What energy storage to turn peak to baseload power?

The only way I know of on that scale is to pump water up to a resrvoir and use it to drive the same turbine during base load when the wind or solar source is not available

It has been used in many parts of the world for quite some decades in the reverse order, ie run the base load station at full power during light load times and pump water up, then use the pumped water from the resrvoir as peak load in excess of what the baseload station can supply.

Probably would be best with a positive displacement pump/motor or suitably designed turbine and tunnel/pipe and valve system.

I fully agree with the above statement. Pumping water to a higher potential has proved to do this quite efficiently and at low cost of installation. One could think of storing electricity in supercaps but the capital requirements are huge and therefor not an option for this kind of energy quantities and cycle frequencies.

Randolph Toom

www.heat2power.net

Here in the UK we too use pumped water storage for energy storage, but this is mainly to do with the requirement for instant power - which pumped storage can do rather better than the old coal and oil stations which needed 4 hours to get up to speed. However the advent of gas turbine power stations has allowed the utilites to change supply quantities as a GT station can be up and running in less than one minute.

However, another solution to spare capacity is to have some processes which are carried out at those excees times. Australia use electric pumps for water purification from sea water, which are solar and wind powered as available. the process is then run when wind power is available, to top up the existing reservoirs.

Starting a hydro TG's are not a big issue. Keep more capacity for peak load operation instead of pumping-up and reuse for generation, where we may end-up wasting almost half of the available potential energy.

The two most viable large scale energy storage technologies are hydro-electric pumped storage and compressed air. Pumped storage is most effective when there is a large difference in elevation between two reservoirs. The largest application in the United States is the Helms Creek pumped storage installation in California.

Compressed air requires a sealed cavern, such as an old natural gas or oil field that can be successfully pressurized. The compressed air is mixed with a little natural gas and then expanded through a combustion turbine.

However, it is more effective, produces much cheaper power and is just as environmentally sensitive to just build a nuclear power plant for base load applications.

Yeah - because mining, refining and shipping fuel rods are all now done without risk in environmentally friendly ways, and all the problems inherent in disposing of waste that will be lethal to all life forms for about 1.5 million years were thankfully entirely solved just this morning.

Wow,

What a remarkably negative attitude to express on an Engineer's Forum. With attitudes like that I would still be living in a cave.

Nuclear energy has provided a tremendous amount of clean safe energy for many years and the total loss of life has been tiny compared with the coal mining and generation industry which preceded it.

When the Thorium reactors currently under development in India and Australia etc - now that we do not need the uranium for military and warlike purposes - come on stream then that will have solved another set of problems, as the half life is only 250 years.

Ah, another wisecracker on the net. Well, I must say that it is fortunate that the he did not include his name in his response. This saves him much public embarrassment. Bet he has a Hollywood address.

My apologies to engineers out there that I will spend some time, for perhaps the millionth time, again explaining reality to those who confuse politics with science.

So, here we go:

* Currently, nuclear power produces about 75% of the electrical generation in France, and France is the world's largest exporter of electrical power. The French have had a full fuel resprocessing plant in operation for many years. Nuclear fuel has been reprocessed by the United States Government for 64 years (military applications). The USA gets 20% of its electricity from our 103 nuclear plants. A mere 500 units would easily produce all the power we need. (Note: The economical penetration of nuclear for the USA is about 50 to 60%, with the balance of generation made up of other sources.)

* After reprocessed nuclear waste has been in storage for approximately 350 years, its radiation and hazard levels have dropped below the levels of the original uranium ore from which it was mined. Nuclear power is a process of converting isotopes with long half-lives to isotopes with short half-lives, i.e., it removes radiation from the environment in net over time. People who do not like radiation should welcome this opportunity to accelerate its destruction.

* The management of nuclear waste was not solved this morning, it was solved about 50 years ago. There are many scientifically sound ways to manage nuclear waste, it is not an engineering or scientific problem. Currently, the USA does not recycle spent fuel rods from civilian nuclear plants. These fuel rods are sealed Ziconium cylinders holding ceramic fuel pellets containing the spent fuel. This stuff is going nowhere.

* If the management of nuclear waste were really an insurmoutable problem and as serious as the critics maintain, we would all be dead. For example, it is a popular left wing religious belief that one pound of Plutonium released into the waters of the earth would kill all life. That this is nonsense is evidenced by the release of over 12,000 pounds of Plutonium into the environment during nuclear testing by the United States, Russia and other nations. With just 50 gallons of water, a group of terrorists could kill 100 million people by drowning. Wow, water must be unsafe and should be banned. It has an INFINITE half-life, and some of it has Tritium in it that is RADIOACTIVE.

