China's 40-story gravity batteries threaten lithium's energy reign
China’s towering EVx project uses 24-ton blocks to store excess power, raising them when energy is cheap and letting them fall at will.
What is the point in building these battery parks? To cover power outages?
To put it simply, the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow precisely when you need electricity, at least not all the time. You need to store solar generated energy from midday so that people can turn their lights on in the evening, and you need to store power from windy days to use on still days. Otherwise the electricity is wasted in the moment and non-existent when you need it.
Power usage is not consistent throughout the day, but power plants are optimized to make a consistent amount of power. You don't just turn a knob at the plant and make more or less power. You're stuck with all the electricity that's coming out of the plant, like it or not. So when plants are making too much power, you have to store that electricity somehow, and when plants aren't making enough to you need to have reserves. That's what a 'battery park' like this is does. In America, we call this storage 'the power grid'.
And yes, it gets more complex still when you start adding renewables like wind & solar, as now the power being generated is also not consistent. And although they generate 'enough' power, they tend to generate power at the wrong times. So the ability to store power & distribute it later becomes even more important.
I've seen debates on the gravity batteries before, and while they certainly work, I doubt they will really displace significant amounts of lithium battery usage. For one, sodium batteries are already a thing and much more likely to replace lithium. The biggest drawback with sodium batteries (lower energy density) is not a problem for grid applications.
Even more importantly, with how fast the industry is growing, by the time new solutions are scaled up for mass adoption, large amounts of new lithium battery storage will have been installed already. Although installing 25 MW of new battery capacity with one project is nice, we need 1300 ish GW of new batter power capacity by 2030 to support enough renewable generation. It will take a lot of projects, very large projects to fill significant amounts of that capacity with gravity storage.
Of course, that's not to undermine the fact that this is definitely a step in the right direction.
what is your take on vanadium flow batteries
I've never heard of those before o_o
Username checks out. What do you think of calcium batteries?
I don't think of calcium batteries. I'm not a battery engineer T_T
It's all going to depend on what offers the cheapest lifecycle cost for a particular use case I imagine.
I wonder how the dissipative losses on this technology compare to just pumping water up into a reservoir behind a dam. Because in theory the most simple way of storing potential energy that is also scalable without too much effort (you can use valleys in the natural landscape as a container, you don't need to build everything from scratch) is transferring large masses of water from a lower to a higher elevation. But the problem with that has always been friction/heat losses, which can be quite an issue whenever you try to replace chemical batteries with a physical energy storage.
Either way this will be fascinating to keep an eye on, if chemical batteries can be replaced by a much cheaper and more scalable option that would be a huge win for renewables.
Finding the correct landscape is not impossible, but it's definitely not an easy thing to do. If you can deploy a gravity battery directly next to the industrial area of a city, you have a lot of advantages. Moreso if you can charge that gravity battery from a river flowing past the industrial area.
Edit: same could be said for deploying a chemical battery
That's a very good point.
