Grid scale battery storage, coming to a field near here....

[ProDave]

An interesting flyer popped through the door today, sent to all houses in the locality.

 

Just over the hill from here, on the way into town, they are starting the initial planning of a grid scale battery storage plant.

 

The proposal is to take over a field next to a local substation, and fill it with battery storage.  Details are scarce at the moment but the companies website talks of short term storage, up to 4 hours, to charge at times of surplus renewable energy and discharge at peak demand times.

 

It won't affect us, it will be well out of site and probably not very visible either from the road as the substation it will be adjacent to is down in a dip.

 

Someone thinks it is now viable to spend a lot of money on a lot of batteries.

[SteamyTea]

10 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Someone thinks it is now viable to spend a lot of money on a lot of batteries.

If you look on the Elexon website you can see how cheap excess Scottish wind power is, and how expensive emergency extra generation is.

Large scale storage is much cheaper than domestic level, though I do think if most houses had 1 kWh of storage that could deliver at 3 kW of power, that would be very useful. It would be owned by the power companies, rather than the householder. That way people cannot tinker with it.

[Dillsue]

42 minutes ago, ProDave said:

It won't affect us

With a very large quantity of potentially toxic chemicals stored near me Id be wanting to know all the measures taken to deal with fire, chemical leaks etc. I know very little about battery chemistry but I doubt the contents are something you want drifting in the air or leaching into local ground water.

[Roger440]

9 minutes ago, Dillsue said:

With a very large quantity of potentially toxic chemicals stored near me Id be wanting to know all the measures taken to deal with fire, chemical leaks etc. I know very little about battery chemistry but I doubt the contents are something you want drifting in the air or leaching into local ground water.

No one seems to care about litium leaking into the environment. Id go so far as to say its going to be an environmental disaster many years from now.

 

All the batteries from phones, laptops and other consumer electrical stuff just goes straight to landfill. 

 

Eventually thats going to end up in the ground and our water.

[ProDave]

10 minutes ago, Dillsue said:

With a very large quantity of potentially toxic chemicals stored near me Id be wanting to know all the measures taken to deal with fire, chemical leaks etc. I know very little about battery chemistry but I doubt the contents are something you want drifting in the air or leaching into local ground water.

It's about a mile from us, over the brow of a hill, and not upwind (prevailing wind) of us.  In fact there is only one house close to it, and that is a croft.  I would not be happy if I was that croft, but it would not surprise me if it was their land the plant will be on, and they will be adequately compensated so they don't worry about it.

[GavH]

It might not be an electrical battery.

We had a proposal in Caithness, for a mechanical CO²  battery to be trialled.

 

Use spare electricity to liquify CO² for the air and store in Tanks.  Then at a later time expand through turbines to generate electricity.

 

 

[SteamyTea]

13 minutes ago, GavH said:

CO²

Seems an odd choice of gas.  I think CO₂ is only liquid in a very narrow pressure/temperature band, the critical point.

Though for CO₂ that is a reasonable 304K and 7.4 MPa, so maybe that is the reason.  Easy to store at 30°C and 7.3 Atmosphere.  Lightweight kit.

Edit: Whoops, DuckDuckGo saw MPa as mPa, so 1073 PSI, or 73 Atms.  Still not extreme.

Edited April 27, 2022 by SteamyTea

[ProDave]

It sounds like batteries to me.  the flyer says:

 

"It would comprise of a compound of electrical equipment, battery units, transformers, store and energy meter building"

 

There was one company on the news recently building a trial storage plant that literally wound a stack of concrete blocks to the top of a tower to store energy then let them back down again to generate energy.

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

 

There was one company on the news recently building a trial storage plant that literally wound a stack of concrete blocks to the top of a tower to store energy then let them back down again to generate energy.

Why not just pump water up and down an old water tower.

Lower embodied carbon footprint.

[markc]

33 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Why not just pump water up and down an old water tower.

Lower embodied carbon footprint.

Energy density, they are building towers of dense concrete or steel blocks and a automatic crane grabs and places the blocks or grabs and lowers them to the floor. You would need a massive water tower to hold an equivalent mass and height difference. They are also looking at deep shaft variants 

[SteamyTea]

Concrete and steel are about 3 times the density of water.

Water though, can easily run downhill, in a suitable pipe, and any angle.