Grid Scale Energy Storage 30x cheaper than Lithium-ion! How do they do that?
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- Опубліковано 14 чер 2024
- Utility scale energy storage is a hot topic right now as grid operators look for ways to economically adopt intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar into our global electrical systems. Now a team at MIT has combined and improved several existing technologies into a flexible modular solution that could be as much as 30x cheaper than existing lithium-ion technology.
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Reference Links
Main MIT paper
www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
Liquid Metal Research Paper
pubs.rsc.org/en/content/artic...
TPV cell efficiency research paper
www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
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It would be very interesting to have a segment done which revisits startups/technologies that were the subject of past videos. It's very easy to produce promotional materials that promise a 'demonstration plant in 2022', but how many of these actually happen? You've covered a lot of these things in the past, maybe it's time to do a retrospective across the board and see how many (or which ones) are fulfilling their promises to scale up to utility sized configurations.
Hi Dave. It's a point that has been raised many times. I do try to keep my eye on progress, and I will aim to do some follow ups where appropriate.
I'd be interested in the technologies that failed to come to fruition, and what the roadblocks were...
while i think your point is very valid, i think the topics he covers are usually with very solid research, and sometimes with funding for scaled prototypes.
the truth is, if there was a new infrastructure scale technology that keeps achieving goals is probably an scam. because infrastructure investors priorities long term stability more than short term gains. which means if some new technology keeps having news, it's either not infrastructure, or not real
@Hates Spam Good point, but I would say that things change over time - as in "evolve". When things evolve there are a lot of failures. I think Dave's channel is a very good resource - akin to a scholarly journal. Published articles are there to be read and pondered upon. That's my take. By the way, there is a thing in Hawaii called a "Spam musubi". It's pretty good.
@@Aaron628318 If a project fails, there is no reporting on that. And sadly, most of the projects are failing. Still, the working few are a great start.
Looks like the giant "radiator" could be a heat exchange that then uses the heat in a community heating system?
Yeah, that point is a waste, using that heat as a must!
It works in dense urban areas.
A bit of a problem given that most peaker plants aren't located in cities because of land value and quality of life issues
@@jimurrata6785 So, it will be an industrial zone. Maybe preheating requirements can be fulfilled with it.
@@Sekir80 Anything is better than shunting it into an atmosphere that has already reached a tipping point.
@@jimurrata6785 Human energy production is mostly irrelevant on a planetary scale. Fossil fuels are a problem specifically because the CO2 released from producing one unit of energy goes on to reflect MILLIONS of units of thermal energy back to Earth. Remove that huge multiplier, and our direct energy production isn't even a rounding error in the planet's normal energy flows.
This has been designed by mechanical engineers and it shows, which usually means expensive... The cost analysis feels way too cheap. The capex must be huge. You have shown far simpler and cheaper systems, which whilst not so efficient appear a lot more attractive. Excellent explanation. Thanks
I expect each component part of the system has been shown to work in the lab. Scale it all up 10,000 times with some impressive engineering challenges, and voila! - a cheap (cough cough) energy storage system.
I'd say you're right only to a point. There's always a threshold that a more expensive but better performing system at scale is cheaper than the simple, low intial cost system.
First I was interested, but when it got to the photocells it went downhill fast.
The reason we don't use germanium photocells already, is because they are much more expensive than silicon ones. Like 100x more expensive for 10-15% better efficiency.
So to build enough photocells to generate 1GW of energy alone is a BIG undertaking, as no photovoltaic system was ever build in this size and infrastructure. You need also to convert the low-voltage DC current into a high-voltage AC current, which will eat at least 5-10% of the efficiency on top.
The heat storage alone is complex enough and was never build in a big industrial scale, so build that first, cut all the photocell stuff out and make steam and use an old decommissioned steam turbine and generator that has already an efficiency of 50-60% with technology that is tested and proofed.
When you get that to run, THEN you can add and try the photocell system that will most probably cost more than a state-of-the art steam turbine with generator and go and proof that it will surpass the 60% efficiency that a modern steam turbine generator has, and that produces the needed high-voltage AC current from the get go and needs no DC-AC converter stage.
All in all, sounds rather improbably and bad practice to start with multiple, new, unproven technologies instead try to get the first part running first and iterate, but I did not read the papers if I missed something.
Your point is 100% valid.
When you get molten graphite, then why don't use it to make steam?
Steam turbines are used everywhere around the world. So use it to make electricity.
@@stunningsalman The system uses graphite blocks. I didn't hear molten graphite being mentioned at any time. Additionally Apollo's analysis is stunningly incomplete, with a meaningless conclusion.
You seem to have assumed that the light intensity of the molten tin would be the same as mild sunlight falling on the earths surface. You make no adjustment what so ever when you compare a sun based system and its wattage per cell and what the intensely heated tungsten foil would provide. Nor did you address the precise nature of the frequency tuning in the light source AND the cells. In short nothing you said has enough analysis to reach any conclusion at all. Perhaps you were biased to start with and it led you to the kind of short cuts and insouciance you demonstrated.
Um... why are we talking about germanium? This video is talking about gallium arsende doping of solar panel surfaces. Germanium and selenium are for diode semiconductors... not the same thing. And that mistake makes me question the rest of the analysis. There are indeed many missing considerations. And I question whether or not the electricity needs to be converted back into AC in the first place. That's thinking with a mental straight jacket. Doesn't need to be AC if the energy is transported away chemically for instance. Doesn't need to be AC if it's powering grow lights for a green house next door. Doesn't need to be AC if it's running an HVAC system or motors in a car plant. The best inverters have efficiencies of around 97.5-98%. You guys are kidding yourselves if you think an MIT professor is not going to test the pieces of this system in isolation. The undergrads working for the grad students working for the post docs working for these professors have more elaborate notions than these suggestions.
@@darinhitchings7104 If it's a system meant to store energy from renewables, that can later be fed back into the AC power grid for use during the times the renewables don't produce anything (which is the whole idea), it will of course need to output AC.
But as you said - good inverters doesn't waste very much power.
It was more about the transfer of stored heat energy within the system and getting photovoltaic panels to work under such extreme conditions, that was the thing.
