I dont know if I am happy or sad I didn't see your videos before attempting something very similar. We both came up with surprisingly similar ideas! I got significantly better results, with a fraction of the height. I realize I cant actually talk to you about it, but I have a great many questions! My setup is just using a water tank 8 feet above my jet(s). Differences: 1) I also built my own alternator (my first, I am no expert), but I used a different idea - I made a rotating magnetic field with a stationary armature around the outside - this required no brushes. Old school, yes, but its seems to be producing a good bit more watts. I also connected a rectifier with a capacitor. I made this at a lower voltage - intending to light LED (3.5 volts was the target, I am hitting 2.9). 2) Not having a 3 D printer, my wheel is similar size, but just using curved blades. I did try different sizes, but they all produced similar watts (larger made less volts, more amps; small made more volts less amps). 3) I used much larger pipe feeding the jet- 2" all the way to the jet. Knowing the head would be exactly the same for all size pipe - and knowing I had very little at 8 feet, I just upsized to reduce any loss from friction and fittings. 4) Solar panel and pump - my idea was to run the "turbine' (I don't really know what to call it, its a horizontal version of yours, but just with blades) all the time and power the load all the time. The solar would turn on the pump when it was available, and outrun the "turbine", filling the reservoir when there is no solar. To achieve this, I have a 100 watt panel, driving an 86 watt pump. The pump is submersible, and does outrun the "turbine". These could clearly be smaller to use the way you did. 5) I turned my wheel 90 degrees and added a second jet going the opposite of the first. In testing, I found this didn't actually produce any better watts for the water used. (2 smaller jets vs 1 large) But it does give me different capacities. I am lighting 1 foot strip of LED's -using 1.6 watts;. I am using 1.6 gallons a minute, filling my tank at 2.5 gallons a minute. This gives me roughly 1 watt / gallon a minute (at 8 feet head+ up to 2 for a full bucket). Clearly, I would still need 1100 gallons to run this all the time. assuming I had max daylight every day (its the idea I wanted to see, not really using it practically).
California actually has the most pumped storage of any state! Another way of looking at the economics of storage is that it allows a higher capacity factor of existing generation (i.e. run it at capacity more of the time), allowing the capital costs to be spread over more generated power. Much of the peak load is handled by single-pass gas turbine peaking plants, which are inefficient but lower capital costs than, for example, combined-cycle gas turbines that capture the waste heat. This can be particularly important for high capital-cost, low-fuel cost generation. For example, the Northfield Mountain pumped storage was constructed for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Renewables also fall into this category, having very low operational cost. Battery storage has been displacing gas peaking plants to a significant degree. Much of California's pumped hydro is part of the California Aquaduct system. Of particular interest, given discussion of power from Oregon, is the 3.21 GW HVDC Pacific Intertie from the Dalles to Los Angeles, which terminates near the Castaic pumped hydro facility. This allows making more complete use of this link, transferring power even when LA has a surplus. This was completed in 1970, and has been upgraded a couple of times since. Originally it used mercury-vapor valves, but now uses thyristor inverters. The use of HVDC links is both more efficient over long distances and allows different sections of the grid to operate independently without need for synchronization. The first pumped hydro in the US was in 1930 in Connecticut on the Housatonic, and is still in use. The reason storage projects emphasize the power (e.g. megawatts) rather than capacity (megawatt-hours) is that, from a grid operational standpoint, the key attribute is the ability to absorb or provide power, to match generation to load. For batteries, the corresponds to the rating of the inverters; for pumped hydro, the ratings of the generators/pumps. In the case of batteries, it is not uncommon to see the total capacity omitted entirely (annoying, yes!) and assumed to be 4 hour at full rated capacity. Of course, they're never operated at full capacity over the full 4 hours. 4 hours works out to be fairly useful capacity when spread out over a daily cycle. This tends to confuse engineers when they first encounter it (myself included!). Of course, both numbers are important. 4 hours isn't universal, and substantial benefit can be had from even smaller amounts of storage. For example, the Dalrymple battery in South Australia is a 30 MW facility-but with only 8 MW-hr of capacity. But this is enough to absorb peaks from the nearby wind farm, and to stabilize the grid in case of an outage on the transmission lines, buying time to fire up "conventional" power sources. www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41833
I work at bigger winery and we are about to discontinue 4 250.000L tanks, currently the market is basically offering next to none for this capacity as demand dropped. I have no technical background whatsoever, but I got the idea of doing something like you at our facility. We work closely with a local university on projects to get more sustainable and luckily our owner is eager on being best/ first in class on project which make us stand out. I will push my idea to them and see if this is a economically feasible idea. Currently the difference in heights could lead to a problem from my basic understanding, but let’s see what some motivated students/ professors will come up with. Sounds to me like a interesting project to be working on. Thanks for the basic insights and understandable math!
