I've said it before - there's a massive storage facility in California for LNG. It made headlines a few years ago when it was leaking. Turn that giant gas tank into a cryobattery. We know that California needs energy storage!
I live in Los Angeles, and I wouldn't mind a mass-production air filter removing particulates, carbon, and ... oh yeah act as a grid buffer. This tech is so simple and it's going to let the fossil fuel energy production land gracefully! Thanks for the update!
This was great! Been following them for a long time. Dr Javier Cavada is such a nice person, and had a 17 year career at Wärtsilä Corporation, Finland (where I am from).
It seems to me that between lithium, Liquid metal, and liquid air batteries, the grid storage problem is solved - bring on solar and wind - the constraint is gone.
Really sounds like the right approach, no matter what the efficiency might be, as long as it is long lasting, repairable/recycable... But I really would like to know what the round trip efficiency is, they can currently achieve? And how does it compare to redox flow batteries?
I looked at this a few years ago and they only seemed to be taking money from the sort of people who can put 100K in (and not worry too much if it all fails). So far as I can tell that's still true.
@@Wookey. yeah-- I don't really see the benifits of going through all that trouble to liquify --- when simple compressed air in tanks would probably be easier---- and then just running pneumatic motors.......... especially when stored hydro and gravity batteries seem even easier to build.... Seems like it would lose efficency pretty fast,the longer that you would have to store it... Think of the energy it takes to refriderate things......... and again, I don't even understand the benifits. ....... Seems like using that surplus energy to make hydrogen and use the hydrogen to burn in turbines, would be even easier.. who knows. I'd love to see technical comparisons on all these ideas.
@@calholli Compressed air storage is a thing too. 'CAES' as opposed to 'LAES'. There is a large one in Germany using a salt cavern, but it's only 42% efficient. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage The issue is managing the heat generated by compression. CAES with caverns has the same problem as pumped hydro - you can only use it in places with convenient geography. Insulated tanks can be built anywhere and storage loses are quite low for large tanks. Highview do some clever stuff to move waste heat from the compressors to the expansion turbines, which significantly improves efficiency. Newer CAES designs do too, but none of those are online yet so we don't know exactly how the efficiencies compare. Making Hydrogen by electrolysis is 70% efficient, but that's only one way. Burn it in a turbine is 50-60% so round-trip efficiency is only 35%. That's worse than diabatic CAES. It does have the advantage of geographic independence and the electrolysis part can be very small-scale. And you can use the hydrogen directly as fuel. I agree comparisons would be very interesting. As new both CAES and LAES plant is being constructed we will no doubt get some real numbers soon. Overall I think LAES could turn out to be very popular if the cost is as good as Javier says.
@@calholli *"especially when stored hydro and gravity batteries seem even easier to build.... "* Hydro is dependent on geography. And gravity batteries either require massive holes in the ground or elaborate block towers with coordinated cranes. These are all part of the solution but liquid air seems the most scalable. The closer the storage is to the consumer the better so transmission losses occur when charged by surplus solar/wind instead of having the bulk of transmission losses between storage and consumer. *"Think of the energy it takes to refriderate things"* You can either keep it liquid by refrigeration or keeping it under pressure in an insulated chamber. We had liquid oxygen carts in the Air Force. They were fine sitting out in 100F+ weather with negligible losses from expansion. But I assume if thermal expansion is unavoidable for liquid air then that can just be used to generate electricity or cooling etc..
was telling people about this 11 yrs ago, most of them thought I was nuts and certain industries very much, still, don't want this type of change to happen. We will get there though, there are compressed air driven cars to, they used carbon fibre tanks below capacity.
Was talking about liquid air cars in the Nineties but I lazily never did the research to determine the amount of energy per a given amount of liquid air. Does anyone know? In looking at compressed air cars, I come up with about 133 W/hr. per liter for liquid but the energy out will depend on the efficiency of the turbine or motor. If this is say 70%, then it gets about 100 W/hr. elec. out per liter. This is about a third or less of what a Lion would deliver by mass I estimate. However, if the waste heat from liquefaction is stored by say, molten salt, the overall efficiency could reach 60%. Solar air heating panels on the car body could increase this further. It could make for a cheap car with all the air conditioning you could use.
Extracting CO2 by liquifying air takes too much energy to be cost-effective. But if you have to liquify the air anyway, the equation changes quite a bit. This alone should make the approach attractive, given the carbon-capture side-effect.