Basically it's a system that just convert electricity to heat and store the energy as thermal energy
- which can then be converted back into electricity again when energy is needed That can be done in many ways.
The more complex a system is and the more unproven technologies that's used, the more unpredictable the costs tend to be
- making less likely to get the funding needed and be scaled up for practical use.
Thanks for bringing these new ideas to wider audiences without skipping the detail. "Dumbing down" eventually dumbs us all down.
Thank you :-)
Hi, how's going?
You recommended me into this channel.
@@gerjaison Yes indeed, glad you found it. Many new and promising solutions featured here that nobody else is really talking about, at least not in any detail. Hopefully it is interesting as promised.
@@onebylandtwoifbysearunifby5475
Yes, it's a great channel. The video content and its description is detailed with all the references listed.
Excellent recommendation! 👍
Deeply appreciated.
@@gerjaison Glad to hear it. And he doesn't have advertisers, so no commercials or bias, which is rare these days. The more people exposed to these ideas, ...hopefully... the better community decisions will be made. It's a challenge when the world is run by failed lawyers and successful criminals.
"Tin is a relatively scarce element with an abundance in the earth's crust of about 2 parts per million (ppm), compared with 94 ppm for zinc, 63 ppm for copper, and 12 ppm for lead."
It ranks as number 49 for relative abundance in the Earth's crust.
Very interesting, harvesting energy to make a giant lightbulb in a shed, to create light…I love the idea.
I was reading the article earlier today but your video made it alot easier to grasp. Thanks
Neat. It does seem like a complicated system, lots of moving parts with the associated downsides. And as others have noted it would be nice to make use of the waste heat off the cooling units.
But it's novel and it does seem as though they have actually thought about scalibility and practical deployment.
I liked the sound effects when bits were being dropped in place in the animations.
Thanks, Dave!
Yeah, you'd think they could use the heat or waste heat to either run a turbine or something else.
@@scottgillespie2562 Oh you mean like a decommissioned steam turbine like a power plant?
It is likely that the waste heat is to low in temperature to be really useful. Maybe if they had a use very close, like maybe space heating.
@@danp762 Some European cities have district heating. Might be a good place to try to pilot one of these.
@@danp762 What would the temperatures of the water be near 1atm? if its hot enough for a water heater we could build these near cities and use the waste heat to power all the hot water in a village or neighborhood. Less energy that would be used on the indivisual basis and it would be included with the price of power. Utilities would be overall more efficient. Just an idea of course but very interesting indeed.
The solid state nature of these cells leads me to believe that they should first be used to replace the application of Seebeck generators (which never reached above 10% if I remember correctly), ie in remote nuclear applications (RTGs in space and remote locations). It should also make the implementation and downscaling of small nuclear reactors (with high quality heat in the 800-1200deg range) much easier than trying to adapt turbines for this purpose.
Good thinking!
PVs only work if the heat source is hot enough to emit near-IR. TECs can work at lower temperatures.
Probably only in locations that have a ready source of very hot geothermal energy. Like literally near surface lava/magma.
Molten metal and then water cooling in the same system. These are supposed to be engineered systems, not dreams worked up by brainy students at MIT.
If they are going to be moving high heat around, why not look at the heat management systems already worked out for reactors running at higher temperatures for higher efficiency, and those use molten salts. Such salts have high heat capacities and can be pumped without the plating tendencies of molten metals. Also, various mixes of molten salts can be adjusted to the characteristics desired, while molten metals would be less flexible.
You're having way too much fun. Thanks for everything. Bill
It's nice to hear that several mit around the world are working together on this concept. Good topic
the initial cost looks promising. As a former 800 MW power plant maintenance manager I wonder, what will be the ongoing maintenance issues and what would the cost be. Those costs must be considered when selling the idea to a developer.
When your "basic principles" description looks like a Rube Goldberg machine....
I would expect someone who has worked in this industry to not fall for this BS. This is like taking a battery with close to 100% efficiency and throwing away over 1/2 that energy on losses. This is a BS hype piece, as usual for this channel.
@@excitedbox5705I'm not going to defend this vid as there is plenty of scope for losses not mentioned. However, round trip efficiency of batteries is no better than 95% and except for hugely expensive cells, solar PV is about 20% efficient at energy capture, making overall sunlight to stored energy efficiency of 19% at best. Solar thermal capture can be as much as 90% and if you ignore all the undiscussed losses in the system in the video, the solar to stored electricity efficiency would be 36%. I can't see it being anywhere near that efficient, but it's an interesting concept.
@@lisakingscott7729 Solar is actually much less efficient because those 20% is claimed at room temp in a lab and not under real world conditions. However, this system is talking about taking that inefficient energy and converting it to heat and only getting
I've been working with extreme high temperature carbon applications/systems the last 10 years, and while this idea is novel, if someone were to approach my firm and ask me to design it, then put my name on it, I wouldn't feel too bad about laughing in their face.
The most significant problem I see with this (and there are many) is maintenance. In this type of system, maintenance is more of a 'please the bean counters' word, as there is no spare part exchange, it's straight to System Replacement when something breaks or fails. Bad high temp pipe? Total replacement. Cracked carbon bend? Guess what... No patch job for that.
Carbon is good for many, many things, but when mixed with this level of heat, calling it brittle would be far too kind. It's right on the border of ablation.
Now on to the more serious issue, the argon holding facility and its contents. Argon, as some may know, displaces oxygen. That's its primary purpose in most industrial uses in one form or another. Once that holding building is sealed up for operation and FLOODED with argon, you can't walk inside without bringing your own oxygen supply along (also presuming the insulation on the city bus-sized block of graphite is up to snuff. It'd be like trying to shrink wrap the sun in a thermal blanket). More devastating still, filling a hermetically sealed building with argon will require a new word beyond 'expensive'. At approximately $2.50 US per CCFfor argon, needing to fill an approximately 4.5million cubic feet of internal volume... Yeah, that's gonna hurt. And if those graphite blocks insulated with thermal jackets should need some, cough, maintenance? Gotta pump that gas back out. Let us not forget about the not-insignificant entry price of gigantic blocks of graphite. Using top tier grade for this application, one multi-part piece would net Millions of dollars. One. Block.
