'No-water' hydropower turns England's hills into green and pleasant batteries
'No-water' hydropower turns England's hills into green and pleasant batteries
Technology based on dense fluid said to open up 'massive opportunities' in mountain-light English countryside and around the world
I'm not gonna jump on board with this one immediately, there's a few things about it that aren't wowwing me.
- R-19 is their magical 'denser than water' fluid. They don't have to be so secretive and if they are going to be secretive then I'm gonna assume it's not good for us.
- it's only really so that you can get the same amount of power from half the height. they aren't selling it as "store twice as much energy", but rather "use in locations that have half as much height". The thing is that the UK has used this kind of power for decades, there are old coal mines and natural cave formations that have large water flows. the water is pumped to the top when you have an excess, and dropped to power during demand. This system seems far better in general, even without the mysterious R-19 fluid. We don't /not/ have height differences in the UK, we have lots.
- It's Intellectual Property. Investors like IP so it can be licensed for royalties and bumps up the balance sheet. From their website I found this link
"RheEnergise said it invented the new high-density fluid, known as R-19. Chief executive Stephen Crosher told Professional Engineering that the liquid is a fine-milled suspended solid in water, with low viscosity and low abrasion characteristics. The base material is used in oral medication applications, in a similar way that chalk is used as a bulking agent for pills and tablets. He said the raw materials are common and available, including in the UK, and the fluid could either be manufactured on-site or at a depot. "
- Hydro is very geographically restricted, halving the height makes it less so.
I like the idea of using old coal mines, there's been pilot projects in Germany and Australia but I've never seen them amount to anything
The base material is used in oral medication applications
Calcium carbonate. The density for a calcium carbonate suspension in water is right on the money for what they've stated. They're being so evasive because they haven't patened it and likely can't. They're treating it like a trade secret because they can't make it into IP.
Edit: yep, they use it in oil drilling, so they can't patent it https://glossary.slb.com/en/terms/c/calcium_carbonate
This is logically efficient from a technical standpoint, but from a practical perspective is a terrible idea. You're only getting 2-2.5x th energy storage out of the process, but in return you're effectively requiring that the entire fluid system be isolated from the environment. Toxicity aside, you can't do anything with the fluid outside of the system. It's probably not something you want local fauna drinking, nor do you want even the slightest chance of this leaking into the local aquifers. I presume that, if it's not fully isolated, the fluid mix balance would have to be adjusted to offset evaporation of the water. And if the plant turns out not to be as great at you hoped hat do you do with the fluid?
Some numbers - a quick google says "According to Ofgem, the typical household in Britain uses approximately 2,900 kWh of electricity annually." I'm going to round that up to 8kWh/day. For a small village of, say, 1250 homes and a three day storage capacity, that's 30MWh. 1MJ (MWs) is 1000kg (one metric ton) stored at 100m - the upper end of this project. Since 3600 seconds per hour x 1MWs = 1 MWh, and we want 30, that's 1MT x 3600 x 30 = 108,000 Metric Tons of this high density liquid needed for a small project to put a 3 power day buffer in place for a town of 1250 houses. WTF are you going to do with 108,000 metric tons of high-density fluid if you decide is isn't working? Your reservoir would only need to be 25% bigger (wider, longer, and deeper/taller) to just do the whole thing with water and you wouldn't need to figure out how to get 3500 full size tanker trucks to transport it all away somewhere for a different project for for de-slurry processing.
If the fluid is what I'm thinking it is (calcium carbonate in water with a stabilizer), fluid loss would just be water loss and they wouldn't go to great pains to isolate it. They'd just add more water, since most of the weight they're pumping is the calcium carbonate.
to put a 3 power day buffer in place
Hydro is used to smooth out peaks and troughs in the power supply. You're not even close to getting a useful estimate.
The fifth largest hydroelectric power station in the UK is 160MW
100MW by 2030 is a pretty big deal.
I agree you need much less capacity because you'd usually just want to even out fluctuations, but I think the general gist of the comment is still true: you need just 2,5x the amount of water to produce the same amount of energy. The article says very little about the liquid, and very little about why this would enable them to build this capacity much quicker. A little more data would be nice.
The article in this post is written by yet another dunce who doesn't know the difference between energy and power. That single generating station would fill 100 MWh of capacity in 37.5 minutes.
I mean, we actually could use that damn water, for things, it's a perfect reservoir for drinking and/or irrigation.
Who in their right mind looked at this and said "You know, mercury has a higher specific gravity than water, it might even work better!!"
What's 108,000 tons in volume?
It's designed to go underground. I see it like water towers, every town has one to get mains water pressure and a store of water.
Wouldn't these be similar for energy? 3 days emergency backup power sounds great, plus it smoothes peaky renewables.
Edit. It's about 40x swimming pools
https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=volume&unit=cm&amt=100000
Very cool. Do we know what the fluid is? Does it pose any health risks if it somehow leaks into the groundwater?
It's just good ol' fashioned mercury.
The article claims it's 2.5x as dense as water, which according to this density chart is probably bromine.
Our innovative fluid R-19 is environmentally benign and has been engineered to be non-reactive and non-corrosive.
They're saying it's minerals and a polymer. In that case even a leak into groundwater would just be leaking groundwater. (Depending on what the polymer is)
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This is very neat. I wonder what the energy loss is, between what's required to lift the water and what's gained by releasing it. Regardless, eco-friendly high density "batteries" are a great concept.
It's probably very low efficiency, but if you can design renewable energy systems to provide enough overage during peak generation periods, maybe it doesn't matter.
As an example, MKBHD's solar roof produces something like 30KW during peak sunlight, which is so much more than his home uses (even with air conditioning turned on) that it can charge his house batteries to 100% and gives him power to sell back to the electric company for future power credits.
Admittedly, not everybody has a house with a large roof or $120K to spend on solar. But if we can drive solar and wind power down enough in price per unit, the efficiency of the storage system becomes a lot less of a concern.
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Yeah at the end of the day renewable energy is rapidly becoming pretty close to free. Efficiency doesn't matter as much when the energy costs nothing to generate.
If you have the system always running most of the cartage back to the top could be handled by the siphoning effect, like draining a washing machine or siphoning patrol.
You'd need energy to get it started but after that it should keep siphoning as long as there's liquid to siphon.
I don't understand how that would work in this case; if this is true, I think I'd need to see a diagram.
My understanding is that they use energy to pump the liquid up during times of excess, and release it to generate energy when there's more demand.
I guess it's pretty good. Most hydro is >90% efficient. Losses are from friction turning the impellers and electrical circuits
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Let me know if you find it!
I believe thunderfoot talks about a similar concept in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxGQgAr4OCo
At 03:47
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This is so heartening. Do things smarter and healthier. What a great idea.
Running on arbitrage of energy prices gives new meaning to 'buy the dip'.