I don't really understand the benefit of liquifying it--- Why not just compress the air and be done with it. Seems like it takes a lot more energy to cool it down that much, into a liquid------- and keeping it stored at that low temp??? which I don't really understand the process that well, or how or even why its done.. lol But I would think that there would have to be a benifit over simple compression alone. but I agree with you, that the extra side effect of scrubbing the c02 out at the same time is pretty awesome.. at least from a "climate change" type marketing gimmick at the very least.
The removal of of the CO2 sounds teriffic until you look at at the overall amount. 1000's of these things running for hundreds of years would hardly make a difference. The solar on my roof for 1 1/2 years has helped reduce 12.6 tons of CO2.
@@Wookey. "Stored hydro"?? How does that work?---------- I would guess, basically pumping water high into a resevoir and then running a turbine with it like a hydro dam, when needed? if its not this, then what?
Solar and wind power output are very different in colder and winter months typically a factor of 2. Storing energy efficiently across seasons in this case would cost 25% less.
It depends on the type of storage tank and delivery system used. In Brymill's LongLast Storage Tank, liquid nitrogen has a static holding time of up to 220 days.
I love such concepts and technologies, I would just love to hear the efficiency of them. In every interview where you talk about energy storage. What's the efficiency? I think it is a key metric and should always be covered. Thank you.
OK, but what's the round-trip efficiency? For me it seems like there's a huge amount of waste with the cooling and reheating. If the losses are not too horrible, then the super low cost and the practically unlimited capacity would still worth it, but only for long term storage, but not for daily cycling. Maybe you can even store energy for the entire winter. The other issue is the large scale. We are moving from large power plants to distributed energy generation and storage, so this doesn't fit well into the new system.
Did you find out? Id say its not that efficient. Theyd need waste heat source to keep it relatively efficient. Id say 15% to compress 15% to expand and 10% to store.. not to mention cost of filtrations and compressing and heat pumps.
I know he said that the only condition is make it BIG, so how small is small? Can it store energy for Hospitals, Commercial areas, or Malls? Love to have one in my house, power 🔋, clean water and cleaner air. 👌
I don't think there were any questions about efficiency. Their brochure (link below) says "60% efficiency in standalone configuration" and "70%+ efficiency by utilising waste heat or cold". This is pretty good and way better than hydrogen + fuel cell, but a bit less than Dinorwig (pumped hydro UK) at 74-76%. Sounds like a winner if these figures are correct. They were founded in 2005, are privately owned and located in London. in Central Londonwww.highviewpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Highview-Brochure-November-2017-Online-A4-web.pdf
Is it possible to use the de-commissioned fossil fuel power station generators to connect to the Compressed Air tanks. To me it would make sense, you already have the generators and the connection to the grid.
So are they running the turbines just simply by the pressure, almost as you would steam? or are they using the "air' as a mixture into a combustion process?... Its not exactly clear how they turn the tanks of air back into something useful..... I have seen a car that has a "pnumatic piston engine-- But it had to be a very high pressure... Which I suppose if you are compressing air so much that it turned into liquid--- I'm sure its high pressure. lol. This is actually very interesting......... Between this battery and a gravity battery-- it really does make wind and solar make so much more sense.
I would really like to know how much % energy is wasted currently just because we can't switch off hydro or other plants. CO2 capture hmm 🤔 interesting, solving two problems the same time. Could they capture the exhaust of coal plants? 🤔
Pump pneumatic : OK enough description. Not enough data on Watt-out versus watt- consume per cycle Watt-out versus operating, maintenance cost Watt-out versus investment cost.
We need to start talking about long distance high voltage DC energy transmission. The high voltage lines we have now loose a lot of energy. High voltage DC doesn’t have that issue. Current the problem with high voltage DC is the cost of the equipment.
Existing HV transmission is reasonably efficient. The UK HV grid only loses 4-7% for example. It's just that the longer the distance the better DC looks, so for very long lines or connections between unsyncronised grids it's better than AC (but also much more expensive).
I don't beleive that's true. Edison and Tesla already had these wars back when they were deciding what system was going to be built; and I believe it was proven that DC has a much greater voltage drop across long distances, and you have to build amplifier stations along the way. I don't recall with any real certainty though --- I just remermber seeing something like that on, maybe TLC back in the day-- like a mini documentary style show.
@@calholli Go read some references rather than speculating/disagreeing on the basis of half-remembered documentaries :-) . What I said is correct. Wikipedia is generallly a good reference.