As said, there's a lot of billion dollar problems to tackle here, and while the thought is appreciated, not even God can help you run fast enough should you be sitting in a board meeting and this idea is presented to your stockholders.
Even nitrogen can be used instead of argon (it reacts with some metals though) but simple solutions are not popular in MIT!!
All that for 50% efficiency in perfect conditions.
The idea sounds cool, but IMO should be relegated to sci-fi novels for now.
@@janami-dharmam Nitrogen, CO2, helium if you want to lighten your load... 😉
@@user-yl2wm2gy3z That 50% is even worse as it's only for 'up time', which for a facility like this would no where near 24 hours a day. Using 'excess' grid run-off, it wants to use that energy to basically power a small city for a week to get everything up to temp, then let it sit for a month in 'passive' mode? (And what kind of renewable energy farm has excess energy on the modern grid?? Did we forget about the 150 million electric cars they want to replace fossil burners with? The aging US grid can barely keep up when there's a temperature swing... )
The whole thing sounds like it was written by a kid in grade school with no working experience vs a relatively prestigious higher education/thinktank. 🤦♂️
Not to pile on but isn’t Tin a relatively rare material that if you were talking about adding tons of these storage facilities on the grid would jack up the price of tin beyond belief. Also the process for refinancing tin uses coal. I wonder just how environmentally friendly this idea actually is. I’m glad people are working towards net 0 but that could also be achieved through sequestering emissions at a NG plant. We do have 200 years supply of the stuff.
One of your greatest videos yet, love the science info that your channel provides.
Greatest science and tech channel on UA-cam or TV.
Wow, thank you!
Very interesting. I know you have done some great videos about the challenges of depending on alternative energy and their unreliable/sessional output and have presented the idea of overproduction/storage balance and this concept fits right into.
One thing I realised is that the system still requires rare minerals like gallium to operate. Not the best thing for large scale sustainability.
True, but how many first efforts are ideal?
Argon too. I'd be interested in hearing how they'd fully insulate/isolate that carbon storage chamber from leaks, and at what concentration would the proper reactions take place.
@@markhathaway9456 it's essentially impossible to avoid the use of gallium here.
But I have no idea how much power you can get per kg of gallium through this system, nor how much gallium is produced each year.
I like the diversity of energy storage solutions being worked on and your channel's continued enthusiastic coverage of them. We need commercial solutions that work and the cheaper the better.
When I heard gallium arsenide solar cells I initially rejected this idea as being ludicrously expensive. But when I heard 100kW per square meter of panel, I changed my mind entirely. This does sound very promising.
Thanks Mark. Only time will tell of course.
@James Too bad for your part of the world. Meanwhile in mine, I've been living almost entirely powered by solar for several years now: hot water, heating, cooling, car - everything. 24 solar panels and a 30kWh home battery.
Fossil fuels are an incredible technology - it's just they have the tiny problem of causing cancer, respiratory diseases and changing the natural environment too rapidly for nature to keep up with. That's the only reason we have to find alternatives.
@@JustHaveaThink id like to know.. how you have 30 times less.. you can have 30 times more of something or.. 1:30th of something being less.. but.. 30 times more.. is that really good science reporting 🤧🤕😷😬
There are many synergies here. Electricity like this to power ground-source heat pumps coupled with well-insulated buildings promises a very low cost to heat homes and offices.
I note that some kinds of batteries suffer dendrites growing through the structure of the battery, as the metallic elements comprising the structure move. This can tolerate a maximum number of charge/discharge cycles before breaking down completely. Can you comment whether or not TPV suffers this?
GaAs is an environmentally toxic material - and a great solar cell. The question for me, when it comes to Grid Scale Power Storage - what is wrong with larger amounts of safe material which is not sitting at 2000 degrees? I would prefer a few more acres of Fe-Na (Iron and Salt water) than a lot of graphite and molten Sn (tin) at these extreme temperatures. This is potentially a great technology for systems launched into space - it's lighter than the Fe (Iron) based cells. I predict we will hear "I wouldn't want one of these systems in my backyard". If located in remote areas, we have to transport the power (grids) and that is expensive (look at your electric bill - it is itemized) and lossy. And backyards are where we will need storage as solar generation becomes more distributed into the communities.
Always learning with you.
Thanks for sharing with us and take care of yourself.
Cheers. Much appreciated.
All of your work, can change the world, very informative, contextual. Thanks
This technology certainly warrants a working prototype. I'll be following it closely
Between this and the liquid metal battery team with Don Sadoway, MIT is churning out some hot energy storage startups. My only real scepticism (which has also bedevilled Prof Sadoway) is around the ability to maintain the integrity of all the components at this sort of heat over time. I hope they can manage these challenges.
BINGO. I remember when "everyone" put in a solar water heating system in the late 70s. When we went house hunted in the later 80s, they all had been disconnected and electric water heaters installed.
@@GilmerJohn greece and mediterranean european ocuntries all have solar water heaters on their roofs, and use them almost exclusively for hot water generation, especially during summer.
I’m afraid they do not believe in entropy. Or at least suppose it can’t happen to their brainchild.
@@russbell6418 -- Well, the "system" seems to take the highest "quality" of energy (electric power from conventional solar or wind) and convert it to HEAT which is then extracted via solar. The system might be cheap per kwh stored, but you might be lucky to get 30% of you high quality energy back. Pumped storage or large spinning masses make more sense. Or simply compressing air into empty NG wells might do the job.
One good thing about this is the ability to put the plant on the site of decommissioned existing plants. This can enable the use of existing urban infrastructure and provide continuity for workforces and prevent the disruption of communities. Too many private investment decisions ignore the effects on ancillary public and community investment.
Excellent explanation! Thank you
Excellent idea, seemed complicated at first but not in comparison to other large scale projects. Great to see innovative ideas come to life.
No, this is too complex, too much place for loss, not to mention the energy extraction is limited by the 40% efficiency of the photovoltaic cells... Waste of energy to cool 'em off so they don't vaporize. Also... I think the pv cells 40% conversion efficiency is only the incident radiation, which is a small fraction of the radiation losses that are effectively lost through the coolant system that ensures the pv cell isn't vaporized.
