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Good evening and welcome to the car's
West Stage,
the next talk is about storing
energy in the 21st century.
Frank is a journalist
mostly writing on manned space
flight but also working
on energy storage, and he's
going to tell us what his ideas
are, what his knowledge about solutions
for the future of storing
energy will be.
Please welcome him.
All right.
Um, as was
already said, I'm a journalist and I'm a
podcaster, I write text, I speak
into microphones.
Doing presentations is not part of my
job. My presentations are bad.
I'm sorry about that.
So this talk is going to be about
energy storage and 21st century.
If you expect this to be about
the future, you're only
half right.
Because if you had to
look at the calendar, it's 2020.
We are in the 21st century.
And one of the things
we need to talk about is our
state right now and how we got here.
And you might be a bit surprised
by my first slide.
Yeah, 1859
let asset batteries
actually very first kind of battery that
was ever invented.
That was actually rechargeable.
And it's still the most popular
battery around.
As you can see, it's
over 370 gigawatt hours
of light as the batteries are produced
every year today, and
that's more than twice.
Or maybe this year it's
just about twice of what we have in
production and lithium ion batteries.
So it is this really is a very important
technology.
And yeah, electric
cars where are not
very modern invention, in fact run
to sort of last century there were quite
popular and.
Lots of people will say, yeah, OK,
that's that's.
This was the moment when when everything
went bad, but if you look at
the actual performance of these cars,
well, this was for early adopters.
They had poor HPS three kilowatts
of power.
They were driving at about the speed
of what you would walk maybe
a little bit faster.
And if you were trying to go up
a hill, this thing still
waste a ton. I mean, it's almost as
heavy as a modern car.
There were not very good overall.
You need when you have a real car,
you need a bit more than that.
These days, about 70 million passenger
cars are produced every year.
25 million commercial vehicles like
vans, trucks, tractors and so on
are produced every year.
And.
About 90 kilowatt hours of
lithium ion batteries are put
into electric cars.
So if we took all the
production of passenger cars
and divided the
batteries among them, it's one point five
kilowatt hours per car.
That's not quite enough.
So the number of electric vehicles
you see on the street is not because
people are not willing to make more, but
they just don't have enough batteries for
that.
We need.
At least 3500 gigawatt
hours. And that's about 20 times
the current production of lithium ion
batteries just to supply
passenger cars.
All the other things like trucks, vans,
vehicles, maybe great
storage, all the other things that you
need the lithium ion batteries for
is not included in that figure.
But in fact, lithium ion batteries
are still a very modern technology,
and there were
others like naked cadmium.
I also turn of the century,
and yet others like Nick Iron and
what happened with Nick Iron is that
they replaced the cadmium of iron
fact was still a bit more expensive
to produce.
But these batteries
kind of worked, and that was a great
advantage. On the other hand, nobody
quite knew why they worked.
In fact, when you see the when you see
the formula here,
these formulas were figured out in
around 1960 or so before.
That was very hard to figure this out
because you couldn't actually look into
the battery and do all the chemical
analysis, and they needed near
infrared spectrometry to figure that
out.
They will look at that formula and you
squint a bit and maybe
subtract the O-H here from
the H2O.
What you actually see is that
here's the hydrogen and moves over to
over to the to the nickel.
And this was something that was observed
and somebody had the idea
that you could just build a battery
without any cadmium or any iron.
You just have hydrogen in there.
And these batteries were actually quite
successful, even though you might never
have heard of them because
they're mostly used in space.
Hubble Space Telescope still has them.
The International Space Station had
them or has them.
They're currently being replaced by
lithium batteries.
But they were quite important, at least
in that area,
and especially because they had a
large. They could sustain a large
number of cycles
like 20000 50000.
And you have to remember they were used
in satellites or like
the space station in very low orbits.
So every 90 minutes they go runs
once around the Earth and they have a
sunrise and the sunset every 90 minutes.
So about 6000 per year.
And so you get six thousand cycles
every year
and your battery has to has to be
able to sustain that.
However, these batteries were absolutely
not suitable for anything
here on Earth.
For one thing, you don't really want to
have a pressure vessel filled with
anything around you because
it's really high pressure and something
might go wrong, especially when you build
like millions of them.
And also
inside there is gas.
