looks really promising, a leak would suck though.
Actually a leak would really blow !
It's a clever way to think about long term energy storage. Helping monetize CO2 capture is a nice bonus.
Also congrats on hitting 1 mil, Matt!
This doesn't do that in the least the CO2 storage even when fully built out is nothing compared to what we put up in the air. This is just a battery although it looks like a much cheaper one for grid storage which is good.
i thought that too and it would be really intersesting to plug in the numbers and see how it would play out. Like How much CO2 is Stored in One Cycle/Storage Plant and how much is that compared to global CO2 Output. It wont be much, but i'd be interested in the numbers
@@miroconzelmann5027 ….he said “ 100 to 200 tons “ at the beginning of the video. Burning one gallon of gasoline, makes 20 pounds of CO2 (climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html) ……. so 20,000 gallons of gas to make 200 tons CO2…… sadly, in 2021, the USA burnt 369 million gallons per day…….still good technology though!
@@josieriley9334 ok so thats less than nothing 😅.... aaanyway
I've been talking about energy storage as the killer technology we need since the 80s. If (and it's a big if) they can get half of what they say then this really could be the killer technology we've needed. I still think we should be building dozens of modern nuclear plants to get us the energy needed now to get us clean water and get us to a time when solar/wind can fill the CO2 batteries.
Nuclear energy has one killer feature not a lot of people mention, 1% of Uranium is useful for energy production, 99% needs to be dumped somewhere and there is not a single (yet) landfill we can store some dangerous stuff for 10k years (or more). It would be a good transition technology 50 years ago but is not a good one today. cost of dealing with the mess of spent fuel or indeed 99% of uranium ore that cannot be used is just too expensive. (Thorium, slow wave reactors and etc probably would make sense 30 years ago with solid founding, but not today with no founding and being 20 years away).
@@drachenfels6782 modern reactors are far more efficient and nuclear waste is tens of thousands of times less volume than coal power. We should have been building more for 50 years we'd be in much better shape
@@Scoots1994 I agree *if* we were building that many nuclear power plants we'd be in a different world. But nuclear has been a disappointment for growth.
The first production-ready nuclear power plant was started in 1951 but yet, 72 years later, nuclear only provides 10% of the world's power. Nuclear power was like the promising college grad with all the honors, degrees, extra-curriculars, and praise from all his professors. But, ultimately, he never left his parent's basement nor had a real job and is well past middle age. There's a lot of reasons why this is the way it is.
@@beyondfossil nuclear growth stalled because of Chernobyl disaster.
@@amitgupta25121993 Sure, the Chernobyl was a huge disaster. We also have more recent major incidents like Fukushima Dai-ichi, Japan (2011) which costed between $1.2B to $2.1B. Then before Chernobyl was Three Mile Island, USA (1979) which costed $2.4B to clean up.
But consider every other year, there are minor incidents at nuclear power plants all over the world. Some leaked radioactive material into the local waterways too. They resulted in millions of dollar spent for repairs and clean up:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
Another factor is the nuclear is an expensive form of energy. Lazard lists the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of nuclear between $131 to $205 per MWh. Similar LCEO for solar farms is between $30 to $41 per MWh and wind farm is $26 to $50 per MWh.
Nuclear construction also has a consistently bad track record of being billions over-budget and years over-schedule. Its laughably bad and has become an inside joke in the energy industry.
This is probably one of the best electricity storage solutions I've seen so far, which seems to actually work, rather than 'it might work' in the future.
However, Thorcon nuclear is promising to generate electricity cheaper than this can store electricity.
Nuscale says it will be starting to generate at about 7c kWh, getting down to about 5 c kWh over time which is the same cost as this solution only stores power.
I believe the 'silver bullet' you mentioned, is actually 4th gen nuclear.
Talk is good but where are the reactors. We need solutions now, not promises that seem to perpetually fade into the future.
They were talking about thorium reactors at my university 10 years ago and there still aren't viable solutions
A marriage between the two technologies. Storage can prevent the requirement for over building a reactor to support the peak demand. If the reactor is stable at over production of say 10% for 70% of its production time and only falls short for 30%....the energy could be stored for later use and supplement times of peak demand. Think of it like peak shaving your home with the use of solar amd batteries, but on a much larger scale.
We do the same thing with air compressors in manufacturing. Don't install a giant electric gobling air compressor for leak loads on the system. Install two smaller units, the second unit will supplement the system for peak demand but when you are steady state...you have a much smaller, more efficient unit running.
@@jamesashurst I have to agree, we need solutions now or just around the corner and not promises of what might work in a decade or two.