@@kayakMike1000 it's probably more than 40% effectively. A lot of that 60% "loss" is radiated back and re-heats the graphite and gets another chance to be converted to electricity. Still way too many steps and multiple ways for the whole thing to fail catastrophically. Solid tin in pipes, anyone? Or how about an inferno should the argon leak?
If you want an example of much more sensible heat energy storage, look at ETES aka "hot rocks" by Siemens Gamesa.
It's comparatively simple:
1) Put rocks in an insulated box.
2) Heat up the rocks.
3) Make steam from the heat.
4) Spin turbine with steam.
No molten tin, argon-filled warehouses, or any of that shenanigans involved. One of their small-scale demonstrators has been active since 2017 with a proven round-trip efficiency of 25%, mostly due to heat loss. Scaling it up will get that to 50% or higher. Their concept involves building these "hot rock" boxes at decommissioned coal power plants, since the required generation and transmission infrastructure is already in place.
As far as I understand it, the issue wasn't that the cells weren't efficient enough, there have been ones with ~30% efficiency at 1200°C for a while, but the material cost was prohibitive.
By building ones that operate at higher temperature you get much more energy per unit area (aka power density), so the material cost is cheaper.
The TPV cells that operate at around 2000°C generate 4x more power per unit area than the 1200°C ones, so they are 4x cheaper in terms of material cost.
Also happened to be just above the melting point of plutonium dioxide, and the operating temperature of the NERVA rocket engine.
@@daoyuzhang1648 It actually operates between 1900°C and 2400°C.
My first thought was actually to build an alternative to RTGs with it.
The corium produced by a nuclear meltdown has around 2400°C.
Basically a solid state fission reactor.
I wonder if that could work.
@@Embassy_of_Jupiter if the plutonium dioxide is contained then yes. Graphite and zirconium carbide should be sufficient to keep the liquid oxide inside the fuel rod casings.
Dave, as always, that was brilliant. Just reading the title and looking at your diagrams without your explanation and my brain started falling asleep 😒 however, once you started explaining the technology, it was like a wee lightbulb switched on and I was fully engaged 👍😊 thank you once again, for unearthing another exciting topic and explaining the potential, allowing a troglodyte like me, to start feeling excited and enjoying some positive news for a change, something which in this day and age, is sadly in short supply. Warm regards from bonny wee Scotland 😊👌
another great broadcast, thanks very much
I'd be interested in how this proposal compares, economically and performance-wise, with high temperature heat storage coupled with an old school steam turbine generating set.
Old school turbines also have the advantage of being already built, (hopefully) underused in the coming years, and they can also run off other things if we need.
Compared to a turbine, there are I think 2 advantages: no blades to crack, inspect and replace, and no monolyth that you must stop to perform maintenance. The whole system is a large array, so if one component doesnt work you can bring it away for maintenance and keep the rest of the plant operational
And simply Stirling engines coupled with the heat storage ? They also seem to have a 40% yield, with a well-known technology.
@@gaelgregoire5413 Stirling is only 40% efficient in ideal (unreal) conditions and takes the more time to start the more max power it hes (the bigger it is, the harder to make it spin and then stop it) and power is proportional to difference in temperature (it would slow down,as it would discharge a block). Standard steam turbines are used for so long for a reason.
@@benholroyd5221 Yeah! Stop an old coal-burning power plant, tear out the coal handling & burning equipment, and put hot energy storage in its place. Hook up the existing (refurbished?) steam turbine and Presto! you've got an energy reservoir. It wouldn't be as responsive as the system described in this video, but the responsiveness could be supplied by actual batteries.
Thanks for the overview! I've been recently studying magnesium combustion, which operates around 3000°C. Thermophotovoltaics seem like an attractive way to capture that energy.
Better to build a magnesium air battery with salt water as the electrolyte.
Happy to see so many new technologies for storing energy!
Sounds impressive. Hope it actually will arrive.
Great video, Dave! Appears that realistic long term storage solutions are starting to come to fruition, all good news!
Cheers Martin. Let's hope so.
I feel like there’s too many losses. There’s an efficiency loss when storing the heat initially. There’s small losses just from radiated heat out of the storage units. There’s a pumping system for both the molten tin and the water. There’s the waste heat loss and then there’s the efficiency of the panels @ “close to 50%” - which means more than 50% losses. So overall the maximum efficiency for the whole system has to be under 30% from energy put in. Am I making a mistake here Dave? Does the reflected light reduce the panel losses somehow?
Thought the same. Might still be an interesting tech when combined with geothermal heat sources for example.
This is where the volume to surface area ratio favors LARGE installations (which is attractive to utility scale operations). Volume goes up by the cube while surface area goes up by the square. So making the system really big minimizes the effects of the losses since there is so much molten tin.
There's already large losses in all existing heat engines.
If panels are 20% and light engines are 40%, you're already at 10% efficiency, that doesnt include additional losses along the way. Overall they are counting on the substantial amount of peak insolation. Makes me wonder if nuclear can do it too. We are already trying to solve where to put the excess heat and scaling energy. Am I missing something y'all?
@@djbaugh33 I suppose efficency is only important when the energy you’re storing is expensive. But if efficiency is really low and the input energy isn’t dirt cheap it just doesn’t stack up against other quick response technologies like Lithium batteries. I think like hydrogen, there could be a place for this when we have triple the renewable energy we need - as solar and wind get cheaper and cheaper you deliberately super size systems to make cheap excess, storable energy.
Well explained....good job 👏
The concept should try and use concentrated solar power as a heat source and substitute this system for the traditional sodium thermal power storage. Ideally if you could use the cooling system for the PV cells to desalinate sea water. Corrosion would result in more maintenance but water revenue should offset that cost . Love the channel’s work .
This segment had me asking, "Why tin?" So I looked up its properties. Besides being soft, malleable and ductile, Tin has a wide temperature range in its liquid state with a melting point of 232°C, and boiling point of 2602°C. These all seem good properties for use in a heat exchange application.
And there is MILLIONS of human slaves ready to dig it up ?