As an Oklahoman (where the wind comes sweeping down the plains), I've always wanted to see this implemented with a purely mechanical wind powered pump to prevent as many conversion losses. Unfortunately, this state rarely has much by the way of elevation change. Thus the wind... Oh well, great video. I've wondered about this since I hid out on my roof as an angsty teen and pondered various mechanical contrivances.
You do great service! I am 67 . In high school I a great algebra and geometry teachers, however my trigonometry teacher couldn't find her face with her hands. I am a person that learns by explanaton not by memorization. My trigonometry teacher could not explain anything she just wanted to us memorize formulas none of which she could explain. I wanted to know how sine, cosine etc was figured out, why was it so, how I could calculate these different items. I taught myself simple algebra and geometry as a kid. Will I read well I can not spell and have trouble memorizing words formulas per my neurologist it is a form of dyslexicea This teacher ruined it all for till now I thank you . A quick story an elementary school teacher berated me because I misspelled of I wrote over it seemed to make more sense. In front of the class she said how could I go into business if I could not spell. I said to her by then there will be machines you could speak to and it would print the correct word. Everyone had a good laugh but me, when I opened the first of many businesses you could have pc's built and Apple was launched it was not long after Dragon Speak came out. So I guess I got the last laugh.
Excellent information :) Less than 1 watt-hour for all that effort is a bummer. I know you're probably tired of all these power related videos but it would be interesting to see a build of a gravity battery and see how well that compares to pumped storage. I would imagine that since during the power extraction phase you're putting torque on a generator shaft directly instead of using a Pelton wheel or whatnot you'd experience higher efficiencies?
Well put, anyway I would personally try to apply different type of turbine type than Pelton which is using only kinetic portion of the flow (basically static pressure transformed by nozzle to kinetic one). Efficiency is limited here by the nozzle and of course manufacturing tolerances of the buckets and especially the blade edge (on large powerstation they are being sharpened such as knife blade to keep efficiency) - this is hard to achiev with 3D print. I would try to look up for radial-axial pump with spiral case and high efficiency suitable for your parameters (head and flow) and tried to used it also in turbine regime. This should work well, it is always more difficult to design pump than turbine (due to cavitation and NPSH - look it up). And because you changed your concept and now you have reservoirs on roof and on ground, you should benefit from the suction effect of draft tube (diffusor on turbine outlet submerged below low water). This should add some extra efficiency to your setup!
Excellent video, alot of people will appreciate see the explaination and theory. If you are interested in mechanical energy storage have a look at flywheel energy storage, very interesting way of storing energy. Also gravitricity regarding gravity batteries, they are looking at dropping/winching weights into old coal shafts to store energy. Keep up the good videos!
Just a thought: seems to me that your setup must have significant friction losses. If the tube from pump to barrel was larger than the pump influent that would allow the water to better “slip” and thus reduce the tubing friction. Seems kinda important, especially for such a small system. Good job on both the physical and mathematical instruction. Inquiring minds want to know.
