Why We Should Be Talking About Energy Storage

we've been driving now for five days across california talking to some of the lead researchers in renewables so what do you think is the biggest challenge for moving towards zero emissions or a renewable future accessibility to an energy source as the energy comes from different places yes we're going to have to adapt the grid so those are good guesses but i would argue that the biggest challenge is actually energy storage we all kind of know the the problem with solar and wind is that we still need electricity after the sun goes down we still need electricity when it's not windy for three days in a row how we store energy for when renewable sources are intermittent is the biggest problem we're gonna need to solve hey i'm diana and you're watching physics girl and if you've been following along with this series we've been driving across california in a hydrogen-powered fuel cell electric car learning all about renewable energy [Music] so thank you to toyota for sponsoring this series we are moving toward a 100 renewable future and there are road maps for getting there by 2050. but the energy sector has a problem when you plug in your tv your dishwasher your particle collider the grid producing your electricity is most likely on demand oh people need more energy like turn another gas plant on but if we're really going to move to a fully decarbonized future we won't have those gas plants anymore we actually visited a solar power plant that has to slow down their plant sometimes because they're like we'll be charged money if we provide too much electricity the grid was not built to stockpile energy so it doesn't so the next step must be to add energy storage to the grid when i think about energy storage my mind immediately goes to a warehouse full of lithium-ion batteries we realize lithium-ion can't do everything a hour battery will cost about 10 times as much as a 4 hour battery there are other drawbacks to lithium ion as well they catch fire they lose capacity over time the supply of lithium is estimated to run out by 2080 and experts say the cost won't come down fast enough to keep up with our road maps but there are some promising complete alternatives to lithium-ion and to even batteries all together i got to go behind the scenes and i'm so excited to share with you what these other technologies look like how some of them work today and how others might work in the future this reservoir here is separate from the other one that was on the other side of the burning highway oh my gosh that's right someone had set fire to the entrances to the parks and we almost didn't get in there that day that was a weird day so this one's actually 300 feet higher than the other one they pump water from over there up to this one and then they pump it back then they pump it up and they pump it back why do you think they do that gravity can fall and it can make power yes exactly there's one technology that comprises 98 of installed energy storage in california pumped storage hydroelectric we drove up into the mountains of the sierra national forest to visit the big creek hydroelectric project we are here at powerhouse number one a low pressure pipeline when it starts down this really steep hill it drops about 2000 feet in elevation the concept is simple energy in just pump the water uphill and then when there's demand energy out let the water fall and drive a turbine to create electricity and it's a twist on a technology that's been around for over a century so when they fire it up in 1913 i think we just had three units going in powerhouse one that's where people lived over time yet it has really evolved into supporting the grid in the use of renewables solar and wind coming online a lot of times during the day i don't know if you've looked at the or know about the duct curve everyone we talked to mentioned the duct curve as illustrating the main point that we're talking about in this video if you chart electricity demand during the day it typically looks like this more demand in the evening and it peaks at sunset but as more solar energy is produced in the middle of the day and comes on the grid that effectively looks to the grid managers like a drop in demand and someone thought this looked like a duck not sure they've ever seen a duck hydro can step in and and compensate for those fluctuations on the grid who who makes that call is does somebody call you up like there's a lot of sun yes so there's actually a lot of market mechanisms in place say we're producing 100 megawatts at this particular plant they were forecasting it to be cloudy today and they didn't think we were going to have a bunch of solar come online well clouds go away the stun starts shining the solar fires up oh man that must take energy that's coming to the grid from solar panels on your rooftop they can't just turn that off and turn it away that's got to come on the grid well you can't put more megawatts on the grid than are being consumed so all right turn your generators down but the coolest part was seeing the turbines in action i cannot even describe it they were like oh yeah we'll take you in there to the pump house where the water is reaching 900 psi and spinning these turbines and then they're like it's gonna be a little loud you might not be able to hear anything so we put in our earplugs and see these turbines and you couldn't even make something big enough for a movie set they're just vibrating your chest cavity i never thought i would go into an energy production facility and feel like this is so powerful in so many senses of the word whether they knew it or not it you know in 1910 what they designed is incredibly flexible and incredibly adaptable if you're comparing to gas plants you've got the same benefit in that you can turn on the system really quickly plus if you compare to batteries the round trip efficiency is very high over 80 but it beats batteries and that you can store the energy indefinitely you just keep pumping up and pumping back down i'm really excited about this industry i think there's a ton of opportunity in hydro but there are some downfalls years of drought can actually affect the capacity this tech wouldn't fit in the middle of new york city so you need large swaths of land it can potentially disrupt the environment plus most people believe that this tech is pretty much built out as much as it's going to be other creative mechanical concepts have taken inspiration from pump storage hydro including using cranes to move around massive bricks or rocks up and down using say automated machine vision software so energy in raise the bricks up high energy out lower the bricks to convert your stored gravitational potential energy to electricity sounded to be like just really big jenga but some companies like energy vault and gravitricity claim 80 to 90 efficiency and decades of lifetime and if you're looking for indicators that this tech is going places they've already built out testing sites and they've raised millions from venture capital and crowd investing sites that's exciting another very promising mechanical base tech is compressed air energy storage where energy in you compress air in giant containers and then energy out you release the pressure later to drive a generator also air gets hot when you compress it so if you can extract that heat as well you can produce electricity with it and increase the efficiency overall of this technology the capacity of these facilities is staggering there are some sites going in in california soon built by the company hydro store with a total capacity of 10 gigawatt hours that's insane compare that to the capacity of this victorian big battery the proposed site in australia using tesla lithium ion batteries that has a 450 megawatt hour capacity or about 22 times smaller than this so for compressed air energy storage the large scale very long duration energy storage looks promising and then a slightly related