Posted on 05/14/2024 2:27:30 AM PDT by Jonty30
It's rarely great news when an area gets blanketed in volcanic ash – but University of Barcelona researchers have discovered it has a rare combination of useful properties, which make it remarkably useful as an energy storage medium.
We've written a number of times about super-cheap thermal energy storage, and a number of other times about highly efficient heat batteries operating at super-high temperatures. The cheapest of these 'brick toasters' use the most abundant of materials, and the most efficient can handle extraordinarily high temperatures using materials like liquid tin and carbon materials – but volcanic ash, as it turns out, might offer a kind of goldilocks proposition in the middle for certain applications.
Fusion record paves way for commercial reactors The key application at the heart of a new study published in the Journal of Energy Storage is concentrated solar power. So, not photovoltaic panels – we're talking those towers out in the desert with huge rows of parabolic mirrors all around them designed to precision-track the Sun and reflect its light toward a single point.
(Excerpt) Read more at newatlas.com ...
And natural gas.
If you want to see some awesome engineering, check out the live cams on the berm and/or road construction in Iceland.
Those guys rock.
My first reaction,, too. Another climate boondoggle looking for government funding. Saddest part is that politicians and much of the general public are so dumb/ignorant of high school physics as to fall for this stuff.
Wonder how ash from a coal fired power plant would work.
bkmk
And natural gas.
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Oddly, NG is not considered a core energy source - I don’t know why.
Interesting. We’re producing more electricity with natgas than with coal and nuclear combined.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01
Maybe because so much natgas generation is via combined cycle peaking plants, and coal and nuclear are more baseload generation. Core = baseload generation, perhaps?
There is a story aobut a scientist, a physicist, and an engineer.
A trash can catches fire.
The scientist analyzes the flame height and temperature and declares it is on fire.
The physicist analyzes how long the fire might burn.
The engineer pees on it.
We’re producing more electricity with natgas than with coal and nuclear combined.
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Yes but the Greens don’t want either so there is only one new nuclear plant built and they are forcing coal to shut down.
They do not want core power sources, so over the past decade the US has steadily lost core power sources. Power companies try to fill in with NG, but the plants are larger and far more expensive, require more maintenance (down time). So the Stats are skewed. Also the Greens want NG shut like coal as well.
This kind of stuff is basically the only “green” energy I support. Heat it up any way you want, but store it well. Sounds really interesting.
Coal ash consists primarily of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, and calcium.
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But it is not rock. QED. Its compressed vegetable matter.
1) Coal is a sedimentary rock.
2) Coal ASH has had all the carbon burned out of it, and has been melted and cooled. It would constitute a sort of synthetic metamorphic rock
I’m not clear on where you studied geology, but it seems to have been deficient.
Coal is a sedimentary rock.
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By its nature coal is a banded material which makes it weak by comparison to most other rocks. Intact rock strength is commonly defined as the strength of the rock material that occurs between discontinuities.
In this case sedimentary material = compressed vegetation to a hardness that varies between the friable lignite and sub-bituminous, bituminous and anthracite, a 2.75–3 on Mohs, comparable to Talc, Gypsum & Calcite.
You can crumble low grade coal in your hands; hard coal shatters when hit with a ordinary hammer. Granite when hit with a hammer makes a very small scrape, if that.
Granite a common volcanic ROCK is a 6 on the same scale.
Apatite, Phosphorite and Phosphate ROCK is a 5 on the same scale.
Even though its nominally labeled a rock, coal and volcanic rock are not the same thing. Each has different properties.
I think solar and wind could be useful to passively charge an electric generator that can run your house for a day so you don’t have to use the system. You could probably get a month’s worth of power that way.
< sigh >
Tell me something I don’t know.
The discussion centers on coal ASH, not on coal.
COAL ASH is a mixture of silicates and metal oxides. The carbon has all been burned out. Tell me, without looking it up: what is the chemical composition of granite? Do you have the slightest idea?
There is an enormous number of industries that use high temperature process heat. Steel blast furnaces ,cement kilns, glass blowing to name the top three. They all need 1000 to 1800C temps and the process doesn’t care if the hot gasses come from natural gas flames, coal or coke gasification flames or nitrogen heated via solar salts, hot volcanic stones or baked clay bricks. As long as the input gas flow is at 1000C or above.
Solar during the day can drop under 1 cent per kWh or in the industry $10 per megawatt hour. At times it goes negative the ability to take nearly free electricity turn it into 1000+C heat and store it for hours and days is a game changer for process heat industries. Curtailment power is half to one fifth the price of natural gas in a btu to btu basis these heat storage units pay for themselves from day one. Even more so in Europe or Asia where natural gas is three times as expensive as the USA.
Here is two companies not using volcanic ash. The first uses fire bricks the same.kind used in steel blast furnaces today to hold excess exhaust heat and preheat the incoming gas streams.
