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Page added on March 5, 2020

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Energy Storage and our Unpredictable Future

Energy Storage and our Unpredictable Future thumbnail

It’s a fine spring day and you decide on a whim to go camping. By early afternoon you’ve reached a sheltered clearing in the woods, the sky is clear, and you relax against a tree trunk rejoicing that “The best things in life are free!” as you soak up the abundant warmth of the sun. As the sun goes down, though, the temperature drops to near freezing, you shiver through a long night, and you resolve to be better prepared the next night.

And so by the time the sun sets again you’ve invested in a good down sleeping bag, you sleep through the long night in comfort due to your own carefully retained heat, and then you greet the cold dawn by cheerfully striking a match to the pile of dry sticks you had gathered and stacked the day before.

In this little excursion you’ve coped with variable energy flows, using technologies that allowed you to store energy for use at a later time. In short, you’ve faced the problems that Graham Palmer and Joshua Floyd identify as critical challenges in all human civilizations – and especially in our own future.

Their new book Energy Storage and Civilization: A Systems Approach (Springer, February 2020) is an important contribution to biophysical economics – marvelously clear, deep and detailed where necessary, and remarkably thorough for a work of just over 150 pages.

The most widely appreciated insight of biophysical economics is the concept of Energy Return On Investment – the need for energy technologies to yield significantly more energy than the energy that must be invested in these activities. (If it takes more energy to drill an oil well than the resulting barrels of oil can produce, that project is a bust.) While in no way minimizing the importance of EROI, Palmer and Floyd lay out their book’s purpose succinctly:

“we want to argue that energy storage, as both a technological and natural phenomenon, has been much more significant to the development of human civilizations than usually understood.” (Energy Storage and Civilization, page 2)

Central to their project is the distinction between energy stocks and energy flows. Sunshine and wind energy – primary energy sources in a renewable energy future – are energy flows. Grains, butter, wood, coal, oil and natural gas are energy stocks. And storage mediates between the two:

“Energy storage deals with the relationship between stocks and flows: storing energy, whether by natural or anthropic processes, involves the accumulation of flows as stocks; exploiting stored energy involves the conversion of stocks to flows.” (page 1)

Our current industrial civilization relies on the vast quantities of energy stored in our one-time inheritance of fossil fuels. These energy stocks allow us to consume energy anywhere on earth, at any hour and in any season. If the limited supplies of readily accessible fossil fuels weren’t running out, and if their burning weren’t destabilizing the climate and threatening the entire web of life, we might think we had discovered the secret of civilizational eternal youth.

Fossil fuels are higher in energy density than any previous energy stock at our control. That energy density means we can ship and store these stocks for use across great distances and long periods. Oil is so easy to ship that it is traded worldwide and is fundamental to the entire global economy.

In particular, fossil fuel stocks can be readily converted to electrical energy flows. And electricity, which is so magnificently versatile that it too is fundamental to the global economy, cannot be stored in any significant quantity without being converted to another energy form form, and then converted back at time of use – at significant cost in energy losses and further costs for the storage technologies.

This is the crux of the problem, Palmer and Floyd explain. The vision of a renewable energy economy relies on use of solar PV and wind turbines to generate all our electricity – plus electrification of systems like transportation, which now rely directly on fossil fuel combustion engines. A major part of the book deals with two closely related questions: How much storage would we need to manage current energy demand with the highly intermittent flows of solar and wind energy? and, Are there feasible methods known today which could create those quantities of energy storage?

Beyond simple technologies like huge tanks or reservoirs of oil and gas, and stockpiles of coal, our current economy has little need for complicated means of energy storage. Batteries, while essential for niche uses in phones and computers, store only tiny amounts of electrical energy. But in Palmer and Floyd’s estimations, to maintain an economy with today’s energy consumption without fossil fuels, we will need to expand “current technologically-mediated storage capacity by three orders of magnitude”. (page 28)

What might a thousand-fold or greater expansion of storage technology look like? Palmer and Floyd provide some excellent illustrations. Pumped hydro storage is one promising candidate for managing the intermittent energy flows of solar PV or wind generators. Where suitable sites exist, surplus electricity can be used to pump water to an elevated reservoir, and then when the sun goes down or the wind calms, the water can flow down through turbines to regenerate electricity. This is a simple process, requiring two water reservoirs that are close geographically but at significantly different elevations, and is already used in some niche markets.

