New energy storage tech breathing life and jobs back into disused coal power plants
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2021
- Coal fired power plants are one of the biggest causes of the catastrophic climate crisis now facing our civilization and over the coming years thousands of gigawatts of coal power capacity will be retired all over the industrialised west. But what about all the jobs and livelihoods of the families who live and work in those communities? Now, one company plans to replace the coal burners in those disused plants with an energy storage system that can not only provide useful grid balancing power using the same infrastructure, but also bring gainful employment back to hard working people.
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Research links
E2S Power
e2s-power.com/
www.powerengineeringint.com/s...
MGA Power
www.mgathermalstorage.com/about
Other energy storage solutions for coal power plants
www.siemensgamesa.com/product...
cleantechnica.com/2020/09/22/...
www.powermag.com/long-duratio...
www.aalborgcsp.com/business-a...
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This is one of the most important technologies. Coal power plants not being a stranded asset will be good for creating the political will to transition. It also takes a little bit of the sting out of countries building new coal fired power plants.
We need several big test facility´s ASAP. This could put positive pressure on coal plants to shut down, giving them a money carrot to do so.
Will make it easyer for Poland (needs transitioning help) and Germany (at the moment keeping coal and fasing out nuclear). (I am from Estonia, our coal Plant is probably a bit small to be worth the investment.)
Not sure you understand what is being proposed. The coal power plant is not being used. No coal is being burnt. The main reason for mentioning coal power stations is that it’s already connected to the grid, has permissions for industry etc. Removing the old boilers and converting will cost a lot of money which I’m sure they will want from governments to pay for it.
It’s a giant storage heater.
Transition?
Renewable energy is already cheaper and cleaner than coal and nuclear.
Stranded assets? This is not an accounting problem. Societies should do the right thing anyway.
@@PetraKann For the transition to move forward we need Coal plants to be taken down, and develop storage capacity. As it is now, a big part of windmill and solar energy is destroyed, or simply shut of because delivery on time is not working right now. Green energy will not work, until we solved the large scale storage problems.
I never thought I'd hear Belgrade, my home town, mentioned in one of your videos, let alone be about green and renewable tech. Especialy since the situation during the winter heating season put's us at one of the most polutet cities in the world.
Let's hope the pilot goes well and this actualy happens and they retrofit the existing coal burning heating and power generating plants.
They wasted an entire power plant on this nonsence instead of converting it to biomass?
I was just thinking: "Hey, it will be great if we apply this in Serbia, since every major city heats on some minor coal-thermal powerplant, and then Belgrade comes up!" 😁
@@milosmaric8733
If your that desperate to lose all of your money.
Ok, but in Belgrade we don't have any cooling tower in our power plant, because they use the Sava river instead.
😞
@@lordsamich755 The biomass supply can vary wildly, and frankly, burning trash or organic matter poses its own set of problems. This solution is essentially a giant capacitor for wind/solar generation, what wind/solar need when at night/wind not blowing. Biomass may be a complementary technology, but not a competing technology.
Very interesting - good to see people thinking beyond the normal new tech solutions.
Also sanity, reality and the laws of physics.
When I saw this video I wondered if you were going to talk about MGA thermal. The CTO, Alex post, was my year 6 buddy in school and I caught up with him when he went to a pitching show in 2019 to talk about their thermal energy storing idea. They have recently received some funding to commission a pilot project. Really exciting. I hope they get the opportunity to really test their idea.
Scaling up would be awesome, huge markets everywhere there's a coal plant. Where did you study?
@@notlessgrossman163 University of Newcastle, Australia. MGA is a, I think spinoff?, Out of there. The way he described the tech was like a chocolate chip cookie with the chocolatey bits being the aluminium specs in the graphite
Excellent video. I see where some have even considered using pure silicon which has a much higher enthalpy of fusion, 1787 kJ/kg vs only 396 kJ/kg for Aluminum. Containment issues become preclusive at silicon's high melting temperature but this is expected to be overcome soon.
It's great that this has been developed by UNA. It's such a shame we have such a useless government that's more interested in coal and gas than renewables. Imagine if instead of wanting to spend $600 million on a gas plant, the money was spent on commercialising MGA tech
@@geoffsemon7411 yeah it's a bit of a shame with how they are handing innovation in Australia. Just glad to see some Australian research, either industry fuelled like this, or lab based like the sugar added to the LiS battery tech from Monash recently. I hope they turn a positive head towards innovation in the future
This is so amazing and smart: repurposed coal plants for clean energy.
These are the ideas we desperately need to transition. Brilliant
Well, but I don't love the round-trip efficiency. Pumped hydro and lithium ion can get you something like 80-90% of the energy you stored. This will be lucky to get half that.
Better than nothing? Maybe. But it may be hard to compete with other energy storage solutions, if your operation involves buying twice as much excess electricity.
@@ps.2 I must agree on that one. I would like to see the actual numbers on a large scale test before i clap exited. There are other technologies more promising on first glance. I like liquid air storage, and decentralized pressure domes a lot more. And liquid air storage could also be placed on former coal plants, but this aluminum/graphite system would benefit more of the concrete structures, coal plants provide.
This technology suffers from the thermodynamic inefficiencies of heat engines, plus the significant costs for operation and maintenance and significant use of cooling water. Battery storage requires no labor, little maintenance and no cooling water. And perhaps most importantly, no large greedy for profit monopoly utility opportunity to inflate the costs. We must take every opportunity to replace monopoly for profit electric utilities that profit from expensive, polluting coal, gas and nuclear power generation! Let’s save the planet with renewable energy and electrify transportation and space heating and cooling (heat pumps) and end fossil fuel usage.
And the best part is the plants don't have to be torn down.
The tube wall boilers in large steam plants are enormous , the amount of containerized heat storage units to replace a single boiler would be substantial , and these stations are designed to run constantly not intermittently.
Yes they are designed to run constantly but thats manly to protect the boiler. If you remove the conventional boiler then I’m not sure the same constraints would apply to the STG and ancillary kit
you're barking up a tree , the wrong one
My "Hamster" theory is that if the little animals can't eat all the food available at the time (think excess power supply) then they stuff it into pouches of their mouth (think heating up the Al-graphite) to take home and eat later (think using the heat to generate energy later-on when you need it).
