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Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

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211–220 of 293 posts

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#211

Many of the greenhouse Youtube channels I watch do a smaller DIY version of this. They have either dark barrels of water in the greenhouse with the windows facing south to the sun, or a thin metal wall filled with clay and pipes acting as a sun-heat-battery. They pump the water through the barrels or clay battery into pipes that are under ground to store the heat. In winter time they extract the heat from the ground…

This reminds me a lot of the Earthship community in the middle of the desert, which always focusses on smart ways of reusing water for different purposes, and by not wasting water as much as possible. The houses usually have a clean/grey/blackwater + a rainwormbox system to process fecals and reuse it for growing plants. Their air conditioning system is basically just a pipe in the ground where the hot air flows thro…

> This reminds me a lot of the Earthship community … I was always wondering why … there are no water storages on the roof.

All the standard Earthship designs I've studied do store their water on the roof, but they use batteries instead of water pumping to store unused electricity, because to run a conventional house's electrical systems at night you need to store tens of megajoules, and lifting water three meters only stores 0.029 MJ per cubic meter. A cubic meter of water weighs a tonne. So you'd need hundreds of tonnes of water to store the requisite amount of energy that way.

A 12-volt 24-amp-hour deep-cycle lead-acid battery goes for US$61 at retail, and that's nominally a megajoule; it replaces 33 tonnes of water at 3 meters of head, you can pick it up in one hand, and it doesn't require an electromechanical pump/turbine to convert the energy into a useful form. And if it shorts out, though it might cause a fire in your electrical room, it won't flood your house.

If you're building on a plain, you either need to support your upper water tank with earthworks (say, 2 tonnes per cubic meter of earth) or dig out a hole for a lower water tank for water to flow down into (also 2 tonnes per cubic meter of earth). If we want to store 700 cubic meters of water in a 2-meter-deep water tank whose bottom is 3 meters above grade, we need to pile up 2100 tonnes of dirt covering a water-tank-holding area of 350 m², a tank area with minimally a diameter of 21 meters. And you need a similarly sized tank down at grade level for it to drain into. You can cut this in half by putting the downhill tank in the hole you dug to get all that dirt, but it's still over a thousand tonnes of dirt. Aside from the 1400 square meters of water tank top and bottom surfaces, this would increase the earthmoving effort involved in building an Earthship by over an order of magnitude.

Then you need to pump the 700 tonnes of water out of a well, because that's four years' worth of rainfall on the area covered by your giant water tanks (assuming 250 mm rainfall per year). This is a feasible thing to do, and it's less water use than what cattle ranchers evaporate from their windmill-fed water tanks, but it would probably clash with the sensibilities of many Earthship types.

Alternatively you can put 20 deep-cycle batteries on shelves in a closet-sized concrete room. So that's what they do.

If your Earthship is situated at the foot of a 100-meter-tall mesa, the situation changes, because now you can store a megajoule per tonne of water. So you could use more reasonably sized tanks, like, 20 tonnes. But Earthships are mostly not designed for that situation, because it's rare.

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't scheduling the EV charge when the demand is low while production is high help a lot balancing the grid, at basically no cost for the EV owner? Let's say I have a EV with a smart charger that will keep the vehicle at least 60% charged, but charge up to 100% when the energy price is low (e.g. during the night).

> at basically no cost for the EV owner? Only if you have a battery with unlimited charge cycles. This doesn't seem possible with current technology - and even if it were, manufacturers would still optimize for higher density and reasonable longevity after 100,000 miles. Most people would average a charging cycle a week, so they can't see the difference between a 2000 cycles battery and a 50,000 cycles one in the lif…

The idea is you wait to charge until prices drop, rather than charge as soon as possible which adds zero charge cycles or degradation. Discharging into the grid is unlikely to ever be profitable for the average consumer but it isn’t impossible for the economics to work out just look at how high Texes Grid prices have gotten during extreme events.

Delayed charging is already a common feature on many EV and could shift demand quite a bit in aggregate.

Also, battery degradation reduces range so there is an impetus to extend useful life well past expedited useable life. Aka if you want 95+% capacity at 100,000 miles that’s inherently increasing capacity at 1 million+ miles. Manufactures do care about resale value so useful capacity at 100k miles is likely to improve over time.

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "beyond niche", it accounts for 95%+ of worldwide stored energy and is the de-facto energy storage mechanism that all new battery storage technologies are compared against. It also has round trip efficiency comparable to the li-ion batteries (80-90%), which is incredibly hard to beat.

95% stored energy by what measurement? See my other comment. It is not accessible to everyone, nor can it be made accessible to everyone, and the current storage capacity is a marginal fraction of what we actually use. It's a short term load balancing tool that operates within a small energy window.

95%+ by total energy stored/provided.

There's little to no water use in the storage or discharge of pumped hydro, water goes from one reservoir into another. The limiting factor is how much water can be pumped/discharged, not how much water is available in storage (which tends to be significantly more than the amount pumped around). So there's little reason why they wouldn't currently be fully utilized.

