Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

The Intermittency Challenge and the approaching need for massive storage of rapidly dispatchable energy has led the concept of the National Battery, a unified facility that holds the aggregated outputs from an array of intrinsically episodic renewable sources, releasing energy as demand requires. In this contribution, the original demonstration of Murphy that lead-acid batteries are [...]

This is how the idea is introduced: Donald Sadoway is working on a battery miracle — an inexpensive, incredibly efficient, three-layered battery using “liquid metal.” Professor Sadoway explains that his angle has been to design around the oil price point, not around some wild and cool technology that can never compete economically. He goes on [...]

Due to the stochastic nature of wind, electric power generated by wind turbines is highly erratic and may affect both the power quality and the planning of power systems. Energy Storage Systems (ESSs) may play an important role in wind power applications by controlling wind power plant output and providing ancillary services to the power [...]

The present work compares the environmental impact of three different thermal energy storage (TES) systems for solar power plants. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for these systems is developed: sensible heat storage both in solid (high temperature concrete) and liquid (molten salts) thermal storage media, and latent heat storage which uses phase change material (PCM). [...]

The global market for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries has risen fivefold to $10 billion a year over the past decade. But lithium supplies are limited, and the cost of the metal has skyrocketed in recent years. So researchers are on the lookout for novel battery chemistries. At the meeting, researchers described materials that could pave the [...]

This study investigates two methods of transforming intermittent wind electricity into firm baseload capacity: (1) using electricity from natural gas combined-cycle (NGCC) power plants and (2) using electricity from compressed air energy storage (CAES) power plants. The two wind models are compared in terms of capital and electricity costs, CO2 emissions, and fuel consumption rates. [...]

This new battery chemistry uses inexpensive, abundant materials. It relies on the same principle employed in lithium-ion batteries—moving sodium or potassium ions between electrodes during charging and discharging—but does it much more cheaply. “For grid storage, the battery can be huge, and using sodium and potassium is very attractive because they are so abundant and [...]