Guarded Optimism from a Pessimist | 32 comments (32 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorne_Hill_wind_farm

Sorne Hill wind farm
The Sorne Hill wind farm is a wind farm located in Buncrana, Inishowen Donegal Ireland and erected in 2004. The farm is run by Tapbury Management Limited.
Phase 1 of the farm has 16 wind turbines with a 60 metre hub height and 70 metre rotor diameter giving a total capacity of 32 megawatts. Phase 2 of the farm will which is an additional 6.9 MW of wind power for which turbines have been ordered and are due to be installed in the autumn of 2007. This will make Sorne, at 38 MW, one of the largest wind farms in Ireland.
In one of the largest contracts for an energy storage system in the wind power industry, VRB Power Systems Inc. has contracted to supply a 1.5 MW x 8 hour Vanadium redox battery system. This will be driven from phase 2 of the wind farm and will enable surplus electricity to be generated when demand is low, and will improve consistency or supply to the electricity network

http://www.leonardo-energy.org/drupal/node/959

says the cost of the battery system is $6.3 millions.

French 2006 average grid power use is 55GW (peak use was 87GW), so 1.3TWh per average day.

Cost of storing one average day of France electricity use by this system is thus 682 billions USD (37% of 2006 France GDP). Of course we don't have to store all of it in batteries but this gives a reference number :).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_%28electricity%29

says that sales of batteries amount was 48 billions USD in 2005.

Hydro (pumped or not) is a nice storage too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_energy_storage

Source for french grid power use:

http://www.rte-france.com/

which has 1996 to now electricity grid use at 30 minute sampling available as zipped excel file.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sat Jul 14th, 2007 at 11:16:38 AM EST
[ Parent ]

NaS battery (4.00 / 2)

Assuming it's 1.2 MWh at $2.5 millions it's four time more expensive per MWh than the vanadium battery described in the parent comment.

May be some technical information is missing somewhere though.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2007-07-04-sodium-battery_N.htm?csp=34

20070704
[...]
A test case in West Virginia
American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest U.S. utilities, has been using a 1.2 megawatt NaS battery in Charleston, W.Va., the past year and plans to install one twice the size elsewhere in the state next year. Dozens of utilities are considering the battery, says Dan Mears, a consultant for NGK Insulators, the Japanese company that makes the devices.
"If you've got these batteries distributed in the neighborhood, you have, in a sense, lots of little power plants," Walker says. "The difference between these and diesel generators is these batteries don't need fuel" and don't pollute.
The NaS battery is the most advanced of several energy-storage technologies that utilities are testing. The oldest and most widespread form of energy storage in the USA, pumped hydroelectricity, collects water after it spins a turbine and uses a small amount of electricity to send it back and repeat the process.
Lead-acid batteries -- the same kind used in cars -- were installed by Southern California Edison in 1988. But the batteries, though inexpensive, typically fill warehouse-size buildings and last about five years. That's because the acid that connects positive and negative electrodes corrodes components.
An NaS battery, by contrast, uses a far more durable porcelain-like material to bridge the electrodes, giving it a life span of about 15 years, Mears says. It also takes up about a fifth of the space. Ford Motor pioneered the battery in the 1960s to power early-model electric cars; NGK and Tokyo Electric refined it for the power grid.
Since the 1990s, Japanese businesses have installed enough NaS batteries to light the equivalent of about 155,000 homes, says Brad Roberts, head of the Electricity Storage Association. In the USA, AEP is using the 30-foot-wide by 15-foot-igh battery to supply 10% of the electricity needs of 2,600 customers in north Charleston, says Ali Nourai, AEP manager of distributed energy. The battery, which cost about $2.5 million, is charged by generators from the grid at night, when demand and prices are low, and discharged during the day when power usage peaks.
[...]