Another great video and information. Just a side note, might not have boxes with your name and address on boxes 😉 Just for safety reasons as I’ve dealt with people showing up on my property in the past from accidentally exposing my mailbox in a video. Thanks for your content on both your channels 👍
Great videos. Thank you. Question: I'm in the process of buying land in Florida to use as a homestead. As you probably know, FL is pretty flat. For the homestead, I will be drilling for a Well and putting a septic system in. So how about the following idea ... In addition to the Well to use for potable water, how about drilling an additional hole from the surface of the land down to the water level in the Aquafer. Then, use solar to pump water to the surface to store in a pond on the surface of the lot. Then, put a generator at the bottom of the hole. Then, dump the rain or solar pumped water down the hole to create electricity, when needed. The pond essentially working as a battery for later energy use. I'm guessing there are two obvious issues with this idea: 1 - The required permits for the county to allow you to dump rain water or pumped water down into the Aquafer. 2 - How to make sure the Aquafer would accept the gallons / sec dumped into it without filling up the hole where the generator is. Your thoughts?
I also wonder about aquifer recharge from captured rainwater... Some areas of CA want to do this with so called recycled water which is not the same and seems worse to me, if not scientifically then emotionally. Adding micro hydropower generation to the idea of recharging ground water sounds like a win to me. Risks include that water directly charging ground water would need to be filtered at least as good as the natural filtration it would have been subject to when passing through soil levels... I would love to see this topic discussed at greater length and with thoughtful research.
Thanks for an instructional video. I am curious on alternative ways of storing energy from my rooftop solar and since I live on a hill next to a lake I thought what if my excess solar pumped water instead of selling it cheap? This is theoretical since I have a wife cancelling "crazy ideas" =). But with your calculation example a 40 foot container (73530L) and 10m of height could store 2 kWh. But I didnt understand the last bit on efficiency of the turbine in comparison of pumping it up there, what can I expect from a miniturbine that the water is released through on its way back to the lake?
We are experimenting with this principle commercially in Australia - interesting
3 роки тому+1
It would be interesting to try to charge a single AA battery directly off the solar panel. I think it could charge several of them at the same time, indicating that the little pump is very inefficient.
Cool videos.... Thanks for that information on CA... Sigh.... Ram pumps seem to be all the rage, however, I've not watched any videos about them... Wondering if one would have been more efficient.
I had often wondered about doing something similar but was lacking some of the engineering maths to calculate the amount of storage. I often thought about a similar idea of lifting a weight and controlling its decent but if I'm not mistaken the energy is the same. If you had a platform that was raised say a foot (300mm) off the ground and when you got home at night drove your car onto the platform this would give you a stored energy that could be released by lowering the platform with hyd?
What's never mentioned is the way electric suppliers have raised prices through the roof in the last ten years alone. The pumped storage facility near me in Northfield Mass, is destroying the section of the Connecticut river it's been pulling water from for the last 50 years. First Light came in, bought up everything, set up a massive solar farm alongside it and is selling off all that it makes to the highest bidder instead of augmenting our supply as they promised. We're left subsidizing the building of the solar farm so they can reap the benefits. Everyone forgets, Tesla wanted to deliver free electricity wirelessly back at the turn of the century with no impact on the environment. Solar farms a re a waste of land, they're ugly and inefficient, the windmills depend on oil and regular maintenance, they're a fail as well. They slough off ice in great sheets in the winter and do great damage when they begin to fail.
1st, The link to this channel is not working in the main channel info. 2nd, The link to this video, is working. 3rd, I don't understand any of the finer details for what you're on about here. Mainly because I failed maths in school. But thank you for doing this in depth. Just wish it was easier to understand. 4th, Yay metric. Yes, I'm Australian. Edit.... Link working now.
Wouldn't you calculate the efficiency with the power you need to put in? So let's say the pump has a efficiency 60-80%, so the overall efficiency is more like 0.81x0.60=~48-64%.
