Submitted by Wagamaga t3_zo53e4 in technology
Comments
oDDmON t1_j0kxykm wrote
Agreed! And the “Check Yourself” section at the end was definitely a value add! 👍🏻
trustmeep t1_j0m2571 wrote
It does help avoid "wrecking yo' self"...
MedicalUnprofessionl t1_j0nhiqa wrote
#1 in self wrecking prophylaxis
IamreallynotaNPC t1_j0l836g wrote
I came here to point this out, what a great site, and sooooo cool to see an idea I have had since a kid (I am 43 now) coming to life. You could do this with any weighted objected honestly, could be dirt in a giant bucket or such, and then hoist it back with purely renewable (sun/wind/etc). I would have never thought any country would bother though.
BeShifty t1_j0li57g wrote
FYI Pumped hydro storage was already the most popular form of energy storage in the world and has been in use for more than 100 years.
hideogumpa t1_j0mqosl wrote
There's also the tower lifting concrete blocks, the pull a heavy train up a hill, the lift huge concrete cylinder storage... lots of ways to use gravity to recoup energy
einmaldrin_alleshin t1_j0naiie wrote
Concrete wouldn't be scalable though, because the mass that can be lifted is limited by the weight that the mechanism can move up and down. So you get a few minutes of power at most before all the weight is on the ground.
With pumped hydro, any single pump and turbine can pump water between huge reservoirs. They can potentially provide power through an entire night or more.
So gravity storage with solids is more an alternative to flywheels and batteries, which have a much different role in the grid.
jawshoeaw t1_j0o0jkl wrote
Concrete gravity storage has been demonstrated to be scalable. You just use more blocks of the same size. Pumped hydro is severely limited to areas that can store water without causing ecological problems. Also concrete doesn’t evaporate.
einmaldrin_alleshin t1_j0othgk wrote
Producing concrete is an ecological disaster in itself, not to mention the cost. And while it won't evaporate, it'll break down as it's stacked and unstacked for thousands of cycles.
Ixneigh t1_j0nt69t wrote
What’s the conversion rate?
Ffishsticks t1_j0lv0fl wrote
Dinorwig in Wales has been running since 1984 (construction started in 1974). Though versions have been used since 1907
modsarefascists42 t1_j0lxrl4 wrote
Check this out
https://spectrum.ieee.org/mix-mountains-and-gravity-for-longterm-energy-storage
There's another company doing something similar by building a tower and using barrels filled with garbage as the weights. Just using the excess solar energy to lift the buckets up high then let gravity return the energy. It doesn't matter if these methods are inefficient because the source of them is free solar power.
Edit: found a different company doing the same thing lol
[deleted] t1_j0omvmf wrote
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lamb_pudding t1_j0m0ucl wrote
I actually used it. At first I was like naw, I know what this article said, but it was short enough that I said why not.
bigbangbilly t1_j0m7qa6 wrote
>high quality kids journalism
Is newsforkids.net just news for a younger audiences or it it made for kids by kids like the Krusty line of clothing?
poopmaester41 t1_j0m810s wrote
In the “About” section:
“NewsForKids.net was created by a teacher to make the news accessible to kids. We carefully choose high interest stories appropriate to the audience, and present them in a way that is easy to understand.
News is necessarily complicated and messy. There’s a lot to know. We strive to make each article as self-contained as possible, giving the necessary background and not assuming that the reader already has certain knowledge. This is a daunting task. Where it is not possible to give all the necessary information within the article itself, we try to provide easily accessible resources to fill in the gaps.
We work hard to use simple language when telling the stories. Our goal is to be as inclusive as possible. It’s easy for advanced readers to read “down”, but not for struggling readers to read “up”.”
Lmao your Simpsons reference gave me a good laugh though.
bull1226 t1_j0l60ah wrote
This is nothing new, we've had something similar in Michigan for years, although not as big. Consumers Power pumps water from Lake Huron into a reservoir when electricity demand is low. When demand goes up, they release the water which then drives turbines.
IamreallynotaNPC t1_j0l8d7p wrote
Oh didn't know this. On the west side of Michigan myself and I have always wondered why we don't do something similar, but guess we do... kind of. Better to use solar/wind to move the water in the first place though, but I am sure that's being incorporated as well, or at least considered.
LJDAKM t1_j0lu5ih wrote
There is something like that in Western Michigan
dongasaurus t1_j0mgedb wrote
If there’s any solar or wind in Michigan it’s already incorporated. Hydro storage serves the same purpose whether the grid is renewable or not, it’s just a lot more necessary with more renewables on the grid.
Effective-Gas6026 t1_j0l8hj3 wrote
Its not a ”world first” kind of news, and neither does it have to be. Theres as big europe-wide energy crisis going on, you know? Perfect example of american entitlement. Everything has to always be about america.
putalotoftussinonit t1_j0la32w wrote
The Grand River Dam Authority has Lake Hudson that replenishes Grand Lake and make cheap, cheap power.
