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I’m not gonna jump on board with this one immediately, there’s a few things about it that aren’t wowwing me.
- R-19 is their magical ‘denser than water’ fluid. They don’t have to be so secretive and if they are going to be secretive then I’m gonna assume it’s not good for us.
- it’s only really so that you can get the same amount of power from half the height. they aren’t selling it as “store twice as much energy”, but rather “use in locations that have half as much height”. The thing is that the UK has used this kind of power for decades, there are old coal mines and natural cave formations that have large water flows. the water is pumped to the top when you have an excess, and dropped to power during demand. This system seems far better in general, even without the mysterious R-19 fluid. We don’t /not/ have height differences in the UK, we have lots.
- It’s Intellectual Property. Investors like IP so it can be licensed for royalties and bumps up the balance sheet. From their website I found this link
"RheEnergise said it invented the new high-density fluid, known as R-19. Chief executive Stephen Crosher told Professional Engineering that the liquid is a fine-milled suspended solid in water, with low viscosity and low abrasion characteristics. The base material is used in oral medication applications, in a similar way that chalk is used as a bulking agent for pills and tablets. He said the raw materials are common and available, including in the UK, and the fluid could either be manufactured on-site or at a depot. "
- Hydro is very geographically restricted, halving the height makes it less so.
I like the idea of using old coal mines, there’s been pilot projects in Germany and Australia but I’ve never seen them amount to anything
The base material is used in oral medication applications
Calcium carbonate. The density for a calcium carbonate suspension in water is right on the money for what they’ve stated. They’re being so evasive because they haven’t patened it and likely can’t. They’re treating it like a trade secret because they can’t make it into IP.
Edit: yep, they use it in oil drilling, so they can’t patent it https://glossary.slb.com/en/terms/c/calcium_carbonate
Patenting chalk water solution is like patenting milk.
Oh look, I’ve made up a liquid consisting of suspended lipids, sugars, and proteins! Please detain these cows!
These corporations would try to patent any molecular arrangement that contains two oxygen atoms and call it a day and they’d fight a plant for it.
2 oxygen atoms? Your product sounds awfully similar to my proprietary, patented, 1 oxygen, 2 hydrogen atoms compound.
I hope you have a good lawyer.
Well, dehydrogen-oxide has been proven to, in large enough quantities, be deadly to humans.
Well spotted
This is logically efficient from a technical standpoint, but from a practical perspective is a terrible idea. You’re only getting 2-2.5x th energy storage out of the process, but in return you’re effectively requiring that the entire fluid system be isolated from the environment. Toxicity aside, you can’t do anything with the fluid outside of the system. It’s probably not something you want local fauna drinking, nor do you want even the slightest chance of this leaking into the local aquifers. I presume that, if it’s not fully isolated, the fluid mix balance would have to be adjusted to offset evaporation of the water. And if the plant turns out not to be as great at you hoped hat do you do with the fluid?
Some numbers - a quick google says “According to Ofgem, the typical household in Britain uses approximately 2,900 kWh of electricity annually.” I’m going to round that up to 8kWh/day. For a small village of, say, 1250 homes and a three day storage capacity, that’s 30MWh. 1MJ (MWs) is 1000kg (one metric ton) stored at 100m - the upper end of this project. Since 3600 seconds per hour x 1MWs = 1 MWh, and we want 30, that’s 1MT x 3600 x 30 = 108,000 Metric Tons of this high density liquid needed for a small project to put a 3 power day buffer in place for a town of 1250 houses. WTF are you going to do with 108,000 metric tons of high-density fluid if you decide is isn’t working? Your reservoir would only need to be 25% bigger (wider, longer, and deeper/taller) to just do the whole thing with water and you wouldn’t need to figure out how to get 3500 full size tanker trucks to transport it all away somewhere for a different project for for de-slurry processing.
If the fluid is what I’m thinking it is (calcium carbonate in water with a stabilizer), fluid loss would just be water loss and they wouldn’t go to great pains to isolate it. They’d just add more water, since most of the weight they’re pumping is the calcium carbonate.
to put a 3 power day buffer in place
Hydro is used to smooth out peaks and troughs in the power supply. You’re not even close to getting a useful estimate.
The fifth largest hydroelectric power station in the UK is 160MW
100MW by 2030 is a pretty big deal.
I agree you need much less capacity because you’d usually just want to even out fluctuations, but I think the general gist of the comment is still true: you need just 2,5x the amount of water to produce the same amount of energy. The article says very little about the liquid, and very little about why this would enable them to build this capacity much quicker. A little more data would be nice.
More information is alway s useful. But it’s pretty obviously quicker to build because it only needs to handle 40% of the liquid and it’s not on a mountain.
The article in this post is written by yet another dunce who doesn’t know the difference between energy and power. That single generating station would fill 100 MWh of capacity in 37.5 minutes.
I mean, we actually could use that damn water, for things, it’s a perfect reservoir for drinking and/or irrigation.
Who in their right mind looked at this and said “You know, mercury has a higher specific gravity than water, it might even work better!!”
It’s 2.5x heavier than water so can produce 2.5x the power for any given volume.
We have a lot of hydroelectric. But we don’t have the mountains to build much of it.
Again, we can use the water for things, and water is something we can get more of one way or another.
A 2.5x multiplier doesn’t seem as worth it to me, especially when we can do stuff like add hydrothermal storage to that number easily, among other things.
We can get plenty of water. We can’t get plenty of suitable sites.
If the water leaks we can shrug our shoulders.
