[pinglepongle]

Lightsail Energy

Energy Storage Startup LightSail Raises $37.3 Million From Thiel, Gates, Khosla

Not sure about this idea, but I think Danielle Fong has the balls for it!
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... le/259632/


LightSail Energy, a California startup developing a compressed air renewable energy storage system, has raised a $37.3 million from a group of high-profile investors that include Peter Thiel, Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla, the company said Monday.

Co-founded in 2009 by Steve Crane and Danielle Fong, then 20, LightSail initially attracted $15 million from Khosla Ventures to create a highly efficient compressed air storage system. Like other compressed air systems, Lightsail’s technology uses motors to compress air in a tank to store energy generated by wind farms and other renewable source. When the air is heated it expands and drives pistons to generate electricity when, say, the wind isn’t blowing.

The company’s innovation is to capture the heat generated by the compression and store it in a spray of water for later use. LightSail claims that allows for a much more efficient storage system as energy does not have to be expended reheating the air.

Forbes Magazine earlier this year named Fong, 25, one of its 30 Under 30 energy innovators to watch.

Canada’s Innovacorp also participated in LightSail’s current round.

“The power grid needs cheap, reliable energy storage, but every single solution to date has been only incremental,” Khosla said in a statement. “They have the potential to totally disrupt the electricity industry’s assumptions with reliable grid-scale storage at a fraction of the cost of today’s battery technology. When deployed, LightSail’s technology would reduce the need for transmission line investment, peaker power plants, and make renewable energy practical and mainstream for the first time.”

[Newfie]

Do they make any energy storage density claims, such as compared to lead acid batteries?

[pinglepongle]

Dunno.
Let's ask Danny
http://bambuser.com/v/2771732
(video takes a while to load, but it's worth the wait)

[kuidaskassikaeb]

I think that compressed air storage is the way to go, and there are already a few in use for large utilities.

If air can be pressurized isothermally it is as efficient as a spring, this is where everybody wants to go.

That said, I really just don't understand what they are doing. One big problem with air compressors is condensation. The heat liberated during compression would evaporate the water. Then be reabsorbed when the water condenses later in the process. So I really don't understand this.

[pinglepongle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kuidaskassikaeb', ' ')So I really don't understand this.

[pinglepongle]

http://www.khoslaventures.com/cs_lightsail.html
LightSail: The power of iteration
When we first met with LightSail Energy, the company had three exceptional scientists and a unique plan: to create a car running on compressed air. As with many start-ups, iteration on the original concept was key to its success.
We brainstormed with the company for six months, making a number of introductions to customers for potential feedback. As LightSail iterated, we guided the company through both its technical and business development. Eventually, the founders were able to identify an exciting opportunity: to apply their compressed-air technology for grid-scale energy storage. The company is now executing on its new business plan full throttle.

THROTTLE?

Well, somebody ought to!

[sparky]

.
Compressed air was used in one of the first submarine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_submarine_Plongeur

it was used to power urban trams ,conveyancing system ,internal and city wide mail
Today it is widely used in large chemical and petrochemical plant
as the favored power for safe control , it is very easy to back-up

As for economical storage , so far nobody has found a way
Air is a bit expensive

[pinglepongle]

These guys have the same idea
http://www.sustainx.com/technology-isothermal-caes.htm

They are getting lots of money from investors and governments

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... le/259632/

[sparky]

.
Typical starry eyes enthusiasm , no mention of the storage side
with compressed air low energy density ,
the requirement are for massive banks of high pressure tanks to hold the air
It would work certainly ,
compressed air has a very mature tech , plenty of components are readily available
build one and see , there must be some apropriate usage somewhere

[kuidaskassikaeb]

These do exist now.

1978— The first utility-scale compressed air energy storage project was the 290 megawatt Huntorf plant in Germany using a salt dome.
1991— A 110 megawatt plant with a capacity of 26 hours was built in McIntosh, Alabama (1991). The Alabama facility's $65 million cost works out to $550 per Kilowatt hour of capacity, using a 19 million square foot solution mined salt cavern to store air at up to 1100 psi. Although the compression phase is approximately 82% efficient, the expansion phase requires combustion of natural gas at one third the rate of a gas turbine producing the same amount of electricity

The problem with these is that that in compressing air some of the work is turned into heat, actually a lot, and then when expanding the work of the gas cools it reducing the available work. At very low rates or expansion or compression however, it can be 100 percent efficient. So it's actually the speed of the operation not the energy density, which is limiting. Pressures of 4000 psi are not out of the question.

What these guys seem to want to do is store the heat in the latent heat of vaporization of water. If water could remain in the gas phase till expansion, when it would condense out, it would then release its energy then, and you know, Nobel prizes all around. It just isn't obvious how you do that.

[Plantagenet]

Compressed air storage sounds like the perfect way to store all the excess energy being produced from the ECAT "cold fusion" machines.

[pinglepongle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kuidaskassikaeb', '
')What these guys seem to want to do is

[kuidaskassikaeb]

Geeze:

You make me feel like a troll. You started this thread, then switched positions.

The more I think about it the more reasonable it seems. If the tanks only cost 2 million, that's about the cost of one turbine, on what I presume is a large farm. That's not going to stop anybody.

Then you tell me they don't believe in the laws of physics, but don't say what ones.

I was looking at some old mechanical engineering texts, and steam engines are a 19th century technology, so the materials do exist to confine 200 atm steam at several hundred degrees. I assume that the compressed air would need to remain hot to keep the steam, steam not water, and most of the losses would be thermal through the insulation. And since both coal and nuclear plants use high pressure steam, maybe the air is a problem, but I don't see why the tanks should be such a problem.