@@tilapiadave3234 To be sure. A lot of these ideas seem to be a bit of a pipe dream, and there is rarely much consideration given to the long term impact. The main consideration next quarter's earnings.
@@joecaner I guess , as with most things ,, it will be a MIX of technologies that is the answer. Australia is building a HUGE solar system to run power to Singapore but as yet I see ZRERO information on any form of storage ,, seems strange.
@@tilapiadave3234 Some amazing new clean, safe, abundant, non-polluting energy source would be nice, but I agree. Until that shiny day, it will be a mix of new technologies, conservation, efficiency improvements and doing more with less.
Tin is also rare. Not quite as rare as silver, but much, much rarer than copper.
Interesting concept. I wonder how this would compare to just adding the Thermal heating & storage to an existing Gas plant which would allow it to run on the stored heat, or gas heat when storage was exhausted?
Why would a gas plant need storage? Methane is easy enough to store and ramp up production when necessary. That's why they are already used as peaker plants.
It might be worth adding to nuclear installations
There is absolutely no reason to do that since gas is a plannable source of energy which can be used at the exact degree needed at all times.
You need storage for things like wind and solar, not for gas, oil or nuclear.
@@michaelmay5453 You definitely need storage for nuclear - that's why PHES was invented.
@@ThomasBomb45 Nuclear is also plannable, it's usable for wind and solar for obvious reasons but not for anything else.
In Sweden we produce far more energy than we need but when it gets really cold there is no wind and we have to fire up oil fired plants instead, this would be used to store extra energy and use it during the time when we can't get it from wind or hydro.
In reality our problem is that we have shut down our nuclear power plants for absolutely no reason what so ever so we don't have enough plannable power and it would be cheaper and more effective to just go with nuclear.
Very interesting proposal.
I'm just about halfway and this is better than any article I've read about it
Thank you Matteo :-)
Amazing innovation. Hope they pull it off!
Looks like the pump involved is a mechanical one (?). Why not use one without moving parts--liquid sodium was 'pumped' with a solid state pump ( like a solenoid) for the Fast flux nuclear reactor (Hanford, WA). Why not use this same principle?
Electromagnetic pump efficiencies are less than 10%.
@@AsegunHenry Simplicity & maintenance time trumps efficiency. :)
@@michelem.6104 - Not at 1-10% efficiency. At such low efficiency the pump is more so a heater, than a pump, since more than 90% of the energy it consumes just becomes heat in the wires. Maintenance costs on mechanical pumps is dwarfed by their capital and energy costs.
In case you did not realize, most window glass had been made by floating it on a tank of molten tin for at least 60 years now. so don't over estimate the difficulty of molten tin in this system. just apply heat and it melts.
Heating tin on a open bed is not a problem. Pumping it through pipes makes me nervous. I guess, when the pump breaks down for some and the tin gets cold, the system will be damaged beyond repair.
This is amazing! Such a huge accomplishment.
Amazing 🙋🏼♀️ thank you for sharing this with us.
Very interesting. An immediate concern for me is scaling up. There are already concerns over the availability of graphite in large quantities. The EV world is already struggling with this issue, among many others. New sources are slow to develop and may well cause technologies such as this some delay in getting to production.
We have plenty of carbon on our world and graphite is not graphene. What if we used all that coal we will have left over from not burning it, should be doable to purify right?
@@ThaJay That is what I thought as well, but I am not well informed. Commenting for the algo too...
@@ThaJay this would be a GREAT use for coal and/or agricultural waste.
Just was commenting - then saw other comments. You are right about shortage of graphite. I was surprised. But this is natural occuring and appears plentiful - and more about mining capacity not keeping pace with demand. Where there is need and profit I can't see it not being matched within a few to 10 years. If not enough natural occuring deposits then since can be made from coal byproducts (which we have too much of) - and this is at least a long lasting productive and sustainable end use of coal than instead of burning it into CO2 at the levels of billions of Tonnes p.a. in powerplants - as we do now.
@@ThaJay Coal isn't graphite either. Most graphite is mined as graphite directly from the ground. The highest quality graphite is usually made from petroleum coke and requires heating to 2500K. It's not cheap or easy to make graphite from coal.
This is brilliant, imagine being clever enough to come up with this concept.
They are much cleverer than me, that's for sure!
;-)
@@AsegunHenry 🙌
@@JustHaveaThink horses for courses, we are all brilliant in our own way.. no one procrastinates like I do.
Very interesting, thank you for the excellent explanation
Thanks for the video! You’re a clever and awesome guy!!
It seems to me that incorporating a greenhouse to absorb much of the spare water-based heat would add to both the value of the facility and the net reduction of transportation-related emissions for the plants grown in the greenhouse. As a Canadian, building out our local fresh produce industry should be a positive outcome of technologies such as this.
My first thought when seeing the water cooling connected to a heat exchanger was "why isn't that energy being used?". I was thinking along the lines of a turbine, district heating, or even Sterling engine, but greenhouse is a great idea.
Yes, I don't know why that isn't done more. There's one in the UK called Thanet earth that takes the waste heat from the near by British sugar plant.
Why?
Heat in greenhouses is incidental to their function rather than a necessary feature for most plants that do not require a tropical environment in which to flourish.
Also increased heat actually increases evaporation from soil and transpiration from the leaves/greenery which is detrimental to the growth and water consumption of the greenhouse.
Better to cycle it back through a heat exchanger and see if you can't get some further use out of it in power generation.
Agree! There's a lot of potential there for use at least, and also the hope that the 'waste heat' won't adversely affect the local climate.
Looks like a far better grid electric storage solution than what is being used. I would like a comparison of this solution to the molten metal battery solution that is being worked on between a Toronto, Ontario company and Cambridge University. I would think the carbon seals in this system would also work in a molten metal battery. It looks like a grid sized electric storage system is in our near future. It has been needed even before renewables entered the picture as it would elimiate the wasteful peak generating stations and reduce the need for more main generating stations. All of this reduces emissions.
Wow dude, this looks awful. Why would you store so much thermal energy just to use a special photovoltaic cell to extract the energy at an efficiency of 40%? So much of that heat is going to leak... Besides, Ambri liquid metal antimony batteries already work as well as pumped storage.
