Compressed or liquified air for energy storage.

[Mark]

Green battery plant in Greater Manchester awarded £10m grant:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-m ... r-53097208

The facility next to Carrington power station will be one of Europe's largest battery storage systems and will supply long-duration energy storage, said a Highview Power spokesman. It will offer multiple gigawatt-hours of storage representing weeks' worth of storage, not just hours or days, he added.

Energy and Clean Growth Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, said the technology would form a key part of the UK's push towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions."Projects like these will help us realise the full value of our world-class renewables, ensuring homes and businesses can still be powered by green energy, even when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing,�.

Construction of the CRYOBattery facility is expected to start later this year and enter commercial operation in 2022.

Carrington is a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine station.
If the technology is proven, I guess we'll see these battery storage systems retrofitted next to all gas generating plants ?

[vtsnowedin]

Green battery plant in Greater Manchester awarded £10m grant:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-m ... r-53097208

The facility next to Carrington power station will be one of Europe's largest battery storage systems and will supply long-duration energy storage, said a Highview Power spokesman. It will offer multiple gigawatt-hours of storage representing weeks' worth of storage, not just hours or days, he added.

Energy and Clean Growth Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, said the technology would form a key part of the UK's push towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions."Projects like these will help us realise the full value of our world-class renewables, ensuring homes and businesses can still be powered by green energy, even when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing,�.

Construction of the CRYOBattery facility is expected to start later this year and enter commercial operation in 2022.

Carrington is a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine station.
If the technology is proven, I guess we'll see these battery storage systems retrofitted next to all gas generating plants ?

Never mind now I see the reason. I need to read all the link before typing.

[adam2]

As far as I can see, what is to be installed, is not a battery in the classic sense of the word, but is energy storage as compressed or liquified air.

There are two main ways to use this stored energy. Firstly, the high pressure air may be expanded through a turbine and an alternator driven.
No fossil fuel is expended thereby.

The other approach is to use a special design of gas turbine. In a classic gas turbine, a large proportion of the energy produced by the turbine section is absorbed by the compressor section.
In a compressed air energy storage facility, special gas turbines are used that have no compressor section. High pressure air from the storage tank is used together with natural gas or light oil, the output for a given fuel consumption is more than doubled. (this is NOT free energy though if one remembers the energy used to compress the air initially)

Note that fossil fuel is still consumed in this system.
A large scale test plant was installed at Huntsdorf in Germany some years ago. Surplus electricity was used to compress air overnight, this being stored underground. At times of peak demand this air was used in special gas turbines as previously described.
Not certain what happened to the German plant.

The compressing or liquefaction of air produces a great deal of relatively low temperature heat. Unless some paying demand for this heat exists, it represents a large and unavoidable waste.
Thermal desalination of sea water, heated swimming pools, or heated glasshouses for food production have been suggested.

The main merits of such schemes are the fact that no rare, costly, or toxic materials are used. Bursting of pressure vessels could be most unfortunate, but arguably less so than a giant battery bank blowing up.

[Mark]

Highview Power Unveils CRYOBattery, World’s First Giga-Scale Cryogenic Battery:
https://www.highviewpower.com/news_anno ... c-battery/

From how you describe, this seems to be 'Approach 2' ?
The Demonstrator Plant of this technology is attached to a Landfill Gas operation:
https://www.highviewpower.com/plants/

To my simple mind, it's along the lines of the Dinorwig hydroelectric plant, but for gas generating plants.
Which has a slight irony, as the benefit is to smooth out the peaks/troughs from renewable energy generation...
So, you'd only need so many, until all your load is smoothed out ?
Still, seems a good idea to me.

Some info on Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) plants in Huntorf and McIntosh: https://www.storelectric.com/technology/
This technology seems to have been around for quite a while - not sure why it's not been adopted more widely....?
There are plenty of salt caverns going spare in mid Cheshire...