In German language "hamstern" is a word meaning someone stashing enormous amounts of supplies away. The word was used a lot during war times. Basically: it's very greedy.
Maybe it's because they're short?
Or maybe like a hamster running in a hamster wheel spins an axle around like steam drives a generator?
Collect somthing in huge amounts and store the rest for later ... like a hamster
What's intriguing too is that it reduces disruption to the existing infrastructure too. In Houston where I live there are several coal plants which help power the city, and of course they feed into the grid right now. If these coal plants - energy generation hubs - can be transformed into energy storage hubs fed by intermittent renewables, then the grid will experience minimal disruption from the intermittency.
What an elegant complement to the power conversion matrix. Thanks for sharing.
For those who are utterly unaware of the laws of thermodynamics.
Elegant how?
Thank you for sharing these exciting news! It's so gratifying to see how more and more people are coming onboard to the reality of having to change, and Voila! all sorts of brilliant ideas start to appear.
Steam turbines aren't known for being able to flexibly generate power. Cycling them also increases blade wear. Since steam turbines that feed electricity into the grid must operate at a nearly fixed speed (due to the nearly fixed frequency), one can only adjust the power output by adjusting the torque. Metals aren't too keen on varying stress levels.
Well, maybe this technology is best suited for peaker plants, where the legacy equipment is presumably designed for cycling.
If you can't turn the steam turbine off, you can still generate enough power when renewables are running to be able to operate the turbine 100% of the time, consistently.
Not blade wear, but metal fatigue in the rotor disks.
I wonder if you could switch the plant over to charging its own "hamsters" whilst it spins down at a safe rate?
The website doesn't say, but it looks like this system will be most useful for running times between a few hours and a day - peakers. Other systems will be needed for baseload in winter calms. Nuclear reactor retrofits are an existing safe technology which we refuse to use so far.
An Australian company doing trials in Europe. This shouts volumes for the Australian Governments commitment to renewable alternatives to coal and long term greenhouse gas emission reduction. 😞
keep brandishing lumps of coal Scomo, and watch the brain drain
Isn’t there substantial coal mining in Australia?
Primary exporter of coal and anti-nuclear hater comited to fighting climate change.....
@@suspicionofdeceit huge
@@suspicionofdeceit Yes, and the industry is heavily subsidized by the Govt. They get big tax breaks because they are seen as major employers. The reality is that solar, wind and other green industries employ substantially more Australians but don't grease the right palms.
That is a seriously good idea! Love the fact it leverages existing infrastructure that would otherwise be written off.
Let’s hope the cost and reliability stack up. Looks like the concept will scale too, just add more hamsters!
-No. Physics is still a thing!- Oh good you were joking.
i'm not against the idea, however i'm not all on board because you should always have multiple sources of generating power than just solar and wind, to do only solar and wind is ignorance.
if you want to prevent what happened in Texas earlier this year, you need to NOT be ignorant enough to dismantle the backups, even if your sacrificing some of the environmental efficiency.
this whole idea of being 100% clean energy via solar and wind doesn't account for failure in such systems, which is a big mistake and why Texas was fucked earlier this year, because one of their politicians thought it was a good idea to dismantle everything else and only use wind power, and when that storm hit and the wind power went down, it unnecessary put ppl's lives in danger because they relied on one method of power creation and dismantled all the others.
you simply can't be this ignorant when dealing with something as important as power generation, you always need backups when shit hits the fan, in Texas's case it was bitter cold that hit the fan and stopped them from working, which utterly screwed everyone living in the lower states at that time.
In summers we can use a central heat pump system to cool homes,and use the heat generated by heatpupms to store energy and turn it to electricity, absolutely we can't reach hundreds of degrees with heat pump,but we can provide the first stages of heating with them
The waste heat from these plants is low grade and commercially unusable but is excellent for heating homes and farms. You only need insulated pipes to carry the hot water. Water for boilers is usually high grade and the cooling water is usually good for domestic use.
Love these videos that have such hopeful and reasonable to envision information. Great job.
Certainly has a great advantage to use existing infrastructure. This type of storage will be in great demand by utilities as gas declines and should be lower cost and longer duration than grid scale batteries.
This IS a battery system ❣️
I don't see how this could possibly be cost effective. A steam turbine is at best ~50 percent efficient. Combine that with transmission loses, lost heat during storage, etc and you're looking at needing 4+ units in for every unit put back into the grid.
@@wwjbrickd Agree with the concern. Round trip efficiency is certainly important for any type of cost effective energy storage. Lithium batteries for storing energy for say 4 days would be enormously expensive. Yes thermal storage would be physically very large and need great insulation and round trip efficiency would likely be well under 50%. Hydrogen is widely predicted for a role like this too, but storing large quantities of hydrogen would also be expensive especially if it is liquified and would also have low round trip efficiency. Predictions suggest overbuilding low cost solar and wind so there will be frequent times where more power is available than can be used. Heating rocks with this power is cheap and easy. Making hydrogen with this cheap power means expensive electrolyzers that are used part time. Only way to compare is to build one and see what it costs and how it works.
@@rickrys2729 Lithium battery can store energy for months and cost will be the same.
I can already see how the politicians are going to work together to make this as easy as possible for these tech companies 🤪
Yes. End of the day... These guys who are the masters of corruption will cook something out just to please their cronies than the votes.... Unless the majority of the votes are "SMART"....
Coal plants often have many acres set aside for storing coal: perfect for slathering with solar panels.
@@williambreen1001 Or both; one on top of the other
Because reclamation and trees are soo old school.....
@@williambreen1001 I wonder if they would need that much acreage. The boilers of these coal plants are incredibly large. The boiler alone of coal plant in Clarksville, TN is 13 stories high. It is one of the largest coal fired in the world. If each unit of this MGA system is the size of shipping container. That a great number of units.