But for pumped hydro storage to be a primary means of managing intermittent renewable electricity production – that’s another story. By Palmer and Floyd’s calculations, to produce half of current US peak electricity demand via pumped hydro storage, the combined water flow from all the upper reservoirs would need to be far greater than the typical flow of the Mississippi River, and closer to the total flow of the Amazon River (depending on the average elevation differences between the reservoir pairs).

Comparison of required Pumped Hydro Storage flow to major river flows (by Graham Palmer and Joshua Floyd, from Energy Storage and Civilization: A Systems Approach, page 143). This amount of Pumped Hydro Storage would be needed to meet half of current US peak electricity demand.

Building sufficient battery storage is equally daunting. Palmer and Floyd look at the challenge of converting the world’s gas- and diesel-powered passenger vehicles to battery-electric propulsion. Even after making appropriate allowance for the far greater “tank-to-wheels” efficiency of electric motors, they find that to replace the energy storage capacity now held in the vehicles’ fuel tanks, we would need battery storage equivalent to 142 TWh (TeraWatt hours). As shown in Palmer and Floyd’s illustration below, the key material requirements for that many batteries are vast, in some cases greater than the entire current world reserves. And that is to say nothing of the energy costs of acquiring the materials and building the batteries, or the even more difficult problems of electrifying heavy freight vehicles.

Material requirements for batteries for world’s fleet of passenger vehicles (by Graham Palmer and Joshua Floyd, from Energy Storage and Civilization: A Systems Approach, page 141). To match the deliverable energy stored in the fuel tanks, battery production would consume huge quantities of key materials – in some cases exceeding the current world reserves.

Barring unknown and therefore unforeseeable possible developments in storage technologies that might provide order-of-magnitude improvements, then, it is highly unrealistic to expect that we can simply replace current world energy demands from renewable energy sources. Far greater changes are likely: combinations of changes in technologies, trading practices, regulations, social practices, ways of life. The layers of interacting complexity, Palmer and Floyd argue, are beyond the capacity of computer models to predict.

Their book is a bit of a complex system, too. Although many of the ideas they present are simple and they explain them well, there are sections which go beyond “challenging” for readers who have no more than an ancient memory of high-school-level chemistry and physics. (I plead guilty.) Such readers will nevertheless be rewarded by persevering through difficult parts, because Palmer and Floyd do such a good job of tying all the strands together. The second-to-last chapter, for example, provides a lucid explanation of why the “hydrogen economy” offers real potential for replacing some of the energy storage and transport capacities of fossil fuels – while incurring very significant energy conversion penalties that would have major economic implications.

Civilizations both ancient and contemporary need practices that provide a sufficient Energy Return On Investment – but a high EROI is not sufficient cause for a technology or practice to come into wide use. Rather, we need complete socio-technical systems that provide the right combination of adequate EROI, and adequate and flexible energy storage.

Energy Storage and Civilization is a superb overview of these challenges for the waning years of fossil fuel civilization.

An Outside Chance



27 Comments on "Energy Storage and our Unpredictable Future"

  1. makati1 on Thu, 5th Mar 2020 4:42 pm 

    “…Unpredictable Future” Yep! But many try to predict…for a paycheck. Chicken guts or crystal balls? All for $$$.

    No one knows what the next minute will bring. Certainly not next year or 2050.