Many companies talk a good deal but it takes forever for them to deliver and in a lot of cases, they don't deliver.
It's why the tech that interest me the most is near future tech over the next 5 years and not the promise of tech over decades.
What's the timeline for building such a plant? What's that timeline if you include all of the funding, bureaucratic red tape, public awareness campaigns to turnover opinions on nuclear, and sheer construction lead times?
Solar, wind, and storage are ready to go NOW. Although, I do have to give it to nuclear that the supply chains and waste streams are more defined for that tech compared to solar, wind, and storage. Those issues will burden the renewables sector in the next decade, if they haven't already.
I don't think Thorium is that silver bullet you're looking for, but I definitely think nuclear is part of the silver buckshot of sustainability.
All depends on how fast we can get stuff out so that we can transition from fossils to renewables
I definitely think Physical Batteries like this will be revolutionary for our future. It’ll be interesting to see which one eventually wins out.
In the meantime though, I’m all for embracing the intermittency of renewables along with a solid backbone of nuclear and geothermal energy. That’s plenty of clean energy for our very immediate goals so no reason not to build them like crazy!
I agree. We have the knowledge and technology already available to hit our immediate goals. We just have to do it.
@@UndecidedMF nuclear is the main solution to greenhouse neutral on-demand power that provides the grid stability solution that renewables' intermittency requires...
The main issue in my mind is stigma around nuclear power and it's safety. People know a whole lot more about nuclear disasters than nuclear power, and it informs public discourse in an unfortunately negative way :(
I would challenge that this "solid backbone" is necessary. Renewables rather need flexibility. Nuclear is especially bad in this regard, as it's a hassle to power down. Geothermal is just not viable in many places. In an environmentally friendly way at least, not causing earthquakes or similar problems.
Smart grid and sustainable storage should be the main focus right now, not building new nuclear or risky geothermal projects.
@@Triforian Just build nuclear power plants and run them consistently, not intermittently. People are afraid of nuclear in the same way they are afraid if snakes and spiders, irrationally.
@@Triforian You may be overestimating the amount that I mean when I say “backbone”. I’m still editing the video where I fully describe this, but the high level is this: I’m looking for about 10-15% nuclear energy and 2-5% geothermal energy globally.
We really don’t need that much in order to keep critical systems running and those seem to be the numbers that experts have coalesced around.
I love how this system uses the same principles than cryo storage, but side stepping most of the hurdles but choosing the right fluids.
It's look more like a standard air-sourced-heat-pump. Compressor, vaporizer. You can get those too with CO2 as the 'coldgas', these days.
I think the biggest problem with this idea will be safety. It is good news that most renewables are best placed in areas that have low population density. But an accidental release of an industrial quantity of liquid CO2 would result in a ground-level CO2 cloud that would suffocate any animal unfortunate enough to be caught in it. As long as that risk is fully mitigated this seems like a good use of CO2. Goodness knows we have enough of the stuff!
Would be interesting to hear what passive safety features they have in place to deal with catastrophic leaks. Any compressed gas stored at an industrial scale always makes me think about the Bhopal disaster back in the '80s. CO2 isn't THAT dangerous, but a sufficiently large quantity could be a risk. Perhaps having it far enough away from populated areas would be enough mitigation (other than for on-site workers). It would warm up and dissipate into the air fairly quickly.
Genuine question but would putting walls up around the tank storage force the co2 up and away from people? Or maybe enclosing it in a larger box that isnt air tight but slows the expansion of the co2 so less is released into the area at once? Yes anyone in there wouls be dead but it might stop a ton of people dieing
@@graham1034 CO2-detectors, an alarm system and respiratory masks with a small air tank (for several minutes of breathing) would reduce the risk for on-site-workers almost completely.
I really want to see a micro version of this for home / small business use. This looks like a simple enough system that hyper-local energy storage could be more viable that the PowerWall solution.
My thought exactly, erect one of those old water towers that farms have, get some used pressurized canisters to contain it while liquid, and if everything else is commercially available we have a off grid dream possible.
Feels like a totally viable battery storage for anyone that might be a bit handy.
My guess is it's too big (as in takes up too much land) for small scale
There will be no micro version. Storing CO2 in liquid and gas form, storing heat, generating power - all of these work *much* better at larger scale.
If it scales linearly, then eyeballing the bladder, the needed space is ~7cubic feet per kilowatt. If an average house is using 10Kw/day then you need around 70 cuft, or a 5'x5'x5' block of space. Double or triple that footprint for the other component and you have a small out-building less that the size of a guest house. Thats very doable in a lot of locations.
@@EddieGonzalez you still need the pump to generate 70 bars of pressure and the power to do so, etc.