Solar panels interspersed with windmills. At an existing power plant there are less likely to be objections from neighbours, which seems to be the main problem in the UK with onshore wind
@@williambreen1001 your heat pump idea is cunning but sadly less practicable than it first seems for two or more reasons
1. It throws away the main advantage of this over other thermal energy solutions: which is the direct resistive heating of the store when charging. The blocks simply need to be wiredup to the grid connection to heat them up in the storage phase
2. Heat pumps offer best performance with small temperature differences (small compared to the typically 300 Kelvin ambient)
With temperature differences of several hundred degrees you lose much of the advantage.
3. Heat pumps contain gases which are themselves contributing to the greenhouse effect. You need your heatpump to have a very good coeff of performance to outweigh the effects of the inevitable small losses of the working fluid
4. Even if you work round the above, the space taken up by the heatpump at industrial scale would make it take up more room than the proposed resistive heating (which is built into the blocks) and unlikely to fit within the site of an existing coal fired power station
Good idea, roll it out, the only problem is the generators take 7 days to heat up down to prevent rotor shaft warping , the system will need to run for weeks on end to prevent this.
Makes good sense to reuse rather than just mothball the old coal fired plants. Aluminum production isn't quite squeaky clean, but it is plentiful and cleaner ways of producing bauxite and aluminum are possible. Thanks again Dave for a highly professional comprehensive presentation on graphite aluminum thermal storage systems that dovetail into existing coal fired plants!🌱
Soda engines are options for this use of stranded assets they are steam engines and use completely recyclable "fuel". These closed-loop steam engines had no firebox. The boiler was jacketed by a container loaded with about 5 tons of caustic soda (sodium hydroxide). When water or steam came in contact with the caustic soda, it would generate heat - enough to actually run the boiler and generate more steam. Steam emanating from the boiler would be fed through pistons to propel the locomotive forward, and the exhaust steam from the pistons would be fed into the caustic soda to continue the cycle. These vehicles were virtually silent because the steam was not released into the atmosphere.
A soda locomotive could run for several hours, but eventually, the soda would become diluted and wouldn't produce enough heat to continue generating steam. For reconcentrating, the caustic soda was either transferred out of the boiler of the locomotive and boiled in open vats or you can just air dry it and blow air across it to strip off water en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_locomotive
boiled in open vats or you can just air dry it and blow air across it to strip off water - another fossil fuel technology in a different name. 5 tons of caustic soda will provide about the same heat of .25 tons of coal. If the hot caustic soda touches any part of your body... (I do not want to describe)
Interesting and informative , thanks.
I drink to this... but I am surprised that you can just dried the caustic soda and reuse it again...
Another former coal plant thought ... I always wondered how convertible large steam turbines/generators would be to large charging flywheels.
The generators would be reusable, but the turbines wouldn't have anywhere near enough mass to be useful.
Would be absolutely terrible as flywheels afaik. Would probably tear themselves apart to hold a reasonable amount of power
The real issue with this idea is that the generators have to rotate at a very accurate fixed speed to generate power that can be dispatched into the power grid at 50 Hz. or 60 Hz. The only simple way to put energy into a flywheel is to increase its speed or rotation and the only way to get energy out of a flywheel is to slow down its speed of rotation. (For the pedants in the crowd, yes you can store or release energy from a flywheel at constant speed by changing the location of the mass of the flywheel relative to its axis of rotation but the mechanical problems of doing this would be difficult.) This means that the generator mass cannot be used for flywheel energy storage in a system that dispatches power into the grid at a fixed frequency directly from the generator. Yes, you could use a back to back AC to DC to AC converter system to correct the frequency but that has its own problems and costs. Some days you just can't win...
Some people may mistakenly skip watching this vid because the cover picture for the video has a red band along the bottom that very nearly matches the red line that appears after a video has been watched on subscription feeds. Suggest avoiding red bands at bottom.
Good concept addresses the total energy costing of plant and reuses existing materials.
The challenge to repurposed Carnot engines is that the energy needed to heat them up in the first place has to be paid. To be efficient, they need to never/rarely be turned off. That means daily cycling is a non-starter where energy balance actually matters. I see this technology as augmenting existing plants to reduce coal. That's a good thing. But there's not much chanced it'll completely eliminate it. Still a good idea, assuming the new technology can be co-located, and these concepts still should be pursued. Some of that 'to be paid' energy can be reduced by reworking and insulating the old plant parts that weren't designed to require insulation. We need every option to reduce dependence on extraction commodities like coal and oil.
Your claims don't make sense. To the extent that the original plants where load following, so the repurposed plants would be load following too. Now, those plants designed to be entirely base load, wouldn't work well with this technology. But my guess is even those plants would have some flexibility with respect to the steam turbines.
@@richdobbs6595 this is where high temprature reactors with heat storage makes sense.
EXACTLY! All the hardware will 'suck up' a load of heat, and I suspect the machinery itself won't like to be shut down and restarted every damn day. There may be excessive wear, or maybe the restart procedure is a huge PITA that takes half a day.
@@richdobbs6595
France's fleet of light water reactors operate in load-following mode.
Might be the low temp latent heat that makes aluminium more efficient than steel, for heat storage.
Yeah, Al's 660 degree melting point is a good match for existing steam turbines which were designed for steam at 500 - 600 Celsius. Apparently corrosion gets to be a problem with pressurised steam over 700 C.
What a fantastic idea. This channel is so important for the world. We will solve the climate crisis together!
Aluminium latent heat is 1070 Mj/m3, NaCl is 450 Mj/m3 at 800 C, surely NaCl would also work and might be cheaper.
Both an order of magnitude smaller than burning an e-fuel like ammonia or methanol.
Thermal powerplants have an efficiency of round about 40 percent, so most of the renewable energy is lost in the process. There are more efficient ways to store energy! It could make sense however when its much cheaper and faster to implement than the alternatives.
As a basic rule of thumb, 1/3 of the coal energy is lost as heat in the condenser and 1/3 is lost up as combustion gases / unburnt carbon up the stack. This tech could eliminate the combustion losses; however there would be some losses from insulation or energy lost in heating the material. I suspect you could raise the efficiency levels up to 50-55% with this tech, which is a huge improvement from the current 35-40%
In other words, to make this profitable, they would have to arbitrage electrical prices at least 2 to 1. So, buy power at 5 cents/kWh and sell at 10 cents/kWh. How many hours per day can you do this? 2 or 3 or 4? During peak summer demand? Hard to see how this is profitable, it might be, but barely?
