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Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

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Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#171

Post by EricE »

hannob wrote: post #72

Interesting. The German energy company RWE has announced a while ago that they want to build a compressed air storage facility. However the project went nowhere and was silently buried at some point.

Preventing air leakage is frightfully hard - air molecules are a lot smaller than liquid molecules :)

  Apparently these guys have found an economical way to deal with it.  If true then I can easily see why Goldman jumped on them.

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#172

Post by nradov »

czbond wrote: post #143
samstave wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Afghanistan known to be sitting on top of ~1 trillion$ worth of lithium, and also Bolivia?

I still believe that's why the U.S. invaded anyway. We didn't care about overtaking a country for some silly resistance leader. You do it for big money to bilk - like Iraq and oil.

Unlikely. When the USA invaded Afghanistan in 2001 no one was really sure whether lithium batteries would be the right technology.

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#173

Post by abakker »

czbond wrote: post #143
samstave wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Afghanistan known to be sitting on top of ~1 trillion$ worth of lithium, and also Bolivia?

I still believe that's why the U.S. invaded anyway. We didn't care about overtaking a country for some silly resistance leader. You do it for big money to bilk - like Iraq and oil.

But we left without taking any lithium. At some point second and third order hypotheticals are just conspiracy theories. There is no evidence we invaded Afghanistan to get lithium, and at the time (2001), we were not worried about lithium shortages or grid storage.

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#174

Post by epistasis »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #90
epistasis wrote: post #67

Grid storage is going to be big business in the future, on the order of size of storage for electrical vehicles. (And these will certainly not be mutually exclusive markets! Vehicle to grid tech will become widespread, as is already seen in the new F150 Lightning truck). Lithium ion will dominate for the foreseeable future, as the industry has scaled to massive sizes and already, and has the advantage of being curren…

> one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has a rust-based battery. Form is still in the cell prototyping stage, as best I can tell - maybe not even that. There's zero information on their website about where they are in the development process or really anything substantial about their design. ESS on the other hand has a design they've had out testing in the field for a couple years ( https://essinc…

Agreed that Form has lots of hype, but that's one thing that can be needed in addition to working tech. Utility decision makers are not the best at adding new tech to the grid or dealing with innovation. Having some big industry names and the support of the business press that the utility execs and shareholders read is it's own form of currency when dealing with such archaic businesses.

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#175

Post by marvin »

jl6 wrote: post #158

I think the video said the system runs a cycle within a period of around 24 hours. What would it take to store energy in compressed air for ~6 months? This is what high-latitude dark-winter countries need: the ability to over-generate in the summer and draw down on stored energy in the winter.

Pumped hydroelectric storage is an obvious choice for the countries that have the geography, in effect meaning that most of the infrastructure for doing it is already in place. Hydroelectric reservoirs allow storing energy more or less indefinitely.

Of course, the capacity will rarely have been dimensioned for keeping 6 months of usage on hand, but combining pumped storage with over-provisioned wind energy would allow for living through months of unfavorable sun, rain or wind conditions.

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#176

Post by EricE »

konschubert wrote: post #45
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #3

What is the expected efficiency of this?

What matters is efficiency per dollar: Efficiency / cost I am worried that the cost is the driving factor here...

If you ignore efficiency then you stop making a profit pretty quickly. You can solely focus all you want on cost; sooner or later efficiency will make you pay.

Goldman wouldn't be making that kind of an investment if they didn't have a handle on both parts of the equation. Indeed efficiency (dealing with losses from seepage) have been the nut that hasn't been cracked with compressed air storage; these guys seem to have an economical (efficient) way to deal with that problem. If true, then they really are worthy of Goldman's investment.

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#177

Post by toss1 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #145
buryat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flywheels storing a lot of energy are very dangerous, if something happens it's a flying thing that destroys everything on its way

Like a giant rotating wind turbine?

Yes, except with several orders of magnitude more energy and rotating mass.

Wind turbine blades are engineered for minimum mass and inertia, are manufactured primarily from fiberglass and/or carbon fiber, are hollow, and the largest mass is in the center.

In contrast, flywheels are engineered for the highest practical inertia, are manufactured from the highest density material that works, and concentrate that mass as far out as possible.

When a wind blade fails catastrophically, it makes a mess of splinters right around the tower, as shown in [0] and [1].

In contrast, just a small automotive flywheel explosion, contained in a legally mandated scattershield, is almost as spectacular [2], [3]. Now, magnify that from a flywheel just designed to smooth the power from a 375kW (500HP) engine to the scale of a flywheel to STORE the energy of a megawatt-scale wind turbine.

So, no, the danger of a megawatt-scale energy storage flywheel is NOT like the danger of a "giant rotating wind turbine".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-o-4yYb59g [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbCs7ZQDKoM&t=40s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPat3akDiek [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4oxoBKRZgA

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#179

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

buryat wrote: post #151
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a giant rotating wind turbine?

i agree, wind turbines do rotate but not at high speeds, disintegration of one doesn’t lead to catastrophic outcomes. Flywheels on the other hand are meant to rotate at high speeds and hold lots of energy, so destruction of the spindle would lead to some pretty big bad results

This sounds like a perfect question for Randall "XKCD" Munroe's "What If" column:

"What if a 5MW flywheel broke it's spindle?"

Re: Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

#180

Post by nkurz »

ck2 wrote: post #146

Why not use spare energy to lift -really- heavy object(s) and let gravity power the generators when there is a shortage? Million tons of concrete isn't going to suffer any maintenance expenses over decades.

That's a really popular idea on the internet because it's very easy to grasp, but the numbers don't work out well. The weights you can actually lift aren't much compared to the volume of a reservoir of water, and the heights you can lift them are but a fraction of the thousands of meters being discussed here. Yes, the concrete isn't going to require much maintenance, but the gearboxes needed are a significant engineering challenge. Pumping water or compressing air are a lot easier, and batteries are going to be hard to beat.
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