technology other companies are looking to cryo-cool air down to such low temperatures that it turns into a liquid and then when it's heated back up it increases in volume by a thousand times and drives a turbine another related technology we learned a lot about driving around in the mirai is hydrogen but rather than the input of energy coming from compressing or cryo-cooling the hydrogen it comes from just producing the hydrogen the method that is primarily used to produce hydrogen is steam reformation but the goal is to produce hydrogen by renewable methods one such method is electrolysis or splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity the hydrogen stores energy because when you combine it back together with oxygen through a fuel cell you produce electricity so energy in separate hydrogen from oxygen or other molecules energy out allow the hydrogen to recombine with oxygen to produce electricity through a fuel cell you know all about this if you saw the first video in the series about the tech powering the car we drove on the whole road trip a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle so some benefits to hydrogen as most people will point out hydrogen is very abundant just look at all those oceans it's very scalable and modular hydrogen can be a core component of microgriding so one of the biggest problems that they've had in some of the hurricane related natural disasters is that people couldn't communicate phone towers have battery backup which is good for maybe eight hours but if you have a fuel cell backup produce hydrogen locally you can be operable for a week or longer but though hydrogen is readily available it's not readily available alone it's usually connected to oxygen and we have to put a lot of energy in to liberate it the round trip efficiency is looking like 25 to 45 one question though is storage where do you put it hydrogen fuel cells needs very very high purity so you need to find a storage medium that doesn't contaminate it i had no idea but we're already storing natural gas in large underground caverns like empty salt mines the us has been storing natural gas mostly in all sorts of geologic formations salt formations um depleted gas oil reservoirs and we're already looking at converting those plus all of the rest of the natural gas infrastructure to hydrogen it can double as a fuel which may end up being the more promising use for hydrogen we drove next up to fremont california to visit a company called antora developing a tech they're calling thermal batteries where the energy is stored as heat we would take that excess electricity and directly resistively heat these super cheap blocks of carbon very hot temperatures to the point where they are glowing and emitting light so energy in heat up blocks of carbon and then energy out is a little bit surprising they've decided to use photovoltaics the same technology that's in solar panels this is kind of the tricky part that has like plagued thermal energy storage for a while the most common heat engine you'd use for something like this is a steam turbo but they found that the efficiency of the steam turbines gets a lot worse when they get smaller so we use photovoltaics so energy out use a photovoltaic material to turn the radiated light from the hot block into electricity cool and they've decided to call this whole system a thermo photovoltaic system or a tpv the benefits are pretty easy to see we use carbon to store the heat that's a very very cheap material very abundant so it's a very easy thing to make a 40 hour even 400 hour battery it's affordable it has a small footprint so high energy density it's easily scalable and it has a relatively high round trip efficiency at an estimated 50 due in part to the use of mirrors so any of the light that makes it through the photovoltaics and doesn't get absorbed gets reflected back on the other side back to the block and heats it up again but it's a very new technology and they're just in the early research phase although the exciting thing about companies like this is that the international energy agency forecasts that to meet our zero emissions goals by 2050 almost half of our reductions are going to come from tech that's currently in the demonstration or prototype phase so this research is critical and it was really cool to see one of the technologies that might be one of our future solutions one final technology that i learned about on our journey is a battery technology but one that's further along in march 2021 a canadian company called vrb energy announced an upcoming 500 megawatt-hour battery storage facility going in in china so it's similar to the victorian big battery capacity but it's not lithium-ion batteries the tech that they're using is called flow batteries what are flow batteries well it's kind of like batteries but they take all of the elements of a battery and mix them up and then allow them to flow so in a typical battery cell you usually have two sides the anode and cathode the bread if you will and then the electrolyte filling to make a bigger battery then you have to add more of these cells and that can get expensive in a flow battery you take the anode and cathode materials dissolve them in electrolytes and then store them in tanks and then you allow those mixtures to flow near each other with a membrane separating them and they do their chemical reaction thing and produce electricity to scale this up you just need to increase the size of the tanks so it's more cheaply scalable than lithium ion it doesn't generally have the same fire risk and it doesn't have nearly the capacity fade of lithium ion one of the concerns with flow batteries though is that vanadium is one of the most common elements used in flow batteries and the price is rising so other companies are looking to use different chemistries for example primus power is using zinc bromide and they're a california based company that's received 100 million dollars in funding from the department of energy and the california energy commission and there are other companies looking at iron chromium chemistries there are lots of companies with big investments and sites installed form energy vision primus power flow batteries look promising but they're not looking at the days to weak storage that's where some of these other technologies we talked about will come in and that's a sentiment that we heard over and over it's not that these companies will necessarily compete but they're going to complement each other for different uses for example right now for personal storage one of the only options is the tesla power wall but as time goes on other technologies are going to look more enticing as they can last longer capacity doesn't degrade and they're cheaper so at the beginning of this video i came in hot saying that energy storage is the biggest issue that we need to solve but i didn't even know that when we started this series as soon as you start talking to people in the industry though and you see this research and development that's happening you realize how important all of this is plus i came across a prediction of the growth in the energy storage industry to 574 billion dollars by 2027 up from 360 billion in 2019. so this is where the need is and where the investments are going to be in our previous video i mentioned a portfolio approach as our best option at getting to net zero emissions and that was definitely reflected here as they say in the energy industry many juices for many uses they don't say that but they should in the final video of this series we're going to take a look at a solar technology that incorporates energy storage as one possibility for the future of energy hit subscribe if you want to come back for that one and thank you so much for watching happy physicsing [Music]

Channel: Physics Girl

Views: 176,338

Rating: 4.9293499 out of 5

Keywords: physics girl, dianna cowern

Id: mHmIVw9etns

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021