@@LinasVepstas If there is a shortage of electricity generation at night time, electricity will simply be quite expensive then.
And conversely, when there is a surplus (high wind, low consumption) - energy is very cheap (sometimes negative prices).
If that difference is frequent enough (and predictable enough), there then is a business model.
@@arnesteinarson3645 in his comment @Linas Vepstas mentioned exactly that - "arbitrage electrical prices". What he doubts is that you can have high enough frequency/duration of those events to cover the installation costs of this system.
Someone tell Joe Manchin about this; maybe he'll stop opposing changing to renewable energy if he can still make money off of the coal fired power plant that he owns.
Yes please!
He’s an ignorant shameless fool on a person.
OR we tell him that he is a PUBLIC Servant and shouldn't be making Policy based off of where he gets the most money from.
@@kimballspeakthreetheater3318 he already knows that. He don’t care. Manchin and Sinema are in it for themselves. Sinema is like the poor ignored dorky girl in high school that now finds she’s in a position of center of attention and money is being thrown her way and she’s loving it. She’s now drunk on the fame and fortune and is indulging in it forgetting why she’s there: the people who voted for her. With Mitch offering her promises to switch parties and corporate money buying her off. She’s deranged with all this hollow power, even tho she stands for nothing but her 15 minutes of fame and money
@@jvs333 Indeed.
Great job Dave, Thanks
I enjoyed that so much i watched it twice, thanks
Convert the old Coal power stations into liquid air battery stations, you already have the power lines for the national Grid on site to send and receive power retraining the existing staff of the station to build and maintain the station.
Adam G7CRQ - yeah ! GO LIQUID AIR !
Two things come to mind, 1) Aluminium production is VERY energy intensive, and leaves behind a toxic sludge that is often dumped down old Mines etc. o to be ‘Sustainable’ they would have to be made from 100% recycled Aluminium. 2) Cooling Towers are extremely wasteful, throwing heat into the Air, they need to be Combined Heat and Power ( CHP) stations!
This type of system would be viable in areas with district heating where you could use
much of the heat for buildings instead of having thrown it away in a heat exchange tower.
You could also put greenhouses nearby to be able to grow food in the dead of winter.
The biggest pitfall of this is that the infrastructure around these coal plants was not maintained
because they knew closure was coming, so delay as much maintenance as possible.
And Aluminium is often made in places with geothermal or hydro power - so that goes some way to countering the anti-civilisation themes. (Old mine shafts are often interestingly toxic places already)...
intermittent combined heat and power stations are not really that great.
@@firstbigbarney Sure, excess energy could be put to good use. But it's still excess energy, meaning it reduces the efficiency of the energy storage system. Ideally, for 100% efficiency, you'd have no residual heat to use for other purposes.
And this leads me to the crucial question: what is the estimated efficiency of this energy storage system?
Aluminium smelters are increasingly changing over to renewable energy so it's possible to massively reduce the environmental impact of production
The decomissioned coal power station at Uskmouth South Wakes, UK is undergoing work to be modified to a battery storage facility using all the existing switch gear and grid supply infrastructure.
I have been saying that we need to develop reuse plans for the existing infrastructure for years now. I'm glad to see that I am not the only one
Efficiency? By the time the energy goes into the storage system, is retrieved, boils water and spins the turbine, what percentage of the energy in comes back out in the form of usable electricity? That did not seem to be addressed in the video.
I would suggest that those people questioning efficiency are missing the point. Yes, it does have to be have a level of efficiency to make it commercially viable. BUT given the context of global environmental catastrophe due to climate heating, ANY method that contributes to reducing CO2 emissions must be seen as worthwhile. The level of efficiency of any technology tends to be increased over time in any case, so arguing over efficiency at day one is not helpful.
@@chrislaf2011 Asking about the efficiency of the system is worthwhile. For LI battery storage, the efficiency is over 80% and LI battery systems can respond to changes in load in milli sseconds. I don't think that this energy solution can come even close to technology we already have.
@@surferdude4487 there are limitations to Li tech, it's mentioned in the video. Li suck at long offload times. A lower efficiency system is competitive if it overcomes the limitations of Li tech.
@@migBdk LI batteries are good for a few days, even a couple of weeks but they do leak down over time. Yes, I would be interested in an energy storage system that could hold its charge for as much as a year. I'm just not sure that the one discussed in this video is it.
because its a s#it idea with s#it efficiency
You can also stick a nuclear SMR in retired coal plants.
The clever hardworking of researchers, amazing!
As always, a well research and interesting video, thank you.
Cool
This is interesting. However, they fly over some technical challenges. You can't just remove the boiler from the turbine, and there are startup times related to running turbines. They dispatche well once running but it takes time. It is worth investigating. Thank you.
There are many "howevers". The most important is not named at all: how cost effective is it compared to a battery based store? I cannot think of cost efficient way for this thing.
@@muten861 On an industrial scale, batteries are not very cost-effective at all due to their low energy density and limited lifespan. Whereas a block of aluminium is relatively cheap and can be melted and solidified almost indefinitely.
In some places you cold drill deep to get geothermal power (hopfully the right name) and still use many already existing machines.
@@nagualdesign thats simply not true. Aluminum ist not very cheap in this scale. And don't forget the bad efficiency, which will cost a lot more. than the buying sum for this tech.
@@muten861 I said _relatively_ cheap, as compared to batteries. 40kg of lithium-ion batteries (enough to power a home for a day) costs about $2000 and has a limited lifespan. For the same price you could buy over 700kg of aluminium, which can be used for many decades, and I dare say that it could store enough energy to power many homes.
Also, the beauty of using existing infrastructure is that large-scale turbines can be over 90% efficient at converting that heat energy into electricity, and don't require building from scratch.
_[Edit]_ The specific heat capacity of aluminium is 900J/kg°C, so 700kg of aluminium would have a heat capacity of 630kJ/°C (0.175kWh/°C). For comparison, an average UK home uses 8.5~10kWh of electricity per day.
Amazing video. Thank you so very much.
very interesting...... Thx.
This technology may allow some US utilities to continue to bill consumers for leftover coal infrastructure.