If the calcium carbonate slurry leaks we will feel more awkward.
Entirely true, but since we’re talking volume, this is only a 25% increase in linear dimensions (for the advertised 2x increase) or 35% (for the 2.5X maximum slurry density). If we are limited to a specific height of retention, that’s 40% and 60% (rounded). Note: for structural capacity, like a tank, retaining a g=2.5 liquid requires substantially higher strength than a g=1 liquid (for a given retention height). Since this is the internet and should source my knowledge: I know this because I happen to be an engineer who designs retaining structures. Anyway…
For the effective cost of creating and maintaining the slurry, maintaining the integrity of the system (and keeping out wildlife), and the cost of decommissioning the otherwise unusable fluid, you’re likely talking about a reduction in area of 20-38% (1/8) to switch from using plain water to this engineered material. I don’t disagree that there may be some edge cases where the increased risk and expense is justifiable, but it’s hard to see this being viable except as some kind of tech demo.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. They’re doing it and there’s an outside chance that they’ve thought it through properly (and a good chance that they have not, of course).
What’s 108,000 tons in volume?
It’s designed to go underground. I see it like water towers, every town has one to get mains water pressure and a store of water.
Wouldn’t these be similar for energy? 3 days emergency backup power sounds great, plus it smoothes peaky renewables.
Edit. It’s about 40x swimming pools
https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=volume&unit=cm&amt=100000
Very cool. Do we know what the fluid is? Does it pose any health risks if it somehow leaks into the groundwater?
It’s just good ol’ fashioned mercury.
The article claims it’s 2.5x as dense as water, which according to this density chart is probably bromine.
I actually bet it’s just very very fine stonedust and water in suspension.
I’m not sure which would be worse for the machinery
Supposedly it’s exactly that, but stabilized by a polymer to keep it in suspension for up to 60 days without mixing. https://online.flippingbook.com/view/1025707592/10/#zoom=true
Edit: I’ve concluded it’s likely calcium carbonate.
rotor blades are going to love this
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Our innovative fluid R-19 is environmentally benign and has been engineered to be non-reactive and non-corrosive.
They’re saying it’s minerals and a polymer. In that case even a leak into groundwater would just be leaking groundwater. (Depending on what the polymer is)
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This is very neat. I wonder what the energy loss is, between what’s required to lift the water and what’s gained by releasing it. Regardless, eco-friendly high density “batteries” are a great concept.
It’s probably very low efficiency, but if you can design renewable energy systems to provide enough overage during peak generation periods, maybe it doesn’t matter.
As an example, MKBHD’s solar roof produces something like 30KW during peak sunlight, which is so much more than his home uses (even with air conditioning turned on) that it can charge his house batteries to 100% and gives him power to sell back to the electric company for future power credits.
Admittedly, not everybody has a house with a large roof or $120K to spend on solar. But if we can drive solar and wind power down enough in price per unit, the efficiency of the storage system becomes a lot less of a concern.
A system like this is designed to use excess generated power during times of low demand and then to put power back into the grid during peak usage times. This can help negate the need to bring another plant online and they can probably sell the power at higher prices during peak usage.
Pumped storage is great, but it is only a partial answer. You describe the “supply shaping” aspect of grid management, where we assume the demand for power is outside of our control, and we adjust our supply to meet whatever is being demanded. The problem is that pumped storage is not scalable. There are only so many places you can build reservoirs.
We need to focus on “demand shaping”. Instead of (or rather, in addition to) putting power into storage so we can take it back out at a different time of the day, we need to shift our consumption of power so it is used when it can be produced.
Supply shaping is the flattening and shifting of the supply peak to match the demand peak. It is far more efficient and scalable to flatten and shift the demand peak to match supply.
We need large appliances like home and commercial water heaters and deep freezers to be directly aware of grid conditions and temporarily adjust their setpoints a few degrees.
Steel production, aluminum smelting, and other heavy industries are commonly done overnight during the demand trough, where they increase the base load and reduce reliance on peaker plants. They need to be shifted to daytime operation during the supply peak.
We need massive energy sinks such as desalination plants, hydrogen electrolysis plants, and Fischer-Tropsch synfuel production plants collocated with and powered by solar, wind, wave, and tidal energy facilities. They need to suck up any cheap, free, or “negative rate” power they can get, but shut down production and back feed the grid with their own generation when prices rise during the day.
It would take Musk all of 5 seconds of his “giant megabrain” to tell his cars to talk to each other and power companies to enable load management of charging.
So of course he won’t.
Power companies are just places to put dumb relatives of politicians nowadays anyway, they’re slush funds with hard hats.
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Yeah at the end of the day renewable energy is rapidly becoming pretty close to free. Efficiency doesn’t matter as much when the energy costs nothing to generate.
I guess it’s pretty good. Most hydro is >90% efficient. Losses are from friction turning the impellers and electrical circuits
If you have the system always running most of the cartage back to the top could be handled by the siphoning effect, like draining a washing machine or siphoning patrol.
You’d need energy to get it started but after that it should keep siphoning as long as there’s liquid to siphon.
I don’t understand how that would work in this case; if this is true, I think I’d need to see a diagram.
My understanding is that they use energy to pump the liquid up during times of excess, and release it to generate energy when there’s more demand.
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Let me know if you find it!
I believe thunderfoot talks about a similar concept in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxGQgAr4OCo
At 03:47
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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This is so heartening. Do things smarter and healthier. What a great idea.
Running on arbitrage of energy prices gives new meaning to ‘buy the dip’.
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