Thanks for yet another excellent video
Excellent content!! Nice to get some good news.
Very Interesting concept. However I think it is too complex of a system - specifically keeping it safe would require quite a bit of maintenance. And stored heat over months is valuable by itself, specifically in the carbon intensive north
"Argon is needed to prevent oxidation", meaning it will catch fire and explode. What could go wrong???
@@scottslotterbeck3796 How much energy is required to extract that argon?
How intensive is it to create a warehouse sized argon tank to store these 'modules'?
Why not spheres given the S:V ?
How do you go about *eliminating* thermal loss from an object this size?
I agree that we should look into direct heat or cold storage and use that in district heating/cooling.
@@jimurrata6785 Just off the top of my head, I think most argon is found in the atmosphere, and is a byproduct of liquifying "air" to make liquid nitrogen.
@@jimurrata6785 STOP ASKING QUESTIONS!!! Science at work here! LOL.
From end to end , isn’t this a battery with 50% efficiency, I.e. much lower than other systems like pumped hydro? If so, its advantage is storage capacity per dollar, is that a legit summary?
Yes, and you can build anywhere - so near solar. Pumped hydro needs water and mountain and permissions.
@@idjles And 'Permission' seems the challenge these days. In Michigan we have a large and old pumped hydro in Ludington. It's been modernized and works very well. But when asked if they'll build another the utilities say: "Nope, we'd never get permission to do it."
Also as you mention: "Location, Location, Location" while this thermal battery could literally be anywhere.
And scalability compared to pumped hydro
@@larrybolhuis1049 Ironic that the name of the town is Ludington. I am thinking of the Luddites.
@@andyw2132 Other batteries have to have sources for the electricity. The heat system in the video is about collected heat - to - electricity at high efficiency (compared to other means).
This one give me hope of a senseable application with common sense in its thinking.
Excellent episode, as usual.
This sounds cool, but seems so much more complicated than the easy "liquid air battery" approach you covered a while ago.
Cool! Is that 40-50% efficiency rating calculated just from the incident light on the cell? Or is that a total value for electricity input versus output, encompassing all the losses of the heat storage process?
Encompassing all losses
Electric heaters are almost 100% efficient. The biggest exception is heat pumps which are more than 100% efficient because they cool the outside air or ground.
There are only heat losses - cooling of the TPV, and losses during storage and transportation trough the pipes. The cells are only ~30% efficient, but the remaining ~70% energy radiates back to the wolfram-surface as heat, ofc minus the ~5% heat loss that is transported to the cooling block through the gold-bridge.
My concern is the surface area of the TPV cells, that needed for MW output. It will be a huge housing.
@@AsegunHenry I doubt. Overall round-trip efficiency will be closer to 20% or so.
@@nathanbanks2354 heat pumps which are more than 100% efficient - very interesting! what happens to the conservation of energy??
Great video as always!
Where the hell have you been... I love your pod cast... And I have not seen one for a bit. Do more because we need you old man.
This is the real deal. Along with Ambri's molten metal battery and unlike all of the repurposed EV battery technologies that we are seeing offered as grid scale storage solutions this new technology based on MIT research is genuinely fit for purpose. Part of the novelty lies in how the different technologies work together. The graphite blocks can naturally store energy (in the form of heat) for long periods but the pumped molten tin and photovoltaics working together offer a way to extract/release energy (in the form of electricity) in a rapid and tunable fashion.
The idea is brilliant and it works. In large deployments this could put an end to anxiousness about base load and perhaps even worries about the intermittency of renewable energy collection.
Rather complicated system with lots of opportunity to go very wrong. I still think the Ambri molten metal battery is much more viable, because the heat remains contained inside the battery and does not need any moving parts and is more efficient too.
Was having the same thought. It seems very complicated, just keeping the argon inside the buildings is a huge challenge on its own.
Half the efficiency but 100x cheaper than lithium batteries
@@billsgui Ambri is not Li based, it is a completely different technology and it targets this specific niche. Way less complicated and supposedly much more efficient than all these air tight buildings pumping metal around. No matter how good these pumps are I guarantee you it is going to be hard to sell that to engineering companies. Nobody wants to pump molten metal above 1000C all day long. Things can go wrong, with those temperatures VERY WRONG and they will. So I see no future for this idea beyond the MIT lab and the inspiration for other projects.
With all that heat, why not just use it to turn water to steam, and turn a turbine.
@@josephkowalski9836 cause the prof developed a new type of PV and wants an application for it?
Great Think. Thanks for bringing it up.
Glad you liked it!
Nice episode mate!
It sounds great on paper and I am sure it is fantastic in the labs. I just worry that they might find problems like with the solar salt systems, which struggled with moving parts and super temperatures which prevented cheap and easy to maintain serviced systems. On paper it does sound like less stuff to move and fix, but still, if something were to go wrong, it might be very difficult to fix and maintain. Hopefully the larger scale prototypes iron out any kinks and demonstrate a larger scale reliable system.
My engineer spider senses tingled once i hear a bunch of expensive and exotic materials. The build cost of the plant will be astronomic compared to the energy it produces.
Nothing ventured nothing gained. All systems need to be considered.
You described exactly my impressions.
I see a hot liquid metal pumping system with moving parts, completely sealed because of the heat that otherwise damages everything (and will cause fires).
Really, what can possibly go wrong with that?
I was immediately thinking about what those lab guys did smoke!
Later. Mechanical "control rods" that interact with cooling water that if not pumped fast enough will turn to steam and cause all sorts of mayhem.
Having both of these in a confined area with superhot metal flowing ... again, what could possibly go wrong.
And it is not as if cooling water is all that reliable everywhere, a system like this will need a LOT of it and everything has to go just right to not be a total disaster of epic proportions.
@@TheEVEInspiration It seems they are make the classic mistake of trying to do two new things at once. If energy storage is the problem, solve that. If energy recovery from a hot object was the problem, solve that. But energy recovery from hot objects was solved years ago. They should focus on just the hot carbon idea. Also forget argon, use nitrogen or CO2 as an inert gas. Putting hot carbon in a sealed area will soon create it's own inert atmosphere anyway.
Using water to recover the energy from a hot carbon block could not be simpler, cheaper, safer and way more reliable.