Each of the 50 states has their own laws covering how monopolized utility companies finance power plant construction. Some of these unique regulatory frameworks may make a system that uses resistance heating make economic sense.
What is the round trip efficiency?
Steam turbines are about 45% efficient, so less than that.
It depends on the temperature of the steam. The problem isn't the turbine, but rather how efficiently you can turn random thermal motion into directed motion. This is the infamous Carnot inefficiency.
Large gigawatt utility scale solar PV is now coming in at a cost of less than $0.02 per KWh at favorable locations like the UAE and the Atacama desert. At these costs does the round trip efficiency even matter any more? A $0.02 per KWh generation cost coupled with a 50% round trip energy efficiency loss simply becomes the equivalent a $0.04 per KWh generation cost. The problem with intermittent renewable sources is becoming less and less a problem with the cost of generating power in the first instance as it is to the problem of storing the power once it has been generated. It increasingly seems as though the once important cost of generation (and round trip energy efficiency) are both well on their way to becoming an obsolete financial red herring that is dwarfed by the technical capability and associated cost of storing power once it has been generated.
@@incognitotorpedo42 It would be advisable to read the original Carnot work "Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat" (about 130 or so pages). Regrettably, or not, it is in French (as expected) but an early, very good, direct English translation, without interpretation was published 1897. What is quite interesting is that Carnot makes a particular assumptions, that are never mentioned, in any educational course, to reach his conclusion. Understanding these assumptions makes one question the widespread "knowledge" about "Carnot inefficiency".
@@petertownsend252 imo the efficiency argument should still be made for two reasons:
1) Comparing different storage solutions (their efficiency is also a factor in their price)
2) Determining the amount of stuff we'd have to build - less stuff is favorable (and efficiency is one factor in that question)
This for me is a perfect transistion idea. Enough to ease the economic burden of fossil fuel dependent communities, and incentivise political action towards building out renewables. However, it is not a long term play, as we should be looking for more efficient use storage options. The coal plants and their assests should be slowly recycled and repurposed as the communities shift to more sustainable sources of income
Your channel has really cheered me up, it's so nice to finally have some evidence that we have nothing to worry about re energy and climate change.
Watched and commented in Patreon. Just here for the thumbs up!
Just what percent of the energy consumed to melt the aluminum is recovered?
Good question. I haven't been able to find anything on throughput efficiency. But if it's more than ~30% its outperforming Electrolysis -> Hydrogen -> Fuel cell, thought It doesn't have the same potential for seasonal long term storage.
Given that resistance heating is essentially a perfect conversion, it’s probably pretty high. Limited only by the steam-generation half.
@@marxug1 Very large ones have a 50% efficiency. (1,200 MW). Smaller ones are less efficient. Then you have pumps and such.
Who cares when that excess renewable energy was going to waste anyway?
@@rupert274 ( people miss that point - even in using "surplus capacity" to make HydroXXX - chemistry products fanatics repeat: "Hydrogen is stupid: - with no thought to per unit storage cost or ease of transport...
I look forward to the video entitled "breathing life and jobs back into disused petrol stations" ;)
That is easy replace the gas pump with a fast charger
There are some proposed battery technologies that are cheap, have good energy density but are limited by very slow recharging. That makes room for a "battery swap" model that local gas stations could perform well. Remove the tanks, and replace with racks of chargers, so that customer charging time is only as long as a module swap.
High temperature Pyrolisis Bio oil and ammonia as fuel.
Exceptional Channel. Thanks!
I finally subscribed.
A really excellent and informative video (as all your are). Professionally created and produced. It's encouraging that scientists and technologists are developing an increasing number of highly innovative methods of generating power with zero fossil fuel content. How sad politicians just don't get the message (or don't care), and are stuck in the 17 century.
This system is probably losing ~50% of the energy pumped into it.
Turbines are efficient. Boilers arent.
@@likaleklikalek7395 So maybe 60% then? Lot of steam escapes. Giant flywheeels would be 100% efficient by contrast.
Gas fired plants are about 37 percent efficient.
As stated in the video this is one solution not the only solution.
This is a way to reuse preexisting infrastructure.
Removing the more dirty part and keeping good paying maintenance jobs for the existing structure.
There are some people that might lose their jobs. The boilermakers.
In other words, to make this profitable, they would have to arbitrage electrical prices at least 2 to 1. So, buy power at 5 cents/kWh and sell at 10 cents/kWh. How many hours per day can you do this? 2 or 3 or 4? During peak summer demand? Hard to see how this is profitable, it might be, but seems slim?
@@LinasVepstas If it's being used as storage of renewable energy then it should be very price competitive. Already power prices are going into negative due to the volume of renewables. During the day when solar is providing 35-50% of Australia's power, prices per MW/hr are down to -$35 to -$65/MWh
Thank you for sharing this idea however, I've never been fond of the idea of contributing to entropy by generating the lowest form of energy - heat. If they use solar which would be striking the Earth anyway through magnifying lenses to store heat, I'd be on board!
They're called solar thermal power plants. They use mirrors rather than lenses, but, same basic idea.
They've existed for decades... but nobody seems to know quite how to make them cost-competitive.
Fabulous! And a great presentation. Thanks!
Good news. I need this channel. Thanks. 😁👍
First though that came to me was:
Can we use all the coal that is already mined to make the carbon part of these blocks ?
Once that's used up then look to carbon capture as a source for any more blocks.
Unfortunately the carbon in the coal is not in the form of graphite and it would probably not be cost effective to convert it to synthetic graphite which is a very energy intensive process.
Graphite or carbon doesn't just stick to itself, it needs a binder like clay, similar to pencil leads. Pencil leads are initially heated in rotary driers for 12 hours then heated further to about 1000 deg C for 10 hours. So what renewable energy source would you use to manufacture the number of considerably sized graphite blocks? Me thinks there isn't a renewable source to use, they'd continue to burn more coal/fossil fuel to provide the heat necessary in making those sized graphite blocks. Man dealing with climate change is like a dog chasing its tail!!!
@@PeterPete Not really. The blocks will last a very long time so not much actual tail chasing at all. You use words but no numbers which is where the confusion lies.