[BritDownUnder]

I worked with the person who was Commissioning Engineer of Carrington Power station. A German and an utter cnut - probably the two facts are related. He hated everything about England and the UK in general. I worked with him in Australia and he said he hated Australia too and when I suggested he go and find highly paid work in Germany instead he seemed annoyed.

I like the idea of cryogenic storage as it does not seem to use any exotic materials that are in short supply. I am not sure how related it is to compressed air storage but I think that during the 'charging' process the heat formed is stored temporarily through pipes under the ground in the case of the Highview process and then reused during the discharging or expansion process - I believe that is called a recuperator in technical jargon. I have read that during the expansion phase in a US compressed air storage facility has used natural gas as an additional source of energy which sets alarm bells ringing to me.

I would like the know the conversion efficiency of this process to get an idea of the overall usefulness. However if it can be made using readily and mature technology, have greater than 70% efficiency, with few exotic materials and made in the UK then it would get the thumbs up from me.

Looking at the compressed air storage it looks like it is around 50% round trip conversion efficiency which I don't think is enough.

I once went for an interview where the engineer interviewing me said they were working on a project which involved compressing air into an underground chamber that displaced water up a pipe to a tank on the surface and, it was claimed, meant that a constant pressure of air was maintained throughout the whole process unlike simply blowing air into a with no exit and the pressure going up and up. Again, it was claimed that a turbine would be more efficient with a constant pressure of air. He claimed that there were problems in that when air expands through a turbine droplets of water are formed and these can damage the turbine blades. I am sure that these problems can be overcome but it goes to show that few things are easy.

[adam2]

Compressed air and liquified air for energy storage are very closely related.

Compressed air on a scale suitable for bulk energy storage requires multiple large pressure vessels or a suitable underground cavern.
Caverns don't exist everywhere, and large pressure vessels are expensive.
There is always a slight risk of a large pressure tank bursting or exploding. Unless such large tanks are well spaced and protected by bund walls there is a slight risk of a chain reaction whereby shrapnel from one failure leads to other tanks failing.
Pressure vessels also need periodic testing and inspection at appreciable cost.

The alternative is to liquefy the air and store it non pressurised but insulated tanks, cheaper, simpler and probably safer.
To extract the energy, the liquid air is pumped into a boiler where it is heated and expands greatly. This high pressure air can then be utilised in the same ways as that from a storage tank.
Only the boiler, feed pump, and related pipework is under high pressure and in need of testing and certification.
Note that the heat input to the boiler does not imply consumption of any fuel. Ambient air, even on a cold day is plenty "hot" enough to boil liquid air.

A secondary advantage of the liquid air process is that liquid oxygen for medical purposes and liquid nitrogen may be produced by the same facility.
When air is liquified, a small proportion wont liquify because it consists of noble gases with a boiling point much lower than air.
It might be worth extracting these gases.

[Mark]

Large energy storage projects to bypass national planning system under new rules:
https://www.endsreport.com/article/1689 ... -new-rules

Conor McGlone 14 Jul 2020

The government today announced it will relax planning legislation to make it easier to construct large batteries to store renewable energy across England and Wales.

BEIS said removing barriers for energy storage projects, “which are discouraging bolder investment decisions in larger battery facilities�, could treble the number of batteries serving the electricity grid. There is currently 4GW of storage projects in the planning pipeline, which could power a combined 6 million homes, in addition to the 1GW of battery storage already in operation. Today’s move will see ministers introduce secondary legislation to remove barriers for storage projects above 50MW in England and 350MW in Wales, meaning that over 100 large-scale batteries could now be built. The legislation removes electricity storage - except pumped hydro - from the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) regime in England and Wales. This means the primary consenting route for electricity storage in England will be under the Town and Country Planning Act (TCPA) 1990.

In Wales, planning decisions for electricity storage of any size will generally be consented by the relevant local planning authority under the TCPA regime, whereas currently, this is only the case for electricity storage below 350 MW. BEIS initially proposed keeping the limits in place following a consultation in January 2019 but reversed its decision after the industry warned said planning restrictions would drive up costs and stifle investment.