17:40 Okay, you calculated 4.4GWh of "capacity," but they only advertise 3.6GWh of output, which give the 80% efficiency. 🤔 But I thought the "missing" power in hydro storage was (mostly) in the storage, not the delivery. So let's say you had a system that held enough water to produce 100MW for eight hours. My understanding was that during storage, now 100MW of electricity is flowing into the turbines, but less water actually makes it up the hill, so it takes _ten_ hours to fill the "800MWh" reservoir with your 100MW pump. Is that not how it works? Or do the pumps run for ten hours and actually pump a GWh worth of water?? 😅 You're right, this'd be easier to discuss with cubic meters and megagrams. 😜
I would be interested in watching a review of the remarkable from you specifically.... I've been thinking about the product but the investment means I want a review I can trust
Ah but the efficiency I calculated for Swan Lake was only the release of the energy, not considering the losses in pumping it up there in the first place. So it's likely the overall efficiency is closer to 60%.
@@BUILD2 have you accounted for the natural catchment of rain water into the top lake? Here in the UK our pumped storage stations ALL claim 75-80% because the top lake just gets so much rain.
It takes 12kWh of electricity (electric or solar or gas) to pump my dam water up a 20m head to fill a 5000 gal tank. Reversing that only theoretically generates 1.2kWh of electricity (5000*4.5*9.8*20)/3600, which is a whopping 10% efficiency. It makes no sense. My pumps are top quality, and water simply flows through a 2 inch pipe that is about 200m long. Surely the pipe length shouldn't cause a 90% friction loss? What if my dam was directly under the tank, do you think I would get 12kWh of generation? Seems like something is terribly wrong.
The 200m makes a huge difference. Just picture a waterfall just straight down, or a river 200m long with a 20m hight difference. The river wil flow much slower than the waterfall
😆😂 Learn something wow that was so far above my head it got vertigo, I'm glad there are clever people to do the maths just tell me what to build and that's my level. Your builds you do as in the rain gutter and wind turbine car experiments are just class, what I really struggle with is their are guys like you playing with ideas in a garage but worldwide and if all these minds come together with an open source power generation and storage then in stead of the big companies saying the eureka tec is 5 to 10 years away it would be solved in no time. I think that gravity systems are so much better than wind and solar power because its simple it does not require out side sources that's derived by nature, yes the wind is free and so is the sun but the conditions aren't right all over, even if gravity is 60% efficient if its running 24 7 365 days that will do when connected to flow style battery storage, just keep it simple and simple is easy to build and maintain worldwide.
@The Program It takes 12kWh of electricity (electric or solar or gas) to pump my dam water up a 20m head to fill a 5000 gal tank. Reversing that only theoretically generates 1.2kWh of electricity (5000*4.5*9.8*20)/3600, which is a whopping 10% efficiency. It makes no sense. My pumps are top quality, and water simply flows through a 2 inch pipe that is about 200m long. Surely the pipe length shouldn't cause a 90% friction loss? What if my dam was directly under the tank, do you think I would get 12kWh of generation? Seems like something is terribly wrong.