There's extra hydrogen being developed
inside the inside the battery.
And as soon as it leaks
the hydrogen out there, it's flammable,
explosive. It's possibly explosive.
You don't really want that.
So people had the bad idea,
actually, they had this idea before they
said, well, we can just use the hydrogen
gas and they
stored the the hydrogen
in the form of hydrates
and you all have these batteries.
The typical a rechargeable
batteries, 1.2 volts,
and they're chemically exactly the same.
They're chemically exactly the same thing
because they
make hydrogen and hydrogen gets stored
inside this black stuff here, and the
black stuff is
a metal mixture
of metals that easily forms hydrates
and they act.
So you have a chemical bond,
but a very easy chemical bond
between the hydrogen and the material
inside there that can
so the material can take up to
the hydrogen and give it off even
at room temperature at
fairly good rates, at least good enough
for the batteries.
The problem is, it's pretty
darn heavy
when you look at like the stuff that's in
there. It's it's mostly nickel
and cobalt and a bit of
an tonight and.
That was the first mixture there are now
these days there are there are others
that are a little bit better and
completely different materials like
titanium, but
almost always some nickel.
And.
Yeah.
There were others thought
pattern that this one, um.
Actually, four cars.
Yes, Ford did want to build electric
cars and the battery
they had was almost as
good as lithium ion batteries
around 1990.
They're quite good. There were three
times as good as light as asset
batteries.
Only problem is it's a high temperature,
battery, sodium
and to solve for both liquid
and.
If you ever had sodium somewhere
in if you've ever seen the experiment in
chemistry where sodium was in water
and it exploded.
Well, if this sodium is liquid,
it gets worse, gets much worse.
And in this battery,
the sodium and the sulfur
are divided by
a solid electrolyte, and the solid
electrolyte is actually a kind of
ceramic.
It's aluminum oxide, and
it's fairly brittle and porous.
It has to be for because something has to
get through.
So the sodium and sulfur can react
with each other.
And no, you cannot really
use this stuff in a car,
which is kind of obvious.
You don't want to have liquid sodium in
your car, and
these batteries are anxious they still
use these days in grid storage,
especially in Japan.
There's a company
I had never heard of when I read
about those in 2010,
and I know it's 2010 because that company
was TEPCO.
If anybody remembers this and
why, this is why it's important
that I read about this in 2010 and
remember this sometime later in 2011,
I'm.
But the problem is a lot of
these, a lot of these batteries, and
we'll talk about lithium ion
batteries in a moment.
Materials is
one of my favorite charts in Wikipedia.
It's the abundance of chemical elements
in the Earth's crust, in the Earth's
continental crust.
It's a bit of a lie.
If you there is we have
oceans and the oceans
contain a lot less hydrogen than
would be in the stable.
This is not a complete table.
I took some sections out just to
show some important bits here
like, you know, let us down here.
It's fairly rare.
Lithium is also quite rare.
The reason lithium is rare is because
of what happens in the sun.
Lithium is very suitable
to nuclear fusion.
So a nuclear fusion lithium
almost immediately gets burned, and we
don't have a lot of lithium anywhere in
the universe.
Um, also
not on Earth. As you can see,
um, cobalt is almost
the same.
And actually, if you want
to build batteries and you want to build
a lot of batteries.
You want to have something
rather up there as far
up as possible, like,
you know, sodium, for example, we had
sodium sulfur batteries sorry
for would be somewhere in between here,
but we have a lot of sulfur because
in case you didn't know, we
do produce a lot of oil
and there's a lot of sulfur in the oil
and our fuels these days
have yet we have to take
diesel out of the out of the oil
in order to produce our fuels because
otherwise we'd have lots of
sulfur dioxide emissions
and all that sulfur that
gets taken out of the out of the fuel
ends up somewhere.
And so we have a lot of sulfur
around so we can use that any time.
Other stuff that's maybe, maybe
you may be surprised there's titanium on
this list, too.
And it's it's we
have a lot of it. It's like the ninth
most element nickel
is some is quite
rare on the one hand, but it's a much
more common, especially in production
than something like cobalt.
The other thing you might want to know
about elements, by the way, it's
really hard to find a good
periodic table that
shows the right numbers
and the only one and is free to
use, and the only one I found
was a Japanese one.