Doing this at small scale would bring that entire system out of balance. You'd need the same power for a lot less storage. It won't get small until the pumps and everything get efficient enough to be smaller. But even then, big-scale will yield way more. As I've commented on the other 4930 comments saying this; It'd definitely be better to do this for an entire block or neighbourhood instead of per household.
Tesla switched over to LFP batteries for their Megapacks which use neither nickel nor cobalt.
Also, IIRC LAES stores the liquified air at 15 Bar(218 psi) at room temperature.
With the size the system takes it sounds like it would be a good fit for places like the United States that have a lot of land that they could use to store these batteries.
We're going to run out of room for people to be able to do cool things if we build things too big bro.
The land use issue could possibly be solved by using smaller dome groups that are hidden under the solar cells themselves. This would also have the advantage of you being able to do maintenance on the dome assemblies without taking the entire system down, simply by using isolation valves. Manufacturing and deployment times may also be quicker as you would have smaller structures to build.
Now this is an intriguing idea.
Reminds me of how Dave with Just Have a Think on YT just this year did a video on distributed underwater hydrostorage bladders encased in concrete spheres that operate on the pressure differentials presented at the seafloor.
With these membrane bladders for CO2 storage, you could raise the solar panels in the air like 2-4 meters or so and scatter the bladders sparsely to allow working clearance for maintenance and inspection. The only problem here is that these bladders might impede any convection cooling that might be gained from raising the panels, and so the entire solar fleet may run at a lower efficiency as a result.
To an environmentalist, reduced efficiency but with greater storage capacity via distributed domes still sounds like a good deal. The problem arises when you consider economists and investors that want to see their ideal rates of return.
There's different patterns you could do with this idea, though. You could stagger rows of bladders / solar arrays so that there would be corridors underneath the panels for improved convection cooling. PV plants could reconfigure like this, as well as CSP plants that use parabolic troughs and are already spaced out (although the spaces are there to allow for maintenance and removal of dust/sand that build up on the trough, but I digress).
You'd have to calculate what the space savings for distributing the bladders + all of the additional piping, cabling, and equipment needed to operate the bladders (and the inherent losses therein) compared to lumping it all together. I have an idea the calc would have to depend on how much surface area is available, and that distributing the bladders may work better for larger and larger utility-scale farms.
Awesome idea though!
More expensive tho
This Energydome is a brilliant idea, it works in a similar way to the old gasometer tanks that rise and fall in a frame - instead a huge "bladder". Thank you, Matt, for another great video.
Take away co2 from the plants….the horror.
There is another plus for batteries not mentioned and that is speed. In microseconds, batteries can change their output/input to stabilize the grid. I also question the 75-80% efficiency, but if true, that is pretty good. Not sure why they chose CO2 over other gasses that compress into liquids at reasonable pressure/temps. This thing is sort of a backward air conditioner and as such, you could use any number of refrigerants used in the hvac industry. Perhaps CO2 is just a good choice based on price.
Co2 is unique with its point being so easily accessible, also liquid is accessible at room temperature. Other gasses that behave like this like methane have far worse compression ratios and global warming potentials.
@@varno Not really unique at all. Look at a list of all the hvac refrigerants that exist All of these compounds were specifically designed to have their gas/liquid transitions happen at reasonable pressures/temperatures and to do so with substantial heats of condensation/evaporation. My guess is that they use CO2 because it is cheap.
And also its a great marketing ploy to say you store co2.
@@apostolakisl there is actually a big move to use co2 as a refrigerant, as almost all other refrigerants have massive global warming potential. Further other refrigerants tend to be very expensive comparatively, which is a big negative for a storage system.
And safety, abundance, availability, ease of use.
You could also put solar panels on the dome itself to get the most energy out of the space used.
CO2 as a liquid is used in refrigeration systems. Seems to be an additional food industry opportunity here.
Output should be called Bagawatts.
Nice cover!
I consider myself pretty good informed about what is happening in science and equipped with a good general knowledge about science. But your videos leave me standing open-mouthed time and again! Keep up the excellent work! 💐
I drove a hazmat tanker for 2 decades carrying liquid Co2 I learned quite a bit about it . This is a genius idea I think it could turn things around and we can finally shut down the coal plants .
I sure like the fact that no exotic materials are required, meaning that this solution seems to be future proof. At least for quite a while.
The production of battery electrode minerals are not exactly environmentally friendly, as I understand it.
They need less exotic materials though, not none. They still use electric engines and certain alloys in their system.