I dont know if I am happy or sad I didn't see your videos before attempting something very similar. We both came up with surprisingly similar ideas! I got significantly better results, with a fraction of the height. I realize I cant actually talk to you about it, but I have a great many questions! My setup is just using a water tank 8 feet above my jet(s). Differences: 1) I also built my own alternator (my first, I am no expert), but I used a different idea - I made a rotating magnetic field with a stationary armature around the outside - this required no brushes. Old school, yes, but its seems to be producing a good bit more watts. I also connected a rectifier with a capacitor. I made this at a lower voltage - intending to light LED (3.5 volts was the target, I am hitting 2.9). 2) Not having a 3 D printer, my wheel is similar size, but just using curved blades. I did try different sizes, but they all produced similar watts (larger made less volts, more amps; small made more volts less amps). 3) I used much larger pipe feeding the jet- 2" all the way to the jet. Knowing the head would be exactly the same for all size pipe - and knowing I had very little at 8 feet, I just upsized to reduce any loss from friction and fittings. 4) Solar panel and pump - my idea was to run the "turbine' (I don't really know what to call it, its a horizontal version of yours, but just with blades) all the time and power the load all the time. The solar would turn on the pump when it was available, and outrun the "turbine", filling the reservoir when there is no solar. To achieve this, I have a 100 watt panel, driving an 86 watt pump. The pump is submersible, and does outrun the "turbine". These could clearly be smaller to use the way you did. 5) I turned my wheel 90 degrees and added a second jet going the opposite of the first. In testing, I found this didn't actually produce any better watts for the water used. (2 smaller jets vs 1 large) But it does give me different capacities. I am lighting 1 foot strip of LED's -using 1.6 watts;. I am using 1.6 gallons a minute, filling my tank at 2.5 gallons a minute. This gives me roughly 1 watt / gallon a minute (at 8 feet head+ up to 2 for a full bucket). Clearly, I would still need 1100 gallons to run this all the time. assuming I had max daylight every day (its the idea I wanted to see, not really using it practically).
Thanks. I think I have got sonething to build on a thought I had. Running a turbine from water stored at a height by solar pumps 😊
California actually has the most pumped storage of any state!
Another way of looking at the economics of storage is that it allows a higher capacity factor of existing generation (i.e. run it at capacity more of the time), allowing the capital costs to be spread over more generated power. Much of the peak load is handled by single-pass gas turbine peaking plants, which are inefficient but lower capital costs than, for example, combined-cycle gas turbines that capture the waste heat.
This can be particularly important for high capital-cost, low-fuel cost generation. For example, the Northfield Mountain pumped storage was constructed for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Renewables also fall into this category, having very low operational cost. Battery storage has been displacing gas peaking plants to a significant degree.
Much of California's pumped hydro is part of the California Aquaduct system. Of particular interest, given discussion of power from Oregon, is the 3.21 GW HVDC Pacific Intertie from the Dalles to Los Angeles, which terminates near the Castaic pumped hydro facility. This allows making more complete use of this link, transferring power even when LA has a surplus. This was completed in 1970, and has been upgraded a couple of times since. Originally it used mercury-vapor valves, but now uses thyristor inverters. The use of HVDC links is both more efficient over long distances and allows different sections of the grid to operate independently without need for synchronization.
The first pumped hydro in the US was in 1930 in Connecticut on the Housatonic, and is still in use.
The reason storage projects emphasize the power (e.g. megawatts) rather than capacity (megawatt-hours) is that, from a grid operational standpoint, the key attribute is the ability to absorb or provide power, to match generation to load. For batteries, the corresponds to the rating of the inverters; for pumped hydro, the ratings of the generators/pumps. In the case of batteries, it is not uncommon to see the total capacity omitted entirely (annoying, yes!) and assumed to be 4 hour at full rated capacity. Of course, they're never operated at full capacity over the full 4 hours. 4 hours works out to be fairly useful capacity when spread out over a daily cycle.
This tends to confuse engineers when they first encounter it (myself included!). Of course, both numbers are important. 4 hours isn't universal, and substantial benefit can be had from even smaller amounts of storage. For example, the Dalrymple battery in South Australia is a 30 MW facility-but with only 8 MW-hr of capacity. But this is enough to absorb peaks from the nearby wind farm, and to stabilize the grid in case of an outage on the transmission lines, buying time to fire up "conventional" power sources.
www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41833
I work at bigger winery and we are about to discontinue 4 250.000L tanks, currently the market is basically offering next to none for this capacity as demand dropped.
I have no technical background whatsoever, but I got the idea of doing something like you at our facility.
