Integrating Wind and Energy Storage
As noted here, the huge Chinese wind turbine concern Envision Group is buying Nissan Motor Company’s battery manufacturing business.
“The acquisition includes Nissan subsidiary Automotive Energy Supply Corporation (AESC) and battery manufacturing operations in Smyrna, Tennessee, owned by Nissan North America, as well as operations in Sunderland, England, owned by Nissan Motor Manufacturing.”
Here’s just one more story, pointing to the importance of integrating storage with variable energy production (solar and/or wind).
It’s also an opportunity to remind readers that 2GreenEnergy represents one of the best-conceived wind/storage projects on the planet, one that will implement CAES (compressed air energy storage). We’ve initiated talks with several potential clean energy investors, but there’s still time for anyone interested to get involved.
Craig,
Zhang said there were no plans for an initial public offering for the group.
Envision Energy was founded by CCP favourite Lei Zhang and has quickly become one of the world’s largest wind turbine makers, just behind Vestas, Siemens, General Electric sales exceed $2.5 billion.
This purchase will add more storage capacity to Envision and assist in shoring up capital raising capacity in the advent of a shortage of investment funding in the PRC.
NEC has been seeking to reduce exposure to investment in the EV market since Tesla decided to produce batteries in house.
Renault-Nissan has also been suffering from the intense drain of capital caused by the commitment to electrification, and decided to divest the loss making battery division.
Recently, Envision rejected claims of Turbine unreliability, and poor performance but conceded “maintenance’ had been an issue, but was now resolved. Western reporters in China report official harassment being employed as a deterrence after asking “unproductive” and “negative” questions to Envision Energy or Lei Zhang.
As for Compressed air energy storage (CAES) infrastructure to store Wind generated energy as an investment opportunity, the technology show a great deal of merit in theory, (especially under lakes, ocean beds etc).
However, the engineering challenges and ROI would indicate investment is only for the very brave (and patient) or those with very deep pockets and a very good knowledge of the industry, engineering and potential risks.
Nit, IMHO, for the faint-hearted or those hoping for quick returns.
I’m afraid that I remain just as pessimistic towards CAES as I have ever been.
There just is too much loss in the cycle. Ideal gas laws remain pretty strict, so you have the issue of tremendous amounts of heat being generated with compression. That heat is low-grade heat, and difficult to capture and use effectively… so it’s just loss.
Going through the intense challenge of sealing a cavern to be gas-tight, setting up very large compressors and large turbine assemblies to compress gas and recoup energy, only to lose half of the energy of compression at the start (then deal with turbine inefficiencies and cooling causing reduction of overall power potential of the stored gasses as the cavern depressurizes)…
Meh. The price differential between peak and off peak power is just not going to be high enough to justify this as a solution.
It would be FAR better to just build out grid interconnectivity into mountainous areas where pumped hydro can be employed. If you do wish to use an underground cavern, you can actually consider underground pumped hydro. It’s easier to make a cavern water-tight than it is to make it gas-tight, the turbines are much cheaper, the pumps are a similar cost to the compressors… but the cycle efficiency is around 90%, instead of ~25%.