This system looks like something Rube Goldberg might have invented after his 6th coffee in a morning. The system may be a miracle of scientific advances but it is complex beyond belief. The idea is to store excess energy which is inherent in solar and wind systems. So far so good and they end up with getting out 50% of the energy they put in which is quite respectable. But the material infrastructure and maintenance; is that all in the overall efficiency calculation.
Even if it is, there is a much better option for any region requiring heat in the winter. That is geothermal storage. To avoid curtailment losses, excess energy is turned into heat and stored underground. The efficiency of this operation is around 50% as well but the infrastructure required is a matrix of vertical holes in the ground. Such systems cost about 0.6% of the cost of chemical batteries per kWh and can be up and running in weeks using garden variety drilling equipment.
The downside is that they produce heat rather than electricity and therefore are only useful 6 months a year for output but can store excess energy all year long. What the MIT team has done is impressive but it just won't fly once the practical hurdles begin to be encountered and there is a vastly cheaper, easier and proven alternative.
Compared to thorium salt reactor designs, this is not particularly complex.
Geothermal storage, on large scale for heat pump application has been done in Canada. The cost is huge, around 100k$ per house.
Am I missing something? The whole point of TPV is to convert the heat to electricity.
@@gg3675 it converts very hot heat (2000c) to electricity, there is still a lot of potential in the remaining heat.
@@hellsing56666 where was this $100,000 per house storage facility built? What is the name of it?
Amazing video. Thank You!!
Glad you liked it!
Another excellent overview; thanks. One suggestion in relation to the demonstration of surface area / volume: I find that just by showing how the ratio changes when you cut a block in half, adding 2 more surfaces (and additional surface area) to the same volume, is a really good way to make the point.
I'm curious what happens in a system like this when some of the molten metal SOLIDIFIES in the pipes... How is it melted again? Wouldn't every inch, including valves and other fittings, require a heating element? I suppose there are existing molten-metal pipeline systems?
If I were designing thermal storage like this, I would run all piping inside the molten reservoir. think of it this way... Instead of external pieces that are connected together, all the parts are inside the big storage tank. This way, unless the entire reservoir of molten metal solidifies all remains liquid, always. And if the whole contraption really did cool down, then just heat it all back up. The extra benefit is practically zero loss... at least from any piping and components and the entire contraption is insulated easily. without anything protruding.
This can be solved using alloy with low melting point, like solder - which is also based on tin and that gave me the idea. Solder needs only 200 C to melt, preheating pipes to such temperatures is not a big deal.
Given siting at peaker plants, it seems easier to just use molten tin in graphite as storage medium, and then just use the tin to produce hot gas for existing turbines. The driver here is to drop the required capital investment, not get a bit better efficiency. For instantaneous load response, just use a bit of LiFPo battery capacity.
Use two-way stirling engines to pump heat in stead of electric heaters.
the whole point is to replace expensive batteries with this so what is your point?
@@cornishcat11 This looks more expensive than batteries and much more fragile than batteries so what's your point? Gas turbines and molten salt storage is much simpler and cheaper.
Great video, good concept. I wish the video addressed their solution to the initial startup problem: How to initialize the pluming and carbon blocks to a point such that the tin does not solidify in the system (external to the heading system) while the system comes up to operating temperature.
Quite complex, but revolutionary! A new way to store energy fantastic, doesn't seem cheap. Really thinking outside the "box!"
They should be able to run the cooling water through a turbine so they don't dump the heat overboard without extracting all the available energy.
It is difficult to extract heat from water unless it is steam
@@tedwatts5021 That has been the traditional way and few efforts to produce electricity directly from heat have been of any use. The key about this system, one most everybody here doesn't seem to understand, is that the method they're using generates electricity from heat at a much higher rate than ever before. (as I understand it)
This design uses properties of materials instead of heat pumps. Nice.
It would be good if the heat from cooling the MPV could have been reused. A good place for a heat pump, perhaps.
Clearly there is potential to provide baseline geothermal power.
Well, the system as presented uses a resistive heater to supply thermal energy to the tin. The trouble is that they have a coefficient of performance of 1 (100% efficient) but a heat pump can have a COP of 3-4, so if you use an engine/ir cell to extract the energy again, you can get all of it back in theory unlike with a resistive heater.
@@chalichaligha3234 While I do love the heat pump idea (Heated and cooled my home with one for 30 years), what heat pump can rise to that temperature? One of the few benefits of resistive heaters is they can get VERY hot! Heat pumps on the other hand would struggle to reach temperatures of this level.
very informative video.
Thank you 😊
Awesome. Who would have thought we can create electricity from heat as efficiently as heat engines but with TPV.
The technology has been around for centuries. Thermoelectric generators are used every day.
This does not create electricity. Electricity is used to melt tin. And only then is the system 40% efficient in converting the heat of the molten tin back into electricity.
Who would have thought that heat engines were 'efficient'?
@@luc_libv_verhaegen Exactly. People are pretty dumb. As is this overly complex crap. Hydro storage, folks!!!
@@scottslotterbeck3796 Hydro is great. Everyone who needs to know, knows that. But we don't have mountains everywhere.
Very nice Dave. You're my favorite technology UA-camr. I don't necessarily agree with all of the climate conclusions but I really enjoy your technology videos about new technology.
Thanks Scott. Glad you like them :-)
You do such pro work man:)
Cheers Dylan. I appreciate that feedback :-)
4:34 a few years ago when Boston had quite a snowy winter, the snow plows were dumping snow on to this one site along the river. the pile of snow had eventually become as tall as an 8-storey building, and didn't completely melt until the following August...
There now seems to be a critical mass of industrial & technological innovations and production towards energy storage that will make variable, cyclic renewables practical as an energy source that can be utilised as a baseline and peak electrical power supply.
One might have cause for optimism, but hopefully, this won't be permanently 20 years away from reality...
Exactly.
I think building one is really hard, to the one side you have huge temperature shifts etc putting a large straign on equipment but if you need to fix or replace anything you got an oxygen free environment filled with stuff that's thousands of degrees. It's orders of magnitude harder then molten salt and that was a design disaster.
