ESS recently went public and has some good sized deals for their iron-flow batteries. If they're what's claimed, they ought to be a pretty scalable technology without too many materials bottlenecks.
I believe "pumped water" is the currently available battery technology that has the capacities required, but I'm under the impression that it can't scale further (new dams / loss of green space)
Any form of storage will have poor efficiency compared to primary production, particularly pumped water. We're talking about under 50% efficiency.
Moreover, you need an absolute MASSIVE amount of storage to make intermittent sources like solar and wind equivalent to baseload power.
In winter months, solar in New York will produce less than 5% what the same facility will produce in the summer. Shorter days, lower sun, snow, leaves, clouds... all contribute to this.
One cloudy winter and the entire state would be without power - for weeks. It would be catastrophic.
The size of the water reservoir needed to replace plants like Indian Point plant don't exist on the East coast. You would need to flood absolutely massive areas of land.
But some of this summer production increase is by design: summer power is worth more on the grid, so you over-design to capture more sun in summer (steeper angles, ignorance of winter shadowing, reduced focus on winter cleaning/maintenance) at the cost of winter production.
If you were building an off-grid system, the summer/winter discrepancy would be smaller. You might even overbuild for winter production at the cost of summer production.
The project is expected to reach commercial operation by the beginning of 2023. Enabling the storage of electricity to be used when it is most needed will help increase the amount of variable renewable energy that can be put onto New York’s grid. It will also, as with some recent high profile projects in California, help reduce the state’s reliance on peaker plants; which are only called into action several times a year when electricity demand is at its highest.
The raw materials are lithium, potassium and iron. All are abundant but require significant energy to extract. So if we have a clean grid they can be produced with almost no carbon emissions. So if using "dirty" batteries is necessary to create the clean grid, it's still a massive win.
>if we have a clean grid they can be produced with almost no carbon emissions
Everything is possible. But not everything is practical.
Energy density matters. Especially in industrial applications.
For example, electric passenger vehicles are a great solution because the weight of passengers is negligible.
Electric semis hauling freight? Not so much. The payload has to be reduced by a significant amount because the battery is so damn big.
I don't know what the extraction process involves, but I've been to a few mines. Truck, the size of a house moving massive loads. And lots of big stationary machines, which I assume are already electric powdered.
> Everything is possible. But not everything is practical.
Which is why your question is so impractical. You're asking about kilotonnes of carbon on a project that will save megatonnes annually. If your question forces them to source batteries with a 10% smaller carbon footprint, you'll will likely have done net harm to the environment by delaying the project and forcing us to rely on dirty electrical sources for longer.
Your question is standard FUD technique. On the surface it appears to be a reasonable question. Because it is, at least in other contexts. But in the context of a green energy production plant, it's a distraction.
Yes, we need to make mines greener. So ask your question in the context of mines.
> Electric semis hauling freight? Not so much. The payload has to be reduced by a significant amount because the battery is so damn big.
More FUD. The batteries + motors weigh about one tonne more than the engines and diesel they displace. In response, Europe has increased weight limits for electric semis by 2 tonnes, and the US by 0.9 tons. Even if they didn't, a 1 tonne difference in a 35 tonne load is not especially significant.
Quebec hydro is actually developing it to go to grid scale. They have much better performance and none of the problems. In fact the early evidence is that the batteries somehow get better over time.
If that all sounds too good to be true, it's worth reading what other battery experts have to say about these claims. For example:
> The ninth research paper in Braga and Goodenough's "glass battery" work regrettably shows many of the hallmarks of pathological science. ... ad hoc theory, violations of the laws of thermodynamics, basic mistakes, disregard for established knowledge, absent or invalid chemical characterisation and, when all is said and done, devices that don't work the way they're said to.
>If that all sounds too good to be true, it's worth reading what other battery experts have to say about these claims. For example:
I wouldn't say it 'sounds too good to be true' when a nobel laureate is the one publishing. The same guy who invented the battery everyone uses today. With work being confirmed by multiple countries and multiple universities.
