Here’s a piece on a subject we haven’t talked too much about recently: energy storage. In this case, it’s analogous to pumped hydro (see left) or advanced rail energy storage, both of which take off-peak energy and use it to …
Tag: pumped hydro
New, Completely Unworkable Concept in Energy Storage
Six or eight years ago, a client paid me a small fee to provide my opinion of a concept called “advanced rail energy storage,” or “ARES.” It’s essentially pumped hydro without the hydro. In other words, it replaces water with …
New, Completely Unworkable Concept in Energy Storage Read More »
Getting To 100% Clean Energy
How can we achieve our quest for 100% clean energy? Let’s start with the understanding that nuclear, while it’s very clean, is baseload, i.e., it can’t be ramped up to address the quite significantly changing loads that we experience through …
Dubious Energy Storage Concept
Can energy be stored by pushing heavy stuff uphill? Of course. That’s what pumped hydro is, which represents over 95% of the utility-scale energy storage current implemented on this planet. It’s also what advanced rail energy storage (ARES) is, which …
Legitimacy of Solar Energy
A friend writes: Hi Craig, Is this piece on solar energy a real argument or a conservative pipe dream? I respond: The latter, as one might infer from the other content on the site.
Tagged with: coal industry is far from dead here in the U.S, costs of operating coal plants have risen dramatically vis-a-vis natural gas and renewables, Department of Energy, EPA, fossil fuel industry, intermittence of solar, Legitimacy of Solar Energy, long-distance power transmission, pumped hydro
High-Level Discussion of Energy Storage
As our civilization attempts to integrate more solar and wind into its grid-mix, the subject of energy storage becomes increasingly important. This article in GreenTechMedia offers a cursory look at the three technologies that are competing with batteries: pumped hydro, compressed …
New Role for Decommissioned Coal Plants
In the context of grid management, we hear a great deal about “ancillary services,” which normally means adding a bit of power to the electricity grid, specifically generated so as to manage seemingly small but extremely important issues like unwanted …
Getting Off the Electricity Grid
Lots of folks comment on the imperative to “get off the grid,” and I certainly understand that. I’m reminded of a young man who wrote to us shortly after 2GreenEnergy opened in 2009 who was so torqued with Pacific Gas and …
Integrating More Solar and Wind Will Eventually Require Large-Scale Energy Storage Solutions
Guest blogger Cameron Atwood sent me this graph showing the increase in the use of solar and wind energy from 2005 to 2012. Impressive stuff. Here in the U.S., our grid-mix is currently comprised of more than 4% wind and …
New Compressed Air Energy Storage Plant Coming to California
It appears that planet Earth is on its way to its third implementation of CAES (compressed air energy storage) – one of a handful of different technologies that warehouses off-peak energy production and makes it available for times of greater …
New Compressed Air Energy Storage Plant Coming to California Read More »
Tagged with: advanced rail, biomass, CAES, compressed air energy storage, Doty Windfuels, flavors of renewables, flywheels, geothermal, grid mix, Hydrokinetics, off-peak energy production, pumped hydro, solar, solar energy, synthetic gasoline and diesel, Thermodynamics, utility-scale installations of PV and solar thermal, variable energy resources, wind, Wind Energy
