Exploring the world’s largest batteries. Old tech could still be the future of energy storage. Go to https://brilliant.org/Undecided to sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership. Because of the intermittency of renewable energy like wind and solar power, storing large amounts of electricity is a necessity for the decarbonization of our energy system. However, we still don’t have enough batteries to compensate for renewable energy slumps across the planet. When thinking about the biggest utility-scale energy storage installations, a huge cylindrical lithium ion battery powered light bulb may go off in your head. But what if I told you the world’s largest battery taps into water rather than lithium? Can an old technology, even one still learning new tricks, be the answer? Let’s see if we can come to a decision on this.
Corrections:
7:04 Clarification – $100/kWh is the build cost.
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What do you think about leaning into older technology like pumped hydro for solving our energy needs? Go to https://brilliant.org/Undecided to sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership.
If you liked this, check out This Battery Breakthrough Lets EVs Charge in MINUTES https://youtu.be/48vPgAPtkJg?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7UWp64ZlOKUPNXePMTdU4d
Thank you for making this video, as storage really is a missing link in the renewable energy supply chain. It seems that many countries and regions have in recent years dramatically scaled up their renewable energy production but done nearly nothing in comparison for renewable energy storage leading to reliability and cost problems.
I did not even know about compressed air. I would love to see more hydro especially the kind that is broken off from natural rivers as to leave those ecosystems alone. Also really looking forward to Geothermal becoming more affordable to setup. If all else fails I still think we should be developing Atomic to make it safer and more affordable along with these other technologies. I don't think a one size fits all will ever solve our energy needs.
Since it is static, why not use lead acid batteries? I read once that BBC radio used Lead-Acid for it's backup consisting of baths of acids with lead plates that were able to be lowered into them on chains. Talk about low tech. Does it matter that the installation weighs 3 or 4 times and a chemistry energy density of 15% to that of lithium-ion, if the chemical makeup and construction to achieve it is dead simple. No gel mixtures and porous membranes as used in cars, just acid and thick lead plates. Repair, reshape the plates (repour them) on-site.
Recycle those old car batteries directly into grid storage installations.
I wonder if spinning wheels and super caps can scale up to became options
I'm surprised there was no mention of liquid metal/sodium thermal batteries here, even as a side-note.
Pumped hydro is good but I think Energy Vault are on to something with their towers of concrete blocks. Complete frees gravity batteries from any link to the local topography beyond needing a flat area to build the tower.
What about the research of Prof Donald Sadoway of MIT, you featured him in a video on July 13, 2021? https://youtu.be/m8751tkBU_Q
This is exciting, but the two facilities in Nevada and California are in severe drought. Lake Mead is only 149 feet above dead pool, at which point it won't generate electricity and drinking water may be limited.. So where would the water come from?
Hydroelectric power (including storage) is the past, present, and future
Have you seen the Polar Night Project? They’re storing energy in sand. Looks very promising. It doesn’t require lots of hard to find and toxic materials as batteries do, doesn’t require specific geological advantages (slopes), isn’t dangerous, and doesn’t destroy wildlife habitats in any way.
Thanks!
PUMPED hydro cannot generate power, just store and release it. This discussion is pretty confused.
If I'm supposed to think of a big lithium battery instead of immediately thinking of pumped hydro……we need to end any notion of democracy with equal votes and have some standardized testing to qualify….. I don't think CAES is "similar" either other than also harnessing easy to understand dynamics. air pressure is a thermodynamic effect and is an entirely different energy conversion math than gravitational kinetic potential. It's an important distinction because you have to now included the gas heating as it compresses, cooling for expansion…..pipes freezing when you try to turn it on…… thermal effects are not very efficient. you got ohms and shit to deal with. It's not a bad technology but the physics mean it will always be less efficient than other methods. You use what you got…… Lithium ion batteries really don't belong in industrial energy storage solutions……flow batteries have much lower costs and last longer. (giant chemical tanks of battery juice without the microstructures that degrade that you can't fix)
Thanks for the awesome video.
In my opinion pumped hydro is the best electric grid storage by at least Double the next best option. Building the ponds in the desert without mitigating water los is probably not ideal, but still better than electro chemical batteries and compressed air.
Everybody forgets that lithium batteries are a consumer good. They are expensive, resource intensive, and degrade more every time they are used. Pumped hydro is cheap in comparison and lasts forever with little to no maintenance.
Compressed air is not efficient because a tremendous amount of energy is lost due to heat generated by compressing the air. Also, compressed air is about as safe as a nuclear power plant, if it has a critical failure everyone within a quarter mile could be killed.