@@Wookey. I graduated in 2000. Took electronics class and graduated as a general electronics technician. I also worked for a couple years as an electrician, I quit at the journeyman level. I also trimmed trees around the power line companies for over 5 years; So I'm not completely ignorant to how electricity works, just a little rusty because its been awhile. I thought about it for a few moments: I believe the comparison I was referring to was todays AC transmission lines vs trying to send 220 DC down the power lines--- which is a dumb comparison, and makes sense why I remember them needing booster stations along the way from heat losses due to all the current being transferred. Obviously it has to be high voltage, to lower the current and minimize losses. The argument was that you can't easily step the voltages up on DC through simple and cheap transformers, like you can AC. So you would have to transfer at the voltage that it was being generated, which is much lower than the 765kv AC that is used today... meaning the losses would be too high. So obviously it must be stepped up, and the only real way to do that (DC) is to take the generated AC voltage and step it up through transformers (which is what we do already) and then add on the extra cost of building huge high voltage converter stations to convert to DC..... and again, once it reaches the destination, there is no real way to lower the voltage back down without building yet another huge converter station (back to AC) so that you can step it back down through transformers again (as we already do) to primary voltages. All of our in home systems can't easily be converted to a DC system without everyone buying all new appliances and bulbs, ect.. So there is no real point in sending DC all the way to the home........... And even if there are minimal effeciency gains from HVDC, you have all that extra cost of building the huge converter stations on both ends. It just seems like another layer of complexity and cost without enough reduction in losses to offset the expense. Maybe if you are building the entire infrastructure from scratch, like in a 3rd world country that doesn't have anything yet--- then maybe you could integrate it for the longest transmission runs and it might make sense.... One of the main advantages of HVDC is that you only need 2 conductors instead of three and you can use smaller conductors due to not having the induction losses, interference losses, and skin affect losses-- But our infrastructure is already built, so you wouldn't be able to get those gains unless you are building a long line for the first time.. And it would have to be long distance for it to add up enough reduction in loses to make it worth building those large converters.... I can see possible situations when it could actaully make sense, and once its built,the running costs in the long term would make it worth it.. Sorry so long, but you said you wanted to "talk about it" -- lol
@@calholli Exactly. So DC is normally used for new interconnects that are _either_ very long or connect unsynchronised grids, although we have two quite short subsea ones in the UK that are just instead of conventional AC links . We have 7 already in use and 2 more under construction: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Maps and there are plenty more around Europe and the world. So they clearly do make sense in practice.
I was hoping you'd ask some actual questions, maybe some technical ones. This interview sounds too much like a superficial marketing video straight from a company's website.
yeah same--- I was very curious how the tanks of air can be converted back into something useful..... but from I can surmise.. . Just think of it as a pnumatic air compressor. Basically when the grid (especially wind and solar) are running at a surplus because of low demand at that moment ------- they can run these systems to use that extra electricity to compress the air into tanks---- and then when its time to use it, they just run that compressed air through a turbine just like a steam engine operations.. I'm not exactly sure why they liquifiy it, maybe it makes it easier to store.... but it makes sense in that can help level up the peaks and lows of a randomly running solar and wind system--- and turn on and off at will, as needed......... There is also something called a "gravity battery" --- Which is basically a large tower or even deep vertical mining shaft--- that, when you are in surplus--- you can run an electrical crane to lift very large, many TON blocks of concrete or stone and hang them side by side in the air---- and then when you need that extra power--- you just go the other way, and grab those blocks with your crane and let it free fall down the shaft, pulling the crane cables holding it--- which would then run those large electric motors in reverse and create electricity. Much like regenerative braking works. I think that's really fascinating also. Very cool stuff. It really makes the intermittent issue of solar and wind to not be an issue. But I can imagine that you would have to build a lot of these. lol...
@@calholli Why liquefy air at cryogenic temperatures? Because it enables you to store a lot more air in a given tank size without worrying about several tons pipe bombs. When it is time to re-expand the cryogenic liquefied air to run a turbine, just pump it through a heat exchanger.
@@teardowndan5364 So you have to constantly keep it cool and then heat it up. Doesn't sound very efficient. I guess if you aren't storing it for more than a day at a time.
@@calholli A high-vacuum Dewar flask can take months for its contents to finish boiling off and this gets better as the ratio of volume to surface area increases, no problem for long-term storage. The main selling point of this stuff is that you can have easily scalable pumped-hydro style storage anywhere without rare materials. Most energy storage only has 70-80% cycle efficiency so if you are really concerned about efficiency, the best is to not need energy storage in the first place. Storage is only necessary to buffer variations between sources and sinks over a given period.