Working for GRDA is a goddamn nightmare.
DangerousMusic14 t1_j0lxlsf wrote
Grand Coulee Dam pumps water from the Columbia River up into Banks Lk in WA state.
The trick is having enough water and then having enough excess generation capacity to use to pump up hill. Water and power demands will be an increasing challenge for existing systems.
pbjamm t1_j0lq8vn wrote
There is a series of lakes in California (the Edison Lakes) built by the power utility over a century ago. No pumped hydro as far as I know but a series of man made lakes that each generate power as the water works it's way down the mountain.
beebeereebozo t1_j0lss2c wrote
The Helms Project in that area is pumped storage using Courtright and Wishon lakes. Has been operating since 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant
Deathbeddit t1_j0m9s52 wrote
Good example, I think you mean Ludington pumped storage on Lake Michigan. Pretty sure mostly powered by fossil fuels still. Another commenter provided a link, I think it’s important to emphasize that it burns more energy than it produces, not including the impact of building and maintaining the huge system. 10 to fill, 7 generated.
nyaaaa t1_j0lxtd6 wrote
> This is nothing new
Really now? You are saying the country that has 30% pumped storage generation capacity based on their total energy generation capacity, isn't new to this?
Interesting observation.
Weird flex coming from a 2% country citizen.
kuikuilla t1_j0lvo4y wrote
> can store more energy than 400,000 car batteries.
Is it too hard to tell the actual energy storage in kWh or MWh?
Edit: wiki says plant power is 900 MW and storage capacity is 20 GWh. So around 22 hours worth of capacity if used at full power.
hyphnKnight t1_j0lz5gz wrote
The car battery thing is because this is an article is targeted at kids
kuikuilla t1_j0m1651 wrote
I don't think kids care about car batteries either tbh :D
hyphnKnight t1_j0m1ahp wrote
Very fair lol, “could power your cell phone for X days”
Solid_Hunter_4188 t1_j0r2lrm wrote
It can’t be measured that way. Maybe “it can store 4,000,000 cell phone batteries worth of energy” Since it can’t actually run slow enough to charge one iPhone for any good amount of time. Then give them the watt hours.
United_Falcon8183 t1_j0m1ls5 wrote
Puts it in perspective, easier to consume for kids. Not everyone is as brilliant as you
mufasa_lionheart t1_j0l9fzy wrote
So.... pumped storage, ok
Matt_Tress t1_j0mur85 wrote
Came for this.
Eltex t1_j0ocl5n wrote
You mean like every elevated storage tank in the world?
prtt t1_j0p2w5e wrote
You mean with the tiny minuscule detail that this is the largest example of it, by a significant margin?
mufasa_lionheart t1_j0ql7ko wrote
No, most elevated storage isn't at this scale and also doesn't harness power on the way down as that would defeat the purpose of the elevated storage.
The difference between "elevated storage" (I'm assuming you are referring to things like municipal water towers) and "pumped storage" is the form of energy that it was built to store.
With "pumped storage" the stored energy is electricity in the form of potential energy. Excess grid power is used to move water from one reservoir (like a lake, not a tank) to another with a higher elevation (like up a mountain, not a tower, like 1000 feet difference, not 100). Then, once more energy is needed, they change the potential energy into electricity using turbines as the water moves to the lower reservoir. They repeat this process as needed.
This process requires massive amounts of water, and a huge elevation change to store meaningful amounts of electricity. It also requires massive pumps/turbines to take advantage of the cyclical price of grid power.
With "elevated storage" the stored energy is water pressure in the form of potential energy. This is done both to provide water pressure to higher elevation homes without the need for huge pumps and to equalize the demand for water pressure. They use a small (compared to pumped storage ones) pump to maintain a water level in the water tower which typically maintains a higher level of pressure than the pump provides.
This requires relatively low power pumps because physics gets leveraged and the tank provides a buffer to higher demand than the pump can keep up with. The tank only needs to be large enough to provide a safe buffer for peak water demand. The pump only needs to be large enough to have enough volume to easily keep up with average water demand and enough pressure to get that volume up to the tank. There also aren't any turbines impeding the outflow because that would lower the available water pressure and because the outflow could only produce a negligible amount of electricity.
iancarry t1_j0m9yhx wrote
so.... wattery?
beebeereebozo t1_j0ltemx wrote
Error_404_403 t1_j0m7ilo wrote
Provided electric motor efficiency is around 90%, pump friction energy losses are extra 10%, and generation efficiency is 80%, we have overall 60 to 70% of the energy to be stored can be recovered later on. This is a very good number, comparable to the EV battery charging efficiency of 90%. AND, unlike the battery, the number of charge/discharge cycles is not limited for the hydroelectric storage!