Thanks again for the excellent video!
Renewables, and pumped hydro and li-ion and such expensive mega-projects. Or we could just built a couple modern reactors and produce power for a century. But that would be too easy…
Considering the difficulty and environmental costs in mining and processing Rare Earth elements, it seems like a much more intelligent option to reserve those elements for small fast-usage electronics (anything from laptops to cars to even batteries for small residential or commercial set-ups), which is where Li-ion batteries specialise. Sure, Li-ion can be used to manage those high-peak grid fluctuations, but this is obviously stretching them outside their optimum capabilities, and it honestly seems like a wasteful and problematic use for them, especially when we're going to be depending a lot on Li-ion batteries as it is for so many other uses.
With more funding diverted to other battery options, like pumped hydro, compressed air, and liquid metal batteries (besides other battery systems which are in the pilot and prototype phase), these battery systems could cover grid needs without resorting to Li-ion. Although these battery systems all specialise in longer-term energy storage, it looks like with some modifications to grid management these batteries could still be retrofitted to work over those peak fluctuations (e.g. like creating a pumped hydro system that has multiple tunnels that drop down vertically (past multiple small turbines) to an underground reservoir).
Li-ion is the easier, cheaper option for short-term grid batteries (with more funding behind it) but that may really not be the direction we want to go in.
Pumped hydro or even compressed air sounds way better and cleaner than Li-ion battery storages which produce a bunch of hazardous waste like sulfuric acid.
Once upon a time, I did some back of an envelope calculations, and, assuming a head of 100m, and a doubling of grid energy throughput thanks to decarbonisation of transport networks, with a margin of a month's power requirement if completely full, I ended up with the US requiring a volume of water roughly equivalent to a quarter of the Baltic sea just for energy storage.
Now, I have made some significant assumptions there, allowed a generous margin for absorbing truly wild volatility in renewable sources, and the Baltic is quite shallow by most standards, but the point still stands that the water requirements for a full pumped hydro energy storage solution is… Vast. To put it mildly. The states has plentiful options for exploiting far higher heads (as demonstrated in this video), but other nations such as the UK simply don't outside of a few narrow cases.
I can see pumped hydro as a useful component of the storage mix, and for that matter, a badly needed one for the near future, but I think that it'll never give the sort of accessibility or energy density required to be the primary form of grid-level storage once grids are entirely decarbonised.
I wonder did you consider lifePo4 battery before ? they have 6000 cycle life span and energy density is not that low also you can find a 1kwh storage unit for less than 100$.
The big problem is Lithium mining is an environmental disaster.
why not top air tanks with solar panels and between each tank a wind tower both filling the tanks and use the compressed air at night for continuous electric any heat could operate drive thermocouples for even for juice
Very good overview. What about the use of sand as a heat storage medium?
Why not just build a dam on a river? Is it the environmental concerns, drought, and flood that make this a way of producing power an option?
A varient of Pumped Hydro would be a possible even in tanks without a difference in elevation with a tuned mass gyro. This would enable two tanks filled to the half way mark, to fully drain one tank into the other many times, until the tank circuit oscillation finally stops. Daylight charging with solar and wind pump the water from one tank to the other, then the water while passing to the next tank spins the tuned mass gyro, until the levels in the tanks equalize, then the tuned mass gyro pushes the remaining water into the receiving tank before slowing and stopping with the last bit of water pushed in. The process reverses, with a measured amount less with each repetition. The measured amount equals the resistance to the flow; pipe diameter, resistance in the pump and transmission in the tuned mass gyro, and power drawn off the system. If the wind happens to be blowing while the water is flowing, that much energy is added to the system extending the oscillation.
This tuned mass system works with any paired weights.
You should do a piece on flow batteries 😉
I also find the idea of using the sea as a pumped storage facility very interesting.
Damming of an area and drain it. Draining it below sea level (by pumping) gives the same energy potential as filling above sea level, but is far less risky, because a dam failure refills the emptied area, instead of causing a massive wave.
Lithium ion batteries are not sustainable for the future we run out of resources very quickly.
A thorough and engaging video as always. Sorry if you mentioned it and I missed it, but where are they getting the water to fill reservoirs in arid climates like California and Dubai? Isn't this putting even more pressure on an already scarce resource?
impressive.
