Highview Developing 50MW/500MWh Liquid Air Energy Storage Facility in Chile
highviewpower.com
highviewpower.com
I like that it can potentially run for decades without chemical degradation, and that it is environmentally friendly since most of the parts (compressors, dryers, generators, tanks) can be recycled down the line with minimal environmental impact.
Things that seem concerning at first glance:
* Maintaining sub -196'C requires a lot of complex refrigeration, monitoring and pressurization equipment, which can be prone to failure (see Hampson–Linde cycle). The expansion factor of liquid air to air is roughly 800x.
* Round-trip energy efficiency: I can't see a system taking electrical input to produce liquid air on the way in and similarly to run a turbine generator on the other end without having substantial losses both ways... I believe Tesla is around 88% on their system.
* Gasses used in refrigeration continue to be an environmental and health concern even with modern compounds.
Hopefully with some cost scaling or proof of longevity it can be a valid solution.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampson%E2%80%93Linde_cycle
Not opposed to it, though. While I don’t think it’s a slam-dunk win against batteries by any stretch, it’s good enough not to be a waste of money if someone builds one (which is probably true for that cement-block gravity energy storage thing).
It has been done, in a laboratory. Scrap steel is routinely sold at market rate.
Furthermore Chile has a democratic government, not a communist dictatorship, so it's extremely unlikely for something like that to occur there.
A totalitarian state directs all of its population's efforts in pursuit of state goals. The USSR during WWII (Or during the civil war, or during the years in between the civil war and WWII) would strongly qualify - and between Stalin's death, and Glasnost, would semi-strongly qualify. North Korea would strongly qualify. Singapore, modern Russia, or modern-day China would not, because most activity that takes place in them is undirected market economics. They have a few directed economic areas, deemed of import to the state, but for the majority of activity taking place in them, the state is not involved significantly closer than it is in western countries.
Fukushima was hit by an earthquake and tsunami. Most deaths attributed to the Fukushima disaster were people who froze to death because they couldn't afford heating after electricity price hike caused by Fukushima's shutdown.
Keep in mind that nuclear plants have been operating since these incidents all over the world, without further problems. There are over 440 reactors are running right now. Even the Chernobyl power plant kept operating the remaining three reactors until the year 2000.
Do you have a source for this? How many froze, and of those which were for economic reasons?
I was in Japan at the time, and the assertion doesn't look right, unless it's comparing tiny numbers: e.g. zero nuclear deaths and two frozen through economics, technically means "most deaths" were from freezing.
Yes, both are small numbers of people. I think it's a very illustrative effect — how few people were directly affected by the disaster, and how second-order effects affecting whole populations are magnified. Similarly how fear of flying after 9/11 caused people to take less-safe-per-mile car instead.
Even if the model holds correct, the government's policy to shutdown reactors immediately was likely the right choice. Just in terms of number of expected deaths.
Two factors lead me to think so: aftershock risk and the possibility of systemic failure in the nuclear industry.
Oil & Gas kill far more people every hour of every day.
If we followed your logic trains and cars and airplanes would have never taken off.
If 'gases under pressure' is a deal breaker for you, I hope you don't use gasoline, or buy any products that are shipped by gas-powered, or diesel-powered vehicles.
Doesn't say much without any volumes attached to it.
Even at intermediate scale, ammonia is preferred.
Well you can just power an engine on the temperature gradient. That's going to incur some losses though. This seems to be the downside of storing energy cooling stuff, you have to fight the second law of thermodynamics both ways.
It is typically a mistake to assume people behind an innovative development, that they are spending $150M on, are idiots.
Turbo- and super-charging enables an engine with a given displacement to take in more air, and thus can burn more fuel, than one that must fill cylinders with no more than ambient air pressure; and can thereby deliver more power. It doesn't change the engine's thermodynamic profile.
I suppose that in theory the cooling step would be where you could recoup your losses a bit by using an efficient heat pump, but getting the coefficient of performance greater than 1 could be pretty difficult for such extreme temperature differences.
So, more storage is better.
Storing for say 1 month means you get 12 payouts per year, storing it for 12 hours means you get 365 payouts per year. If your on average getting say 1c/kWh from the distance in values prices every day then your monthly sale needs to be at 30c/kWh to be worth it. Prices simply don’t rise that high every month making long term storage less valuable than daily storage.