I'm sorry, but it shows the right
numbers. That's important.
One of the important things if you want
to have a battery that is light and has
a lot of power is
the way these little numbers
that nobody cares about down here.
That's one of the most important numbers.
Um, because
that's how much the atom weighs.
Chemical reactions only
chemical reactions only work when
you work with the outer electrons in the
outer shell, and
the energies of these electrons in the
outer shell are kind of similar.
It's always like a few electron
volts.
It doesn't differ too much.
I mean, it's like, OK, it can be one.
It can be a five, but it's not like,
it's not like one has five and the other
has five hundred on the other end.
Here, everything goes from one hydrogen
to something like lab, which has
207.
So the differences are quite huge.
So when you have a flat battery, you
already know it cannot have a heck of a
lot of capacity simply because
the atoms in there are
very heavy.
Same goes for something like cadmium.
Nickel, on the other hand, is a lot
better already.
I mean, you're around 60, you know,
nickel, cobalt, manganese, iron,
that stuff is around 60.
And.
On the one hand, it's quite heavy, on the
other hand, it's much lighter than the
stuff we had before.
So when people were looking for high
performing batteries,
they were looking in this corner up
there.
Obviously, hydrogen is the lightest
atom of them all.
And if you just want to burn hydrogen,
you get a lot of energy out of it.
On the other hand, it's hydrogen, it's a
gas.
It's really hard to contain into
anything.
And so for a battery,
it's not the first choice.
So what's the next best option
you may have noticed?
I took the the noble,
the nova gases and anything below
fluoride out of this out of
this one, just so it looks a bit nicer.
But helium? No, you cannot make a battery
and appear out of helium.
So they were looking at lithium.
Lithium is fairly light.
You see, it has a weight of seven.
That's seven grams per mole.
Um, and if you want to
make a battery that has the highest
possible performance, it's obviously
lithium.
Um, sodium has
very similar chemical characteristics.
That's why we have a periodic table,
everything that's on on top and one
column has kind of similar
chemical behavior.
So sodium will play a role a bit later,
but as you can see, sodium is
about three times as heavy as lithium.
And so the first choice
when you look at when you look at
a new battery that you might want to
invent will be lithium
and not sodium.
And that's what was done.
Of course, this year we had a Nobel Prize
finally for it won't be good enough.
At the age of 97 years,
by the way, he's still a researcher.
He's still researchers in
batteries, lithium batteries
and also sodium batteries.
And this was
a revolution.
It was really the big breakthrough.
If you if you ever look at
I mean, there's so many articles
that I try not to write, let's say
this next super battery is just
around the corner.
On the one hand,
developing this thing I
took from the 1970s
until the 90s
just to just to make it work properly
and commercialize it.
The first ones were offered in around
1970 and 1991.
Um, but
it improved and improved
quite a lot since then.
As you can see, it's almost two and a
half times the capacity
in the last 30 years.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of
people who write articles saying, Yeah,
OK, we can
get five times or ten
times the capacity
within the next five or 10 years.
By the way, these kinds of articles and
announcements have been made ever
since batteries were around.
I mean, you can actually find articles
in the 1990s, around nineteen
hundred that sat the same thing like,
yeah, OK, ten times as much in the next
ten years.
Well, let's put it that
way. One hundred years later, they
had we had about 10 times as much.
So that's about how long it takes, but
it's actually not bad, and we are really
quite good, especially in the last in the
last 20, 30 years, improvements
have been quite good.
Um,
main problem with this thing?
OK, maybe I should say how it works.
Um, there was actually
another another talk that explained
how this thing works would be quite
brief.
Um, you have a material
with lithium in here.
That's a cathode.
And when you charge it,
I put a negative charge in here
and the positive ions go
over here and are and are stored
in this case.
And that was the first first kind of
battery ever was around was
in in carbon,
actually, they used Coke.
I think these days we
use graphite and graphite is
a we more or less makes this
one out.
Um, if you remember,
if you remember the
this table, um,
storing it in graphite has a problem
you see up there. Carbon carbon
has a weight of twelve.
And when you saw lithium, when you saw
lithium in in these layers,
you need about six carbon atoms
to store one lithium atom.
And the carbon atoms together,
six carbon atoms have a weight of 70
to the lithium atom has
a weight of seven.