I'm very curious what hydro storage could realistically be accomplished here in California. Most of the major rivers dammed are actually dammed at least twice in the Sierra Foothills; so it seems like a basic system is already in place, ready for modification. I think it would also be great if we restored Tulare Lake as the lowermost reservoir, thereby doubling (tripling?) as a aquifer and wetlands restoration project. Given the extreme to which the aquifer has already been overpumped and the arid conditions, I suspect it would take decades to reach anything approximating equilibrium. Think of the improved water flow in the rivers as well, though.
That brings me to a second plan I've mulled over for awhile that could also both enhance California's potential system as well as bring it to equilibrium much much sooner. Pump flood waters (and ONLY flood waters) from the Mississippi basin above flood prone confluences to reservoirs in the upper Colorado River basin to better mimic natural annual flow patterns and replenish downstream reservoirs and delta flow—but WITHOUT southwestern agencies' claiming any water rights or the system further harming the already taxed and polluted lower Mississippi. A necessary challenge would be to filter the water of all microbes, given the substantially different flora and fauna of the regions. This same system could also recycle a portion of the Mississippi back upstream during dryer years in order to both improve midstream flows on that year's diminished rivers and improve recharge of the Oglala Aquifer. It seems California's system could tap one of the lower Colorado reservoirs to speed up achievement of near-equilibrium and then a much smaller amount when snowpacks are insufficient. Heck, I'd gleefully entertain storing water in Owens Lake to repair the hydrology there, reversing some of the great damage done to the subregion's climate to boot.
Near where I live in North Texas, there is a large old abandoned coal mine. It's flooded below a couple hundred feet, I believe, but the "hole" of the mine disgorged some 30 million tons of coal before it did- that is a real big hole! And a local energy market that could well use some way to store "off peak" power. That would require better informed politicians and utility exec's. FR
stop breading is the answer not more !!
Oh, you wiggley, jiggley guy. Just bouncing away. I feel . . . seasick?
Is it just me, or wouldn't it be a good idea to build a solar array over the upper lake to reduce evaporation and make use of that wasted space?
U missed hydrogen
The insatiable appetite of people to consume energy, oftentimes wasting much of it, will not change until education shift the viewpoint of enough people to not waste resources. Until that happens energy producers will have a very profitable business.
every reactor that B/W in indiana built failed within 5 to 7 yearsdue to sabotause they hired local farm boys and were allways going out on strike for more wages then when they came bac to work they would sabotage them thet all failed from cracks in the main preasure vessels the builders did the damage i saw them do it. they would drop a welder lead on the shell when it was cold it would crack the shell it sounded like ice on a pond breaking then B/W would hide the cracks with new weld after it went back into the oven for another week those guys cost so much damage that they finally had to close the plant. i knew the ones that did the damage they were farm boys from white county illinois . i dont really blame them for what they did in away we were treated like slaves and little pay they finally closed the plant it opened back up some years later german company making other products for the GOV. those that we built were breeder reactors that made plutomium for the H bombs they are the ones that make all the waste that is fuckimg up the the inviroment and can,t find places to store it it is leaking into the ground water in some places but the GOV needs the bombs to kill every body with when this country finally pushes the big button. the country keeps hiring old bastards for president there are to many raginnitesold fuddies in line for the job to kill us in the next war youall make sure to vote for the dum assesto rule america.
you have to give respect to get respect god of the destroyer onthe inter net i just got warned to not use my rights of freedum of speach on the inter net the GOD of the internet does not belive in freedom of speach.
I know the largest battery is a sodium sulfur type dates back to the days of Henry Ford that technology was given away and sold back to us in a millions 🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
It's weird how we never touch on the "dark-side of the moon" – reducing energy demand.
Is energy the real currency? Money is just a way of keeping track
I've been curious if you could use a Mercury closed loop pumped liquid storage. Unfortunately Mercury is a horrible element for… well… everything, including machines. I liked hearing that R19 was an option for energy density.
Why don't they put huge black tarps or shade balls over hydroplants? Isn't their efficiency being evaporated away?
In 2020 chinas coal produced power totalled a massive 4,629,600 Giga Watt hours (Wikipedia). This hydro facility. the largest in the world, takes total chinese pumped hydro storage to 100 giga watts. To become cabon neutral by 2060 all the coal plants need to close and that much solar/wind capacity needs to be built instead. And if there is a wind free period in winter energy on a massive scale needs to be stored not just for hours but for several days until the weather changes. Does anyone else see that this is virtually impossible. Am I missing something.
i suggested a storage hydro plant above the columbia river in wash. was turned down because you aren't allowed to take water from the river and return it to the river.