Calholli--- you were wondering why they would liquify the air. If you compress any gas (carbon dioxide, nitrogen, helium, carbon monoxide, air, etc.) enough, it liquifies. There is nothing to stop any gas from liquifying if you compress it enough.
The downside of this company is that liquifying air is not a very efficient use of solar or wind power. But this is certainly a good way to handle major surges in intermittent renewable energy. If the strategy is to massively overload the grid with renewable capacity and balance with storage, this company will be clutch.
You really should’ve asked about how this technology compares with hydrogen energy storage. The EU, the US, and Asia all have governments that seem to be very interested in hydrogen for storage. How do we get them to consider LAES instead? Does it have any advantages over hydrogen that we can use to help sell this?
Pumped Hydro runs 70-75% efficiency Liquid air runs 60-70+% depending on how effectively the waste heat is used. Hydrogen runs 20-45% depending on H2 formation, storage and generation methods used. Hydrogen will have a very limited use cases. It is primarily being pushed by and funded by current fossil fuel companies in order to prolong their viability. Over 95% of all hydrogen in use today is sourced from fossil fuels.
Without a discussion of efficiency, you cant talk about how this would work in the energy market. Your talking about taking a finished product, electricity, and losing a lot of it to turn back into that same electricity. There is no turbine that can extract energy as well as a battery. What this effect has is you would have to multiple the price or renewable storage by the efficiency factor making it much more expensive.
They have done webinars that show comparison to hydrogen, much more efficient, about twenty percent loss. They have clever tech that stores excess heat from the turbines and then use in the liquefaction. Perfect use case for excess renewable power or wasted hear or cold at industrial site.
I think efficiency has become a mantra that we don't fully understand, we just want it because someone told us we want it. Look at it this way, the grid needs more wind and Solar but those are unreliable. Often, they overproduce what the grid needs and that will get worse as more is installed. Right now, that extra energy is curtailed, they just shut off the generation capability, 100% wasted. If instead we run it through this plant and use 50%, isn't that a better option? There are use cases for more efficient forms, sure. But more efficient forms of storage are also more expensive, especially when scaled up. Each tech will have its use, I can see this one shining in grid storage and balancing.
You use excess electricity to compress and cool nitrogen into a liquid and store liquid nitrogen in a thermal flask.. then when you want electiricty back. You warm up liquid nitrogen ,it exspands and makes pressure that drives a turbine ti produce electricity.. is that what you mean?
The traditional power grid was production, distribution, and consumption. This one way system resulted in a certain mindset, which may result in big solar and wind farms with large storage facilities. On the other hand, a distributed systems would balance the equation with micro grids and many local renewable sources. It will be interesting to see the battle. I think this reference, though old, is interesting: ABC Science, Australia, Comprehensive, Feb 2016 Battery Powered Homes | Renewable Solar Energy Storage ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yxABosWfuus.html
From the following gov.uk site "Highview Power’s innovation lies mainly in the way that waste heat generated in the compression process is managed for reuse in the eventual discharge of the stored energy." Source: www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/highview-power
Compess and cool ,with fridges and compressors, nitrogen into tanks and warm it up again to expand it to run turbines for electricity. Question is cost efficiency and area needed for tanks
How much CO2 to build the panels? Come on. How much CO2 to build a bycycle, or running shoes..... I sure as hell do not think 12.9 tons, the estimate to how much CO2 they have saved from entering the atmosphere. Next you will want to add in the CO2 emmited from the people who thought of building the panel. It will always be something. My number one reason for the Solar and the electric cars is the boatload of money that I am saving, and that would just be a little smaller boat without the incentives.
Pumped hydro is 70-75%. Li-ion is only 99% in theoretical. Once thermal management is included to prevent run away fires that comes down some depending on the local thermal conditions. Liquid air has 60% efficiency in a standalone configuration and 70%+ efficiency when utilizing waste heat. Keep mind other variables to consider are cost and environmental impact of the full life of the storage system from mineral extraction through end of life disposal/recycling. Energy storage will not have a one size fits all solution.
The only critical component missing from this video is the fact that when the cycle is complete, 2 kilowatts in makes less than 1 kilowatt out. And although perhaps cheap to build, I would guess the maintenance is pretty high too. Interesting technology, but just like hydrogen, lacks the efficiency to make it something viable for long term. This video is basically an infomercial of hype.
This is incorrect. Liquid air has a 60% efficiency in standalone configuration and 70%+ efficiency when utilising waste heat. By comparison pumped hydro is in the 70-75% efficiency range. While Hydrogen is in the 20-40% range depending on formation, storage and generation methods used.
