New Ways to Store Solar Energy for Nighttime and Cloudy Days

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/earth/15sola.html?ref=business

New Ways to Store Solar Energy for Nighttime and Cloudy Days

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: April 15, 2008

Solar power, the holy grail of renewable energy, has always faced the problem of how to store the energy captured from the sun’s rays so that demand for electricity can be met at night or whenever the sun is not shining.

The difficulty is that electricity is hard to store. Batteries are not up to efficiently storing energy on a large scale. A different approach being tried by the solar power industry could eliminate the problem.

The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer’s battery store about the same amount of energy, said John S. O’Donnell, executive vice president of a company in the solar thermal business, Ausra. The thermos costs about $5 and the laptop battery $150, he said, and “that’s why solar thermal is going to be the dominant form.”

Solar thermal systems are built to gather heat from the sun, boil water into steam, spin a turbine and make power, as existing solar thermal power plants do — but not immediately. The heat would be stored for hours or even days, like water behind a dam.

...

[NNadir]

1. This idea has been failing to stop dangerous fossil fuels for more than 3 decades.

When does the fundie anti-nuke community going to stop pretending that if they breathlessly announce the same idea they were running out 30 years ago, it's not actually going to be new?

Never?

Why am I not surprised?

http://socialissues.wiseto.com/Articles/169087496/?print

[LiberalEsto]

8. Of course you can have your nukes

if you promise to store all the spent fuel rods in your basement and back yard.

:D

[kestrel91316]

11. Ever notice how NNadir never likes to talk about how the

waste could be SAFELY stored for millennia??

[diane in sf]

2. funny, solar power stores better than nuclear waste and there has been lots of money

and time spent trying to solve the nuclear waste problem (the problem that never really goes away). On the other hand solar has shown remarkable increases in efficiency and dropping prices, especially in the last few years.

[krkaufman]

3. touche. n/t

chuckle.

[jpak]

14. Actually, the nuclear industry solved ITS nuclear waste problem in the '80's

They got the republics to take it off their hands and dumped it into the laps of taxpayers.

We ALL own their spent fuel now...

:puke:

[FREEWILL56]

4. This is fine if you are going to need that energy in the form of heat,

but to go through the conversion process from heat to electricity causes a large loss in efficiency. I would also say that there will be a loss of heat even in the best thermal insulating processes that would make storage good only for short durations of time and not in weeks. Batteries have better storage abilities than heat even with the cheapest of batteries used. Some have gone the route of pumping water to a high storage area to later be used to generate hydroelectricity, but again the conversion losses are present and there's water evaporation. That large battery bank is looking better for efficiency, but is not good for cost effectiveness.
edit to add:
Diane in sf,
Though I agree that solar efficiencies are rising, I don't agree that prices are lowering much at all. In fact due to Germany having a large incentive for solar there was a large run on pvs that caused a rise in pvs costs due to being more scarce elsewhere. Prices have not gone down much from that rising surge that started a few years back.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. A better way to turn heat into electricity

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4243793.html

[FREEWILL56]

13. Interesting reading and I hope it pans out.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. I'm stunned!

A solar start-up has solved the energy crisis! we're all saved! hooray!

[kestrel91316]

12. Easy for you to mock Americans and the very real dilemmas

we face..........you being safely esconced in NZ..........

Did you flee there rather than face problems here, perhaps?

[Dead_Parrot]

15. Unless I missed something...

...we're in the same biosphere. I'm not that far away, y'know.

[formercia]

6. Heat of crystallization

I was working on this problem in the 70's, but then the price of oil went down and everyone went back to their old habits.
The heat of crystallization works by putting heat into an insulated container containing a solvent and a compound that goes into solution by absorbing heat. The reverse is drawing the heat out and it precipitates.
Not as much energy as steam, but you can store the heat for longer periods at atmospheric pressure.

[midnight]

7. Ok. When can we have it, and how do we get it?

Or is this some time in five to ten years?

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. Well... it depends on what question you're asking

If your question is "When can we get the technology working?" It works today. It's been working for years.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/thermal_energy_storage.html

If your question is "Can we build a plant this afternoon?" The answer is no. It takes years to build a plant, but we could start building them this afternoon. (They're already being built.)