On top of this these things aren’t 100% efficient. Buying at 7c/kWh and selling at 8c/kWh is losing money if these are say 80% efficient. Which means you’re never going to profitably buy and sell throughout the day. Thus the 500MWh capacity will mean some long term storage.
So we do need long-term storage and we will have to finance it so that when we need it, we can count on it
Next solar and wind don’t correlate and solar output never hits zero on cloudy days. So, excess capacity always directly reduces the need for storage. Working out the ideal amount of excess capacity isn’t trivial, but unless storage costs tank dramatically something like 85+% on worst case days is likely viable. Which could then easily be covered by hydro.
A large issues is islands, but plenty of people setup off grid houses completely dependent on Solar. It’s simply generally more expensive.
I am very glad you are not responsible for planning for the availability of power I depend on.
Now, if your saying Chile can’t trust it’s maintaining good relationships with any of those 3 counties then sure.
All the tradeoffs, together, are an optimization problem that is not hard to solve for conditions found. Since the ultimate source of power, solar, is the cheapest ever devised, they start with a huge advantage. It would be foolish to bet against them.
This apparatus is for use mainly when the sun is not shining, or when it is not shining enough. Sometimes the sun barely penetrates the clouds, and then you need a boost all day. Maybe it would be cheaper to import power from a dam in Paraguay than to keep your tanks full and cold until you need it. But it might be cheaper to buy power only if they know you don't really need to.
Energy economics are more complicated than we can safely generalize about here. The safe bet is that somebody spending $150M has thought it through.
The other grid storage I wonder about was that Army salt water battery that Jeff Dahn said fairly effusive things about a few years ago. I have heard nothing of it since, so I assume it had cycle problems or other fundamental issues.
Scaling it out proportionally would only have economies of bulk purchase and site engineering.
("Thermodynamic analysis of a hybrid energy storage system based on compressed air and liquid air" by Bharath Kantharaj, Seamus Garvey, Andrew Pimm)
https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/OutputFile/75803...
Obviously, besides batteries, you need other components to transmit, convert, etc electricity, yet the difference is quite large.
I guess question becomes - how much it will cost to maintain such cryogenic storage solution vs replacing lead acid batteries over time.
EDIT: while shopping for a used UPS unit for my server rack, with expectation that the unit itself will come without batteries and I will purchase new batteries separately, I was getting about $125-$150 per kWh for everything, including UPS itself and a set of new batteries.
I am not proposing to use used tech to build such a storage, just interesting to look at prices.
biased/sponsored test but still casually informative test of actual lead-acid performance: https://youtu.be/iy3hga_P5YY
PS: lead-acid is very dull at self discharge.
> That makes me wonder why they went with this system.
Cost, presumably. The stated figures would give $300/kWh, which seems to be about where the all-in cost for lithium ion facilities lands, but this would likely have a longer lifespan.
Notably to me is that cost per mega watt hour varies a lot more than two to one. Which says to me energy storage is economically feasible using a number of different technlogies.
"Liquid Air Energy Storage systems have the potential to be a competitive local and grid scale energy storage technology. They also have the potential to facilitate the penetration of renewable energy technologies. However, there is a clear disconnect between what has been proven in literature, and what has been demonstrated in practice."
I'm very concerned with the credibility of that source based on this alone. Unpublished and/or future-dated articles are to be taken with a pile of salt.
This kind of publishing is becoming more and more common, most likely to boost the journals impact factor (average number of citation within 2 years of publication). It's sketchy but doesn't say much about the article, only the journal.
There are likely other engineering factors involved, but those efficiency figures are pretty damning on the surface.
Also from Wikipedia, the efficiency if 25% if you let the heat of liquefaction and the "cold" of vaporization go to waste, but it can be improved to 70% if you store that heat and re-inject it in the cycle.
Mostly wondering where and how they store the liquid air. Metal tanks? Underground caverns?
As they get bigger, storing the heat removed in molten salt might prove useful.
The tradeoff of excellent underground insulation vs. accessibility for maintenance is tricky. For the case of molten salt, expectation of corrosion complicates it further.
With any luck, plummeting aerogel insulation cost will make the question moot.