[deleted] t1_j0kxwq0 wrote
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JapaneseJohnnyVegas t1_j0lu9tm wrote
Like turlough Hill in Ireland. Built in 60s I think. Cool idea.
transmitthis t1_j0m0kkv wrote
Always thought having this on a personal level instead of a massive bank of expensive batteries, for house use would be an interesting project.
Maybe it wouldn't work at all, but I imagine a large cylinder made from lead encased in mild steel. That is in the basement, or corner of a property. It's then raised with excess power - electrically.
A full roof of solar for a day = being able to raise this really heavy weight about a third of it's full range
Any time you need the energy you release the weight, it slowly comes back down producing electricity - which can be temporally stored and cleaned up in a small battery / Victron arrangement to power house use.
luxmesa t1_j0mc4xn wrote
I wanted to do some quick math on this.
Let’s say you’re trying to replace a power wall. That’s 13.5 kWh or 48.6 MJ. It takes 9.8 joules to lift 1 kg to a height of 1 m in Earth’s gravity. Let’s say the height of your basement is 3 meters. The weight would need to be 1,650 metric tons to replace the powerwall.
vAltyR47 t1_j0mvwsg wrote
I wanted to see how big this would actually need to be.
Let's say we're using cast iron. Density is 7800 kg/m^3, so you'd need approximately 211 cubic meters of solid cast iron, which is a cube with side length of approximately 6 meters. So you'd need two stories just to fit the thing in your house, and another to be able to lift the required amount.
So that's obviously impractical, let's use a denser metal. The densest metal material is osmium at 22,600 kg/m^3, resulting in a block 73 m^3 which is a cube with side length 4 meters, which still doesn't fit in your basement, but we can probably fit most of the mechanism into two stories.
The densest know element is hassium, which gets you down to a cube with side length 3.4 m, which still doesn't fit in your basement (let alone the height needed to lift) and has the minor drawback of a half-life of 10 seconds.
So short of exotic materials you generally only find in stars, such a system is fairly impractical on the household scale.
I think this example really highlights the main drawback of these kinds of energy storage systems: they take up a lot of volume.
vellyr t1_j0n7ph5 wrote
Why is a six-meter cube impractical? Lots of people have that much space on their property in America, and you could easily make it taller/narrower and put most of it underground.
jawshoeaw t1_j0o0ws2 wrote
Impractical for small suburban lots/homes. Quite feasible for larger properties. Of course water would probably be used as it’s readily available. Or maybe dirt /sand?
Longjumping_Meat_138 t1_j0or66e wrote
Water is best, Dirt and Sand would be impractical. But we have to think about the fact that the Storage system together would be the size of two large cars. The issue with storage would be most problamatic and so would the cost of building these tanks. It could easily ho upto 20,000 dollars for two tanks if not higher.
[deleted] t1_j0msbik wrote
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dangil t1_j0mc9px wrote
What’s the efficiency of this?
poke826 t1_j0mcxz4 wrote
According to this article >The output is more than 80%: for every kilowatt hour of electricity used to pump the water upstream, 0.8 is fed into the grid.
Martholomeow t1_j0mn34m wrote
This article is written as if it was for kids!
mryosho t1_j0mpx0q wrote
i'd be curious what the economics of covering the reservoirs with floating solar panels would be...
Jkay064 t1_j0mqy35 wrote
I wonder how much stored energy is lost per year due to unavoidable, constant evaporation of the lake.
blindside1 t1_j0odo0f wrote
Shade balls (floating balls on the surface of the water) can reduce that evaporation by 80+ percent.
Afa1234 t1_j0nift6 wrote
Always loved this idea, I’ve always thought it should be put into practice on the west coast, paired with desalination plants and doubling as water reservoirs.
vahntitrio t1_j0on1m2 wrote
There aren't many locations in the world where you can pull this off. You need topography that just doesn't happen in many places.
Afa1234 t1_j0onkr6 wrote
Too true, which is why they should take advantage of the places that can
things_U_choose_2_b t1_j0nnzj1 wrote
Whenever I see these projects, I think about something, maybe it's a dumb idea but...
considering they're using water, gravity and 'free' energy from renewables...
What if, instead of these giant reservoirs, you had a vertical tube of very very very dense liquid? Surely that would maximise the energy it could store while minimising the space used?
Cynical_Cabinet t1_j0o2nh6 wrote
The way you do that is a hydraulic piston. Make the piston out of some really heavy materials, and then pump in water underneath to lift it. That's the only potentially feasible way to do gravity storage that isn't a traditional pumped hydro storage.
stewartm0205 t1_j0oly27 wrote
Regular dams could be used to back renewable. Keep the output of the dam low when there is enough renewable and ramp it up when there is less renewable. The good thing about dams is that it only take minutes to raise their output.
wetclogs t1_j0pts83 wrote
Pumped hydro should be used with the existing hydroelectric systems to take advantage of solar and wind. The Columbia Gorge seems like an ideal location.
