The first 500 people to use my link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare https://skl.sh/sabinehossenfelder04241
For decades we have seen scientists and engineers trying to outdo each other in finding more efficient and cheaper ways of storing energy. A group from the German Aerospace Center now says that sulphur is the way forward. Let’s have a look
🤓 Check out my new quiz app ➜ http://quizwithit.com/
💌 Support me on Donatebox ➜ https://donorbox.org/swtg
📝 Transcripts and written news on Substack ➜ https://sciencewtg.substack.com/
👉 Transcript with links to references on Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/Sabine
📩 Free weekly science newsletter ➜ https://sabinehossenfelder.com/newsletter/
👂 Audio only podcast ➜ https://open.spotify.com/show/0MkNfXlKnMPEUMEeKQYmYC
🔗 Join this channel to get access to perks ➜
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw/join
🖼️ On instagram ➜ https://www.instagram.com/sciencewtg/
#science #sciencenews #tech #technews
Solar power and wind turbines are great, so long as the sun shines and the wind blows. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Our great energy transition, therefore, will need lots of energy storage. You may recently have seen some headlines saying that thermal energy storage is going to save the day.
I wasn’t terribly excited about those, but then I read about a project that does it with sulphur. And they might be onto something. Let’s have a look. Thermal storage is a way of storing energy by first using the energy to create heat, and then later using this heat to create electricity.
Some systems work instead by using energy to cool, and then later using the cold substance to create electricity, but the principle is the same: A difference in temperature can be used to create electricity from it. The most common type of thermal storage uses molten salts.
The big advantage over batteries is that it’s simple and low effort, which makes it comparably cheap. According to some estimates molten salt thermal storage is 30 times less expensive than lithium batteries while reaching a similar efficiency, that is well above 90%.
Their major problem with this thermal storage is that the heat inevitably leaks, so the longer you want to store the energy, the more you lose. Molten salts are good for few hours up to a few days or a week at most and this is why I haven’t been terribly excited about them.
It’s a good idea to ease out day-to-day fluctuations, but they won’t fix the much bigger problem with renewable energies which are extended phases of little sunshine and wind, known as Dunkelflaute, that can last up to two weeks. But, we have a newcomer to thermal energy storage which is literally hot, in the sense
That it works at temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees Celsius. The idea is to add a chemical loop to the thermal storage. It’s then called thermochemical energy storage. This has been around for some while, but a group from the German Aerospace Center added another twist to it.
They store the energy in a stable compound, sulphur, which can last pretty much indefinitely. Basically, you use solar energy to create heat, and that heat is used to perform a chemical reaction that requires energy. You store the reaction products, and if you need the energy again, you let the products
React and get the energy back. Concretely, their cycle uses sulfuric acid. With the heat derived from solar energy, you can split off sulphur and water. You collect the sulphur, and if you need the energy back, you burn it. It’s kind of like storing energy in hydrogen, except that sulphur is a powder.
It’s easier to store and handle. While it’s not exactly tasty, sulphur itself is of low toxicity, though several of the reaction products are highly toxic and highly corrosive. They say that the process is also more efficient, than solar to hydrogen which has a very low efficiency dangling around 15 to 20%.
According to some estimates, the sulphur cycle could theoretically reach 26% but there are few studies and in practice the numbers might be lower. It’s also important to notice, this isn’t a type of storage that you can use with your average solar power plant or wind turbine.
Like most ideas to produce hydrogen from solar, it works with concentrated sunlight. That’s when you use a collection of mirrors to focus the sunlight in one spot where it then gets really hot. This extreme heat is needed to get the sulphur cycle going.
That isn’t to say that I’m somehow against it, it’s just that I don’t think it’s quite the game changer that the headlines make it out to be. What we’d really need is an efficient way to store the energy of the already existing solar and wind arrays.
You see similar headlines popping up every once in a while, like this recent one in the NYT that mentions a few other newcomers. Like for example the company Energy Dome, based in Milan, that fills a huge balloon with carbon dioxide. During the day, solar energy compresses the carbon dioxide until it becomes liquid.
At night, the liquid carbon dioxide expands back into gas, which drives a turbine and produces electricity that is sent back to the grid. Or a recent study from Eindhoven University in the Netherlands that says that ion can be rusted and un-rusted to store energy and later release it.
I could go for days with listing different ideas for how to store energy but the kids will be back from school in about 10 minutes, so let me wrap this up. These types of storage all have different pros and cons, in terms of how long they last or how efficient they are etc.
But at the moment none of them is both efficient and versatile enough to solve the problem with intermittent energy. If only we had a reliable way to generate energy without carbon emissions like this thing, what was it called fluclear, nukkelar?
Earlier this year we saw a wave of famous YouTubers quitting, and ya know, I get it. It cant be difficult to balance your creative aspirations with management and with whatever is left of your personal life. But I’ve found both advice and support on Skillshare.
Skillshare’s the largest online learning community with thousands of classes by and for creators. They cover specific disciplines such as film & design, but also general topics such as freelancing and productivity in general. To help you get started, Skillshare offers learning paths to gradually build your knowledge to beginner to expert.
