Steam Turns Night into Day

Another IFFY proposal. Depends on a well insulated high pressure steam accumulator to store the steam for later use.

My guess is that it will prove to be another expensive load leveling storage system in need of a thorough engineering cost analysis of all facets of the proposal before final design and implementation are considered.

Possibly the storage cell would require heated walls (>100 C), or the energy of the steam would be bled away via heat losses. That might cost more than any savings. Most large cities have miles of high pressure steam pipes running under the streets. How do we convert the boilers to solar energy for at least several hours of fuel savings a day? Liquid metal heat transfer from solar heaters? Dowtherm et al?

The steam temperature in modern power generation boilers is about 1000 degrees. (I forgot if that is F or C. I read the specification plate on a boiler decades ago.) The technical problems involved in storing a gas at such high temperatures and high pressure have got to be monumental. It seems to me it would more practical to store air at high pressure. This is already being done, using salt domes to contain the air.

Bill Morrow

this is viable as the transition from liquid to gas stores a lot of energy, but not in a small space, unless we elevate the pressure a lot = risk of a big bang unless well house. In addition, as the pressure goes up, so does the temperature, but we can deal with that with lenses.

It is much like phase change solids that store lesser amounts of energy in melting.

Insulation is the thing. With modern superinsulation we can make a steam tank that can hold hot steam for weeks, even months(longer costs more), in the same way we can store liquid nitrogen for weeks/months, with tolerable losses by evaporation or condensation, as the case may be.

So I feel this is viable physically. Is it viable economically? The cost of the steam tank and insulation for time and pressure are economic factors we need to take into account.

The other factor is we can only recover the energy as mechanical/electrical energy with a Carnot gate in the way. so 50-60% will be lost. For home heating this is not a problem, but storing sumer steam for winter heat might be very costly in terms of vacuum super insulation. Storind day heat for night heating = no problem, even water tanks work for that

No joking, what we need is a break through in Capacitor design so we can make very large ones. They are the perfect storage for electrical energy being able to store it indefinitely and then be able to release every single bit of the energy stored. The number of charge and discharge cycles in in the billions.

I built an Emergency light with a little hand cranked generator, a Super Bright white LED and a large capacitor. 1 minute of cranking gives about 20 hours of light.

Someday no one will even be able to remember what batteries were.

capacitors suffer from the analog of the carnot limit. 1/2 CV^2. As the voltage falls the rate falls and unless you up convert, soon your LED goes out, yet the capacitor is still half full, and you cannot use it.

In addition, capacitors are the analog of a spring. Batteries change an oxidation state of matter, thus are always going to beat capacitors in terms of total energy stored.

Capacitor can have higher voltage than batteries and with higher grade insulation you can get higher energy stored. Current super capacitors are low voltage and you cannot series them without large losses in their capability.

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

This site talks about 42 volt capacitors

http://www.supercapacitors.org/index.htm

I think we are arguing about a non-problem. We have a surplus of electrical energy at night. We need the energy during the day which makes solar perfect in some places. The night time power requirements can be handled by the grid.

Steve

"I think we are arguing about a non-problem. "

The PROBLEM: Can a LARGE, Well Insulated, Hi Pressure Steam Vessel, be built to contain a Large Amount of Stored Energy?

Several electrical utilities have pumped storage lakes where water is pumped to a high elevation lake site to be used via turbine generators to supply the peak power demands, above and beyond the steam generating capacity.

One wind farm even considered the possibility of pumped storage. They apparently realized that they had one already on a somewhat distant part of their grid, Siting and building another would not be prudent.