We work closely with a local university on projects to get more sustainable and luckily our owner is eager on being best/ first in class on project which make us stand out. I will push my idea to them and see if this is a economically feasible idea.
Currently the difference in heights could lead to a problem from my basic understanding, but let’s see what some motivated students/ professors will come up with.
Sounds to me like a interesting project to be working on.
Thanks for the basic insights and understandable math!
As an Oklahoman (where the wind comes sweeping down the plains), I've always wanted to see this implemented with a purely mechanical wind powered pump to prevent as many conversion losses. Unfortunately, this state rarely has much by the way of elevation change. Thus the wind... Oh well, great video. I've wondered about this since I hid out on my roof as an angsty teen and pondered various mechanical contrivances.
Sounds like my childhood. Just not having the education to make sense of things.
GR8 Video;... full of information...
You do great service! I am 67 . In high school I a great algebra and geometry teachers, however my trigonometry teacher couldn't find her face with her hands. I am a person that learns by explanaton not by memorization. My trigonometry teacher could not explain anything she just wanted to us memorize formulas none of which she could explain. I wanted to know how sine, cosine etc was figured out, why was it so, how I could calculate these different items. I taught myself simple algebra and geometry as a kid. Will I read well I can not spell and have trouble memorizing words formulas per my neurologist it is a form of dyslexicea This teacher ruined it all for till now I thank you . A quick story an elementary school teacher berated me because I misspelled of I wrote over it seemed to make more sense. In front of the class she said how could I go into business if I could not spell. I said to her by then there will be machines you could speak to and it would print the correct word. Everyone had a good laugh but me, when I opened the first of many businesses you could have pc's built and Apple was launched it was not long after Dragon Speak came out. So I guess I got the last laugh.
Excellent information :) Less than 1 watt-hour for all that effort is a bummer. I know you're probably tired of all these power related videos but it would be interesting to see a build of a gravity battery and see how well that compares to pumped storage. I would imagine that since during the power extraction phase you're putting torque on a generator shaft directly instead of using a Pelton wheel or whatnot you'd experience higher efficiencies?
Well put, anyway I would personally try to apply different type of turbine type than Pelton which is using only kinetic portion of the flow (basically static pressure transformed by nozzle to kinetic one). Efficiency is limited here by the nozzle and of course manufacturing tolerances of the buckets and especially the blade edge (on large powerstation they are being sharpened such as knife blade to keep efficiency) - this is hard to achiev with 3D print. I would try to look up for radial-axial pump with spiral case and high efficiency suitable for your parameters (head and flow) and tried to used it also in turbine regime. This should work well, it is always more difficult to design pump than turbine (due to cavitation and NPSH - look it up). And because you changed your concept and now you have reservoirs on roof and on ground, you should benefit from the suction effect of draft tube (diffusor on turbine outlet submerged below low water). This should add some extra efficiency to your setup!
Why do draftvtubes cause suction?
Thank you, Master.
Great video. Thank you
Excellent video, alot of people will appreciate see the explaination and theory. If you are interested in mechanical energy storage have a look at flywheel energy storage, very interesting way of storing energy. Also gravitricity regarding gravity batteries, they are looking at dropping/winching weights into old coal shafts to store energy. Keep up the good videos!
Powering the grid with the world's biggest cuckoo clock! Quite a concept.
Just a thought: seems to me that your setup must have significant friction losses. If the tube from pump to barrel was larger than the pump influent that would allow the water to better “slip” and thus reduce the tubing friction.
Seems kinda important, especially for such a small system.
Good job on both the physical and mathematical instruction. Inquiring minds want to know.
16:00 there were too many freedom units
Another great video and information. Just a side note, might not have boxes with your name and address on boxes 😉 Just for safety reasons as I’ve dealt with people showing up on my property in the past from accidentally exposing my mailbox in a video.
Thanks for your content on both your channels 👍
Great videos. Thank you.