Like this one, on creative productivity, kickstart, and sustain any project. It’s a great course for people with experience in a number of different professions including video creation. It has tons of practical advice for how to reliably come up with new ideas, how to become
Better at time management, and how to break down different projects into manageable chunks. This course has really decreased my stress levels. If you’re looking to start something new or expand your creative skills, Skillshare is the best place to start.
But if you go there, make sure to use our link because the first 500 of you will get 1 month free trial of Skillshare, so go and check it out. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow.
21 Comments
As always, the solution is not to try and do everything with a single technology, but to have a mix of several technologies. That gives you a much wider performance portfolio as well as redundancy if one technology ends up failing for some unexpected reason.
Its not even anything new. We've been distinguishing "peaker plants" from "baseline" for decades already, long before the modern push toward green energy. The idea that we need a one-size-fits-all solution is patently silly and just being used as another excuse to delay starting work on the necessary transitions.
Far better to focus on Renewable Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis and "artificial photosynthesis"…You get pure, liquid hydrocarbon fuels that can be used in existing and advanced (higher eta) internal combustion engines and stored-transported with existing infrastructure. Let's all remember too that the transition to renewable (eternal) energy may give us a higher cost per unit of energy but we also have enough potential to make improvements in efficiency sufficient to compensate higher unit costs by reducing the units of energy we need to do the same things.
Hydrogen electricity storage isn't great on efficiency. Round trip is below 50%, butvway above the claim of 15-20% here. Need to clarify if you mean electricity to chemical to electricity or sobething like heat to chemical to electricity. It sounds like the latter, but not super clear.
People often say that solar doesn’t produce energy when the sun doesn’t shine. Or they’ll hide the lie by saying something like “solar is great and all but the sun doesn’t shine all the time”. This misleading in the extreme.
Obviously solar doesn’t produce energy at night, but it still produces 80% of regular capacity on cloudy days because most of the light it absorbs penetrates the clouds as per normal.
So solar does in fact produce energy when the sun doesn’t shine and it functions quite well.
Storage is need primarily for the night, not for any time the sun doesn’t shine.
i did solar thermal storage – a total waste, the correct way to do this is to make solar and wind farms in the mountains over high and low water reservoirs covered with solar panels and smaller but numerus wind turbines whose sole use is to pump water from the low reservoir to the hi reservoir , then producing steady running hydroelectric power from the hi to low reservoir – added bonus , is the reservoirs , and in a places mostly uninhabited and very windy, these reservoirs can even be built in tabled steps
unnecessary research into fractionally efficient, and won't ever get much better, storage. by one estimate there is already enough uranium mined and in storage to power the entire world for the next couple hundred years. Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot. 😞 !!!
This sounds a lot like the idea of using Boron as an energy storage medium.
i have a very random question – do you prefer polyester fabrics? it seems like youre always wearing that type of material
What is happening now is that intermittent production is rapidly scaling and giving very low prices some days in some parts and if the difference in a day or two gets really big then you don’t need that super efficient storage to be financially viable. Early adopters might be able to use this gap to actually earn money with ok efficiency. The stars are lining up for green energy.
Question no one will answer, and therefore, I'm wasting my time. Why doesn't the storage community just use excess electricity to use eltrolysis to split water and house O and H tanks to recombine when needed? I'll ignore all the terrorist answers.
I got really high once and designed a new type of nuclear weapon. It scared the shit out of the earth so much some sort of entity removed it from my brain.
Nuclear reactors can't match the intermittent demand because they can't regulate quickly enough. Therefore, for them to be efficient, you'd also need storage, at least for day to day coverage.
Isn’t there a possibility of redox reactions with just sulphuric acid. They do weird shit with mushrooms and electronic current it should be possible to directly make some sort of dead living AI or vacuum type bulb switch computer that is “human”.
What could go wrong with megatons of Sulfur storage? For a comparison, let’s ask people in Lebanon.
and what about the Natrium ( i don't like Sodium )
and huge weights.. Huge Waterpools.. heating Aluminium as an energy buffer ?
5:08 Nucular, it's pronounced nucular. Nucular.
Sounds like a chemical equivalent to gravity batteries… But I have no idea what the eficiency stats are those.
Sabine, I have the solution if you want to contact me.
bizarro comments, but neat topic! Wish the world was less scared of nuclear
Energy storage is an interesting topic. What about pumped storage? Pumping water into reservoirs, then releasing it when it is needed to drive turbines has been around since the 19th centurym it is where 90% of the world's surplus energy is currently stored (apparently a new hydro facility in Australia will store more energy than all the battery sites in the world combined).
Renewable energy generation is presented here like its intermittent nature is an insoluble problem. In a region as big as the US or Europe, the wind will always be blowing somewhere, and sunlight will always be coming in every day (you get something from photovoltaic cells even on cloudy days), and you will have full sunlight somewhere each day, so the problem comes out to storing energy overnight (you can do this with batteries made of much more readily available materials than lithium, since they are stationary) and distributing energy from places getting good wind and sunlight to places that are not. No need for generating radioactive waste with nuclear fission.