I've been wondering about this one for a while, and I know we've discussed it in a few threads here. Not enough of an engineer to develop it myself, in a different business etc. so I'm really happy that somebody else is doing this. CNN link: thermal battery developers in California
I wonder if heat pumps and geothermal will continue to be better than these methods? It's interesting to see this idea, but there's no real hard numbers in the article, more of a fluff piece without industry analysis of viability.
Heat pumps and geothermal are ways to move energy around. Thermal batteries are a way to store energy. I've made the argument before (elsewhere on this site) that if your generation cost is low enough, just buffer all that energy as heat in rocks. You can use that heat to make steam and run traditional turbines or possibly do other neat stuff with it. It's much less efficient than using the electricity directly, but that's fine because it doesn't force you to schedule your loads for when the sun is shining- which makes it much more valuable. You just use whatever sunlight you have, whenever you happen to get it to heat rocks, while using the rocks to make steam for a turbine running at whatever duty is needed for the current load. You can think of it as man-made geothermal, if that helps.
Yes, but Geothermal is based on the harvest of heat that has been stored in earth's core for billions of years. Why waste money on a box to store heat when an unlimited supply is already being stored under your feet?
If a good chunk of your solar electricity is being wasted 6 hours a day but you have inadequate power the rest of the day there is potential to use your excess power to superheat water or supercool your home (weather allowing) This “ thermal technology “ is available to anyone with a hot water heater or live in a region where you need to heat or cool a house, overheat/overcool and shut off at peak bleeding off / using your stored thermal energy until excess power becomes available.
Phase change heat storage has history. But bulk heat storage ... not so much because of the huge mass needed. I would rather have an insulated tank of paraffin, 136.4 kJ/kg, than a tank of any non-phase change substance. Bob Wilson
Last year's Christmas gift to the brother was a thermos that made use of phase changing paraffin to cool scalding drinks, and then keep them warm. Took a bit to refind the brand. BURNOUT Mugs – Temperature Regulating Travel Mug
Seems to me thermonuclear energy is, by far, the cleanest energy we can produce. (At least until the hydrogen engine comes further along.)
While Fusion is still a ways out, the existing fission based systems only are affordable if you don't do cradle-to-grave whole cost accounting because the additional billions of dollars just to decommission a nuclear power plant and safely store all that nuclear waste (which the US still doesn't have a long term storage facility for) is by far the most expensive of energy generation there is. At this point the promise of building more nuke plants is just a way the energy industry gets billions of dollars up front to build something that will never be completed due to "unexpected costs overuns." Even the mini-nuke plant projects are getting canceled because of the dishonesty of this con game.
The thermonuclear energy that we can produce today, produces and scatters huge amounts of radioactive fallout. The fusion energy we can produce two decades from now (or two decades from 2000, or from 1980, or from 1960, or ...) is still hypothetical. On the current paths, it won't be clean, just much less dirty than today's fission. Those released neutrons that escape the reaction will react with the containment vessel, turning it into eventual hazardous waste. Hydrogen engines are already excellent. It is the hydrogen fuel supply that is the very major obstacle.
The largest fusion reactor in the world fired up in Japan. JT-60SA Vs. NIF: How the Fusion Experiments Compare
Future generations are gonna have it so much better than all this awful stupid we're living with right now! So sick and tired of the fossil fool industry being in complete control of all the world's governments. Those criminals trying to suffocate the world to make themselves rich stole over $7 Trillion in subsidies from governments in 2022 and 2023 looks to set be even bigger: Fossil Fuel Subsidies Hit Record $7 Trillion In 2022 – International Monetary Fund - Health Policy Watch
If it's really under your feet, start drilling. What's that? You'd rather go someplace where only need to drill 200' instead of 10,000'? Is that closer to where you'll use the resulting power? Oh. And you don't already own that land? That's where this system works. You can put it anywhere solar already works, but gain the advantage of storage.
While estimates vary significantly, what I'm seeing suggests that more of it is likely radiogenic than primordial. From radioactive decay of various elements after Earth's formation. That 'unlimited' supply is limited to about 70mW/m^2 over average continental crust, or about 50 watts over my entire suburban home lot. And it is has a very low average temperature differential from it to my local atmosphere or any likely radiative cooling panels at night, so energy extraction efficiency for use as a prime mover is horribly low. Boring deeper holes to warmer zones is very expensive. Surface trenching depth is cost-limited by OSHA safety requirements for shoring up trench walls when digging deeper than 5 feet. So for the vast vast majority of us, geothermal simply cannot be not a primary energy source, just a low grade heat source for heat pumps driven by high grade energy from some other source. And for most of us, outdoor air-source evaporators are much cheaper than all the ground excavation work needed for a ground source heat collector. Earth's internal heat budget - Wikipedia Geothermal gradient - Wikipedia
