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The all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Lithium ion batteries are great. They power
much of the world around us and in our pockets, but trying to scale the technology up for
the grid and storing massive amounts of renewable energy is challenging. Limited battery cell
supply and manufacturing, difficulty supplying enough rare earth metals and minerals to make
the lithium ion cells, and questions around longevity. What if there was another way?
A method that used air to store energy? This ... could change everything. I'm Matt Ferrell ... welcome to Undecided. I've spent a lot of time on the channel diving
into energy storage technologies and different kinds of batteries, like lithium ion and flow
batteries. They're absolutely essential to make renewable energy work as our primary
energy source. Without energy storage, we're wasting vast amounts of energy potential.
When we can't use all of the energy solar and wind are generating at the time they're
making it, we actually have to turn those systems off. It's called curtailment. When
you see wind farms with turbines not turning, that's why. But before we get to how air might be able
to solve this energy storage problem ... I can hear you already ... but what about lithium
ion batteries? Well, we are seeing lithium ion battery installations starting to pop
up all over. One of the more notable examples is Tesla's Hornsdale Power Reserve,
which was recently expanded by 50MW. It's helped to improve the electrical systems resilience
and reduced the cost of frequency control ancillary services by about $116M in 2019
alone. But so far these battery systems are designed
for 2-4 hours of energy storage. Solar and wind are some of the cheapest methods of generating
electricity today at around $40 and $29 per MWh respectively. But when you add in lithium ion battery storage to solar or wind, and calculate the cost it's around $150 per MWh for four hours
of energy discharge capability. The price doesn't scale well the larger you make the system ... and
that's where the power of air comes in. But before I get to how, I’d like thank
today’s sponsor, Squarespace for not only sponsoring today's video but for powering
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or domain. Thanks to Squarespace and to all of you for
supporting the channel. Liquid air energy storage, or cryogenic energy
storage, is using a process that's been around for a long time. The basic principle is simple.
Use energy to compress air down into a small space. When you need energy, you release that
air, letting it expand and turn a turbine to generate electricity on the way back out.
It's not that different from pumped hydro storage. The big difference is that you aren't
limited by geography ... you can build these anywhere. And there's far less impact on the
environment since you're not redirecting water and building out massive facilities. I had
a chance to chat with the CEO of Highview Power, a company specializing in cryogenic
energy storage ... sometimes called a liquid air battery. "What Highview Power has been doing during
the first 15 years of life, the company is close to 16 years old, has been to develop
a technology that is integrating processes that are very well known like liquefaction
of gas. What we are doing is liquefying air, taking the air that we are breathing and storing
the energy by the means of fluid. It's a cryogenic fluid that this air that is in liquid state. So it sounds like ... For the normal person in the city, on the countryside, it sounds very strange, liquid
air, but we're doing that since middle of last century to produce nitrogen, to produce
oxygen. We're cooling down the air separating the different components to produce oxygen
for hospitals, oxygen for industries, nitrogen for industrial applications. We are using
that engineering to store energy." The process takes in the air around us, cleans
and dries it, and then cools it down to -196°C, which shrinks the volume by a factor of 700
times. That means you're taking 700 liters of ambient air and freezing it down to 1 liter
of liquid air. This liquefaction process has been around for over 100 years and is known
as the Claude Cycle, for the French inventor Georges Claude. Fun fact ... he also invented
neon lights by using neon that was a byproduct of his air liquefaction business. Anyway,
when you freeze air into a liquid, you aren't storing high pressure air ... because it's
frozen, so you're storing frozen air in insulated, low pressure vessels. Warming the air back
up and releasing it through a turbine generates the electricity. The energy efficiency of
this process on its own, the energy in vs. energy out, isn't that great. According to
the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, this process can be as low as 25% efficient. A
far cry from a lithium ion battery that's between 80-90% efficient, but that's not the
whole story with these systems. When you layer in capturing waste heat and cold that's generated
by the liquefaction process, you can drive that efficiency up to 60-70% ... or even higher. "Theoretically as you know, this is about
the cooling down, extracting the heat, storing the heat or reusing that heat again when you
gasify. You can isolate the whole system. Isolating means investing in isolation to
the point that you can have ... You never have 100% efficiency, but you can have as
large as you want. What Highview has been doing is standardizing the system, making
it modular so that having a standard product, a standard solution that has 60%, six, zero,
60%. You can invest more and get it bigger, and you can invest less and get it lower.