Flipside, this guy has a bias as he's a direct commercial competitor.
and as a battery expert he's saying things like:
>This is, as best I can work out, how it goes:
So he's not a battery expert? He doesn't understand?
>I am not especially familiar with field-effect transistors, but I will touch on this briefly to try and put it in to some sort of context.
Besides existing hydro, there's biomass (like coal plants, just without the coal), new pumped hydro, thermal electric (where you heat up rock and use the heat to drive a turbine, still no full-blown plant), and chemical batteries like lithium-ion or flow batteries. Chemical batteries are currently too expensive for longer term storage, but lithium-ion are already competitive for peak shaving.
So no new invention is needed, but some of this tech needs maturing/getting cheaper.
Extending the grid is also often helpful, albeit still somewhat expensive. I think we need someone to work on making that cheaper.
If you just need energy for heating, you can store the heat in a big insulated pond with an insulated floating lid on. That's cheap, and good enough for seasonal storage. There are several of those ponds in production already, village-sized ones, but they're going to build a town-sized one not far from where I live.
Your largest-scaling options are thermal storage (molten-salt thermal, not to be confused with molten-salt electric batteries), compressed air energy storage (CAES), and pumped-hydro. The last as with hydroelectric dams is limited by available sites and environmental impacts.
Any thermal storage or thermal-process generation (e.g., molten salt thermal storage, synfuel-based generation) will be limited by Carnot efficiencies, with about a 30% energy recovery to thermal input possible. Hydrolysis loses about half of input energy, hence the 15% return on synfuel storage.
Synfuels are another option. Most of these involve creating hydrogen, many (and the ones I tend to favour) will then combine that with carbon and/or oxygen to create hydrocarbon analogues or alcohol. These are very-long-term stable, and have high energy densities. They're valuable for specific uses already (portable power tools, vehicles --- especially off-road or remote, aircraft, and marine shipping). The total net energy recovery is low, on the order of 15--25%, but the storage capacity, the storage durability, the handling characteristics, safety, and extensive extant experience and capital for storage, transport, and utilisation, are all positives.
I've followed the electric battery story reasonably closely for about a decade. It's characterised by big promises and relatively low delivery. LiON is likely the best light-weight battery, for mobile and portable applications, simply based on chemistry. There are only so many light atoms, and the ones lighter than those we're using are exceedingly anti-social. (Notably flourine and chlorine.)
Air-metal, molten-salt, and molten-metal batteries might afford large-scale capabilities, though most research seems to have had limited success. All involve inconvenient behavioural properties of the electorlytes and cells themselves. None are well-suited to mobile applications. Several should be kept some distance from other infrastructure (e.g., residential/commercial zones, etc.).
Energy banking through direct thermal storage (hot water, ground/geothermal heat/cold storage, etc.) are possible, though would require considerable revisions to existing land-use and infrastructure interconnections. Reducing overall energy loads through passive designs minimising heating, cooling, lighting, and other loads, is also probably a factor.
We're headed to a future in which energy economics will be markedly different from those of the past 50, 100, 150 years. It's those economics which have shaped our activities, infrastructure, and land use. I strongly suspect all three to adapt substantially to the new regime. Assuming that the lifestyle we've become accustomed to will continue forward is probably at odds with future realities.
Electrolysis can actually be done at above 70% efficiency. 80% efficiency methods are available. You unfortunately lose some additional energy when compressing the Hydrogen for storage, or when you turn it into Methane for storage.
Carbon capture is also possible at low energy cost, from seawater, as described in a set of research articles published by the USNRL through the 2010s. The Google X Project "Foghorn" failed to develop this in an economically feasible manner, but my view is that that's more a measure of the mis-pricing of fossil fuels than of the method itself.
The resulting liquid hydrocabons are largely perfect analogues of petrol, kerosene (jet fuel) or deisel, and require no compression or refrigeration.
This is pretty much a press release, but a bit of a summary: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ess-sb-energy-softbank-reac...
That said, it's entirely out of my realm of expertise for vetting how good their tech or plans are.