  2. Cloggie on Thu, 5th Mar 2020 7:36 pm 

    Any thoughtful engineer confronted with the storage problem can tell you in advance that batteries and pumped hydro-storage will play a marginal role at best:

    https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2019/12/07/mark-p-mills-hack-for-the-fossil-fuel-industry/

    The only two REAL SEASONAL STORAGE OPTIONS are:

    – thermal
    – chemical (hydrogen and derivatives)

    (Scroll down a little for a table with storage options).

    But chapeau to PO.com to place an article that is not about oil.

  3. peakyeast on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 4:14 am 

    @Cloggie – I agree on the thermal storage. I have plans for both a heating and a cold storage in the ground next to the house.

    But if I get wealthy enough I would buy a 1000 KWh of LTO batteries. However that requires at this point in time that I have a few hundreds of 1000s of $ available for just that.

    About 50-100$ per KWh currently. And then the BMS and inverter system and extra solar panels on top.

  4. Davy on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 5:27 am 

    I have found multiple different systems with lower power demand works best. I have solar/batteries, solar thermal heat, and wood heat/winter water heat. I have the best insulation strategies I could buy. I practice conservation of energy use. Be efficient, use less energy and be open to intermittency and you expand your horizons.

    The future of energy storage is surely of many different types because no one type has widespread applicability and different storage types fit different applications. There is grid size down to individual. Chemical is good but the conversion issues are high. Thermal is good but it does not work as well with power production. Pump storage is great but high cost. It seems any strategy has an issue but where they have sweet spots is where they will become economic. It is unclear whether humans can master storage to power the current high energy civilization without fossil fuels. I don’t see it happening per physics and behavior but energy storage will be vital on the way down to a less energy intensive living or collapse.

  5. Cloggie on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 6:15 am 

    “But if I get wealthy enough I would buy a 1000 KWh of LTO batteries. However that requires at this point in time that I have a few hundreds of 1000s of $ available for just that.
    About 50-100$ per KWh currently. And then the BMS and inverter system and extra solar panels on top.“

    Exactly the same attitude a good friend of mine has. He wanted to know from me how many car batteries he needed to become electricity autark in combination with solar panels.

    I arrived at 2400 and urged him to have a chat with his wife first, as in: “don’t even think about it”.

    Typical hyper-individualized mentality, aiming at surviving on your own, rather than what you should do and concentrate on the survival of you within your in-group of a couple of thousand:

    https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/dutch-island-ameland-energy-independent-in-2020/

    “Dutch Island Ameland Energy Independent in 2020“

  6. DT on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 9:34 am 

    No FF inputs? No industrial Civilization.

  7. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 10:05 am 

    1831 — Edgar Allan Poe expelled from West Point.

  8. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 10:10 am 

    1933 — US: No Interest? Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Pres. Roosevelt closes all banks.

  9. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 10:55 am 

    Dow 30
    25,579.13
    -542.15(-2.08%)

    It could be worse—
    The Fat Boy and the Thugs are probably just smiling (the Fat Boy has been bankrupt 6 times, so this is minor).

  10. JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 10:58 am 

    Duncan, who is fat boy?

  11. Davy on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 10:59 am 

    I have a wood heating system in place at my cabin. It may not bw as a siphesticated as what they talk about here, but it is simple, robust and works rather well. A low-tech, but high-intellect approach is what I took. I burn my furniture to stay warm. However this paradigm had a potentially game-stopping flaw in it. I found, I quickly ran out of furniture to burn. This presented me a dilemma that was not easy to solve at first. I searched my lot, but I found that most of the stumps on my property failed to yield the heat I needed and were difficult, if not impossible to work with. Nor did they burn in a pleasing and hands-off manner I was after. Most of the other items that ‘cloggo’, ahem, my property are made of metal and plastic and did not combust near as readily as wood or particle-board furniture.

    After much thought, I realized that they key breakthrough to a REAL GREEN renewable energy future, was within my grasp. In hindsight, it was obvious what I needed to do to solve the intermittentcy problem posed by my limited furniture stockpile. So, what to do?

    Steal my neighbors furniture.