If this energy storage solution is actually able to manage a LCOS of $50/MWh, we may have just found the quick and cheap route to solving the problems of intermittency (although nuclear power must be a part of the energy grid for now, unless the situation dramatically changes in the next 50 years and we succeed at making nuclear fusion power into a cost-effective and viable energy solution, thus launching humanity into its next stage of evolution as a species). This technology definitely appears HIGHLY promising. I'm cheering on its success fully and completely.
hopefully this catches on . seems good and it is simple in design. if the CO2 they required could be captured on site then it is even better.
This is the first time I think one of these new energy storage innovations would work. Why? Because it's simple. This design should be very cheap to make and maintain, and quite efficient.
With all the various bulk energy storage technologies coming out these days, it will be interesting to see which ones end up winning in the market place. Overall complexity, total cost of ownership, best use and permitting issues are all factors.
Yes. I suspect it'll be driven in part by geography. Solutions that are more space efficient favouring countries with greater land costs.
This is and you are one of the very few people/channels who understands energy as a whole and don't pump up the hype with flashy words. Thanks you for the channel and amazing videos.
I think it is more his team that understands energy. That or they know how to read and repeat a press release.
Matt, I've watched a number of your videos and just want to say THANK YOU.
Always interesting, concise and understandable. You have quite a grasp on how to share information. Your passion for new tech and answers to major problems in our society is enlightening. Major respect for you, and again, thanks for all you do.
You say it's long term energy storage, but it's not really, because you need to store the heat released when compressing the gas which means it's relies on a thermal battery to run at high efficiencies so really you can only store the heat for about 48 hours unless you use a phase change material I suppose, but then you would need a LOT of that phase change material, something that changes phase as 25C or so, well insulate it and you could store the majority of the thermal energy maybe for months depending on the ambient temperature , and with some evacuated solar thermal tubes you could recharge the thermal battery as fast as it could deplete.
in the summer you wouldn't even have to worry about it depleting because on average the temp would be 25C in most places people live most of the summer, again the size of the thermal battery would be a problem though because the heat capacity of all the tunable phase change materials I have seen are worse than ice in the amount of energy they store release or store by changing phase, it's not like 1/2 or anything that bad.
Although if you just berried the thermal battery 2 or so feet underground you could probably get 25C temps all year round, especially if you tuned the material to start phase changing at 17C, really it would depend on the climate where you are installing it.
I love all the options presented on this channel. The future looks bright thanks to technology innovators & risk takers despite the claims of science deniers and those who want to return us to technology of the 1950's.
It is so funny! I've searched a way to store liquefied CO2, produced during winter, for a later time in order to sell it to the beverage industry and bumped into an energy storage solution that seems the best. No wonder it has the best roundtrip efficiency. Good video, Matt! Keep on the good work!
I have to say that I really enjoy your channel and content. It's nice to see positive presentation of the various options that are being presented.
I wonder how well this might scale down? How much space would it consume to store power for a single household? The attic in my house is a large open void. Putting in bladders that could inflate to fill that space would be a great potential solution to localized storage. Powerwalls are interesting, but it's still a lot of metal with all of the negatives associated with it.
I also wonder if this technology could help improve grid stability? I live in Ontario and honestly the most expensive part of my hydro bill has become the delivery charge, which is to cover the cost of the grid in Ontario. As capacity increases, the size and capacity of all of the redundant systems goes up as well. Could this be used at grid scale to help reduce demand on the grid in the event of an outage.
We need this now! Especially in countries with a lot of wind, sun and space it can't be that hard. But I'm sure it won't happen that fast as we actually need it.
So, if CO2 and its phase-change can yield this kind of performance, it would be interesting to see how ammonia, or maybe even a fluorocarbon, would do.
Ammonia would facilitate much longer storage period. Weeks and months not just a day or two. To me, that type of solution would truly make wind/solar viable
Removing the fluorocarbons would be even better than co2 at reducing greenhouse gasses. They are responsible for like x4-x6 the amount of warming than co2, at just a fraction of the volume.
I was thinking about ammonia, too. It’s a common refrigerant, so there is a lot of industrial-scale equipment for exactly this purpose already. It may not have the buzzword compliance of CO2, and be more of a problem in case of a leak or accident, but it may be more thermally efficient. I’m sure someone else is working on exactly that, though… this really does seem like an obvious approach.
The problem with anhydrous ammonia is material interactions. It degrades many alloys. CO2 is relatively inert and cheap. HFC are designed for very low pressure phase change for refrigeration. In this case the pressurization is what you want to run turbines.
@@davestagner you’re not looking for refrigeration in this case. You’re looking for pressure differential of phase change to drive turbines.