So the carbon is about 10 times as heavy
as the lithium.
So obviously this is not ideal,
but it took a long time just to max this
out.
These days, I think they're at around 90
percent or so of the theoretical
capacity.
So if you want to do something with
graphite, um,
you kind of improve this much more.
On the other hand, here.
This one says metallic cobalt
and.
This is because lithium cobalt
oxide was material of
choice from the beginning
in lithium batteries
and was pure cobalt oxide.
This, too has changed.
Um.
Oh damn it.
OK.
This will change and we will see it later
on.
Lithium, where's lithium
coming from?
This year, I I was always
sure that most of the lithium is coming
from Chile, and it's not too bad
I wasn't wrong. But actually, this
changed in the last two years.
These days, most of the lithium is coming
from Australia.
And what changed
is that lithium
used to be mined simply by pumping
water into the ground into
salt layers where you had a lot of
lithium salts pumping the
water up, evaporating it,
concentrating it and extracting
that everything from that.
Um, there are some spots
where this is possible, and it's actually
quite easy and also quite cheap.
But that's limited
and we're pretty much run up to
the limit.
In Australia, what they're doing is
mining or ores.
Like this one here spodumene.
This is a lithium
lithium aluminum silicate.
And in theory, they
could contain about the earths
themselves could contain
about six point eight percent
of lithium by weight.
I know that's lithium oxide, so it's a
bit it's about half that's about
three three to four percent of
lithium.
But typically, you would get maybe one
percent of lithium by weight, and that's
just for two. Or you have to get to the
oil itself.
And you when
you when you mined something, you not
only get yourself, but also other
stuff. So actually, you
need to mine maybe about a thousand
tons of stuff in order to get one tonne
of lithium, and that
sort of thing is done on a large scale in
Australia.
And that's where, as you can see,
that's where it's coming from, and most
of that is, by the way, from Chinese
firms, because most of the
battery summit in China,
cobalt cobalt is a huge
problem,
a problem.
For one thing, because we don't have too
much of it.
As you have seen, it's about as much as
as lithium and you need a lot
more cobalt in your battery than you need
of lithium simply because, I mean, it's
the same number of atoms.
You know, if you had lithium cobalt
oxide, you need one lithium atom
and you need one cobalt atom.
But the problem is cobalt is a cobalt
atom is about 10 times as heavy as a
lithium atom.
So you need a lot more cobalt, then
you need lithium.
And so we first
ran into the problem of running out of
cobalt.
Cobalt is mostly mined in the Congo.
Um, you will have seen a lot
of pictures like this one
and much worse ones also.
And about a quarter of
the cobalt is mined
in the Congo.
No, sorry.
Two thirds of all the cobalt is mined in
the Congo and one quarter
it. It depends, depends on
on the economy, on the current
economic conditions.
Something between 10 percent and a
quarter of all the cobalt in
in Congo is
mined by small scale farms like
small-scale mines like this.
But most of it also mostly
by Chinese companies,
or at least to a large part by Chinese
companies mined in something like this.
I didn't.
If you go and look for pictures
of cobalt mindset are free to use,
you only find this.
So I have a place that is actually
a copper mine. I'm sorry, but I
really didn't find a free picture
of a large scale cobalt mine anywhere.
Um, but main problem
is really the Democratic
Republic of Congo is a
war zone.
What one poor
country, and it's
really worth reading up on the history of
this country.
And that's the problem.
The problem is not cobalt cobalt, it's
just it's just an element somewhere in
the table.
Don't blame the cobalt blame, the
blame, the social situation in this
country.
And aside from that, we still have
limited reserves.
So there's there are many good
reasons not to have cobalt or to at
least reduce the amount of cobalt you can
have and is
what has been done.
Also, because culverts getting expensive,
the more you know, the more demand
there is for cobalt, the higher the
prices get and when when demand
outstrips the supply, prices
just skyrocket.
So people had to find alternatives
and they did. Um,
these days, modern nickel
sorry, modern lithium ion batteries
use something like nickel manganese
cobalt mixtures instead of just
pure cobalt.
Um, and you have numbers
like five, three, two or eight one one
eight one one means eight eight
parts nickel, one manganese and
one part cobalt.
So today,
batteries use between one tenth
and one third of the amount of cobalt
that they that they used to use.
