Harnessing the Wind Without a Breeze
One of the knocks against wind energy is that you don’t have power if you don’t have wind. Well, an energy company in the Upper Midwest might have the solution.
This story from the Minneapolis (MN) Star-Tribune says Xcel Energy Inc. has teamed up with the state of Minnesota and a Virginia-based technology firm to test the first battery in the country capable of storing wind energy:
The breakthrough technology, which is the size of two semitrailer trucks stacked atop each other, was built in Japan and shipped to Luverne, Minn., where it will store electricity generated by the nearby Minwind Energy wind turbines. S&C Electric Co. expects the equipment will be completely installed by April.
The battery consists of a score of 50-kilowatt modules. When it is fully charged, the massive sodium-sulfur battery — which weighs about 80 tons — can store 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough to power 500 homes for about seven hours. It will cost more than $5.4 million to buy and install the battery and analyze its performance.
The technology could help allay critics of wind energy, who lament that no electricity is produced when there’s no wind. If successful, the battery will store wind energy and release its power onto the electrical grid when the air is still.
“Energy storage is key to expanding the use of renewable energy,” Xcel Chairman and CEO Dick Kelly said. “This technology has the potential to reduce the impact caused by the variability and limited predictability of wind-energy generation.”
Xcel, has invested $3.6 million in the project and hopes that the battery will become key to its wind energy operations.
6 Comments »
Tara
Correct me if I’m wrong, but technically there is still no energy being produced when there is no wind. They are just holding already “produced” wind energy to release it later.
Can’t they make use of all the wind energy they are producing? Are they making so much that they can store volumes of it for later? I’m just curious.
Luke
Often times transmission capacity is constricted by base load equipment that does not turn off and on easily (imagine flipping a switch on a 300MW coal-fired plant, not gonna happen). So the available wind production cannot always be transported to demand hubs while it’s being produced. The storage is necessary to allow wind power to fully replace dispatchable power production assets. Otherwise the capacity cannot be counted upon by customers and must be backed up with things like natural gas-fired turbines. Of course, we could just build an enormous amount of transmission capacity (the Picken’s plan) but someone would have to pay for all that space that only gets used 30-40% of the time at full utilization (the typical capacity factor of wind turbines), and that someone would be you and I, the utility rate payers. Wind power will drive conservation, through displaced coal kWh, or probably moreso through economics and its impact on prices.
Ravi Soparkar
How do you claim harnessing the wind withou a breez? There is no mention about energy generation, when there is low or no wind. Is this most effective power storage system?
Laramie Jordan
“That’s enough to power 500 homes for about seven hours. It will cost more than $5.4 million to buy and install the battery and analyze its performance.”
500 homes for $10.4 million dollars. That works out to a bit more than $10,000 per house for their share of the battery cost ~ for seven hours worth of power.
Something tells me the economics of that won’t work out.
Ron Davison
All right Laramie!
Someone broke out a calculator!
But this is a demonstration so it will be expensive but I think Laramie is onto something here…
Lets say the thing actually works as planned, the cells all stay balanced for the life of the battery the size of a house, they get the cost down to 1/5, and it lasts for 5 years….
That,s 2.20$ a day per house.
10,000/5=2000
2000/5=800
800/365= ~2.20$ per day per household
If this is offset by cheaper electricity then it is a wash…
Coal is not 3 cents/KWh retail and add in the carbon fee, and it more like 20 cent retail. add in… whoops there goes 1/2 of Florida, New Orleans, Hawaii, Fiji, (your favorite vacation spot add) here as the ocean rise (yes, even if we do everything we can some of this will happen, maybe not before you and I die but go look into your grand kids eyes_ besides I bet it will happen before we pay of the 20 trillion dollars of debt we have. (Don’t forget about Social Security obligations) (And we ain’t gonna pay that off with H1-B visa tax revenue and wall mart wages…) sorry kinda got off topick, but not really…
add refurbish cost after deterioration of efficiency becomes an issue and cost of capital…lets call it 3$ per house per day.
Now compare that with the cost of upgrading the transmission grid and its ~ 25 to 50 year life span…Someone from the electric companies chime in her would ya???
Add in the fact that the wind does not blow every day for 1/2 the day and then it does not.
I do not know what the wind profiles look like but I bet they don’t match the demand curve of a day/night cycle.
However it may be a good part of the mix in a very small fraction of storage totals. it does match demand cycles so it will have some value.
It also matches better with solar as solar is a day cycle last time I checked.
Put these in new mexico coupled to a solar farm and compare it to shipping the morning power east for eastern peaking times and west/north/south for afternoon power. (I think the eastern shipment has the best phase matching as peak loads for spring/summer/fall are two to three hours lagged behind solar peaks. (tracking systems cut this peak ~ in half)
How much energy is lost in transmission.
When energy is transported across three states how much is really lost?
how much does the transmission upgrade cost when averaged out per KW/hr ?
How much is upgrading cost compared to whole new transmission lines? 1/2 ??
Water potential storage, salt dome storage, and oil reservoir storage (I just thought of this! could help push out more oil too!) are probably better for larger % of energy storage as they are not going to be limited by the same limits as a man made battery but on their storage sizes. How many empty/low oil wells are near the high wind areas?
steam injection with excess wind energy output in old/dry/low production oil wells is another twist on the above idea.
Low grade petroleum upgrading with hydrogen/HHo. Natural gas pumping from source to local storage caverns is another with variable pressure as excess wind energy goes up and down. Heat storage in winter, cold storage in summer at homes and buildings for air-conditioning, excess cold storage in meat lockers and Ice houses. this all helps by adding demand side leveling lowering peak neads localy and becomes economically viable when variable pricing of the excess wind energy comes into play.
add in the “build it they will come” principle
(add some electric oven baked pies for good measure) and new business wilI and communities will sprout up near the excess wind enregy sources and it all starts to make sense in a holistic big picture kinda way.
Gotta stop now I need to go see a patent attorney for the rest of my ideas… :)
Peace out
Techron, the Observer
Laramie Jordan
The easiest form of storage is simple mechanical storage — what I call the “cuckoo clock” plan.
Next to each wind turbine build a tripod of steel beams as tall as the turbine. When the wind blows and the turbine generates excess electricity, an electric motor would winch a very large block of concrete (perhaps a 100,000 lbs or more) to the top of the tripod. When the wind stops blowing, gravity would pull the concrete block down turning a generator to pump stored energy in the form of electricity into the grid.
On a very small scale, cuckoo clocks have been doing exactly that for hundreds of years. Scale up the cuckoo clock’s energy storage system, and eliminate the need for complex. expensive batteries. Take advantage of gravity. That’s about as simple as it could get.
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