Liquid Air Batteries. Literally energy from thin air. Seriously. Literally!

well you think that's too aggressive dear just put the hammer down i'm gonna use it in a minute though put it down until you need it all right as many of you know i bang on quite a lot about how energy storage is a key to the success of distributed smart grids and how it's destined to unlock our sustainable energy future for most people nowadays energy storage means one thing a lithium-ion battery but lithium-ion batteries aren't the only way to store energy in fact in very basic terms if you can find a way to use energy to make something physically happen in a reversible way then you've probably created an energy storage device if i lift this hammer above my head i'm using energy in my arm muscles to put potential energy into the hammer by keeping it up here against the pull of gravity if i let go and get out of the way obviously then the potential energy is released as the hammer falls to the ground and if you attach a string to the end of the hammer and fix the other end of the string to a little dynamo then as the hammer falls it'll turn the dynamo and generate power albeit very briefly engineers all over the world have been using this basic energy conversion principle on electricity grids for decades in the form of pumped hydro the only snag is that it needs a big height difference between two very large bodies of water and that means hydroelectric solutions are often severely limited by geography so what if instead of deriving our energy needs from moving water up and down mountains we could just generate it out of the air that surrounds us sounds a bit too good to be true doesn't it but that is precisely the principle behind a potentially transformational technology called liquid air batteries hello and welcome to just have a think if energy storage really is destined to transform our electricity grids and move us away from our dependence on fossil fuels then it needs to satisfy a few fundamental criteria it needs to be long duration like 12 hours or so it needs to deliver enough power to actually plug the gaps in the grid at peak times it needs to be economically viable probably needs to be scalable and adaptable and of course it needs to be environment and climate friendly energy storage systems tend to have a trade-off between duration and power this graph shows two axes with a vertical axis representing duration and the horizontal axis representing power lithium ion batteries typically deliver their power over a period of up to four hours and the largest plant currently in existence is the tesla 100 megawatt construction down in south australia lithium-ion batteries have a really good energy density and they're instantly responsive so they're brilliant at smoothing out temporary spikes in demand but they're still relatively expensive and that upper limit of duration of four hours is generally considered to be the minimum time window of peak operations for most grids above lithium ion on the graph sits a technology called flow batteries we haven't looked at flow batteries in detail on this channel yet but that episode is coming soon so watch this space suffice to say that flow batteries can deliver their power for a longer duration but have a lower energy density and so currently only have capacities up to about 50 megawatts then up here we've got the behemoth of pumped hydro which as we've already seen gets great dollops of power from huge reservoirs easily delivering up to a gigawatt of power for a full 24-hour period if necessary but with the very obvious limitation of location and by the way just to lob in another major caveat with hydropower where massive dams are built within the more delicate ecosystems around the world like the brazilian amazon or as the chinese are doing in places like thailand and vietnam then the huge scale of construction and the diversion of water can completely upset the ecological balance of that area and cause great damage or even extinction for vulnerable animal species not to mention taking away vital water supplies for indigenous human beings further down the river anyway back to the point the target space on this graph for liquid air batteries is beyond four hours duration with a power output above 25 megawatts which puts them somewhere in here the leading exponent of this fledgling technology is a uk company called high view power back in january 2020 highview teamed up with power station developer carlton power to commence development of an 85 million pound 50 megawatt liquid air battery facility in manchester in the northwest of england backed by a 10 million pound grant from the uk government and a 35 million pound investment from the japanese sumitomo group however you say this pilot plant will provide enough extra stored energy to power two hundred thousand homes for five hours at a time their design philosophy is heavily based on using existing off-the-shelf components which means they can buy all the kit from original equipment manufacturers or oems with decades-long proven track records of performance in similar industries and that also means they get the benefit of many years of field experience that those manufacturers have gained plus the assurance of warranties and all that good stuff the components are modular and scalable allowing systems to be constructed anywhere in the world at sizes of anywhere between five megawatts and many hundreds of megawatts if needed and the capital startup costs are very low as well which always puts a smile on the faces of brian and colin in the corporate spreadsheet department from an environmental point of view the system doesn't use any scarce resources doesn't have any toxic components and doesn't give off any emissions all sounds pretty good so far doesn't it so how does it work well the first part of the system is a large industrial air liquefier a technology that's been used for over a hundred years to produce gas products by distillation the liquefier draws in ambient air and cleans it up a bit by stripping out moisture and carbon dioxide then it's cooled down to extremely low cryogenic temperatures that condense the air into a liquid that liquid looks and acts quite a lot like liquid and nitrogen because that's what air is mostly made of it's 700 times more dense than the atmospheric air we breathe and it emerges from the process at about 15 times atmospheric pressure which sounds a lot but it's actually well within operating pressures for existing gas cylinders lpg gas images for example can handle around 25 times atmospheric pressure the fluid can then be stored