Category: Energy Storage

Rolling Power

Electricity moves down a wire at close to the speed of light. In March, a tiny tech firm in San Francisco drew a crowd to witness power moving 100 million times slower, at the very modest pace of a freight train bumping around a rail yard. And I mean literally at freight speed, because the aptly-named startup, SunTrain, convened us to watch a diesel locomotive hauling solar energy.

The star of this demonstration at the Port of San Francisco’s Pier 96 rail yard was a freight container that SunTrain had crammed full of lithium ion batteries and mounted on a standard 27-meter railcar…

So begins my latest feature for the solutions-oriented Anthropocene Magazine, profiling the creative thinkers who see railroads — the ultimate industrial dinosaur — as a lever to equip power grids for a wind and solar-powered future. SunTrain would turn railroads into a power transmission solution, using railroads to make an end run around grid congestion that’s holding up power projects across the U.S.

Imagine mile-long trains with 120 or more battery cars, charging up where wind and solar power is cheap and making daily deliveries of over two gigawatt-hours of clean energy each—enough to power a small city, port, or datacenter for days. 

I also cover a slightly more mature rail-to-grid concept: feeding power lines through rail corridors, thus avoiding the environmental impacts, cost and community upset that delay and frequently kill grid expansion. A handful of transmission projects in New England and New York already co-locate power lines beside rails. And the proposed SOO Green transmission project would follow rails for nearly all of its 560-kilometer journey from Iowa’s wind belt to Chicago.

The ultimate challenge facing both approaches is getting railroads to think outside the box and to make room for cleaner power. That will get easier if, as expected, even President Trump’s pro-carbon policies can’t keep the railroads’ rolling boxes full of coal.

Read the full story @Anthropocene

by pfairley

Scientific American: Solar And Wind Power Could Ignite A Hydrogen Energy Comeback

Hydrogen is flowing in pipes under the streets in Cappelle-la-Grande, helping to energize 100 homes in this northern France village. On a short side road adjacent to the town center, a new electrolyzer machine inside a small metal shed zaps water with electricity from wind and solar farms to create “renewable” hydrogen that is fed into the natural gas stream already flowing in the pipes. By displacing some of that fossil fuel, the hydrogen trims carbon emissions from the community’s furnaces, hot-water heaters and stove tops by up to 7 percent.

So begins my February 2020 feature article for Scientific American which explains why hydrogen energy — presumed dead after a round of hype and disillusion two decades ago — is roaring back. Renewable hydrogen is central to the European Commission’s vision for achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, for example, and a growing focus for the continent’s industrial giants. As of next year, all new turbines for power plants made in the European Union are supposed to ship ready to burn a hydrogen–natural gas blend, and the E.U.’s manufacturers claim the turbines will be certified for 100 percent hydrogen by 2030.

This time around it is the push to decarbonize the electric grid and heavy industry—rather than hope for fuel cell vehicles—that is driving interest in hydrogen. “Everyone in the energy-modeling community is thinking very seriously about deep decarbonization,” says Tom Brown, who leads an energy-system modeling group at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Cities, states and nations are charting paths to reach nearly net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner, in large part by adopting low-carbon wind and solar electricity. Integrated energy models show that they’ll have a hard time keeping the lights on during periods of low wind and sunlight without hydrogen, and that hydrogen will pay for itself long before it solves that problem.

by pfairley

Scientific American: Europe Stores Electricity in Gas Pipes

This month Denmark’s biggest energy firm, Ørsted, said wind farms it is proposing for the North Sea will convert some of their excess power into gas. Electricity flowing in from offshore will feed on-shore electrolysis plants that split water to produce clean-burning hydrogen, with oxygen as a by-product. That would supply a new set of customers who need energy, but not as electricity. And it would take some strain off of Europe’s power grid as it grapples with an ever-increasing share of hard-to-handle renewable power.

Turning clean electricity into energetic gases such as hydrogen or methane is an old idea that is making a comeback as renewable power generation surges. That is because gases can be stockpiled within the natural gas distribution system to cover times of weak winds and sunlight. They can also provide concentrated energy to replace fossil fuels for vehicles and industries. Although many U.S. energy experts argue that this “power-to-gas” vision may be prohibitively expensive, some of Europe’s biggest industrial firms are buying in to the idea.

European power equipment manufacturers, anticipating a wave of renewable hydrogen projects such as Ørsted’s, vowed in January that all of their gas-fired turbines will be certified by next year to run on up to 20 percent hydrogen, which burns faster than methane-rich natural gas. The natural gas distributors, meanwhile, have said they will use hydrogen to help them fully de-carbonize Europe’s gas supplies by 2050…

Read the rest at Scientific American

by pfairley