Question: I'm in the process of buying land in Florida to use as a homestead. As you probably know, FL is pretty flat. For the homestead, I will be drilling for a Well and putting a septic system in. So how about the following idea ...
In addition to the Well to use for potable water, how about drilling an additional hole from the surface of the land down to the water level in the Aquafer. Then, use solar to pump water to the surface to store in a pond on the surface of the lot. Then, put a generator at the bottom of the hole. Then, dump the rain or solar pumped water down the hole to create electricity, when needed. The pond essentially working as a battery for later energy use.
I'm guessing there are two obvious issues with this idea:
1 - The required permits for the county to allow you to dump rain water or pumped water down into the Aquafer.
2 - How to make sure the Aquafer would accept the gallons / sec dumped into it without filling up the hole where the generator is.
Your thoughts?
I also wonder about aquifer recharge from captured rainwater...
Some areas of CA want to do this with so called recycled water which is not the same and seems worse to me, if not scientifically then emotionally.
Adding micro hydropower generation to the idea of recharging ground water sounds like a win to me.
Risks include that water directly charging ground water would need to be filtered at least as good as the natural filtration it would have been subject to when passing through soil levels...
I would love to see this topic discussed at greater length and with thoughtful research.
Thanks for an instructional video. I am curious on alternative ways of storing energy from my rooftop solar and since I live on a hill next to a lake I thought what if my excess solar pumped water instead of selling it cheap? This is theoretical since I have a wife cancelling "crazy ideas" =). But with your calculation example a 40 foot container (73530L) and 10m of height could store 2 kWh. But I didnt understand the last bit on efficiency of the turbine in comparison of pumping it up there, what can I expect from a miniturbine that the water is released through on its way back to the lake?
People wouldn't normally call it 'paying', but 'the price went negative'.
I'm also surprised you didn't know about pumped hydro.
We are experimenting with this principle commercially in Australia - interesting
It would be interesting to try to charge a single AA battery directly off the solar panel. I think it could charge several of them at the same time, indicating that the little pump is very inefficient.
There is a hydro pumped storage reservoir scheme in Scotland that is built inside a hollowed out mountain. Check it out.
Cool videos.... Thanks for that information on CA... Sigh....
Ram pumps seem to be all the rage, however, I've not watched any videos about them... Wondering if one would have been more efficient.
I have been to Bath County Pumped storage many times.
Does height make a difference? How could you make it more efficient?
I had often wondered about doing something similar but was lacking some of the engineering maths to calculate the amount of storage. I often thought about a similar idea of lifting a weight and controlling its decent but if I'm not mistaken the energy is the same. If you had a platform that was raised say a foot (300mm) off the ground and when you got home at night drove your car onto the platform this would give you a stored energy that could be released by lowering the platform with hyd?
The 394MW capacity will be based on a certain head. In reality, as the reservoir drops you will get less power.
3 Sig figures on density but rounding acceleration due to gravity to 9.8 made my brain hurt a bit 😂
What's never mentioned is the way electric suppliers have raised prices through the roof in the last ten years alone. The pumped storage facility near me in Northfield Mass, is destroying the section of the Connecticut river it's been pulling water from for the last 50 years. First Light came in, bought up everything, set up a massive solar farm alongside it and is selling off all that it makes to the highest bidder instead of augmenting our supply as they promised. We're left subsidizing the building of the solar farm so they can reap the benefits. Everyone forgets, Tesla wanted to deliver free electricity wirelessly back at the turn of the century with no impact on the environment. Solar farms a re a waste of land, they're ugly and inefficient, the windmills depend on oil and regular maintenance, they're a fail as well. They slough off ice in great sheets in the winter and do great damage when they begin to fail.
So how much water do you need to power your house for one day?
Natural water source + ramp pump + storage x mini hydro = charged battery
Now how do we make it more efficient!?
1st, The link to this channel is not working in the main channel info.
2nd, The link to this video, is working.
