Moving Mountains, Storing Energy (TEDx Talk)

July 1st, 2013 by Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz

This article was first published on Lenz Blog.

TedX talk by Professor Heindl on his idea of storing energy:

I have blogged about this concept before, in November 2011. I like it. As Heindl explains in this talk, it is cheap (per kWh), has a high efficiency, and a low footprint.

The only problem is that there are none of these projects built yet. It may work, but it is still an unproven concept.

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Tags: energy storage in mountains, energy storage mountains, energy storage videos, Germany, India, Italy, TED, ted talks, videos

About the Author

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz is a professor of German and European Law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, blogging since 2003 at Lenz Blog. A free PDF file of his global warming science fiction novel "Great News" is available here.

Ken

Why not use air reservoirs at the bottom of the ocean and use a fluid pressure source? The mountain concept poses a lot of risks to include cave-ins, earthquakes, or even small tremors.

We have this article over at (http://www.revolution-green.com) as well and point back to cleantechnica.
Matt

Sounds like a lot of wasted effort to cut/seal the rock. Plus only works on some formations types. If you willing to do that much set up work there are simpler plans.
1) Use old mines, seal two layers 500-1000 feet apart (some mine it is a lot more) and pump between. Can only works were old mines are, but a lot of them. But only needed work is to seal them, also old tech. My dad sealed salt mines back in the 60s, to use for water storage back when USA was making it’s underground space to live through MAD.
2) Use tanks under ground or dig/seal a big hole underground and a river/lake/ocean, need tank/seal so you don’t pollute the water.
3) Use some old shafts (or dig a new). Hang a large mass on a block/tackle.

Note every tall building can do the block/tackle approach. It “looks” like a elevation shaft. With new building taller than set number of floor could be zoning requirement. Also most building need some amount of heating or cooling. Just use thermal storage (been in use for decades), when extra power store the cold/heat. Use it when the PV/wind power drops.

The reason the thermal storage isn’t already in every large building is that the pricing model does not exist. Dream for a minute, assume for all large power user (don’t want to scare people about their home, yet) that power is price but the hour of day. Price sent out one week ahead. So my controller gets that data, and project weather date and plans when it will pull power to save me the most. Plus the grid can send out request to pull more power (at a discount) or use less if there is spikes in production or use.

We don’t need single site TWh storage, that is old thinking, we need distributed storage just like we have distributed use.
- Bob_Wallace
  
  I agree. I think we’re going to see batteries almost as cheap as pump-up or cheaper than pump-up.
  
  Because batteries are so much easier to site than pump-up reservoirs and so much quicker to install even a slightly higher cost would probably make them the major storage choice. And batteries have almost no new transmission costs.
  
  Will they be in individual buildings or in “neighborhoods” as utility substations are? Depending on what type of batteries turn out to be the least expensive. The Ambri liquid metal batteries would be very cheap but not appropriate for houses and commercial businesses. I can see them installed at substations.
Dave2020

Effective water seals are essential to any raised-weight accumulator. These sketches indicate that both the piston and the cylinder have to be metal-clad.
http://www.eduard-heindl.de/2_6B%20HHS%20Eduard%20Heindl.pdf

That strikes me as a tall order, not to mention all that diamond wire sawing!!

“There shold (sic) be systems, that stop a leak by physical means.”

Easier said than done, but even if it can be done, this energy storage design is in the wrong place in the electricity network. It should be before-generator, so that you never produce loads of ‘wrong-time’ electricity in the first place.

Then total installed generating capacity AND the energy storage requirement are both much less, and the whole system would be cheaper to run.
Mark

The problem is that you’re going to be pumping water against tremendous back-pressure to lift a mass of rock that size. I can’t think of any pump-system that has ever dealt with such pressures.

That’s not to say it can’t be done, but it should give any engineer pause, especially as he notes that the economics of the system are tied to making it as large as possible.
- Bob_Wallace
  
  I agree. I found this presentation lacking. Where’s the math for system pressure?
  
  It shouldn’t be hard to find out the record pump built and operated to date. Work from that to determine the maximum sized system that could be built using known machinery.
  
