Large-scale energy storage to reliably manage large amounts of renewable power
Hello all! It’s been while, but I am happy to be back blogging and have some exciting news to share. Today, we have announced a new project that I will be working on to help bring the future of large-scale energy storage closer to reality.
With the prospect of a more diverse electric grid that has higher penetrations of renewables like wind and solar, in the future, we will reach a point when large-scale energy storage solutions will be needed to support managing these intermittent resources.
Working with a number of partners on this project, such as RWE, ESK, Zueblin/OIH, the DLR and GE’s Oil & Gas business, our team at GE Global Research in Munich has initiated a program in next generation Adiabatic Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES). We actually call it “ADELE”. It’s basically the idea of absorbing large amounts of surplus electricity – like excess wind power – from the grid to compress air into underground caverns beneath the earth’s surface. The innovation of the ADELE approach is that heat generated during the compression is stored in a thermal energy storage. Thereby, the compressed gas can later be heated up again and used to help power an air turbine and generate power when electricity is in high demand.
The system has a very large energy storage capacity, is highly efficient and has no emissions. Before this concept can be commercially implemented, substantial technical issues must be addressed, mainly in the field of turbomachinery and the thermal energy storage. Our team in Munich will be responsible for the overall system optimization and, jointly with our colleagues from GE Oil & Gas, for the development of the advanced compressor and turbine which are critical elements of the concept.
The aim is to install an initial demonstration plant by 2013. It will have a storage capacity of one billion watt-hours (GWh) and generate electrical power of up to 200 megawatts. With this kind of large-scale energy storage, ADELE could provide backup capacity within a very short time and replace forty state-of-the-art wind turbines for a period of five hours.
The three-year project is a direct follow-up activity of a successful feasibility study between GE and RWE on the same subject in 2008 and 2009. Read more on GE Reports.
The losses in such a system are “appreciable” The best solution out there today are Vanadium Redox Batteries. Read this Discovery Mag. article to get the facts: http://bit.ly/4zNrRI
VJ