    Now before you say anything, many of the cabins and trailers near my cabin had plenty of surplus furniture for me to burn. Sometimes, I would ask the owners if I could have their furniture, and if they said yes, great. If they said no, that was not a problem either. I would simply wait till they went to sleep, or went into town, and would take whatever I needed. The best part of all this is that it is REAL renewable energy system. Whatever furniture I took form my neighbors cabins and trailers, would often get replaced, thus, providing me with the renewable energy base required to sustain my activities. Which, as you all know, primarily consist of posting and moderating this un-supervised comments area.

    This system requires some energy inputs on my part of course, there is no such thing as
    free lunch after all. Lugging heavy furniture through the bush is not easy but according to my analysis, the heat liberated by the various dressers, outdoor chairs, tables and whatnot is surely net-energy positive. Sometimes, I all I have to work with are those tall heavy dressers and I get to close to collapse dragging those back to my cabin. But I’ve learned a lot about the physics of furniture movement over un-even ground and I know which furniture burns best, and provides the most fuel. For example, a nightstand is easy to move, but, doe not provide as near as much heat as say, one of those full-sized TV stands. You know, those huge old-style TV stands that weigh 200 pounds. It is vital to have a ready supply of neighbors furniture on the way down to a less intensive energy future.

  12. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 11:06 am 

    Hint:
    Vix
    47.71
    +8.09(+20.42%)

  13. Cloggie on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 11:54 am 

    CESAR seasonal heat storage in basalt rather than water, allowing for temperatures far beyond 100C, like 500C:

    https://cesar-energystorage.com/

    20x30x6 m = 700,000 kWh is cluster of 50 homes.
    Has European patent.
    Built by Cees van Nimwegen (75) who retired and sold his business and used the return to built the storage system.

    This just in:

    https://www.duurzaambedrijfsleven.nl/energietransitie-business/33091/energieopslag

    The village of Boekel will built a first storage for 36 homes, aided by the EU and provincial government BOM.

    Van Nimwegen first built a system for his own home as a demo:

    https://www.duurzaambedrijfsleven.nl/energie/32081/energieopslag-basalt

  14. Davy on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 12:21 pm 

    Trump is fat boy juanpee.

    stupid

  15. JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 12:52 pm 

    I have a wood heating system in place at my cabin. It may not bw as a siphesticated as what they talk about here, but it is simple, robust and works rather well. A low-tech, but high-intellect approach is what I took. I burn my furniture to stay warm. However this paradigm had a potentially game-stopping flaw in it. I found, I quickly ran out of furniture to burn. This presented me a dilemma that was not easy to solve at first. I searched my lot, but I found that most of the stumps on my property failed to yield the heat I needed and were difficult, if not impossible to work with. Nor did they burn in a pleasing and hands-off manner I was after. Most of the other items that ‘cloggo’, ahem, my property are made of metal and plastic and did not combust near as readily as wood or particle-board furniture.

    After much thought, I realized that they key breakthrough to a REAL GREEN renewable energy future, was within my grasp. In hindsight, it was obvious what I needed to do to solve the intermittentcy problem posed by my limited furniture stockpile. So, what to do?

    Steal my neighbors furniture.

    Now before you say anything, many of the cabins and trailers near my cabin had plenty of surplus furniture for me to burn. Sometimes, I would ask the owners if I could have their furniture, and if they said yes, great. If they said no, that was not a problem either. I would simply wait till they went to sleep, or went into town, and would take whatever I needed. The best part of all this is that it is REAL renewable energy system. Whatever furniture I took form my neighbors cabins and trailers, would often get replaced, thus, providing me with the renewable energy base required to sustain my activities. Which, as you all know, primarily consist of posting and moderating this un-supervised comments area.