* Concerning the lethal nature of nuclear waste products, compare the effects of Chernobyl to other disasters. Chernobyl was a design base accident where an entire core of a very large plant was dispersed into the environment. (The plant had no containment to retain fission products, as do western reactores, and it also had massive amouts of graphite in the core, used to moderate neutrons, that caught fire resulting in the magnitude of the accident.) To date, a total of 56 people (yes fifty-six) are dead from this disaster that occurred more than 20 years ago. It is postulated that there may be as many as 4,000 premature deaths over the 70 years after the accident. Most of these will be from the people working on the plant, not the general public. The other three identical plants next door to the destroyed Unit 4 continued to operate through the year 2003.

* Compare this to coal. The EPA estimates that 30,000 people in the United States die prematurely every year due to the combustion of coal. The number world-wide is truly gigantic. In addition, coal releases more radiation to the environment than the nuclear fuel cycle. The Uranium and Thorium in coal are dispersed in an uncontrolled manner into the environment, and to date we are talking hundreds of thousands of tons.

* Compare this to chemicals. The Bhopal chemical plant accident in India alone killed 18,000 people!!!!

* More people die every year from solar power, falling off of roofs, etc., than from nuclear energy, yet nuclear power provides almost infinitely more energy.

* Photovoltaic cells, the darling of the green crowd, use really nasty elements and compounds, which have INFINITE half-lives, are used in an uncontolled manner, yet there is no responsible environmentally sound disposal program in place for them. Where is the public uproar and protests to stop the environmental disaster before it gets out of hand?

* The big major environmental advantage of nuclear power is that the amounts of waste generated are very small compared to the power generated, and this waste is easily controlled to achieve very low environmental impacts. It is amazing that the very benefit is used by some as an argumenta against nuclear power!

* At the South Texas Project, there are two Westinghouse PWRs generating in total 2400 MW of electricity day and night. It is situated on about 14,000 acres acres, of which 7,000 acres is a lake. The plants and supporting buildings and structures occupy perhaps 40 acres of this. The rest of the land is left to the alligators, whooping cranes, egrets, herons, etc. Now, for solar energy to produce the same amout of energy, this entire area plus much additional land, including the lake, would have to be paved over with solar collectors resulting in the destruction of this ecosystem. In addition, large and expensive energy storage systems would have to be built to provide power overnight.

* Nuclear provides cheap power with minimal impact on the environment and low levels of global warming gases. Thus, global warming can be solved and people can still live in civilized ways with air conditioning. Also, the poor get power at reasonable prices and people will not have to choose between their electric bill and sending their kids to college.

* I designed and installed a solar water pumping system for my ranch. Not counting my labor, which was free, the solar panels and supporting structure to mount the panels necessary to deliver power cost about 60 cents a KWH on average over a year, assuming that this installation will survive for 25 years (amortizing the capital cost over 25 years). That anything will live for 25 years without maintenance is a risky proposition. I carefully monitor the actual real-world output, so I know the details (it is important to read the fine print on all solar products, which are sold by people specializing in hype and snake oil. I have been waiting 10 years for someone to demo a so-called 100 watt solar panel that can actually generate 100 watts of electrical power. It won't happen until the snake oil folks rate their products in a rational manner. First off, due to light induced degradation, the output declines 5% in the first 30 days, and then 0.5% every year after that. A so-called 100 watt panel assumes that you are on the equator at solar noon on the first day the panel ever sees the sun with a refrigeration system maintaing the junction temperatures at 77 degrees F. Solar output goes way down when the cells get hot, as they do on any summer day when they operate at 120 degrees and more.) I got my four solar panels for a good price because a friend of mine is in the solar energy business. This does not count the cost of any controllers, inverters or batteries, which of course drives the price up even further. At the South Texas Project, the operational cost of power is less than 2 cents a KWH (this is fuel and operational and maintenance and nuclear waste management costs). The total cost including capital charges is way less than 5 cents a KWH. After transmission to end users, the price charged is 9 to 14 cents a KWH, depending on the utility company.

* The question then is how do we get more nuclear plants in the USA? A good first step would be to export our native morons to Japan, China and South Korea to screw up their nuclear programs so that we can continue to enjoy an energy cost advantage over the rest of the world.

In Germany the RWE Company installed a test site for producing hydrogen with solar energy. They used it for operating fuel cells.

http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm describes an installation in the neigbourhood of Llanberis, North Wales.