It's true that it requires specific geography (water and a place to put water), but it turns out population centers tend to be developed near water sources, already store water for the sake of storing water, and water can feasibly be stored in large quantities underground as well. Which means there's practically many viable large capacity sites near the places that use electricity.

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was always wondering why there are no systems converting the unused electricity in potential energy by moving water to a higher ground There are a bunch of pumped storage facilities around [1]. But they work best at massive scale, so suitable locations are somewhat limited. Plus they are expensive to build and often face environmental protests (similar to building dams). Still, it's a solution I'm a fan of. [1] h…

emphasis on massive scale. Moving 500,000 kg (over 1 million pounds) 7.5 meters (~25 feet aka the height of a house) will give you about 10 kWh of energy. This is equivalent to running a 425W device all day, like a small air conditioner. The relationship is linear. Double the weight or the distance to double the energy. All of the metal at a scrap yard I know of amounts to less than half that weight, for reference. I…

What if you go down instead of up? Drill like a kilometer or two and then build a huge cavern at that depth.

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me a lot of the Earthship community in the middle of the desert, which always focusses on smart ways of reusing water for different purposes, and by not wasting water as much as possible. The houses usually have a clean/grey/blackwater + a rainwormbox system to process fecals and reuse it for growing plants. Their air conditioning system is basically just a pipe in the ground where the hot air flows thro…

> Why there are no water storages on the roof. Quick math - 100 gallons of water 15 meters up off the ground has enough potential energy to run a microwave for 30 seconds. Gravitational storage is pathetically weak. It only makes sense on massive, massive scales. In a residential setting, the storage will never outweigh the extra cost and risk of having so much water on your roof.

Here's some "slow math" in video form ;)

https://youtu.be/CMR9z9Xr8GM

I find him entertaining. Put a 55 gallon drum on his roof, pumping water up via solar and running lights at night. Closed loop system.

He also "does the math" and mentions exactly what you are saying in entertaining format. Just not worth it if you're not doing it on a massive scale, preferably way out of sight and danger.

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#216
post #81
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on some extremely back of napkin math (e.g. doing one of those activities where you cycle to power a light bulb) that seems pretty far off. Was the flow rate extremely low? Have a link?

250 litres x 7 metres is 1750 kilogram-force-metres. Wolfram Alpha [0] says this is about 5 Watt-hours, and gives some other handy comparisons: > ≈ 0.45 × metabolic energy of one gram of fat ( ≈ 38000 J ) > ≈ 0.63 × energy released by burning 1 gram of ethanol ( ≈ 27000 J ) > ≈ metabolic energy of one gram of sugar or protein ( ≈ 17000 J ) > ≈ (0.02 to 0.09) × typical kinetic energy of a car at highway speeds ( 20000…

I've seen some people talk about adding a heavy weight on top of the water in a pumped hydro system - something like a big concrete lid on top of a cylinder type reservoir.

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an exception, that's an entirely different use for a raised tank. And not a very big one either.

It depends what you're calling "not a very big one". On our farm we have a 5000 litre galvanised high tank for house-water.

Right, but do you need more than 50 of those for the specific purpose of evening out pressure?

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an exception, that's an entirely different use for a raised tank. And not a very big one either.

I'd say it's a quite big one, "every city" has water towers to provide pressure to the people living in it, or they rely on the water source if it's higher up than the city. There are probably exceptions, where this isn't true, but raised tanks make modern society possible. https://youtu.be/yZwfcMSDBHs more on water towers, which are raised tanks of water. We also pump water into fake lakes to later extract electrici…

> I'd say it's a quite big one, "every city" has water towers

I meant not a big tank is needed for one house. I wasn't talking about the size of the use case.

> We also pump water into fake lakes to later extract electricity from it.

We do, because lakes are much much bigger than tanks on a house.

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#219

Many of the greenhouse Youtube channels I watch do a smaller DIY version of this. They have either dark barrels of water in the greenhouse with the windows facing south to the sun, or a thin metal wall filled with clay and pipes acting as a sun-heat-battery. They pump the water through the barrels or clay battery into pipes that are under ground to store the heat. In winter time they extract the heat from the ground…

oh yeah the wall pipes would act as a thermo-siphon so that's neat.

I've seen bananas growing (and fruiting) on the north west coast of scotland using these techniques

Re: Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage

#220
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

emphasis on massive scale. Moving 500,000 kg (over 1 million pounds) 7.5 meters (~25 feet aka the height of a house) will give you about 10 kWh of energy. This is equivalent to running a 425W device all day, like a small air conditioner. The relationship is linear. Double the weight or the distance to double the energy. All of the metal at a scrap yard I know of amounts to less than half that weight, for reference. I…

What if you go down instead of up? Drill like a kilometer or two and then build a huge cavern at that depth.

Old mine shafts have been used.
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