    This system requires some energy inputs on my part of course, there is no such thing as
    free lunch after all. Lugging heavy furniture through the bush is not easy but according to my analysis, the heat liberated by the various dressers, outdoor chairs, tables and whatnot is surely net-energy positive. Sometimes, I all I have to work with are those tall heavy dressers and I get to close to collapse dragging those back to my cabin. But I’ve learned a lot about the physics of furniture movement over un-even ground and I know which furniture burns best, and provides the most fuel. For example, a nightstand is easy to move, but, doe not provide as near as much heat as say, one of those full-sized TV stands. You know, those huge old-style TV stands that weigh 200 pounds. It is vital to have a ready supply of neighbors furniture on the way down to a less intensive energy future.

  16. JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 12:53 pm 

    I am a fat boy, Duncan.

    stupid

  17. JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 12:54 pm 

    Forum please note this for the last time:

    We (juanPee, JuanP, supremist muzzie jerk, Richard Guenette, Boney Joe, Truth Buster, Gaia, Kenz300,…..are spending less time on this lame unmoderated forum to concentrate on our chronic depression. We want to thank Davy for moderating us because we need it. We have saved the best of are comments for are new blog. We have years worth of sock material. We have enjoyed being moderating and neutering because our agendas. We will still be here it is just we will be spending more time putting laying in the fetal position in bed. We don’t expect much of help with depression. This is more a suicidal condition over the last 10 years of formulating are REAL Depressed. Many of my suicidal thoughts and filthy lifestyles our my egotistical way of life. We plagiarize and do ID theft daily ruining this forum. Anyone can kill themselves. Do it if it feels good I am thinking about it. For stalkers like me I hope I find more stalking opportunities. LOL. There will be a prize for anyone who can find where I live and rat me out. Double LOL. Anyway fuck are all of you I hate everyone including myself.

    We (juanPee, JuanP, supremist muzzie jerk, Richard Guenette, Boney Joe, Truth Buster, Gaia, Kenz300,…..guess we could have joined the moderated section at PO dot com, but we knew we’d get are ass permanently banned. We’ll try not to let the door smack us up the backside on the way out.

    Goodbye to ALL of you dumbasses.

  18. More Lunatic Davy ID Fraud on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 1:34 pm 

    JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 10:58 am

    JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 12:52 pm

    JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 12:53 pm

    JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 12:54 pm

  19. peakyeast on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 5:35 pm 

    With 90% taxation on electricity in Denmark on top of an income tax of about 50% – being independent of the grid is just as much a statement that I do not want to be robbed blind by greedy powermongers.

  20. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 5:47 pm 

    Hint:
    Quality of life: Denmark ranked 1st

    https://studyindenmark.dk/news/quality-of-life-denmark-ranked-1st

    (you are one of those poor bastards who live in the States)

  21. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 5:55 pm 

    “Recall that this refusal to test fits a pattern: This the same president who railed against attempts to count the dead in Puerto Rico post-Maria… Ignorance is a lethal political tool.”

  22. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 6:02 pm 

    Don’t look
    https://i2.wp.com/digbysblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Screenshot-2020-03-06-at-1.59.37-PM.png?w=627&ssl=1

  23. JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 7:21 pm 

    “Hint: Quality of life: Denmark ranked 1st”

    hint: move there stupid

  24. Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 7:59 pm 

    Well:
    https://miro.medium.com/max/780/1*8-fgvBPAFgPpbbr-YwD9Xw.jpeg
    No views if you don’t like the Fat Boy

  25. More Lunatic Davy ID Fraud on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 8:15 pm 

    JuanP on Fri, 6th Mar 2020 7:21 pm

  26. peakyeast on Sat, 7th Mar 2020 1:56 am 

    @Duncan – you do know that people who grew up as slaves – mostly feel okay about being slaves?

    Unfortunately I have never been one of those.

  27. Cloggie on Sun, 8th Mar 2020 5:28 am 

    ECOdorp Boekel, a self-sufficient sustainable living project, supported by Dutch government and EU:

    https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/ecodorp-boekel/

    In ECOvillage Boekel a seasonal basalt storage facility will be installed, also supported by the Dutch government and EU:

    https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/cesar-seasonal-energy-storage-in-basalt/


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