I recall that the city of Toronto was going to be experimenting with compressed air bladders anchored to the floor of Lake Ontario to use static water pressure to help increase the storage pressure of the bladders while maintaining a reasonably cool temp. The reasoning was that this way they could pump up the bladders during times of low public consumption (i.e. at night), and then use the stored compressed air to run compressors (and the electric motors that power them) in reverse, essentially turning them into a motor powering a generator. I haven't heard anything more of the plan, with the last I've heard of it being at least a year ago, maybe more at this point.
Thanks Matt. The italian Job!. Efficeint and looks simple! One of the culprits that delayed setting wind and solar power was the main critique of land use and the 'change of scenery'. Nobody is nowadys talking about it anymore. Here in Morocco, most of the renewable energy units are set up in remote areas. In short this looks good. I have a question the cost estimate what does it include ? Would it chnage for bigger units?
Here in the US, people are still fighting the land uses that renewables would take. :-(
As stated, there is no one single solution for all needs, but this like a great one to add to the mix.
It's an insanely clever system! Thanks for sharing and I hope this company goes FAR with this!!
One problem in the way of longer term storage is the financial model. If the price of energy varies according to supply and demand throughout the day, a short term storage results in several buy/sell transactions per day. If your cost per MWh is similar but you provide long term storage, you might get one transaction per week or month even, giving a far lower return. We need long term storage for energy security, so we have to find a way to provide a return for the security the service provides, not just the transaction. Of course as more storage solutions and flexible usage schemes, international grids and diversity of sustainable generation schemes come on-line the daily fluctuation in value will decrease. Schemes to guarantee returns for energy security, are being applied to the nuclear industry, but need to be extended to long term storage. It is similar to buying insurance.
Additionally, they can harvest BOTH Heat & Cold from the system (not at the same time).
When the CO2 compresses, heat can be harvested, when un-compressing then cooling can be harvested.
I wonder if this aspect was already calculated into energy storage efficiency or not? If not then this system combined with heating and cooling plants can reach even higher efficiency levels.
The sun's heat would in theory increase the pressure too right?
A Sterling generator would be ideal.
NOPE NOPE NOPE!
You seem to have ignored a major part of the system. When they compress the CO2, it gets hot, so they store that heat in a local Thermal Energy Storage System. They do not provide that heat for other system. They store it for their own future use. When energy is needed, they use that stored heat in order to convert the liquid CO2 into a gas that they can extract energy from. If they were harvesting heat and cooling, they would lose the energy they're storing.
Of all storage batteries this channel has shown.... This one is surprisingly good and I wonder why this hasn't happened before.
You know what would be even better energy produced using CO2 from the atmosphere? That would be some next-level concept.
That's true it will make it a carbon cycle that would sustain itself. Almost like how Hydrogen is a good idea because of its abundance.
@@madat5843 you've essentially hit the problem on the head. Anything self sustained means perpetual motion. Violates laws of thermodynamics
That wouldn't sort anything, since the CO2 inside the bladder is basically the same for 30 years... So it wouldn't even pinch the CO2 level in the atmosphere.
@@ricardomarcelino8388 somebody with a brain 👍
Thank you for the new video! This sounds like a pretty neat idea for grid-scale electrical storage. It has some nice advantages: it's made from already existing technologies, and they store the CO2 at ambient pressure and temperature. The less you have to fight nature, the cheaper and easier the technology becomes. Also there's that 30 year lifetime. But considering how it's made from easily replaceable parts, you could probably keep the battery going for longer than 30 years.
A little late.
I developed this gas storage system over 20 years ago after a Taco Bell run.
😂
This CO2 storage technology is ticking all the right boxes for me: off the shelf components, ambient air temperatures (no cryogenics), simple energy transitions (compression and evaporation), low cost/low impact storage medium (CO2), long life span with no degredation in storage capacity over time, acceptable round trip efficiency, no energy loss during storage, low supply chain risk.
I was already intrigued by compressed air and liquified air storage, and this just kicked it up a notch for me. Thank you, Matt!
They should ditch the solar farm and use energy from the grid at night when nobody else is using it.
@@mth469 Energy storage can be used in lots of ways, including storing excess, or possibly cheaper power, overnight, and then selling it back to the grid when it's more expensive, or most needed because other power sources have failed. It's just a question of who owns the cheap electricity, and how you, as the owner of the energy storage unit, want to make your money. If you own your own solar panels, then the cheapest power will be at noon. Similarly, if you own a wind farm then the cheapest power will probably be overnight.
Otherwise you need to buy the electricity from someone else and you can't control the price as much.
I know what would make a good battery. Using CO2 to create gasoline. I think that would store a lot of energy for a very long time and be pretty easy to handle and transport.
