Tag Archive for: Electricity

Using molten salt to store electricity isn’t just for solar thermal plants

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How can we make wind a more versatile energy source? By adding storage.

How can we make wind a more versatile energy source? By adding storage. (credit: Germanborrillo)

An energy storage startup that found its footing at Alphabet’s X “moonshot” division announced last week that it will receive $ 26 million in funding from a group of investors led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that counts Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg as investors, and whose chairman is Bill Gates. The startup, called Malta, uses separate vats of molten salt and antifreeze-like liquid to store electricity as thermal energy and dispatch it to the grid when it’s needed.

Malta’s system stores electricity by taking that electricity, using a heat pump to convert the electricity to heat, and storing that heat in molten salt. Then, when electricity is needed again, the system reunites the molten salt with the cold fluid, using a heat engine to reconvert the thermal energy to electricity, which can be sent back to the grid.

The concept is outlined in a July 2017 paper in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, which states that “Round-trip efficiency…is found to be competitive with that of pumped hydroelectric storage.” [Update: Ars is seeking a number more specific to Malta’s system and will update again when that number is made available.] Pumped hydroelectric storage is one of the oldest forms of electricity storage, using electricity when it’s cheap and plentiful to pump water up a hill, and then releasing that water through hydroelectric turbines when electricity is expensive and scarce.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

In 2017, four US states generated more than 30% of their electricity from wind

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Enlarge / Wind turbines on private working ranch land on August 1, 2017 near Kevin, Montana. (credit: Getty Images / William Campbell-Corbis)

Last week, as President Trump made bizarre and wandering remarks about “windmills” being an inferior source of energy, the Department of Energy (DoE) released the 2017 Wind Technology Report (PDF), showing that wind energy had an extremely successful year.

In four states—Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and South Dakota—wind contributed 30 to 37 percent of each state’s entire electricity generation. These are fairly unique cases, because the states are sparsely populated and benefit from areas with high wind speeds. But the fraction of wind-generated electricity is growing in many other states, too. Fourteen states had more than 10 percent of their energy come from wind. On a wider scale, wind contributed just 6.3 percent of national generation, although that’s up from 5.7 percent in 2016.

Still, the US is behind a number of countries in how much wind power meets electricity demand. The DOE writes that “wind power capacity is estimated to supply the equivalent of 48 percent of Denmark’s electricity demand, and roughly 30 percent of demand in Ireland and in Portugal.” This year, Portugal had several days in March where renewable energy supply exceeded electricity demand.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Gigawatts of planned natural gas plants despite low electricity prices

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Enlarge / SMITH TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA – OCTOBER 25: A view from private farmland shows a natural gas cryogenic processing plant under construction October 25, 2017 in Smith Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania. The cryogenic plant is owned by Energy Transfer Partners, ETP, one of the nation’s largest natural gas and propane companies. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

Despite plummeting wholesale electricity prices in some areas of the US as well as essentially flat electricity demand in recent years, natural gas and renewable capacity is still being built.

In 2016, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) notes, natural gas-fired electric generation in the US increased by 3.4 percent; non-hydroelectric renewables like wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal increased by 15.7 percent; and conventional hydroelectric power grew by 7.5 percent. Coal electric generation, on the other hand, fell by 8.4 percent in 2016.

Those numbers only reflect the share of electricity generated by a certain type of fuel, not necessarily how many new power plants came online in 2016. But the natural gas expansion looks like it’s still gaining ground in certain areas of the country. According to The Wall Street Journal, at least two power plant companies—Invenergy and Calpine—are going all-out on building natural gas capacity in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Between those two states, Invenergy and Calpine are set to increase natural gas capacity by 8.6 gigawatts between 2018 and 2020.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Bitcoin startup runs your miner for less than you might pay for electricity

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HashPlex will give your miner a home and feed it cheap power.
CoinTerra

There are at least a couple of problems for anybody who wants to run a Bitcoin miner in their home, especially if you buy hardware that’s powerful enough to make some money.

“Miners don’t make very good roommates,” said George Schnurle, VP of engineering for miner hosting startup HashPlex. It’s easy for the most powerful miners to “piss off all your roommates because this noisy hot box is running in your living room.”

Schnurle’s co-founder, CEO and former Microsoft employee Bernie Rihn, was running miners in his apartment, and “he had an extension cord going all the way across the living room because he needed to connect to one of his circuits that didn’t already have a bunch of equipment loaded to it,” Schnurle told Ars. “The one upside of that is he didn’t have to pay a heating bill during the winter here in Seattle because he had these space heaters running in his living room 24/7.”

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