3rd, I don't understand any of the finer details for what you're on about here. Mainly because I failed maths in school. But thank you for doing this in depth. Just wish it was easier to understand.
4th, Yay metric.
Yes, I'm Australian.
Edit.... Link working now.
Wouldn't you calculate the efficiency with the power you need to put in? So let's say the pump has a efficiency 60-80%, so the overall efficiency is more like 0.81x0.60=~48-64%.
Good point
Living in California, and hearing that we pay other states to take some of our power, and still have rolling blackouts.
Try take a look at gravity storage with triangle path.
I did enjoy it
17:40 Okay, you calculated 4.4GWh of "capacity," but they only advertise 3.6GWh of output, which give the 80% efficiency. 🤔
But I thought the "missing" power in hydro storage was (mostly) in the storage, not the delivery. So let's say you had a system that held enough water to produce 100MW for eight hours. My understanding was that during storage, now 100MW of electricity is flowing into the turbines, but less water actually makes it up the hill, so it takes _ten_ hours to fill the "800MWh" reservoir with your 100MW pump. Is that not how it works? Or do the pumps run for ten hours and actually pump a GWh worth of water?? 😅
You're right, this'd be easier to discuss with cubic meters and megagrams. 😜
I would be interested in watching a review of the remarkable from you specifically.... I've been thinking about the product but the investment means I want a review I can trust
All large scale pumped hydro projects are ~80% efficiency, this is widely known.
Ah but the efficiency I calculated for Swan Lake was only the release of the energy, not considering the losses in pumping it up there in the first place. So it's likely the overall efficiency is closer to 60%.
@@BUILD2 have you accounted for the natural catchment of rain water into the top lake? Here in the UK our pumped storage stations ALL claim 75-80% because the top lake just gets so much rain.
It takes 12kWh of electricity (electric or solar or gas) to pump my dam water up a 20m head to fill a 5000 gal tank. Reversing that only theoretically generates 1.2kWh of electricity (5000*4.5*9.8*20)/3600, which is a whopping 10% efficiency. It makes no sense. My pumps are top quality, and water simply flows through a 2 inch pipe that is about 200m long. Surely the pipe length shouldn't cause a 90% friction loss? What if my dam was directly under the tank, do you think I would get 12kWh of generation? Seems like something is terribly wrong.
The 200m makes a huge difference. Just picture a waterfall just straight down, or a river 200m long with a 20m hight difference. The river wil flow much slower than the waterfall
😆😂 Learn something wow that was so far above my head it got vertigo, I'm glad there are clever people to do the maths just tell me what to build and that's my level. Your builds you do as in the rain gutter and wind turbine car experiments are just class, what I really struggle with is their are guys like you playing with ideas in a garage but worldwide and if all these minds come together with an open source power generation and storage then in stead of the big companies saying the eureka tec is 5 to 10 years away it would be solved in no time. I think that gravity systems are so much better than wind and solar power because its simple it does not require out side sources that's derived by nature, yes the wind is free and so is the sun but the conditions aren't right all over, even if gravity is 60% efficient if its running 24 7 365 days that will do when connected to flow style battery storage, just keep it simple and simple is easy to build and maintain worldwide.
So, 55 gals on the roof = about 1 AA battery, hard to believe !
@The Program It takes 12kWh of electricity (electric or solar or gas) to pump my dam water up a 20m head to fill a 5000 gal tank. Reversing that only theoretically generates 1.2kWh of electricity (5000*4.5*9.8*20)/3600, which is a whopping 10% efficiency. It makes no sense. My pumps are top quality, and water simply flows through a 2 inch pipe that is about 200m long. Surely the pipe length shouldn't cause a 90% friction loss? What if my dam was directly under the tank, do you think I would get 12kWh of generation? Seems like something is terribly wrong.
Acre•feet
Seriously, US?
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Give me the simple answer. How long to fill the tank? How long to drain the tank lighting your patio?