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I like Michael Kanellos a lot. If you don’t know Michael, he writes regularly on the CNet Green Tech blog and I met him recently when he was in Ireland for the ISA Annual Conference.
However, I was very disappointed this morning to read one of Michael’s stories about a study of the viability of wind energy in Texas where he said:
Ireland could nearly supply all of its power through wind and some companies are developing technology to store wind power so that these plants could provide power on calm days. Wind harnessed at night, for instance, could pump water up a hill, which could be released during the day.
I’m sorry Michael but that is absolute rubbish!
Pumping water up a hill to store energy is called Pumped-Storage Hydroelectricity (PSH). Ireland has one PSH facility, Turlough Hill. Turlough Hill took six years to build between 1968 and 1974 at a cost then of $50m. Today that cost would be closer to $50bn and it would take considerably longer than six years to build due to the forests of planning legislation which has been passed in the meantime.
Turlough Hill stores enough energy to power the country for approximately seven minutes so we’d need to build a little over 200 more Turlough hills to store enough power to run the country for one day. Even if money were no object, where are we going to find 200 hills with lakes atop?
Currently there are no easy ways to store electricity. The best hope for the country is if plug-in hybrid vehicles are made commercially available and everyone in the country bought one. They could then take in excess electricity at night and sell it back during the times of maximum demand.
In the meantime, making it economically attractive for companies to consume energy when it is abundant (by lowering the temp on their freezers, raising temp on immersions and pools, etc.) and less attractive when power is scarce will in itself help significantly with the energy storage issue. And it would be far cheaper then 200 more Turlough Hills!
5 Comments
Hey Tom, do you think that a company will actually want to lower the temp on their freezers if they have to pay for the additional electricity? Sure it will be cheaper but wouldn’t they rather keep their money than needlessly lower their temperatures?
Cheers,
Dave
Sorry Dave, I wasn’t clear when making that point - allow me to explain.
If the price of electricity drops, a company with refrigeration can lower the temp on their thermostats, sucking in cheap electricity.
Then when electricity increases in price they can up the temp on the thermostats (effectively turning off the compressors) and allow the temp in the freezers to drift back up again.
This way the company is preferentially freezing using cheap electricity and using the chilled goods as a cheap energy store.
Does that make more sense?
How about the idea of storing wind energy as compressed air? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
Hi nommo,
There are a few compressed air storage plants in the world but they depend on having a large airtight cavern to store the air and therefore are not a possibility for Ireland as we don’t have a suitable cave/mine.
As far as I know Compressed Air Energy Storage is not used by anyone to regenerate electricity directly (except in some data centres). It has been used as part of an efficiency improvement in the combustion of Gas.
Compressed air energy storage is indeed currently used on an industrial scale to store and re-generate electricity.
Furthermore, the need for a large air reservoir is not an barrier. Geologies suitable for compressed air energy storage including depleted gas fields, salt domes and saline aquifers are widely available. A wind/compressed air plant is being planned now for Iowa
http://www.isepa.com/
There are many options for energy storage. These have been shown to have great promise for addressing the challenges posed by inttermitent generation in Ireland
http://www.sei.ie/uploadedfiles/FundedProgrammes/REHC03001FinalReport.pdf
further information on compressed air energy storage coupled to wind power can be found here:
http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/research/Capture/captureppr.shtml
this technology has the potential for very widespread deployment on a global scale. And new technologies for storing energy are appearing every day.
We don’t have the luxury of saying we will use plugin hybrids and demand side management for dealing with wind *instead* of storage. we need to deploy all strategies on large scale as quickly as possible