I think there are several problems you have to take in consideration:
1 - A very inefficient process.
2 - If you burn fuel you produce NOx
(Catalytic converters only converts NO to NO2).
3 - Produce of ultra fine particles. It is just soot, even if it is invisible to the naked eye. And no, there is no safe limit.
The only pro, unregarded the source, is ease of use.
@@janjager2906 There are more pros. Existing infrastructure, highest energy density after hydrogen. And the ease of use advantage is a pretty big pro, because ease of storage and transportation also has an environmental impact.
Gasoline does not store very well for long periods. A year maybe without stabilizers. The co2 gets re-released when used.
Love the simplicity of this storage method.
I gotta say, this is quite an attractive cycle from a mechanical perspective. It's a relatively benign process; not too corrosive, not toxic, not terribly hot or cold, readily available.
I think they're vastly overestimating how easy it is to keep a large gaseous system closed over time, and the implication that they're not using customized components is unrealistic. Additionally, environmental planning will be tricky as they'll need to plan for what happens in the event that the whole system pumps liquid CO2 to atmosphere. (They'll likely need to avoid being up-wind and uphill of any inhabited area.) But those are all solvable problems that are much easier to solve than the problems inherent to other energy storage.
I miss a point, which might be helpful for understanding:
When the compressor sucks the CO2 out of the bladder (electricity consumption), air flows into the dome to replace the volume of CO2. When the bladder gets filled (electricity production), air flows out of the dome.
And you could have adressed the risks of a sudden massive release of CO2 by accident.
It's exciting that so many ideas are getting tried. It's far more likely to find a few that work well with many options to pick from, and even the ones that don't work teach us lessons.
This is very promising, if only due to the already streamlined supply chain.
Using this as a future middle step between Carbon Capture Systems and CO2 Storage Systems could also be interesting: capturing CO2 from the air or exhausts, and sending it rather than CO2 stored in "The Dome" directly to the compressor, and when It gets used to produce energy, it can be sent to the long-term CO2 storage solution rather than returning it to "The Dome". Maybe even tewak the system to have CO2 leave the motor in a more favorable condition for long-term storage?
The biggest problem I see with this is thermal expansion in the high pressure tanks. Anyone who’s ever played with airsoft guns or paintball knows that CO2 loses its expansion capabilities drastically in cold temperatures. If the temperature outside becomes cold enough the storage tanks of high pressure CO2 will not be delivering the energy that they are designed to deliver as the pressure will drop significantly. The only way I see it possible to avoid this completely is to bury the tanks far enough underground so that they are below the 55°F barrier. This however creates another substantial problem in the event of a leak, or a tank rupture causing serious affects to the landscape and therefore the climate
It would also take less energy to compress it, so it's not really an issue. It's meant for energy storage, not as an energy source like it is for airsoft.
@@GamesFromSpace if the temperature was hot when it was filled and cold when it needed to be released that would be an issue
@@audikid89 and it's just as likely to go the other way... Except the tanks will be well insulated, not to mention massive enough to ignore daily swings in temperature.
Closed loop phase change energy storage seems like the ideal solution to storing excess energy. The fact that this solution uses established and available technology is a huge advantage. Space isn't a big concern in the US and high energy density storage is best reserved for uses that need it like transportation. I hope they ramp up smoothly and are able to deploy all around the world quickly.
To be honest, the most concerning thing about this technology is that it sounds too good to be true. I hope it is not!
Sounds like a good option for all the places where pumped hydro is not realistic. However, marketing talk is cheap. Lets wait is see what there full size plants numbers are.
I’d like to see how day-to-day maintenance compares to other systems. And I’d like to see how the efficiency stacks up against gravity batteries.
I prefer this over most other grid level battery systems. The system could last indefinitely with only minor replacements needed to sustain its continual use. That is a big advantage over the cost of recycling lithium ion batteries. I’m excited to see how the test plant performs.
Yes AC and refrigerator are closed loops, but still has leaks and can break down.
It seems for "cost cutting" they would generate new co2 rather then extracting it.
you and the intro sound so much better at 1.25 speed up
Modification of the storage building, covering it with a solar collector medium, and paying attention to it's solar alignment when building, could minimize the negativity of its space requirements. I think.
I like this system, its simple, and in future installations possibly half the dome could be covered with flexible solar panels, as the flexible panel technology improves and becomes cheaper
2:29 One question I was wondering about, during charging process, while the CO2 is removed from the dome, is there a gas that's being pumped into the dome to neutralize pressure, or is it being sucked into a vacuum? I find it a bit hard to believe that a dome that large can withstand being in vacuum repeatedly, if even once.