The government notes that the UK has the largest installed capacity of offshore wind in the world and battery storage is critical to ensuring the UK has a constant source of renewable energy. BEIS also said energy storage had played “a key role in balancing the UK’s electricity system during the 20% drop in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring what was produced was used efficiently�. Kwasi Kwarteng, the energy and clean growth minister, said: “Removing barriers in the planning system will help us build bigger and more powerful batteries, creating more green-collar jobs and a smarter electricity network.�

[adam2]

I am impressed by the scale of the proposed battery storage, until recently I never expected utility scale battery storage to be viable, except on a small scale in special circumstances.

4GW ! approaching 10% of national demand. That was science fiction until recently.

[clv101]

There are around 30 millions cars in the UK.

If, some day, 10% were electric, and at any one time 10% of those where plugged into the grid with some fancy vehicle to grid technology. We'd have 300,000 batteries (average say 40kWh), able to discharge say 10kW on demand for an hour to two.

That's would be another 3 GW available - with ~zero capital cost, no planning issues. The cost would be to give the drivers who opt in cheaper tariffs for charging.

That's pretty conservative. What if EV penetration reached 20%, and on average 30% were available? Then you're looking at 18GW available. Not technically impossible within a decade or so?

That's how you build/fund grid scale electricity storage.

[fuzzy]

Why would anyone would volunteer to wear out their car battery? Unless the utilities keep a charge counter and pay for your battery life.

[clv101]

Two reasons; you don't actually own it, it's just leased. Read up on transport as a service. And you're paid via cheaper electricity.

[kenneal - lagger]

This lecture on Mobility as a Service (MAAS) from the Bartlett Energy Institute gives a London centric view of the idea. You might have to scroll through a bit to get to the interesting stuff.

[adam2]

I am a bit doubt doubtful about the use of EV batteries to supply power into the grid at times of shortage.

Firstly, it would require that most EV charge points be fitted with relatively sophisticated power inverters to feed energy into the grid. Somewhat similar to grid tie PV inverters, but no doubt more expensive.
Additional complications would have to be added to the wiring regulations.

Secondly, there would be considerable customer resistance, with a natural tendency to blame any breakdown, or shortfall in performance of the EV on "them" emptying it of energy or breaking it in some obscure way.
Leasing the battery would indeed overcome such problems, but seems unlikely to become popular.

Also consider the effects on the local distribution system of any significant additional back feeding.
Grid tied PV is already leading to excessive voltage rise in areas with a lot of installations.
Doubling the amount of energy fed into the local network could cause very excessive voltage rise.
And finally, how are all these vehicle to grid inverters to be controlled ? Relying only on grid frequency is probably too crude. Control via the internet adds another layer of complexity and risk of hacking.

[fuzzy]

I suppose in practice, there is no need to suck juice out of batteries. If charging a million EVs becomes normal, then base load demand will be supplied - presumably by nuclear unless we actually build tidal/wave. The signal therefore just has to throttle back charging sometimes, leaving all that capacity for other things. Perhaps EV users can set a 'charged by' time and the charger can adjust it's dip cutoff through the night to ensure full charge. This gives a very gradual demand increase for the suppliers. We may all get used to brown outs with odd supply dynamics.

[adam2]

Pausing or slowing charging of EVs at times of peak demand has a lot to commend it, and I have previously suggested exactly this.

A minority of EV users may need a full charge ASAP and this should be available, but at a higher price.
It should be relatively simple to devise an EV charge control with say 3 simple to use push buttons.

Press the red button for a full charge as quickly as possible, at a higher cost.
Press the yellow button for a cheaper charge, subject to being at least 70% charged within 10 hours.
Press the green button for the cheapest charge, subject to being at least 60% charged within 12 hours.
If no button is pushed, then your vehicle will be charged AT NO COST but this may take several days.