Proving if this works or not would actually be a pretty straight forward thermodynamics calculation.

[pinglepongle]

Here are the problems which so far have prevented CAES from being a practical solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed ... gy_storage

Many fully qualified scientists and engineers have attempted to overcome those problems but none of them has been able to make it work.

1978— The first utility-scale compressed air energy storage project was the 290 megawatt Huntorf plant in Germany using a salt dome.
1991— A 110 megawatt plant with a capacity of 26 hours was built in McIntosh, Alabama (1991). The Alabama facility's $65 million cost works out to $550 per Kilowatt hour of capacity, using a 19 million square foot solution mined salt cavern to store air at up to 1100 psi. Although the compression phase is approximately 82% efficient, the expansion phase requires combustion of natural gas at one third the rate of a gas turbine producing the same amount of electricity.[12][13][14]
November 2009— The US Department of energy awards $24.9 million in matching funds for phase one of a 300 MW, $356 million Pacific Gas and Electric CAES installation utilizing a saline porous rock formation being developed near Bakersfield in Kern County, California. Goals of the project is to build and validate an advanced design.[15]
December, 2010— DOE provides $29.4 million in funding to conduct preliminary work on a 150 MW salt-based CAES project being developed by Iberdrola USA in Watkins Glen, New York. The goal is to incorporate smart grid technology to balance intermittent renewable energy sources.[15][16]
2013 (projected)— The first adiabatic CAES project, a 200 megawatt facility called ADELE, is planned for construction in Germany.
2016 (projected) - Apex has planned a CAES plant for Anderson County, Texas to go online in 2016[17]

BOONDOGGLES all of them

No problem, high school dropout and boy-wonder Danny has found a way to make it work.

"we sort of like spray in some water and stuff like that"
"It works really nice like"
"Oh My God...can you please give us some money...I need some more hosepipe and a new frock"

[kuidaskassikaeb]

Dear Pinglepongle:

Is this personal with you?

Seriously, the Wikipedia article had nothing bad to say about compressed air energy, or nothing that isn't pretty well established. If there's something obviously stupid about what she, I guess she is a she, not a he, is trying to do, I can't see it. Certainly nothing that violates the laws of physics. What they are trying to do is an engineering project, and kind of a cleaver one. Maybe it's a little hyped, but that is the way it is in the start up world.

[Graeme]

Into thin air: Storage salvation for green energy

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')ne method is called pumped storage. At the Dinorwig power station in the UK, for example, water is pumped up into a reservoir on top of the Elidir Fawr mountain during periods of low demand. When energy demand spikes, the water is released down the mountain to drive turbines that feed the electricity grid. It's an extraordinary engineering achievement, housed in 16 kilometres of tunnels threaded through the mountain and capable of supplying 1300 megawatts in 12 seconds.

That power, speed and efficiency - about 80 per cent - is why pumped storage accounts for 99 per cent of the world's energy storage capacity. If every wind and solar farm had its own mountain reservoir, it might be possible to make wind energy a 24/7 resource.


Some plants have turned to air, such as a natural gas plant operated by E.ON Kraftwerke in Huntorf, Germany. Instead of using excess electrical energy to drive water up a hill, they use it to compress and store air in salt caverns about 500 metres below ground. When they need the energy once more, they release the air to drive a turbine. The problem with this method is its efficiency, which rarely exceeds 50 per cent. Pressurising air causes it to heat up, which carries away a lot of the original energy. Then, to expand the compressed air, it must be heated a second time, using up even more energy.

However, air may yet hold the key to energy storage - in liquid form. For the past two years, on a patch of land not much bigger than a basketball court in Slough, UK, a liquid air pilot storage plant has been quietly generating electricity using the excess energy from a neighbouring biomass plant. This tangle of gleaming white pipes and tanks has enough advantages over rival technologies to have been hailed as a critical part of our energy future. "This could save the UK billions," says Tim Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London.

[Graeme]

Producing Terawatts of Economical Energy Storage in the next two decades

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')roblem: Wind and solar energy sources simply can't produce power at all times. Energy storage is needed to store energy from the sun and wind when it's produced for use later. No economical, widespread energy storage method currently exists that would allow a substantial portion of the electrical grid's electricty to be supplied by these renewable sources.

Solution: An inexpensive, compressed air energy storage system with 60-70% efficiency could be widely scaled, hopefully enabling terawatts of grid energy storage in the next two decades.

Technology that might make it possible: Water is used to cool air temperature during compression and increase temperature during expansion, making the system more efficient.

This solution is well thought out and considers the response of the fossil fuel markets and companies. A large expansion of renewables will just cause fossil fuel prices to go down to the cost of extraction and processing. Reducing emissions down to 20% of current levels is sustainable. Fossil fuels could only be used for high value purposes,

[sparky]

.
A few points to make ,
Steam is not stored anywhere , you use it or you loose it
It still is the dominant form of electrical power production
coal and nuclear power plants are big kettles with turbines

there is a fair bit of confusion between
energy source , energy transfer and energy storage

energy storage doesn't make a buck it's always a net loss
but can even out differences between the peaks in demand and production
the bigger the output and the larger the delay give a bigger increase in cost
compressed air exist already ,
the power utilities would LOVE if it was practical
variations in baseline production are a pain , and a costly one at that

[Quinny]

Seems pretty obvious if you are going to store potential energy to smooth inputs a gravity based solution is going to be a hell of a lot easier. Suppose there might be some point solutions, but IMHO totally irrelevant in terms of PO.

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quinny', 'S')eems pretty obvious if you are going to store potential energy to smooth inputs a gravity based solution is going to be a hell of a lot easier. Suppose there might be some point solutions, but IMHO totally irrelevant in terms of PO.