Or alternatively, I imagine the pressure can be dropped down to just near to the dome's breaking point.
Air flows in and out of the dome to compensate the bladder volume. Nothing else would make sense.
But yes, this is an important flaw in the description, it should have been mentioned and shown in the animation.
Its not only the LCOS that matters, Batteries can provide system stability services that these type of storages will struggle to.
That looks interesting and promising. The air-compressed systems were my favourites so far, as they are based on long lasting simple mechanic - this CO2 solution is simply step above! Well done Italians!
The company I work for has been supplying evaporators, condensers and compressors on co2 for the supermarket cooling for over 10 years here in the Netherlands.
The dome takes up a lot of space, but is there any reason they couldn't cover it in solar panels? And I wonder if this is something that could be scaled down to be useful in smaller industrial installations, or even in the home as an alternative to Powerwalls.
Exactly my idea! Why not?
You could get by the cryo-costs by using chalk-water. Heat releases the CO2 for S-CO2 and recombined for cold storage. Heatpumps run during sunlight hours, and wind as available and feedback from the system when they're not.
I'm a fan of these kinds of solutions. On the issue of storage space, I wonder if solutions like this could be adapted as offshore systems. It would also be interesting to see if the dome structure is strong enough to host lightweight renewables of its own. That could potentially provide some excess generation that makes up for the efficiency loss, which I'm assuming is in the form of fugitive heat in the thermal store.
I would put this on shore probably, but the windmills offshore. Salt water is bad enough as it is.
I really like that they are not trying to change the world with fringe tech. Seems like they are just trying to do something in a different way. Even just one small step forward is better than no step at all.
That's what I'm talking about. Using existing tech to whip up something that's a good addtiion to the many solutions for energy storage. It does sound a bit too good to be true, but the advantage this tech has over the other mineral batteries is that added cost of mining and social order. I also like the idea that there's no refirgeration needed for C02 to be compressed. Getting 30 years out of this isn't bad. Make it so! Great video explaining this, thanks Matt!
If land for the co2 storage is an issue, put the storage tanks underground or the generating equipment above the tank.
How much oil is required to design, manufacture, install and maintain it? Maybe start adding that info to all your videos. Cause all this stuff required massive amounts of oil to construct.
That Italian guy looked like Mattia Binotto from Scuderia Ferrari. I thought he was just eccentric looking but maybe that’s just the style in Italy 🤷🏻♂️
Sounds good! Probably the best long term storage solution I’ve heard about!
Any time you can turn a waste product into a resource, you have my interest. The process is simple and seems fairly scalable. If they can figure out ways to improve their utilization of the land they're using and keep things maintained well to prevent leaks, they'll be a very good solution. The downside is what happens in the event of a total storage failure. The CO² could suffocate everyone in a certain area if it was attacked. That's the biggest concern I have, honestly.
Leave it to the ancestors of Davinci to do it with off the shelf tech. Was back in the early 80’s when a friends US Navy ship snaps a main drive shaft in two. Told me they were all stoked for three to five weeks of liberty when the Italians in Napoli said they could fix it, the Americans did not believe it was possible but saw no harm in letting them try. Imagine how huge that drive shaft was. They welded it back together but who knows how they got it to be balanced? Friend said the moral on the boat was dead 5 days latter when they were all recalled and back out 6 or 7 days after being towed into port!
Promising but massive in scale and it's uncertain how well it will work. So far we have the concept and it looks like they're building a prototype. That's helpful because one of the things that need to be determined is are the failure points. Based on the illustrations it looks like the storage is the size of several large warehouses, but inside that dome it looks like they plan to use some type of impermeable flexible membrane, basically a big balloon which will have to be assembled from a number of smaller sheets and bonded to each other to form the CO2 "bag". So what happens when the bag springs a leak? How easy will it be to locate the leak and repair it? Like I said, promising and I will be interested in seeing how it develops.
It seems like all these physical compressed/liquid batteries are worth trying and should be scaling just as fast as possible so we can quickly establish which ones work as well as we'd like them to.
I hope this takes off. It sounds very safe since it isn't flammable, doesn't reach high temperatures, and even if the bubble bursts there is pretty much no harm done. Its efficiency is great and it also looks fairly easy to maintain and deploy all around the world.
Maybe the dome could be build on top of a building that contains all of the other parts of the system. That could maybe reduce its footprint a bit.