Trax852 t1_j0no1bg wrote
> Switzerland has opened a massive “water battery” that will help store energy for Europe. The plant works by storing water, which can later be used to generate power.
We call those Dams elsewhere in the world.
cn45 t1_j0rvr08 wrote
Usually when it’s a battery in concept that means pumping the water back up to the lake when energy is cheaper like at night.
The_Ombudsman t1_j0m3na6 wrote
Neat!
Now I have a question: for a given volume of water, how much power is produced coming down through the turbines, and how much power would it cost to pump that same volume of water back up to the upper reservoir?
I really doubt they can get more power out than they use; otherwise it'd just be running all the time, free electricity! But I'm curious what the figures would be anyway.
FriendlyDespot t1_j0m55fq wrote
Between inefficiencies in the pumping, and inefficiencies in the generating turbines, pumped hydro storage is around 75-85% efficient. It's pretty great.
Deathbeddit t1_j0mb39x wrote
The Ludington plant in MI is about 77% efficient iirc, not including energy for maintenance etc. It’s an open system pulling water in from Lake Mi and kills TONS of fish. Like bonkers amounts of fish, even though there are nets to try to exclude them. Also filling is mostly powered by fossil fuels today. An increasing fraction of energy to fill it comes from Renewables but that’s a work in progress. It is a steep design in a lot of ways and I am expecting new technologies will continue to be more appealing. I don’t know what the failure of the embankments would look like but I wouldn’t want to be near it myself.
ckach t1_j0mbgn8 wrote
It's probably somewhat common knowledge, but the physics are pretty straightforward.
Energy = (mass of the water) * (acceleration of gravity) * (height it goes down)
Acceleration of gravity is ~10m/s/s
Height is in meters, usually several hundred for these projects
Mass of the water is in kg. 1 cubic meter of water is 1,000kg, so you can get the mass straight from the size of the reservoir.
The energy will be in Joules. For there are 3.6 million joules in a kwh, so divide to get it in kwh.
So, if you have 50k cubic meters of water going down 500m, that would be
(50,000 * 1000)kg * 10m/s/s * 500m / 3,600,000 ~ 70,000 kwh
50,000 cubic meters of water would be 10m x 50m x 100m, for example.
Weareallgoo t1_j0mg5y9 wrote
This is not quite correct. Your formula is for potential energy. To calculate the power generated by a hydro power turbine, you need to use flow rate (l/s) or mass rate (kg/s), and include head loss and turbine efficiency.
Also, 1 cubic meter of water has a mass of 1000kg, not 50,000kg
ckach t1_j0mi9yu wrote
Yeah, I just wanted to go over energy rather than power since it's what is usually more important to the discussion. Another comment mentioned efficiency, so I didn't bother with it.
The 50k kg was definitely a mistake on my part. I tried editing it from 1k to 50k cubic meters in the example, but must have changed the wrong 1,000.
schwangeronis t1_j0mhf9i wrote
The main reason these batteries are attractive is that they only pump when there’s excess power in the system, which is a hurdle for wind and solar power. So if the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing the battery is discharging water.
The_Ombudsman t1_j0mxhxq wrote
That's all well and good, and was covered in the article.
Doesn't really answer my question though.
schwangeronis t1_j0n87ig wrote
Oh right, there’s loss in the system. I can’t answer how it compares to a conventional battery, but I can say it’s cheaper
eli7vh t1_j0m9b13 wrote
Isn’t this kind of … inefficient?
blindside1 t1_j0odq8l wrote
Yes, but given we don't have a decent battery to make a smart grid work it will have to do for now.
[deleted] t1_j0l427d wrote
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jwatson876 t1_j0la75e wrote
How dumb are you?
sadelbrid t1_j0lrufu wrote
I don't think anyone here knows 1) your point or 2) how it's even related to water batteries.
bad_motivator t1_j0lw5ax wrote
You know this is a public forum right? Why would you humiliate yourself like that?
ImminentZero t1_j0lmt2g wrote
Can you explain what you mean by this?
[deleted] t1_j0lrewf wrote
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Why_Separate_Knobb t1_j0m5lv8 wrote
It's antivax so gotta pretty dumb
[deleted] t1_j0mhz4r wrote
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ImminentZero t1_j0mq3nh wrote
I understand what a house of cards is. What is the relevance here to vaccines and power storage?
papayahog t1_j0lvwc6 wrote
Lmaooooooooo okay
poopmaester41 t1_j0ktztc wrote
This is some high quality kids journalism. Bravo Switzerland!