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Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

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41–50 of 136 posts

Re: Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

#41
post #5

The rather extreme losses associated with electricity > heat > heat engine > electricity seem like an absolute deal killer. Assuming they are at an extreme 50% round trip efficiency you need to be extremely cheap to have a hope of breaking even. Worse heat has fairly low energy density and cools over time so they can’t really scale the up or down that much. It might be possible if they where starting with heat, but f…

Pneumatic energy storage and pumped water storage both have very low efficiency but also low cost, so there are plenty of techs in this space that are being explored.

The question is whether wind and solar can be made cheap-enough to be worth overbuilding them five times over to feed into inefficient energy storage, or if we should just stick to batteries or hydrogen.

Re: Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

#42
post #15

> Now X designs projects with two primary goals: to become a standalone Alphabet division or spin out into an independent company. The difference being that Alphabet retains 100% vs retaining X%? Presumably they're spinning out whenever the capital required would be much more than they want to put in, or the tech seems promising but perhaps not as profitable as they would like?

Maybe they want strategic investors who bring more than just capital.

Re: Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

#44
post #32
post #19

Where are the molten salts coming from?

Typical mixtures use eg potassium nitrate, sodium nitrate, and calcium nitrate. Salts are one of the most produced substances on earth. For instance, potassium nitrate is in virtually every fertilizer. I couldn't find how much is used annually, but it's made from potash, and US reserves of that are ~270 million tons[1]. At 40 to 110 kWh/ton[2] that's a minimum of 10.8 billion kWh (10.8 TWh), or a full day of storage.…

This is interesting from a sustainability model. Both lower tech to manufacturer and I'd assume less damaging to the environment than a lithium mine.

Re: Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

#47

This is extremely exciting technology! Any energy science aficionado worth their salt knows that molten salt can have very high energy density.

Do you have to keep the salt molten?

I believe it melts when it gets hot.

Not sure if you need to keep it hot enough to stay molten...

By the way, this is not new tech! What excited me here is the prospect of bringing these batteries into large scale production. Imo, this is the kind of thing that could transform how we heat and cool homes and other buildings. But right now it's quite niche and hard to access.

Here's Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery?wprov=sf...

Re: Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

#48
post #41
post #5

The rather extreme losses associated with electricity > heat > heat engine > electricity seem like an absolute deal killer. Assuming they are at an extreme 50% round trip efficiency you need to be extremely cheap to have a hope of breaking even. Worse heat has fairly low energy density and cools over time so they can’t really scale the up or down that much. It might be possible if they where starting with heat, but f…

Pneumatic energy storage and pumped water storage both have very low efficiency but also low cost, so there are plenty of techs in this space that are being explored. The question is whether wind and solar can be made cheap-enough to be worth overbuilding them five times over to feed into inefficient energy storage, or if we should just stick to batteries or hydrogen.

Pumped storage has ~80% round-trip efficiency. It's as good as lithium batteries. The biggest limitation is that there's not much room for growth. Most good sites for pumped storage have already been built.

Re: Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

#49
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare the economics of loss here, to the economics of not storing the electricity, and so wasting it in other ways. Yes, there is a round-trip loss through the system. No, this is not always in economics, an insurmountable problem. For instance, "the hump" which was the US air shipment of materiel to China, in order to bomb Japanese forces was obviously a major loss maker in energy terms. Some huge multiplier of fu…

>Energy in the form of electricity is fleeting. If you don't convert it to a persisting potential energy form, it isn't there when you want it. Loss in the system is well understood by the engineers, financiers, planners. This is true, but it only makes sense if you are talking about generation sources that can’t be controlled (e.g. solar, wind). It’s a complete waste if you’re just storing energy from something like…

The cost moment to stop and start spinning metal is huge. These devices can't bid at 5min intervals let alone 30sec. They are precisely the ones which benefit from a method to store electricity, because making steam not exist means then spending time making it exist again, to spin the turbine. They bid into 30 minute supply price moments and then try to run at the highest contract bid price for as long as possible.

Gas turbines can start quickly but its said to be very expensive to do the startup. Its better to run them idle than have to cold start.

If the goal is to remove steam energy sources from coal and gas and oil, I get this. But if you have them, and you have efficiency from constant operating load, then rather than incurr start and stop cost, its better to store, even with wastage.

Back when I was a trainspotter, I used to hang at loco sheds and I asked a driver once why so many diesel locos ran idle doing nothing. he said that starting from cold was a pain. They costed it, and it worked out ok to run idle at their fuel cost, rather than have to restart. I think this is a similar moment.

So basically, I think you may have inverted the thing a bit. You can ignore free-energy inputs like wind and solar, but its wasteful so if you can't shed load in coal, its worth storing energy from solar and wind, meantime. If you have total excess energy from all sources, its worth storing it from anything which it is costly to stop-start, and you might as well store everything you can, to the capacity of storage.

Because wind and solar cannot guarantee supply in specific situations, storage can turn them into reliable power (albiet at lower intensity than the wallplate, because the storage either runs down too soon, or can't deliver as much peak)

Thats what I am reading anyway. This all feels like a classic complex linear programming optimisation problem for wiser people in power engineering economics.

Re: Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt

#50
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare the economics of loss here, to the economics of not storing the electricity, and so wasting it in other ways. Yes, there is a round-trip loss through the system. No, this is not always in economics, an insurmountable problem. For instance, "the hump" which was the US air shipment of materiel to China, in order to bomb Japanese forces was obviously a major loss maker in energy terms. Some huge multiplier of fu…

Okay, but once there are competing possible uses of "extra" electricity, it's going to have a price, and if the price is high enough, then high energy losses will result in some of the alternatives being uneconomical. I think it's going to be hard to pick winners, even if you do some of the math.

Okay, but once there are competing possible uses of "extra" electricity, it's going to have a price, and if the price is high enough, then high energy losses will result in some of the alternatives being uneconomical.

The idea would be (for me at least, I am not neutral in this) to marginalise the coal and oil and gas generation to make it the most expensive form.

If you live in Poland, or Victoria (Australia) you have unlimited brown coal, which burns sulphurously filthy bad smoke, its the worst possible energy source we have right now but its the cheapest. It has already been seen to displace high quality low-ash black coal, because thats worth money in China and India for export. So I get your message: cheap beats clean.

If you legislate for the cost of dirty cheap power, then storage losses are a lot more tenable, compared to the remediation cost. BTW economists actually do cost the deaths per gigawatt. Dirty Coal has a really high death rate both mining it, and burning it. Kids die of Asthma at far higher rates, in economies which burn coal for power. The economic costs of killing children, quite apart from the social costs, are huge. Actuarially speaking, you don't want to do this because you alienate future income from those kids grown up, earning money. Its a third-party damage problem which makes it easy for the brown coal generator to ignore, but when the kids of the coal miners and power station workers die, (and that happens) it gets a bit more direct.

Victoria had underground brown coal fires burning for YEARS.

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