I like to highlight that the pumped hydro and the hydro plants are in that 50 to 60
to 70% efficiency of the whole system." To break down how this works for Highview
Power's facility, they capture the waste cold that comes out of the thawing process when
releasing the air. This cold is then reused during the next cycle's freezing process with
new air. And in the same vein, they're capturing the waste heat from the freezing stage to
reuse during the thawing stage. When re-purposing waste heat and cold like this you can pretty
much design and scale the efficiency to fit your needs. But as Javier pointed out to me
in our conversation, that's not the thing to necessarily focus on. "Again, you can really invest in the efficiency,
but normally what you are going to look in, because at the end it's do you look at the
efficiency or do you look at dollars per megawatt-hour. I can tell you that I don't know one single
person that will look will prefer more efficiency at a higher dollar per megawatt-hour. At the
end, the efficiency is in the formula calculating the dollar per megawatt-hour. How many megawatt-hour
do I get, at what cost? You are including the efficiency insight. You will invest more
in adding more tanks or having a bigger charge station or a bigger discharge station. You
can really make your charging station bigger or smaller modularly. You can have 50 megawatts,
but tomorrow you're going to have 100. You just add another module and get benefits scale,
the same with the discharge, but especially with the storage asset." Systems like these can be scaled up very quickly
by just adding more storage tanks, which can be purchased from the existing natural gas
supply chain. All of the major components of a liquid air energy storage are built off
of components that are readily available. And the larger the system gets, the lower
the per MWh price. Something that can't be said of lithium ion. Lithium ion batteries
are great at responding to energy needs within milliseconds. They're excellent for rapid
response and fluctuations in energy use, which, like in the case of the Hornsdale Power Reserve,
can save huge amounts of money. Cryogenic energy storage hits its sweet spot at large
scale. When you need 4, 6, 12, or even 24 hours of energy storage, then cryogenic air
brings in the value. If you look at where the sweet spot is for
the major energy storage systems available today, you'll find lithium ion in the 10-100
MW range with between 2-4 hours of storage. Right above that you have flow batteries,
which I've done a separate video on if you're interested. I'll include a link in the description.
Flow batteries have a lower specific energy than lithium ion, but are more scalable since
you can easily increase the size of the fluid storage tanks. While the power capability
is slightly smaller, they're more capable of handling between 4-12 hours of energy storage.
Pumped hydro is the big kid on the block being able to easily store 1GW of power and offering
a full day of energy storage. The BathCounty Pumped Storage Station in Virginia is a 3GW
facility with 24GWh of capacity. It's massive. But like I said earlier, that's highly dependent
on geography for a storage system that size. With liquid air you can build a facility anywhere
on a relatively small plot of land and have a system that can scale up to pumped hydro's
energy capabilities. Given its versatility, you'd think that this
is the ideal solution across the board, but it's not. You're not going to have a liquid
air powered smart phone. The system really requires scale and it isn't as nimble in energy
responsiveness as lithium ion batteries. In fact, Highview Power doesn't see this as a
choice between lithium ion and cryogenic air storage. "I would say that brothers and sisters, we
are like the big brother Tolan big and fat and the other ones are the very first ones,
the quick ones For us, the competition is to continue doing the same policy,
burning gas, combustion, open cycle gas turbines, gas engines, gas turbines, combined cycles,
burning the stuff to provide power, that's the competition of this." It's all about picking the right tool for
the job and figuring out what the right mix is for a given areas needs. But when you're
talking about grid scale needs over 4 hours, liquid air batteries make a very persuasive
argument for themselves. Which leads me to my last point about availability.
When are we going to see these out in the world. Well, they're actually already here
and coming fast ... like within the next few years fast. "We have another two projects that are entering
into execution early next year in another part, in Scotland. We have several projects
in the US. We have something like 40 projects in the pipeline, seven very advanced, one
entered in execution end of the year." One of the facilities that's underway is not
too far from me, in Vermont. They've partnered with Vermont-based Encore Renewable Energy
to build out a 50MW / 400 MWh (about 8 hours) storage system, which will help with curtailment
issues in the area. When it comes to modernizing our grid and
transitioning off of fossil fuels, the key always comes back to energy storage. Without
being able to store energy generated by renewables from the time it's generated to when we actually
need it, it won't matter how cheap solar and wind power get. There's a mix of technologies
needed to solve this problem and the deceivingly simple liquid air battery is lining itself
up to be a major part of that solution. The more I learned about it, the more I kept thinking
... why haven't we done this sooner? It's such a clever idea built from some tried and
true technologies that have been around for a long time. There's no cutting edge chemistry
we need to wait for to make this viable ... it's taking advantage of what's right in front
of us ... well, more like all around us. So what’s your take? Jump into the comments
and let me know what you think about cryogenic batteries. And as always a special thank you
to all of my Patrons. All of your support is really helping to make this possible. If
you liked this video be sure to check out one of the ones I have linked right here.
Be sure to subscribe if you think I’ve earned it. And as always, thanks so much for watching,
I’ll see you in the next one.
This liquid air stuff sounds really familiar for some strange reason.