"World's first working thermal battery" promises cheap, eco-friendly, grid-scalable energy storage

[OnlinePoker]

South Australia has recently put the world's biggest lithium battery into operation – but perhaps it should've waited. A local startup says it's built the world's first working thermal battery, a device with a lifetime of at least 20 years that can store six times more energy than lithium-ion batteries per volume, for 60-80 percent of the price.

Climate Change Technologies, also known as CCT Energy Storage, has launched its TED (Thermal Energy Device) with a set of remarkable claims. TED is a modular energy storage unit that accepts any kind of electricity – solar, wind, fossil fuel-generated or straight off the grid – and uses it to heat up and melt silicon in a heavily insulated chamber. Whenever that energy is required, it's pulled out with a heat engine. A standard TED box holds 1.2 megawatt-hours of energy, with all input and output electronics on board, and fits easily into a 20-ft (6-m) container.

Here are some of CCT's banner claims about the TED: For a given size volume, it can store more than 12 times more energy than a lead-acid battery, and several times more than lithium-ion solutions. Installations can scale from 5-kilowatt applications out to a virtually unlimited size. Hundreds of megawatts of instantly accessible, easily controllable power should be no problem – all you need to do is add more units, plug-and-play style. In the case of an outage, each TED device can remain active for about 48 hours.

https://newatlas.com/cct-silicon-energy-battery-thermal-energy-storage/59098/

[zipplewrath]

1. How do they generate the heat?

Generating heat from electricity, especially the high temperatures to melt silicon, is often a horribly inefficient process as compared to combustion systems. I wonder what the total cycle efficiency is.

[NNadir]

3. The efficiency of this system is likely to be...

...extremely low, even compared with other wishful thinking scams in energy storage designed to pretend that so called "renewable energy" could be even remotely workable.

It's in no way even remotely different than the same scheme proposed by that functional idiot Amory Lovins in 1976.

These things pop up regularly like a hydra, even though so called "renewable energy" has failed miserably - as evidenced by the state of the atmosphere - to address climate change.

[DetlefK]

2. Published on April 1st. Here are the many things wrong with that:

1. Storing energy by melting something is bad because you lose energy going over the melting-enthalpy while not getting an increase in temperature out of it.

2. Silicon melts at 1414 °C. That's a shit-ton of energy you need. It also happens to be the melting-point of high-performance-steel.

3. Thermal insultation only works good in a vacuum and maintaining a vacuum costs energy.

4. Converting heat to mechanical power to electricity will get you massive losses due to low efficiency.



Summary:
It can work, but putting energy into it and getting energy out of it has such low efficiencies, there's no way it's competitive with other devices.

[zipplewrath]

4. Chemical Energy

I've seen flywheels proposed for this in the 1960's. We of course have the whole battery path we're on. And hydrogen has been proposed for this for years. It's just hard to match the energy storage capacity of the chemical bonds, other than atomic bonds. I have seen a proposal to use renewable energies to create hydrocarbons from CO2 and water.