There also are other possibilities you
can use something like lithium ion
phosphate has no
cobalt in it at all.
But the problem is you only get about
half the.
You only get half the capacity out of the
battery and
especially when you have something like a
car that you want to have as much range
as possible.
That's not really an option, at least for
this. Um.
It has other positive properties
like it's much more robust.
It cannot decompose thermally
like a lot of the
cobalt like, um,
materials can.
But it's possible lithium
sulfide, lithium
sulfide is something that everybody
would really want to have.
And trust me, it's not for want of
trying because, you know, sulfur
is only half an atom of
sulfur and they're half as
heavy as an atom of cobalt.
And you can have two lithium atoms
together with one sulfur atom.
The problem is the lithium
has to some.
Somehow you have to get rid of the you
have to divide the lithium and the and
the sulfur, and
then you divide lithium into sulfur.
At some point you do it in
stages.
You know, at first you have like two
lithium atoms and one sulfur
atom, and at
some point you have,
I don't know, one lithium and one sarafa
and then you have two lithium
and three sulfur and so on, and you do
it in stages. And one of these stages,
unfortunately, is liquid inside
of the inside of the electrolyte.
And that means that your cathode
is now suddenly soluble
and it begins to slowly but surely
destroy itself every time you charge
or discharge the battery.
And this is a problem that
hasn't actually been solved yet.
There are companies that sell this
lithium sulfide batteries, but only
have a relatively short
life.
And the way they do that is by just
putting a heck of a lot of material and
a lot of lithium sulfide into the battery
so that it, well,
it still destroys itself, but it takes
longer until it's completely gone.
The possibility is there.
Lithium air batteries, also
one of the dreams that everybody wants to
have and lots of people trying
is actually this is
this actually works almost like a fuel
cell, except with
lithium on one side instead of hydrogen
and air on the other side.
The problem is that you now
form your form and
lithium oxide on
one side of the on the cathode side
of the electrolyte,
and it's very hard to really maintain
the integrity of this of this whole
thing.
And especially,
I mean, it works in very thin layers.
But if you want to have a thick layer and
you would need a thick layer in order to
actually exploit this, because
I mean, remember, what you have here is
just lithium on one side, only lithium
atoms and nothing else on the other side.
That would be great and would be perfect.
It would be like two kilowatt hours
per kilogram of battery.
I would be really nice.
But.
It really doesn't work, you need you
only get it in very thin layers and
then you have a relatively
speaking thick layer of electrolyte
between that and so long as the
electrolytes that you need are so thick
that they make up more weight of
the battery than the actual lithium
you are traveling back and forth,
the extra capacity is still worse than
what we have today.
And you also have to make sure you can
cycle of this without losing any of the
lithium on the airside.
And it's um, it's a bit
of a mess. It's a bit of a problem.
And nobody had solved this yet has solved
this yet.
Yeah.
OK. You have the other the other
slide before that, that's why, yeah,
this is just as rare as cobalt.
And we have to we have to
replace this at some point, maybe
as well because lithium supply is
is limited and we have to get like
20 times as much
batteries into production as we have
currently.
OK, anode materials
right now, we have talked about one side
of the battery, now it's the other side,
you remember the graphite with the six
carbon atoms.
Well, you can improve this if you don't
use graphite, you can use graphene
or Crawford
or some nanotubes or multiple nanotubes.
Unicorns might help.
Maybe unicorns can make those cheaper.
But no, right now
they are. You can find a lot of papers
and a lot of
a lot of science being done with
graphene and nanotubes and so on.
And it works. It actually does work.
The problem is, this
is about as expensive as gold.
Maybe not quite, but almost.
And it's not useful for for batteries
right now. Maybe someday
somebody gets to make those on the cheap
and then it's an option.
Silicon and phosphorus could help as
well. It could improve upon the graphene
on the graphite have much higher
capacities because especially
with silicon, silicon forms an alloy
with lithium and
it's you get much better ratios
and so you can get much higher capacity.
The problem is when you
when you perform such an alloy,
what you get is much bigger.
The electrode just gets much bigger.
It gets four times as big as it was
before.
And this puts a lot of stress
on the material and it starts to crack.
And basically, every
time you use the battery again, it
destroys itself.