@@garethrobinson2275 I'm skeptical - man comes out with lots of ideas but has very little of substance! In the video there's no information regarding the energy used to make the graphite blocks/aluminium and how long they will last. How long is a long time? The set up hasn't been tested long enough to know how long the system will last! Overtime the graphite blocks and aluminiuim will degrade it's inevitable (the blocks will probably crumble in time). If they operate the system in a nitrogen filled environment, one will produce nitrides which may impede their operating abilities. Remember nothing lasts forever. You can't get more out of a system that one puts in.
Another thing the manufacturers are overlooking is the fact consumers can actually build their own to generate their own electricity and come off grid! No utility company wants that!!
But all said and done the idea is good and simple.
@@PeterPete Graphite blocks are already used in the production of aluminium, funnily enough. And they deteriorate really quickly there, since they are actually used as one of the reagents (stripping oxygen off the alumina). But we're talking about using energy that would otherwise be wasted anyway; and the more renewables we install, the more of the waste electricity for the taking. As long as you can make it profitably using intermittent energy supply (or justifying the use of on-site energy storage for the peak or low supply hours), you're still fine. "Perfect" is the worst enemy of "good enough".
Why would you think any nitrides will form in a nitrogen atmosphere? Even at 700 °C at standard pressure, nitrogen is ridiculously inert - and that already assumes it has something to react _with_. There's no oxygen; are you suggesting carbon nitrides? Aluminium nitrides? Or reacting with the container?
In general, thermal energy storage has been a relatively fringe thing for decades now - but the plants actually using it seem to be doing pretty well.
It's really hard to grasp the scale of the coal power; I doubt 30yrs of supplying a plant like this would come close to a 1yr consumption of coal of an actual coal power plant, just wild mass guessing here. They eat up such ridiculous amounts of coal every day, and produce ridiculous amounts of toxic and radioactive waste.
This idea might give a coal power station a few years extra life but they would still be inefficient as they throw so much of the heat away in the cooling towers and the turbines need regular rebuilds. Renewable energy will eventually undercut them as its is still falling at an astonishing rate and with new storage methods like flow batteries it's becoming dispatchable.
Problem is renewables become exponentially more expensive as they become higher percentage of grid power due to their intermittent nature. When this takes place back up and peaking power becomes increasingly valuable. Setups that can take advantage of higher returns during peak and backup power demands can be profitable even if the cost of this power is higher that that of renewables.
I can't imagine that the system gets great return efficiency. I'd take Stanley's point about covering the overnight or peak demand and the economics of that but you'd have to be paying 1 and selling for 3 to balance a system that at best has a 40% return.
If rather see the heating done by solar collectors, even if the local isn't that sunny surely having the Carnot cycle equipment would bring the capital cost down to a pack of mirrors and some pipes?
@@stanleytolle416 That's why battery storage will be the next big thing, and their efficiency will always beat the running costs of thermal storage running steam technology.
@@stanleytolle416 That's the whole point of energy storage. All of the intermittent energy will be stored and used when needed. It's only less valuable now at times because there's not much storage. By the end of this decade we'll see solar plus storage cheaper than thermal energy.
One of your best and most uplifting videos - thank you
Thank you!
Electric heaters means they’re throwing away efficiency compared to using heat pumps of some topology. The maximum efficiency of a heat engine is (T-hot - T-cold) / T-hot, or 1 - T-cold / T-hot. So the steam-based heat engine will at most have an efficiency of 1 - 300K / 820K or 63%, which is awful. If you used a heat pump to get the aluminium up to 700C = 970K then the efficiency of that heating could be improved up to 144%. Multiply that by the heat engine efficiency and you boost it to 91%. Which as far as I’m concerned is acceptable, but both those numbers are still assuming perfectly ideal heat engines and heat pumps. In reality I expect them to be closer to 50% and 65% respectively. Throwing away half your power generation for storage just to keep some union folks happy feels incredibly backwards.
Until we have a very significant excess of power to store in such lossy storage units, we should build more efficient methods of storage, like flow batteries or sodium batteries or whatever. As far as appeasing the power plant workers goes, you could still use the existing electrical infrastructure at these locations for making any kind of grid storage. Get rid of those cooling towers and cover the whole thing with solar panels, or maybe thermal solar towers if you want to keep that steam infrastructure too. The existing generators could be used as part of flywheel energy storage units for that grid synchronised fast response buffering.
High energy density really isn’t that big of an issue if you’re on such a large plot of land. Once you’ve spread your batteries wide, start building them high too. Just don’t use a portability-oriented chemistry like lithium-ion that will be dead in 3 years and has a significant fire risk.
Good pionts James. Pumped hydro, 85%, it is what is used today, and it is the figure to improve (not halve :-))
@@bjorn2fly yes but large land area size is needed for pumped hydro I'm told. Is there built structures and denser configurations possible?
@@notlessgrossman163 There are multiple variations on gravitational storage, mostly moving rocks around instead of water, the prototypes seemed to be both more efficient and better scaleable, not sure about the current state.
I cannot see heat pumps getting that hot?
A heat pump has to use something as a baseline to get its reference or starting point. For the heat pumps we're all familiar with they use that air temperature (heat from the environment) as a baseline to get the refrigerant up to say 50F. Then by compression of that refrigerant it will add about 45F creating 95F to heat your home. I don't see how this technique is compatible with melting aluminum. Where are you getting the source of waste heat and what refrigerant is capable of temperatures over 1200F? Seriously, I'd like to know if someone is working on such heat pump technology.
Or we can just put nuclear reactors there instead. :\
I think that's one of the most forward thinking solutions that I've heard so far.
Sounds like a great idea. Keep up the good work.
*The best thing to be on every wise individual's mind or list is to invest in different streams of income that is not depended on the government to generate funds*
he has really made a good name for himself
Through whatsap⬇
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I lost £1200 carelessly trading on a platform then I was referred to Mr Charles Schwab he recovered the loss and made an extra profit of £10,000
Reading the title brought a rush of hope. Finally, the breakthrough! Non-electrochemical, non-thermal storage yet enough surge & density! NOPE, no hope here: just more of the same false hope in batteries & upgrading heat, yet again.
