by Timon Singh
When this author was 10 years old, he was playing with Micro Machines and generally being a nuisance. He definitely wasn’t discovering a new molecule called tetranitratoxycarbon that can be used for anything from energy storage to creating explosives. However, that is exactly what 10 year old Clara L. Lazen has done.
China just took a massive step forward for renewable energy as it flipped the switch on the world’s largest battery, which will help integrate a solar project and a wind farm into a smart grid. Capable of storing 36 megawatt hours of power and taking up the area of a football field, the giant battery bank was built as a joint venture between solar and electric car company BYD and the State Grid Corporation of China to improve a large wind and solar electric installation’s efficiency by 5-10%. It looks like we have a race to see who will have the largest battery in world as utilities struggle to make solar and wind technologies usable for longer periods of time.
I don’t understand why researchers are not trying harder to crack better energy storage solutions. Instead, all the focus seems to be on finding new clean sources of energy. That’s important, of course, but if we could vastly improve energy storage we could presumably make do with the energy sources we already have? And intermittent renewables such as wind and solar would be so much more attractive.
BrightSource Energy is a leading solar thermal energy company. In California, it’s in the process of planning and building some of the largest solar thermal power plants in the world. (For more on its technology, see the last paragraph of this post. For more background, check out our BrightSource Energy page.)
Yesterday, the company announced that it is adding “its SolarPLUS thermal energy storage capability to three of its power purchase agreements with Southern California Edison (SCE).” It now has two solar thermal power plants scheduled to be finished and delivering energy in 2015, and three, with storage, scheduled to deliver electricity in 2016 and 2017. (And, BrightSource — with partners NRG Energy, Google, and Bechtel — are building a 126-megawatt plant for Southern California Edison at the Ivanpah solar project in southeast California).
A new subway development in Warsaw, Poland, captures the braking energy from its metro cars and stores it to boost another train’s acceleration to the next station.
Regenerative braking for trains is picking up steam from the West Coast of the USA to the East, and also in Europe. The energy recovered from a Polish metro car as it decelerate is enough to power a 60 watt light bulb for more than a week. This energy help to accelerate another train on the same section of the line. The key technologies are substations and an energy storage system, based on double-layer super-capacitors, all of which are being supplied by ABB.
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