  If you can’t store for cheap using the largest available pump you’re talking unicorn farts.
  - dynamo.joe
    
    Unless I am missing something, its basically a hydraulic press, which means the pump head pressure is determined by the diameter of the pipe connected to the pump. So, you can adjust pump pressure to any value you like.
    
    Now making a small, low pressure pump means that your charge/discharge rates are going to be small as well. But since it works for pumped hydro I don’t see a reason it can’t work for this. And if you need higher charge/discharge rates you can always install multiple pumps when you reach some ceiling on the pump head pressure.
    
    Anyway pressure shouldn’t be an issue, tho some other factor may prevent this from working.
    - Bob_Wallace
      
      I’m way out of my knowledge pool here, so let me ask.
      
      Water weighs 1,000 kg/cu meter.
      Granite weighs 2,691 kg/cu meter.
      
      Isn’t the role of the granite cylinder to lower the height of the “well”? Pack more mass in a shorter drill down.
      
      If that’s true is it likely that it wouldn’t be cheaper to make a reservoir at the surface, drill down “a long way”, and then create another reservoir at the bottom of that shaft?
      
      You’ve got to store the water at the bottom with the granite plug somewhere anyway. With his system you’ve got to get down deep and install the pumping system/etc.
      
      This precision sawing through granite and fixing/maintaining O-rings looks a bit more complicated than drilling a hole.
      —
      
      Actually, I think this is a lot of unneeded “stuff”.
      
      We’ve got hundreds, thousands of existing dams that can be converted to pump-up hydro. Even many of our 2,500 power producing dams could serve for pump-up storage for large portions of the year.
      - dynamo.joe
        
        I don’t disagree with what you said Bob. But the system (?), device (?) he is talking about is a 1.5 terawatt hour storage system. That’s a really big hole you need to dig.
      - Bob_Wallace
        
        I’d be (possibly) more impressed had this guy brought an engineer on line to pencil out some of the practical aspects of the idea.
        
        There may be a problem finding a site in Germany for closed loop pump-up storage. That’s not the case in the US, or lots of the US.
        —
        
        The second cheapest way to build a pump-up in the US would seem to be to find a steep hill, preferably a bluff, doze out a pond at the top and a pond at the bottom and drill a ‘not that large’ shaft connecting them. Make the change in elevation as great as possible then both reservoirs and the shaft can be smaller. Go for lots of head and minimal flow.
        
        Probably the cheapest way to build a pump-up would be to go downstream of an existing dam far enough to not compromise the dam footings, excavate a smaller “three day” reservoir and install a pump/turbine combo on the dam.
        
        Some dams already have lakes or rivers below the dam. In that case all that is needed is to add a pump/turbine.
        
        Dams turbines are sized for the amount of inflow over the year. Once peak inflow time has passed levels fall and there is extra room behind the dam to hold pumped up water.
        
        Thinking of our California dams, we fill them up with the spring melt water. That’s also when electricity demand is less. The time when we need to store large amount of electricity for AC, etc. comes later when water levels are down a bit.
        
        (I think batteries are going to beat out pump-up before long. )
      - dynamo.joe
        
        I always thought the California coast would be a good place for pumped hydro. Lots of high bluffs along the coast and I hear there is a large amount of water near there too.
      - Bob_Wallace
        
        “Several years ago, the longtime owners of a mountainous parcel in the Tehachapi Mountains recognized that they had a topographic anomaly that could be valuable: a relatively flat mountain top surrounded by a number of ravines up to 914m below. They knew a significant vertical drop was one of the basic necessities for a pumped storage project, and that theirs was world class.”
        
        http://www.waterpowermagazine.com/features/featurepumped-storage-peaks-in-the-us
        
        Closed loop doesn’t require a lot of water. It does have to be filled the first time. After that it needs only what evaporates each year.
JamesWimberley

What do you mean, “it may work?” Archimedes and Torricelli say so; the physics is bomb-proof. A high school student could build a toy rock piston in a school lab. As always, the question is whether it can work economically.
Keith

This video from the same guy is a more concise presentation of the same idea, with a better view of the slides/animations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=m3p_daUDvI8