Canuck MegaBattery "Cleans Up" Wind Power
The trouble with wind is that it's a bit like Adam Sandler's career. Sometimes it blows, and sometimes it doesn't.
That's just fine if all you want to do is fly a kite, but if you're an electrical utility seeking a steady supply of carbon-free juice for millions of homes and businesses, the resource needs a Plan B.
For one Canadian company, that plan B is "battery."
If the deal goes through as expected, next year Richmond, B.C.-based VRB Power Systems will install an enormous "flow battery " in a wind farm at Donegal, Ireland.
When the North Atlantic is truly honkin', turbines will feed a steady 32 megawatts of juice into the island's grid while simultaneously charging VRB's battery.
The battery itself will be large enough to need its own warehouse. Picture a series of enormous plastic tanks containing electrolyte solution. Power will be stored in the bank and later released to the grid via a central "cell stack," about the size of a large commerical refrigerator.
When fickle air currents abruptly die or shift and the Donegal turbine blades slow, VRB's two-megawatt-hour storage system will seamlessly kick in to pick up the slack, "filling in" the power hiccups, and turning a stop-and-go proposition into a resource that the company calls 95 percent constant.
VRB says its batteries--which can be endlessly scaled-up in size as need arises--could also work with widely distributed solar systems such the California Solar Initiative . As part of Arnie's Million Solar Roofs initiative, the Golden State has set a goal to create 3,000 megawatts of new, solar-produced electricity by 2017.
Canuck MegaBattery "Cleans Up" Wind Power
Canuck MegaBattery "Cleans Up" Wind Power
How much land destruction results from Vanadium mining? When these megabatteries cease operating, and they will, where and how will these huge warehouses full of toxic waste be disposed of? How serious would a short circuit explosion of a toxic chemical warehouse containing hundreds of MWh of energy be?
pumped storage
Imagine sailing in the battery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Cheers,
Emil Möller
Flow batteries.
A vanadium redox flow battery? Its not new - this technology has been in use for years. But 32MW? Thats... big. I dont think a VRFB that size has ever been built.
It will work, I am sure of it - one advantage of flow batteries is that increasing capacity just means getting a bigger tank. But cost-effective... I am not sure.
If it works well though, once one company has shown its success I predict every other wind farm is going to want one of their own.
Not 32MWH
The battery won't be 32 MWH, that's the whole wind farm's output. The battery's specs are still tba but will be closer to 2MWh.
Sandler's career does indeed
Sandler's career does indeed sometimes blow but, not to cut him short, the rest of the time it pretty much sucks. Look at windpower from the perspective of those places where solar is an equal option. The two, in combination, can be nearly ideal in the right places.