This company is using carbon bricks and is going to 2000C that’s well above what’s needed for steel making or glass or cement. Silicon wafers need 1800+ not much else does.
https://newatlas.com/energy/antora-carbon-heat-battery/?itm_source=newatlas&itm_medium=article-body
Carbon bricks would hold 1800kwh per meter cube at 2000C to a gas/gas heat exchanger at 1800-1000C them to a small closed cycle gas turbine with the final heat exchanger boiling water at 250F and 15psi such a recuperated closed cycle turbine would be 40% heat to electrons and the low pressure steam would carry the remainder of the waste heat at temps useful for domestic heating, cooking in steam kettles, or if on the coast a small desal unit for residential or condo use. A 4500sqft home uses 3000kWh a month in summer for A.C. Loads mostly the winter use is 500 or less. So 4.1 cubic meters of carbon bricks would hold 7500kwh of heat at 2000C that’s enough for a month of 3000kWh electric net and so much waste heat on the other of 4+ megawatts worth.
That is so much you could cook, heat water, and desal to your hearts content and still be dumping heat to the atmosphere or hydrosphere. If you could get off peak or curtailment power for 2 cents per kWh then your cost of electricity is 5 cents per kWh after running it through your storage they claim 99% eff in and out as heat. With vacuum insulation that’s an achievable number joule heaters are by definition 100% electrons to heat.
The bonus is all that waste heat is “free” and at 250F is perfect for hot water heating,space heating, and desal of seawater. Steam kettles will boil water in bulk and you can brase, poach,slow cook think crockpot/Dutch oven, or steam bake at those temps as well. Finish baking or roasting in a secondary convection oven powered by that cheap 5 cents per kWh. Four cubic meters is 5.2 feet by 5.2 feet by 5.2 feet with insulation a foot or so thick and flow channels for the nitrogen gas probably a 8 foot cube would be the outer dimensions for a months worth of energy for a fairly large house that fits in the back yard my home is this size and the yard is two acres inside the other acreage around it ag exempted. I could fit a 2000 as foot steel building inside my back yard next to the other steel building of similar size that would hold hundreds of megawatts of energy. If you can keep liquid natural gas for 80 days at minus 200+ below zero with vacuum insulation you certainly can keep 2000+ heat for the same or longer it’s all about thermal flux and with radiation barriers and vacuum insulation that flux is minuscule.
That is actually the idea behind these kind of bulk storage things because the power is so variable it is hard to regulate. Send a lot of the power/heat to the bulk storage device instead of trying to regulate it. Then you can draw power out of it later when needed. This is pretty much the ONLY time I agree with “green” power, beyond hydro.
60% of all industrial heat used for processes is under 350F the other 40% is above 350F. If there is a energy dense way to store cheap curtailment / off peak power into heat and then get it back out hours or days later this is a huge win for industry the economics alone make sense. Bricks, ash and carbon are literally dirt cheap. Once you have heat your also have cooling it seems counter intuitive but ammonia cycle heat pumps can run in heat sources as low as 130F and produce sub zero temps with that heat in bulk. Think district cooling and refrigerated warehouses. On the small scale I would love to have a few megawatts hours of heat storage in the back acres “fueled” by a half acre of tracking mirrors heating the receiver to 1200C. With that make 1000C steam.drive a turbine for electrons and use the condenser heat at 150F for ammonia cycle cooling, hot water , heat my pool+ hot tub + sauna. I would also.tap off some steam between the HP and LP turbine case at 500F and 100psi or so. That would go to my outdoor kitchen into a steam kettle, steam oven and steam griddle all are commercially available. When I was in the aww service we had to do KP the entire kitchen was steam powered from the huge kettles to the ovens to the griddles all F rpm the base steam plant. A detached garage sized brick tank would hold 50 to 100MWh-th of energy months of use for an individual structure plus accessories.
A half acre would put out 2 megawatts of thermal energy if the whole thing was covered in mirrors. 50% coverage would be realistic due to spacing rotation and tilt needs that’s still a megawatt thermal. Texas gets 220 days of full sun per year at my.location and latitude it averages out to 5 hours per day every day on a yearly basis. There is a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky that comes out to shower us with its glory every 10 to 14 hours.
Problem is heliostats are over $50 per sq meter of surface area. So 2000 square meter is $100,000 in cost just for the mirrors. With 5 megawatts thermal per day at 30% steam turbine to AC current is 1500kWh per day that’s worth at base load rates $75 per day not worth it, now at peak rates which start at 90 cents per kWh and I have seen $4 this week alone that’s $1350 at 90 cents to $6000 at the peak rates I was seeing on the ERCOT grid this last week.
Now you see why storage makes sense store the energy when it’s cheap and sell like gangbusters when it’s at peak. For this half.acre system I would charge it all day tthen sit on the energy till the following day when the next peak happens size the turbine to put out ten times what the solar input is so you only sell.during the peaks and recharge while selling the prior days energy faster than you are putting in the current days energy. At $1350 a day those mirrors pay for themselves in under a year with a 25+ year lifetime probably need a midlife surface glass.change but the toughglass outer layer above the actual mirror is removable and not all that.expansive it’s the aluminum polished mirror plate that it.
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