I would guess that the skill, materials and workmanship required wouldn't be much different than the launch vehicles SpaceX builds. In other words, it's possible to build a working system using known materials and workmanship.
I'm cheering them on.
Can't help but remind everyone how hard it is to work with high temperature seals.
Look at Dr. Sadoway (Ambri) liquid metal battery. The seal has been their challenge.
At my pay grade, pumped hydro storage is about my threshold of understanding. Amazing technology. Hope it works.
Hydro depends on sun energy to raise it to the skies when gravity and cooling bring it back down as rain or snow. The sunlight melts snow and produces run-off, into fixed stream/river areas. Here you collect heat directly, store it for processing in the video plant, convert to electricity, perhaps store that in batteries, then ship it out to customers. Put the plant anywhere you want, no carbon, size to needs, improve the tech over time.
You generate electricity using a renewable process. You have some excess so you store it by heating graphite. You then use the heat regenerate the electricity at a 40% efficiency.
Seems like a massive loss compared to those associated with charging a lithium ion battery. You will lose at least 60% of the electricity you originally generated.
We don't care about efficiency. We care about cost. If system A delivers energy at a lower cost over a time period than system B, it costs less to the power plant operator, thence to the consumer. If this thermal system is 30 times cheaper than lithium batteries and lasts as long then the math could work out if off-peak electricity is the right price.
I wonder if substantial EV charging will flatten the demand curve some day, making all these batteries moot. The lithium will be in everybody's garages.
@@jamesvandamme7786 Thanks for your answer. In case you are interested, have a look at the "Algae-powered computing" article published by Cambridge. Another interesting smaller scale project.
Whoa, I’m a mech eng, but that was a lot to take in! Watching again 😂 - sounds exciting.
Thank you for this interesting subject! It is the beginning of a new concept. The cooling off the water coold maybe helped by a cryogenic system that needs only cooling water and low pressure steam. It is a small unit with a lot off cooling!
When discussing the cost advantages of this concept for some reason there is no mention of the cost of maintenance and repairs. Will this thing not require it? Looking at the potential design of the system maintanance would be an absolute nightmare. I would not be surprised if the cost of maintenance exceeds by a good margin the cost of construction and launch. A nuclear station is cheaper to maintain than this mostrosity. Even if the whole system is not a scam (there is a great potential for that too) I doubt it will ever leave the lab level.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if you'd peeked behind Wizard of Oz's curtain with "there is no mention of the cost of maintenance and repairs". I seem to recall Mister Think is hugely big on an LCOE thing but did he do one of those here ? Or did he stick with Capital cost per kWh only here for some reason ? (I skimmed though it and forgot it as usual).
@@grindupBaker He just presented some graphs with $ per kWh without specifying the source data. I mentally compared operating this thing with a nuclear power station and it does not look good. Heat carrier: water and steam versus molten metal!; operating temperature: 100 Degrees Celcius or just above versus 2000!; operating atmosphere: air versus Argon! How can this be remotely repairable or financially profitable? Personally I think its a scam.
Apropos of nothing, the sound of the buildings dropping down cracked me up.
:-)
Many years ago there were manufactories that used storable heat energy to propel locomotives around the site. These resembled the steam tank engines of the time but instead of having a fire under the boiler the engine was plugged into a steam raising plant, thus heating the water in the engine and pressure storing energy. The principle is similar to fizzy drink bottles, take off the lid and carbon dioxide is released from the liquid. The water in these engines was heated under pressure so the water was under sufficient pressure that it was unable to boil until power was required to drive the engine. Apparently one charge would last for 6 to 8 hrs. Using this system, existing steam powered generators would have instant source of stream/pressure to meet excess demands as a considerably simpler and cheaper alternative.
Just plain awesome 👌
Glad you like it!
The part that works like a giant radiator strikes me as being a place where improvements can be made to capture and or use that heat.
The rest of the system looks good.
And if it's close to competitive already...
Anyway I look forward to seeing how well it works when they get it out of the lab and start testing a full scale version in the real world.
A theoretical plant based on small demonstrators seems competetive...on price. Untill they build an actuall full-scale demonstrator it's not competetive.
I was thinking the same. If they were to put this in urban areas they could use that waste heat for central heating and hot water?
@@diceman199 You could, but it'd be very inefficient. Using electricity to power electrical heaters, funnel the feat via molten metal into storage blocks and then into photovcells is a hell of a lot less efficient than...just using electricity to power electrical heaters.
Why use this when you can just build a pumped water storage system + electrical heaters.
Some narrow band filters may be useful here
@@nonyabisness6306 not all areas can make use of pumped storage. I’m talking about using the cooling water to heat domestic properties etc to make it more efficient
Sounds cool, although I don't understand the molten tin part, would it not be more efficient to heat the graphite directly with the electricity and have the tungsten foil and stuff attached directly to that?
I think the idea is to decouple the heaters from the storage. Otherwise to add more capacity, more heaters would be required. That's one of the issues with batteries, capacity and power are closely coupled.
yeah, I agree. it seems an unnecessary step to me. I imagine there will be innovation there.
Yes - much simpler and more flexible to have an array of resistive elements in the graphite storage. Minor detail - if the argon leaks and the tin or graphite is exposed to air it oxidises rather rapidly ie burst into an enormous conflagration!
MIT geniuses again 👍👍👍👍
I live in new Zealand we have a fantastic wind resource what a fantastic way to store that wind energy when it doesn't blow
Thanks. Fun and informative as always. Seems like this could be made to retrofit some of the failed heliostat projects as well. Looks like an improvement over the old molten salt system.
;-)
This is brilliant innovation, it needs more innovating to take it from prototype to real world applications.
Thanks to Dave for uncovering this technology for us.
Mainstream media does not show this.
Hold on! I don't think they've even got a prototype working yet! They're talking about getting a big demonstrator working by 2023.
TPV sounds a bit like a solid state stirling engine
either way, quite the interesting topic
Wow, Interesting as always
Thanks for sharing :-)
Why not use the stored heat to heat water to turn a turbine? Is it less efficient than solar panels?
Turbines are more efficient than the quoted 40% of these photocells.
Then add in all the pumping losses and wasted heat.