I am curious how the dome holds out in heavy weather. How well can it handle hurricane winds and potentially flying debris? Other than that it looks like a golden ticket
Cost and time to market are EVERYTHING for energy storage. This looks like it has incredible potential. Off the shelf components, no exotic materials, extremely well understood and simple technology. And it can be installed on-site anywhere wind/solar is installed. It just begs for economy-of-scale construction. If they can really get the LCOE where they say (and that seems plausible), this could be the breakthrough energy storage we’ve been needing. Once solar+storage gets to be cheaper than natural gas, it’s game over for the fossil fuel power industry.
Sounds plausible. I'm optimistic that some set of storage options will emerge that will be adequate for 100% renewable energy in electrifiable applications.
Matt, I believe that peaker plants are one of the most pollution intense energy generating facilities in the US. If we could replace those plants with this solution it would go a long way in evening out the solar and wind intermittency and providing more continuous and reliable energy flow in communities around the states. Could a miniaturized version of the storage be built for homeowners. If all the components are widely available maybe miniaturization and mass distribution would be possible. Just a thought.
THe fact that this uses no complex proprietary technology or rare elements makes it the most convincing energy storage solution Ive seen so far. Just common, off the shelf parts and well researched processes.
Is there something special about using CO2 as the working fluid vs nitrogen or just air? Just wondering if that dome is necessary. I get the CO2 angle from an environmental perspective, but from a thermodynamic perspective, what are the numbers vs using other gasses?
Nothing really special. In a nutshell, they want a substance that can be either a gas or a liquid reasonable temperatures (-40C to 40C or thereabouts), depending upon pressure. CO2 works, most refrigerants work, etc. Off hand I can think of Freon, propane, butane, ammonia, etc. But CO2 has the nice advantage of being fairly non-toxic and cheap.
I think the interesting comparison for size is with pumped hidro. Everyone would build hidro, if they had the conditions. This does not need the water or the elevation change.
I'd just like to know, have any projects you've discussed over the years actudlly went to market? And met claims? Or need their aims? No pun intended that's your job Matt.
This is a very promising energy storage solution, and with its simplicity and utility of design it looks like there will be few technical obstacles to getting it up and running. After compressed air and liquid air took off, I did wonder if other gases would be utilised in a similar way, and CO2 is a very effective choice. Without the extra energy cost and technical issues that occur with super-cooling, it could be very effective and scalable.
Really the only issue - as was mentioned - is the land space taken up to store the CO2 at low-pressure. The best option would be to stick the bladder it in any underground holes that are available - which is also storage reservoirs that can be used for compressed air or pumped hydro - but the CO2 bladder doesn't have any specific location requirements, so really you could stick it anywhere you had space. For solar plants that are located out in deserted rural locations, this isn't a big issue, but for energy storage in urbanised locations, the company might have to come up with some new designs for their bladder.
Another modification for gas-based energy solutions that might become popular in the future is to bind the gas to another molecule, causing it to precipitate, (or binding the gas to a solid/liquid that takes it out of solution), so it can either be stored in a compact form or the chemical equilibrium can be used to do work (e.g. powering a turbine down an energy differential). An example of this that Matt mentioned in another episode is a system that binds the gas to rocks, and heating and cooling the rocks allows for transfer of energy.
Compressed are (or CO2) storage has always been appealing. The ability to decide on more capacity or more total output is great.
The blanket reference you made in the beginning of the video was very helpful in understanding global warming.
asuming the stated stats are at least close to factual, i can only see this as being a great way to store power. i think often people get a bit too hung up on effeciency, and while that is important, there are other important factors. the only thing i don't understand, is if space is a problem, why not dig the dome down? yes it will make the construction cost higher, but i doubt it will so much, that the space saved will be less valuable.
another thing i think is great, is that the dome can be buildt as big as needed, meaning for big scale applications, this could be one of, if not the greatest alternative power storage solution, you have covered so far, IMO.
This sounds like an incredibly promising idea. Industrial scale liquid C02 storage is already a thing that exists, so the hardware (tanks and pipes) for that is probably already available at large scale/low prices, as is the compressor that you mentioned. I would somewhat expect the heat exchangers are readily available too. I think the only novel thing here is the dome. I think this idea has huge potential.
I also think these domes are readily available off the shelf. They are using them on bio gas generation plants in Denmark (gas generation from manure). But they seem to be fully inflated all the time. Don't know if they can sustain the repeated inflation and deflation cycles.
Nothing novel about the equipment. It's a beautiful concept that uses current, off-the-shelf technology. That makes it economical to build and maintain. Super idea!
Not mentioned is the fact that a large leak in the bladder would be very dangerous to humans since it is heavier than air and will therefore hover near the ground.
This is a great technology. The fact that it is based on existing tools and well proven science makes it a leading contender going forward.