in well insulated thin-walled steel vessels that can be safely kept above ground avoiding the need for complex and costly underground construction and then when there's a demand for power from the grid the liquid air is released from the containers and pumped up to higher pressure using a cryogenic pump the surrounding ambient air temperature makes the liquid boil and turn back into gas that can then be passed at high pressure across a turbine to drive a synchronous generator and put electricity back onto the grid so the basic principle is attractively simple but to optimize efficiency the system also recovers the heat of compression on the refrigeration system and uses that to extract more energy from the liquid in the tanks and then when the air is raised to ambient temperature the cold is also captured and stored to be used later to do quite a lot of the cooling back at the initial refrigeration stage the hot and cold stores are also thin walled steel vessels so all of the energy storage components are basically just a volume of tankage over many years of testing and development the company's managed to achieve a round-trip system efficiency of about sixty percent so we've got three standalone system components that are completely independent from one another and that means if there's a need in the future to increase the duration of the system they only really need to add more storage tanks which are cheap and if they need to up the power that the system delivers then the economy of scale they've already achieved means that as a rough rule of thumb doubling the power output of the system adds only 50 percent to the system cost compared with 100 if you were to do the same thing with lithium-ion batteries for example long-duration energy storage systems like this have major benefits for modern grids with significant reliance on intermittent power from renewables like wind and solar perhaps most significantly they help alleviate a problem called curtailment something that represents a constant challenge for all grid operators we won't dive too deeply into the technicalities here but essentially because electricity is the movement of electrons then that movement has to be used to produce power at precisely the time when it's being generated with fossil fuels if you need energy you burn fuel and if you don't need energy you switch the burners off but you've still got the fuel sitting there in the form of coal or gas ready for the next time you need it with renewables like wind and solar you need to be capturing as much energy as possible when the sun's shining and the winds blowing because you know your panels won't be generating anything when it's dark and your turbines won't be turning on a still day but if the grid doesn't need power when renewables are generating it then turbines have to be switched off and solar panels isolated which means all that free energy goes completely to waste systems like hiveview's liquid air battery provide elegant and cheap solutions to the curtailment problem allowing the free energy from the sun and the wind to be captured and stored for very long periods and then released whenever it's needed for as long as it's needed right up to 12 hours or so this graph shows comparisons between liquid air batteries and lithium-ion batteries carried out in a pilot study on new york's grid system based on projected 2025 prices the vertical axis on the left hand side shows the levelized cost of curtailment avoidance or lcoca measured in us dollars per megawatt hour the horizontal axis shows the amount of curtailment that can be avoided measured in terawatt hours and as a reminder a terawatt hour is equal to one million megawatt hours so it's a big number then over on the right hand side we've got another vertical axis which shows the size of any given storage system measured in megawatts the liquid air or cryo battery system is represented by blue bars and lithium-ion batteries are represented by gray bars with a trend line running through all of them and then there's this dotted horizontal line which represents the levelized cost of energy from existing offshore wind which at about 92 dollars per megawatt hour is the benchmark that the operators used to assess the economic viability of the new systems so where the trend line the dotted lines cross is the optimal achievable return for the new york model and that told the operators that they could deploy about two gigawatts of energy storage for the same net cost as offshore wind which meant they'd avoid 1400 gigawatt hours or terawatt hours of curtailment the new plant in manchester england is due to be operational in 2022 with an expected operational lifespan of 40 years it'll employ 200 people including oil and gas engineers migrating across from the fossil fuel industry planning work is already underway on other facilities in europe and the us including a 400 megawatt hour joint venture with encore renewable energy in vermont and design work is in progress on a gigawatt system capable of producing an output of 200 megawatts with a capacity of 1.2 gigawatt hours this is inexpensive existing technology providing scalable solutions for future electricity grids that may well be dominated by renewable technologies but it's by no means the only solution being developed and we'll be looking carefully at the various other potential alternatives in future episodes in the meantime though if you've got any news or views on this particular technology then as always jump down to the comment section below and leave your thoughts there that's it for this week though a massive thank you to the channel supporters over at the patreon page who help maintain this channel's 100 independence you can help support and influence the channel as well by visiting www.patreon.com forward slash just have a think and you can also support for free by hitting the like button and by subscribing both of which raise the channel visibility with the youtube search algorithm and ensure the messages get to more and more people each week dead easy to subscribe just need to click down there or on that icon there and don't forget to hit the bell icon so you get notified about new content as always thanks very much for watching have a great week and remember to just have a think see you next week

Channel: Just Have a Think

Views: 588,329

Rating: 4.9257202 out of 5

Keywords: liquid air battery, highview power, grid balancing, smart grid, electricity grid, distributed smart grids, climate crisis, climate emergency, climate change, act now

Id: tMLu9Dtw9yI

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020