In the 80s my grandfather used to do this for the former Soviet Union. Long story short they were pressuring a salt mine at night for energy storage and somebody failed to report a water leak during the day. They tried to depressurize the mine but it ended up blowing up anyway killing a couple people in The process. This shit can be really dangerous if done incorrectly.
Can you name a method of large scale energy storage that isn't dangerous if done incorrectly?
I think the comment is more about being easy to do incorrectly/dangerously. Pumping water up into a reservoir seems easier/safer.
Can someone explain their revenue to me? They claim 1m in revenue from their existing product which is: "1.75 megawatts (MW) of peak power output; a 2.2 MW charge rating; and 10+ megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage capacity" How does that equal 1m in revenue? You have to pay to charge your air-battery during low-cost hours and then discharge it during high cost hours to make the difference in revenue. The issue is, you c…
While I don't know about their numbers, having a "grid level battery" is definitely something people (or gov subsidies) will pay for.
Interesting. There's a good video describing the operation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWjwwKSR78 After watching it, I now understand that they aren't flooding the entire borehole, but rather are building a smaller high-pressure chamber at the bottom. The chamber is connected to pipes to a surface reservoir. When air is pumped into the chamber, it displaces water up toward the surface. When generating, the…
Totally out of my depth here, but does cooling the gas down have the added benefit that it'll be heated by the earth whilst stored?
I'm guessing not. Earth's heat is way lower down. Think of a cave: always cold. I think what's going on is they're taking the heat out and storing it more efficiently than just dumping it down the ground, where (1) it would leak away, representing energy loss, and (2) as it leaks away, the air would lose pressure. (It would leak away b/c it's harder to insulate an entire mine, basically.) So, they pull it out ahead of time and put it back in when they decompress the air (which I think would add pressure back in due to heating a gas and maybe reduce problems caused by super-chilling other plant hardware? Anyway, seems fitting to add back what you took out if you're shooting for a closed system.)
This isn't new...I recall grad students working on this as far back as 2010. Some citations from an article: “Bottled wind could be as constant as coal.” Wired Magazine. Retrieved 7/15/2010, 2010, from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/compressedair-plan... 59 Cavallo, A. (2005). Controllable and affordable utility-scale electricity from intermittent wind resources and compressed air energy storage (CAES). Sc…
> This isn't new...
Well, yeah, this is in the opening of the article:
> It updates a long-standing technology that never took off for electrical storage.
There is/was plant operational since 1970s in Germany[1], which looks similar to the Wired article, but different from some other solutions posted in comments. Missing some parts perhaps to be viable.
It's probably some kind of hedge strategy for energy crises like the recent Texas disaster (which appears to have been very profitable for GS [1]). Having this capacity around when other sources go down means they'll be able to provide power in similar situations and so reap massive profits. Climate chaos == $$$ I guess. > Bloomberg March 5, 2021 > Goldman Sachs Group Inc. could gain more than $200 million from the p…
> Having this capacity around when other sources go down means they'll be able to provide power in similar situations and so reap massive profits. Climate chaos == $$$ I guess.
I understand that people don't like when others profit from a crisis, but this is also how we solve these problems. Having more generation capacity than we otherwise would have is a good thing, even if Goldman make money on the back of it.
I'm not arguing there isn't more to be done, but when people say "greed is good" this is what they mean.
It's probably some kind of hedge strategy for energy crises like the recent Texas disaster (which appears to have been very profitable for GS [1]). Having this capacity around when other sources go down means they'll be able to provide power in similar situations and so reap massive profits. Climate chaos == $$$ I guess. > Bloomberg March 5, 2021 > Goldman Sachs Group Inc. could gain more than $200 million from the p…
This is where capitalism goes off the rails. Instead of investing $250m into making the power grid more secure and reliable, they choose to invest in profiting off disaster.
Can someone explain their revenue to me? They claim 1m in revenue from their existing product which is: "1.75 megawatts (MW) of peak power output; a 2.2 MW charge rating; and 10+ megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage capacity" How does that equal 1m in revenue? You have to pay to charge your air-battery during low-cost hours and then discharge it during high cost hours to make the difference in revenue. The issue is, you c…
These kinds of utility-run storage facilities usually buy and sell on the wholesale spot market, which swings much more than retail prices do. Somewhat similar economics to gas "peaker" plants, which only fire up when supply is tight and prices spike, making it economical to run a higher-cost generator.
The Hydrostor plant is in Ontario. Here's an archive of hourly spot-market electricity prices there (in dollars per MWh): http://reports.ieso.ca/public/PriceHOEPPredispOR/. So far in 2022, prices have been as low as $0.00/MWh (during a few hours overnight on Jan 5) and as high as $230.87/MWh (during the morning of Jan 11). In 2021, hourly average prices even exceeded $1000/MWh ($1/kWh) twice, on March 28 and October 10.
Interesting. There's a good video describing the operation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWjwwKSR78 After watching it, I now understand that they aren't flooding the entire borehole, but rather are building a smaller high-pressure chamber at the bottom. The chamber is connected to pipes to a surface reservoir. When air is pumped into the chamber, it displaces water up toward the surface. When generating, the…
The big question is how on earth are they digging out these caverns? That seems like a huge challenge, given that they're so far underground. Everything else seems relatively straightforward
It says repurposing old mining operations. Not sure how feasible that is.
I would like more detail on the "Thermal management system" and how long it could store the heat it captures.
One of the benefits they touting is "Long duration energy storage" I would think the limiting factor would be the ability of the thermal management system to retain the energy it captured to reheat the compressed air. Am I thinking about this correctly?
But Goldman Sachs can blow their money however they wish. Although no doubt governments will also throw bad money into this, but I guess if people want their government to fake their lives, so be it. It seems that's living in The Jetsons future HN idolises.