That's not helpful.
Um, maybe.
I mean, there are tricks some people
make lithium like,
like the wafers we use in chips
and make them very small, and you have
very small structures that can store
the atom inside of them
without cracking because they are very
small,
but they never talk about
price for some reason.
I don't know why.
I think it might be too expensive.
Um.
OK.
The other the other thing you can do and
there is active research, and it's quite
promising. Actually, it's pure lithium.
Just nothing.
The reason why nothing hasn't been
done before is
the lithium. When you when you grow
lithium by Bielik
by electrochemical means, you
just put one atom onto
whatever lithium is already there
and you do it by
you do it by an electric field and all
the atoms go where ever there is the
strongest electric field.
Problem is, the strongest electric field
is wherever there's like a little peak,
a little bit of like,
yeah, like a needle, the point of
the needle or something like that.
And that's where they go.
So what you get is 10 traits
that is like, like small needle like
projections that grow ever more
and ever faster.
And that has prevented use of
just just pure lithium anodes,
even though that would essentially halve
the weight of the battery.
And that's why people want to use it.
You would you would just cut the battery
and the weight of the battery in half
and get about twice to twice the
capacity.
What you need a cell is solid
electrolytes because you see
right now the electrolyte.
That's the stuff that's between the
cathode and the anode is a liquid.
And that's why these then fights can form
when the electrolyte is solid,
like in sodium sulfur battery,
you know, like the hot stuff that we had
before from Ford.
And there's there's already something
solid in between there.
And so nothing can can grow through it,
at least if it's solid enough.
And people are working on
this.
They have made some advances.
One of the problems is it's
still a bit too heavy.
The a bit too thick and too heavy,
and
it's a fairly slow process.
You have, I mean, after all, it's no
longer a liquid.
You have to get the ions through
through a solid material.
So the other problem.
Yeah, I as I said, I switched
to slides around, so now we talk about
sodium.
Sodium can replace lithium.
As I already said, sodium
is about three times as heavy as lithium,
so it's not
it's not perfect.
But on the other hand, since lithium
currently only makes up about
maybe three to five percent of the
whole of the weight of the total battery,
switching to something that's three times
as heavy isn't quite
so bad.
One of the problems is that there's
a lot less development that has been
done on on using sodium instead
of lithium simply because, you know,
people started using lithium
because it was the best performing
material and it was plenty of lithium
around. Why not?
I mean, especially in the 1990s, lithium
was mostly used as a grease or
as, I don't know,
like like four colors.
I think I'm they didn't.
They didn't use a lot of it.
So there was plenty there was a lot
of supply of it.
And so why why waste your work
on sodium when you have something that
works and something that is always going
to get you better performance?
So sodium will always be the back,
the second best in performance.
And so people didn't really start
development on it.
They have started development on it in
the last couple of years, maybe this
decade.
You get a lot more papers if you search
online and scholar, Google
Scholar, Google dot com.
If you didn't know that page, it helps a
lot to find
scientific material
and you find a lot more work
on this. And there are even some
companies that are selling them
more like as trials than as
actual products, but at least that
something and they have capacities of 140
watt hours per kilogram, and that's
similar to what we had in the year 2000
and lithium ion batteries.
So development lags
behind about 20 years roughly,
and they still don't have this same kind
of durability and cycle life
that we expect today.
They have they can sustain maybe two or
three hundred cycles these
days. We expect a lot more than that.
All that is the result, because there's
there has been much less development in
the materials overall, um,
sodium is very similar to lithium, but
there are always some subtle changes.
And it just needs to be understood.
It's simply, you need a lot of
a lot of scientists on benches and in
front of their computers crunching data,
doing his experiments just to find out
what we don't understand and what we do
wrong.
Yeah.
The other problem is, I mean, batteries
are great for great for
stuff like this microphone or my
smartphone or maybe a car,
but at some point you want to store
more energy.
And batteries won't cut it,
and it's not lithium batteries,
sodium, maybe sodium,
there's huge amounts of
sodium. We're not going to run out of
sodium, trust me.
Um, but you still
have.
When you have a battery, you still have
to. You have to purify the materials.
You have to assemble them.
There's a lot of processing going on,
and that's a problem
when to when you want to have something
that's really big, something
that can store a huge amount of energy
like we like we need
for for storing.