@SHEISTER CAM Amen.
Jeez you're hard to please. Bet you're a barrel of laughs
@SHEISTER CAM You got me confused w/your life partner. What we all need developed in a simple equation for ya': Adequate energy density + surge capacity = Energy shortage suitable for renewables being harnessed enough. "When the wind doesn't blow & the Sun doesnt shine" is what will supersede fossil fuels so that "the world will move on"
@@dprcontracting6299 Well, the subject matter is about life and death...on Mass Extinction Level...along w/our own species, so... yeah, Just Have A Think isn't a comedy hour.
@@scottwarthin1528 doesn't every little bit help?
Instead of using a cooling tower, we could push the steam through a water tank that could be used to provide heating to homes, or even hot water on tap (if you got it hot enough). The usual heat pumps/hot water units can pick up any slack if the tank gets too cold.
A good amount of energy is used for these 2 purposes, so it'd save some of the energy used for heating and recycle the waste heat instead of just venting it into the atmosphere.
In summer, you could pump colder water to the "heating pipes" to help cool homes down.
@Darren Munsell In the US. Other regions are very different. Most of the coal power plants where I'm from are quite close to cities, and often use the cooling water for heating homes already.
This is the first straight out legitimate genuine storage solution that is on the same scale as pumped hydroelectric
🤣
There could never be any such thing as 'unemployment problems' if we had an intelligent world that simply made it financially worthwhile for people to SHARE the jobs we can agree we NEED to have done and work much LESS...no more working and doing anything FOR money but simply sharing the work we NEED.. (not my idea Einstein advocated this..I just agree with him)
Wow hold your tongue the flavor you speak leaves out all the middle men who now do no work but make most of the money. Then just think of all the insurance agents. And how do you separate all the brilliant CEO’s who ran companies into the ground all while making millions while thousands lost their pensions. No this tastes a bit to fairlysocialmaxist for the average congressman who actually has no job requirements as most of them clearly show by having the capacity to accomplish nothing but licking dumpy’s shoes or dumping on dumpy’s shoes! As for the rest of the corporation’s how can they hide all their socialized costs while they steal the exorbitant profits from labor?
60% Renewables ie wind, solar
20% Nuclear ☢️
20% Gas for burning rubbish etc.
Plant as many trees as I could, install electric storage heaters in houses like my old mothers council house did, there you go I sorted climate change lol 😂
About right, my sums see nuclear up to 40%. Rather than burn rubbish, I see much of it being converted to methane and ammonia and to synthetic diesel and jet fuel using high temperature synthesis. Whatever, we just need to get on with it.
What ever makes sense, fixed percentages are not ideal.
Thank you.
Very encouraging! Thank you Dave.
The most effective way to use stored thermal energy is as thermal energy , 97% on large scale systems. Use it as city heating , industrial pre-heat, greenhouses, ect. If you start out with excess electric power , keep it as high quality power as possible never convert it to low entropy, you always lose when you do that. Every energy conversion has losses. The more conversions the more losses. From a physics standpoint the best way to store power is a reversible system with minimal losses , any conventional thermal to electric system will have 70 plus % losses (MHD < 25%.) compressed gasses to electric 25% loss , gravity systems 10-20%, reversible chemical ie battery 30% down to
This is good news, matters are settling down and more realistic solutions are surfacing as the move to divert from coal becomes more urgent. It should be interesting to see if any of these storage systems make it to the final stage of industrial application.
thank you. this is great stuff.
Great channel beat the hell out of the morning news.
I keep getting this idea in my head that this whole system is in a storage container -- a single one. But then I reconsider that really, it's a whole bunch of storage container sizes modules connected together... because a single storage container would have only enough heat to run for a few minutes.
Thanks for the great video.
I'd actually expect a single storage unit to last quite a while, and that is due to the phase change in the aluminum. You have to account for the heat of fusion of aluminum, which is roughly 376 kJ/kg. So if you completely melt 1 KG of aluminum you have to put in 376 kJ/kg + a little extra to account for heat loss, wont get into that here. When this system is active, a heat exchanger will draw out the thermal energy from the Hamster unit and if it started with all its aluminum in the liquid state, the hot side stays at the melting point temperature of aluminum, 660 C, until the aluminum freezes and releases that 376 kJ/kg. So if the Hamster unit holds only a single cubic meter of pure aluminum to be used as the heat storage medium, its energy capacity at 660 C is effectively 1015200 kJ, or a little more than 1 GJ.
@@MotherNature26
A coal power plant consumes well over 100 railroad cars of coal a day, that's several an hour. I can't believe that a single storage container of molten metal would last more than a few minutes.
@@acmefixer1 First off, I'm just illustrating that these things should be able to hold a fair amount of thermal energy. I don't know how much aluminum they actually contain so It'll be hard to make a direct comparison to coal consumption. I just broke it out so you could see how much 1m3 of molten aluminum could store. Arguably I did not specify a capacity that a single unit would have to satisfy. This will depend on where these are sited. I suspect based on some of these numbers that 1 Hamster unit could probably satisfy a continuous output of 1 MW for 1 day before it is depleted.
Concerning coal: the LHV or HHV of coal varies depending on its grade. Anthracite HHV is about 32.5 MJ/kg while Lignite is much lower at about 15.0 MJ/kg. A coal power plant that produces 100 MW of electric power would probably need about 300 MW of fuel input energy. That requires about 72 metric tons of Lignite coal per hour and I think that is right around the capacity of the smaller hopper rail cars used to transport coal. So it seems depending on the output of the power plant it can certainly consume that much coal. Again, I am just breaking it out into an easier rate to think about: 0.5 to 1.0 rail cars of lignite per hour OR 0.25 to 0.5 rail cars of anthracite per hour to power a 100 MW coal power plant. Sorry for the range on the coal consumption, but I don't see a standard coal hopper rail car size.
You would certainly need more than 1 hamster unit to be able to return an old coal power plant back to operating condition, probably need 100 to 150 units for a 100 MW plant to keep it running for 1-2 days. There are a lot more considerations that would go into how the plant would actually be run, not going to get into that here.
