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Question: Could gravel batteries make renewable energy more realistic?

(Posted by: Meadow F on 2010-04-27 04:52:11)

A company claims to have solved the problem of storing energy from renewable sources using giant gravel batteries: http:/ / www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2010/ apr/ 26/ gravel- batteries- renewable- energy- storage What do you think?

Answers:

Posted by: 2B or not 2B on 2010-04-27, 08:35:12

What do I think? Well, when I first read the article, I thought it had to be a joke. I then had to look at the date of publication of the article, just to make sure that this was a current article, and not an 'April Fools' day joke which I had not heard of before, and then when I realized that it was only published yesterday I had to dismiss the 'April Fools' aspect, and since it is the 'Guardian' then it MUST be TRUE! There are many things about this story which would actually be funny if it were not so extremely sad. Without going into any real and 'boring science' (to far too many people), One thing which interested me which really is worth noting was the comment, "Isentropic claims a round-trip energy efficiency of up to 80% and, because gravel is cheap, the cost of a system per kilowatt-hour of storage would be between $10 and $55. "! I have to ask anyone with a modicum of intelligence to be able to justify that in any way whatsoever. Or am I missing something? It seems to me that none of this makes any sense at all (either scientifically, or financially).

Posted by: All Black on 2010-04-27, 05:15:38

Now we are ready for the ultimate solution of the Green movement - the Great Leap Backwards to the Stone Age! The Gravel battery was invented by Dr Barney Rubble of the University of Bedrock, and utilises the latest in chip technology - stone chips!

Posted by: bravozulu on 2010-04-27, 05:55:35

It sounds promising and interesting. There are obviously not enough hills and suitable reservoirs to make the alternative of pumping water uphill universally available. I don't get why they would want to use gravel as the heat sink though. It seems like there might be more suitable materials that would have a higher heat capacity. Who knows, maybe the gravel is almost as good. Gravel probably already has the right amount of space and surface area for the gas to travel through. Argon wouldn't corrode steel and the battery might even be a potential source of power for ships. They might even be able to collect the heat in a giant supper tanker filled with hot gravel where they collect energy from surf in the southern oceans. All sorts of things come to mind, geothermal from volcanoes, southern ocean wind farms, and other isolated places could be "mined " for energy.

Posted by: Peter J on 2010-04-27, 06:24:22

Show me. If it works it sounds like it will be great, but I wonder how long it will take for environmentalists to flip out about argon, or gravel, or heat.

Posted by: virtualguy92107 on 2010-04-27, 09:54:52

They have a ways to go. You can buy a kilowatt-hour of storage in the form of a lead-acid battery for around $50, retail. It will return over 90% of the input as griddable electricity. For offshore wind turbine farms, or wave-power schemes, subsurface air-pressure energy storage, as discussed by Hugh Bradner, seems like a much better bet. Since demonstration plants are planned, though, we'll shortly be able to see some real numbers.

Posted by: The Vampire Muffin Man on 2010-04-28, 08:56:04

Interesting... Well, for a couple of reasons. One of course being the concept itself. Not sure how much more efficient or cheaper that would be than something like a molten salt system. It would be interesting to see if they could set that up where you could harvest the heat from PV solar panels in addition to converting excess generated power to heat for storage... The second reason is that I wasn't aware that they were using elevated water to store energy. I kind of though that was my idea...and that it was probably too inefficient to be cost-effective. Of course my idea was to have the windmill pumping water exclusively and have the only electric generation being via hydro turbine(s). Seems to me that you'd lose less energy by avoiding converting mechanical to electric and then electric to mechanical again and then once more mechanical to electric. I didn't really do more than toss the idea around in my head, though. _

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