Yeah, something like the grid level
energy.
I've given you I mean, if you if you read
about it in the news
or in articles, you
usually find something like this.
This is from June.
This is perfect for for solar energy,
as you can see lots of solar energy.
But right now, this is
where you had this month
almost no solar energy and we had
some wind, except when
there's not. And we
kind of need to kind of need to store
the wind and order the wind energy
in order to,
yeah, in order to have energy when we
need it with solar energy,
it's much easier.
But the trouble is, we're here at
ninety one degrees north and
at 19 and 91 degrees north
here in Leipzig, for example.
It kind of looks like this in winter.
It's cold and it's cold because we don't
get a lot of solar energy right here.
That's very different when you're
somewhere in California or
even in Spain.
I mean, Spain is already a few degrees
further south and
they did. They get a lot more sun in
winter, as you can tell from
the temperatures, actually.
And so you can rely much more on
the cycle of this sort of energy, like
every 24 hours and so on.
But here we need
much more storage.
We need to be able to store
energy from times like this
and use it in times like these
when we when you don't get any.
And now we're talking
about.
I mean, we need 80,
I think. Yeah, I have it on this slide.
I mean, the amounts we need is huge.
40 gigawatt hours,
by the way, 150 gigawatt hours
is the worldwide production
of lithium ion batteries.
OK, 40 gigawatt hours in Germany
is enough for 30 minutes of power
supply.
Let's say we really need a heck
of a lot.
One of the large scale, what we consider
large scale storage
possibilities is pumped storage
and problem.
He has physics.
Physics like this
is m d h
m is the amount of water the mass of the
water.
H is the height to which you pump it
and is the gravity.
We've maxed out gravity.
Actually, in this solar system,
you will not find a solid surface that
has that has more gravity than ours,
so we cannot optimize that further.
I'm sorry.
Um, height, if you get
something that's better than this, I
mean, this is not three hundred and sixty
meters, but I assume Kitwana
and 60 meters for one simple reason
it's easy to do the math for them.
Then you need one ton of water
to store one kilowatt hour
and, you know,
one kilowatt hour for one, for
one ton of material.
That's a heck of a lot.
And that's why these are almost
always huge and don't store
a lot of energy.
And the total total storage is something
on the order of 40 gigawatt hours in
Germany.
There have been other
other proposals, like compressed air
storage.
What are you doing here in Germany?
We have there used to be a sea
here around Germany and
a lot of these, a lot of the salt
water from the oceans evaporated
and left behind a lot of salt.
And we get these salt domes.
And so what you can do is you can
make holes in the inside the salt
simply by pumping water down into
the salt and dissolving the salt.
And yeah, then you have a huge
hole in the ground, except you cannot see
it from the from the from the surface.
He it's it's it's a bit better
than the pumped storage.
When you do the math on it, you can get
about three kilowatt hours per ton of
salt that here.
That you have removed from the ground.
Um, this assumes
70 bar you
can have. If you go deeper into the
ground, you can have higher pressure.
You can have more more than this,
but it's kind of limited.
And also, you have a hole in the ground
in this hole where collapse sooner
or later.
I mean, these holes are stable for
for us.
They're stable for centuries, maybe
thousands of years,
but eventually they will collapse.
Something will go down.
And sometimes when people don't
pay enough attention, when we're making
these holes, that actually happens.
And you can you can find accidents
where this actually happened.
OK. How do you how does this work?
Um, well, it's very simple.
You pump the air in
and you take it out.
You go to let it flow through a turbine.
It's almost like wind energy, except for
very good turbine and
you get energy from it.
Problem is, when you compress the air,
it gets really hot and
then you saw it and it gets cold.
And then you let it out and you
decompress it, and when you decompress,
it gets even colder, and that's
how you lose a lot of energy.
And so what is done?
There's one of these is in Germany,
actually, there's one in Germany and one
in the US.
And what they do here is they burn,
they burn natural
gas in order to make up for the heat
that was lost.
It actually makes the idea.
It makes the the
the power plant itself more efficient.
But yeah, it's not exactly
renewable.
Um, what people
actually want to do is store the heat.
So as I said, when you compress the air,
it gets hot and then you want to store
the heat.
And when you decompress it,
you put the heat into the decompressed
air and heat it up again and
it gets much more efficient.