I am guessing based on the materials of construction for the hamster unit, that this ends up being relatively cheap compared to the cost of installing other energy storage solutions capable of the same output. At the end of the day, its about cost.
Thank you Patreon. Innovative solutions for the new decade. Going forward.
It's great to hear of another possible way of storing energy.
Great idea 👌
Interesting idea. One issue is that in the US, many coal power plants were built in the 1970's and are now approaching their useful lifetime of 50 years and so to keep using all the existing power plant equipment, major rebuilds are needed which is why a lot of them are going to close. So getting credit for going green but in reality avoiding doing costly rebuilds.
If the power plant is anywhere near renewable sources, the existing switch gear and transmission lines are a big plus so would expect those parts to keep being used.
Thanks for making future exciting again!
This solution also allows the plant to maintain phase with the grid, which is a problem with intermittent power sources.
very interesting concept!
Better yet, there is an electric steam boiler that stores the steam it made until needed -- eliminating the need for the aluminum! Direct-to-Steam storage. Reusing stranded powerplant assets is a phenomenal idea, for many reasons. Hope it plays out.
Looks incredible, it’s ability to utilise existing infrastructure is ingenious!
Same thing can be done with solar thermo and molton salts. Molton salts can also hold the heat for many days. Also the disabling of the cooling tower to get from losing heat after going though the process and returning it back to the boiler and reusing it.
In my estimation, the round-trip efficiency of such a system will not exceed 30 %. Although it depends on many factors, this probably makes this technology too expensive to ever go beyond the experimental stage.
It's a fundamental limitation that absolutely grantees this wont even get to the experimental stage. It's not even intended too.
Yes - I think that will be the main downside to this concept, apart from the inability to ramp output up and down quickly. When you also consider that the efficiency of solar panels converting sunlight to electricity is 20% if you are lucky, plus transmission losses, the whole system efficiency looks pretty poor. The solar power tower might be a better bet, particularly if you could reuse the turbine from an existing power plant.
@@michaeladdis5965
Generally speaking, the geology that makes coal deposits almost always makes hills and valleys. The exact opposite of what you want for a solar tower installation.
Germany is probably the only exception I can think of. But recovering < 30% of 20%, this is looking pretty ridiculous in some very fundamental ways.
@@lordsamich755 the whole purpose of this system is to grab headlines, and harvest some investment money. Nobody with a brain believes it has a snowflakes chance in hell of being viable
Thanks as always for giving me hope for the future. You're the best! Another way to keep folks in the coal industry fully employed is to transition them to restoring old coal mines to their historic environmental state as well as mitigation work for toxic sites. Who pays for this carbon offset? All entities who have profited from the sale and use of coal of course which should be easier for them since their stranded assets will have a new profit generating life. Be well.
On top of things as usual. I learn so much from your videos. Thank you, for crafting them with such care!
I work with a company that is also keen to take advantage of existing thermal electric infrastructure for carbon-free generation and storage. The technology captures light energy and transmits it (as light) to a thermal electric plant retrofitted with mixed salts for thermal storage and conversion to electricity. Similar to your examples, the design replaces the boiler with thermal storage but keeps the power block. The result is a non-intermittent supply of power. This type of solution should be attractive for utilities and, by keeping generation and storage together, does not require huge grid upgrades to scale.
1. This is a technology that can also be added to other thermal power plants (operational coal, gas, biomass), it can not only be added to disused coal plants. On addition to fuel saving there is the added benefit for some types of power plants with slow response times that the response time can be reduced.
2. Solar thermal power plants use a similar technology (molten salt) for storage. Likewise these storage systems can be equiped with electric heaters to store energy from wind or nuclear at night, so it can be used in the morning.
Usual very clear articulation, David. It seems a good and novel idea. The alternative is using CST, Concentrated Solar Thermal, a series of heliostats (mirrors), computer-controlled to reflect maximum sunlight onto a storage heat sink. That technology has been around for a while, but the cost is higher than PVC, so that is probably why electrical heating from PVCs is preferred.
This is the innovation that will get us somewhere. Great video!
I think the schematic was partly wrong. The steam/hot water is in a loop, it is a closed system (similar to a stirling engine). The condensor needs cooling, but that is external.
It's a great idea!
Seems to me the system could also use geothermal in the mix. Depending on the ground heat and the systems involved a 5% reduction in BTU would be low hanging fruit and has nothing such as wind or sunlight to stop the BTU/hr input. There are probably locations where 50% or more could be captured with grid scaled geothermal as many powerplants are near gas fields(lots of holes in the ground as well as a complete understanding of all the the geology in the area. Please keep us all up to date on this as it sounds like a complete game changer as well as stopping arguments about life cycles, cost and ROI for all these expensive and necessary pieces of infrastructure. Cheers from John and Ashly in Calgary, AB, Canada.
The problem is the low efficiency of stream driven turbines. Those system reach only 30% to 40% efficiency (ignoring losses of the thermal storage). This is on the same level of efficiency as hydrogen fuel cells.
One advantage is that hypothetically this is very fast to charge up.
As in it might be able to accept a bigger load than let's say pumped hydro or electrolyzers.
Seems like a good greener refurbishment of power plants. What I didn't hear was how the water, that is given off as steam, could be recycled back as a closed loop process. The diagram showed the water as a one-way flow rather than as a captured, and therefore recycled element, to make it more water efficient. Worldwide water shortage will be a future concern so a process that captures and re-uses its water would be highly desirable. ... from the Mrs ... who enjoys watching your programs as much as I do.
I was a Nuclear operator on an Aircraft carrier in the US Navy. For me the most striking thing about steam cycle heat engines it the efficiency. Theoretical maximum of 30%. Using fluids other than water, such as high pressure CO2 maybe 40%. I think a decentralized energy grid with solar and wind with localized storage could go a long way. A number of Centralized power stations to maintain base load such as these repurposed coal stations, maybe even LFTR's in place of the boilers. Reducing Carbon and Methane emissions can only go so far. We need to stop wasting so much energy by greatly reducing waste heat losses at the generation and transmission stages. Every parking lot and garage and industrial building needs to have Solar on the the roof.
Excellent and informative video as always! I really do enjoy this channel. QQ was this video released by accident? What do I do now on a Sunday afternoon... :)