So instead of 45 percent, you get up to
about 70 percent.
Oh, damn it, OK.
I was way too slow.
The way you can store the seed is
something like this.
Um, how much storage?
There's a lot of thermal storage using
liquid salt.
Liquid salt is not terribly
efficient at that task, especially
because very high temperatures,
but you can actually use stones
like volcanic rock.
Ah, I think Siemens is
building something like this.
And what they use this basalt rocks
like, but this big, I mean,
a couple of centimeters, I mean, like
the pellets you can see here.
And it's a very, very, very slow,
very slow at
very small storage,
dump storage.
You want to build these things big.
Um, and when you build them really
big, they're really efficient
because,
you know, it's a matter of geometry
when you have something like a cube.
And it's one meter on each side
and you make it two times as big.
Two times it's two times this white,
two times as long, two times as high.
It has eight times the volume,
but only four times the surface area.
And when you only.
And the problem is you lose
heat through the surface area.
So when you have eight times the volume
and four times the surface area, it means
that your heat losses are only half
as big.
And that's not actually enough, because
when you take something like this and you
build it two times this big
and you will also
make these parts two times this week, and
that's the that's the insulation.
And when you make the insulation two
times this big, you also reduce
the losses by a factor
of two.
So when you build something like this
really, really, really seriously
big,
you can you have very small losses,
you have losses for for
small ones, you get losses of about one
percent per day.
And when you build them like a
thousand times this big,
you can in theory, get one
tenth of that.
In theory, you could store heat
for weeks or even months in
this, and
you need
who I
I thought I had this memorized.
But you need, I think, about 10000
tons in order to store one gigawatt
hours of of electrical energy
because you can actually use this to to
store electrical energy.
Yeah. OK, I'm sorry.
Everybody enthusiastic about hydrogen,
I will not be talking about hydrogen
because I'm running out of time.
And
yeah.
Big thing here is it has really
cheap raw materials.
Simple stones and
capacity is fairly high.
You get about 30 to 60 kilowatts,
30 to 60 watt hours per kilogram.
If you try to take the
heat because you can eat these up to
about seven 800 degrees
Celsius.
And run them through it come
turbine, like the turbines you have in
the coal powered power plant and
you get an efficiency of 45
percent out of this.
That's not very good,
especially compared to a battery
where you would get efficiencies on the
order of 80 percent or 90 percent.
It kind of depends on how fast you charge
if you have to test a Tesla supercharger.
You have much less efficient batteries
than if you take it slow.
It charges slowly.
But for something as simple as this, 45
percent is pretty good,
especially because you can scale it up
into the gigawatt hour range and even
tens of gigawatt hour range, which
is kind of like what we need.
Yeah.
And all you need is stones,
fairly huge amounts of stones.
The reason why I think this is
a pretty good idea,
even though it's not perfect, as I said,
45 percent year you waste half the energy
is because hydrogen is even
worse.
Yeah, OK.
I tried to do this in two minutes.
I'm sorry, it's going to be very fast.
OK? Hydrogen in theory,
it sounds great. You split water into
hydrogen and oxygen.
You use the hydrogen to get energy
and you have really great
density of energy.
You know, thirty nine kilowatt
hours per kilogram is really great.
You have theoretical efficiencies of
eighty three percent.
And yeah,
that sounds great.
But in practice, what
problem is the efficiencies are
usually related to the lower heating
value, which is not
the higher heating of values.
So there's a fudge factor of about
18 percent in the efficiency
or actually 10 percent in the
efficiencies when you get to the real
efficiencies.
So when you
have when they say, OK, 60 percent
efficiency for the electrolysis,
you know, when they say 70 percent
efficiency for the electrolysis, the
reality is more like 60 percent.
And for the fuel cells, it's more like
50 percent than 60 percent.
And the reality is
when you take all the losses
into account, including in storage,
you get about one third and
very often much less than 30 percent
of the energy out of it than you put into
it. I'm sorry.
That's a big problem.
OK, run on. I'm sorry.
I've run out of time.
To thank him for his great
effort.
And yet
I couldn't see that I really couldn't see
the clock until just now.
OK, thank you.
What switch? It was switched off at
first. That's why I kept looking at my
watch. Sorry.