You may never dream that you can use bricks to make batteries, and the cheaper the bricks, the better - save money and cost less!
Here's what I just read on Rechargen, a power company called China Tianying, in partnership with Swiss-based tech conglomerate Energy Vault, is investing $1 billion to build five giant "brick battery" energy storage systems. The two companies have partnered with Latin American investment firm Atlas Renewables to build the world's first 100MWh large-scale brick energy storage system near the Rudong wind farm in Shanghai, which is currently being commissioned.
What the? You may feel that you don't have enough brains, "brick battery"? What the hell is this energy storage with bricks? How do bricks store energy?
The Rocky Mountain Institute and the Bezos Earth Fund claimed in July this year that the global installed capacity of wind and solar energy will grow exponentially, and lead the world to achieve carbon peak around 2030, and the demand for fossil energy will fall off a cliff, thereby saving human civilization and the entire earth.
However, wind and solar energy are intermittent energy, and power generation is not necessarily the time when electricity is needed, for example, solar energy can only generate electricity during the day, and only dry stare at night during peak electricity consumption, so energy storage has become the key to clean energy, becoming a new blue ocean in the energy field, and various energy storage technologies have begun to flourish.
It may sound lofty, but energy storage is actually a very old concept, such as wood, which is an energy storage product produced by nature for humans. There are also prehistoric organisms such as algae trees that absorb the sun's energy and grow, and after death, they are buried in the ground and converted into fossil energy such as coal and oil, which is itself a storage of energy. The food we eat is also the chemical energy stored by plants and animals, and even we ourselves are an efficient energy storage device that can supply energy to bacteria and microorganisms after death.
The energy storage device we are most familiar with may be the battery, it is a miniature energy storage system, which can be combined to form a large-scale energy storage system, such as Musk began to engage in energy storage in 2015, using lithium batteries to make large Megapack and household Powerwall, you are most familiar with, of course, is the battery pack of electric vehicles.
Energy storage is not high-tech, so the competition is fierce, there is no monopoly product, Musk has a huge advantage in electric vehicles and rockets, but there is really no achievement in the field of energy storage. Various energy storage technologies are developing rapidly, and it is still unknown which one or several will become mainstream.
At present, energy storage technologies are divided into mechanical energy storage, thermal energy storage, electrochemical energy storage, other chemical energy storage, electronic energy storage, etc. Including various batteries, capacitors, power-to-gas, hydrogen storage, molten salt heat storage, ice storage, flywheel energy storage, compressed air energy storage, etc. Even hydroelectric power and pumped storage, which themselves store and utilize the energy of water, may be regarded as the most mature energy storage technology.
And today I want to talk about the "brick battery", is a kind of pumped storage similar to the mechanical energy storage technology, by transporting the bricks to a high place, the gravity energy storage, this energy storage method has a special term, called gravity battery, so pumped storage, in fact, can also be called "water battery".
The earliest gravity battery was the pendulum clock, invented in 1656 by Christian Huygens, who used gravity to power the pendulum back and forth through an escapement. The first gravity-powered pumped storage (PSH) system was built in Switzerland in 1907 and now has a total installed capacity of more than 168GW (2019 data), making it the world's largest form of grid energy storage.
Coincidentally, the Swiss company Energy Vault, which is working with China in 2017, has developed a unique approach by using cranes to transport concrete bricks to high places to store energy, and then letting the bricks land to drive the generators to work when generating electricity, thus having the same effect as pumped storage power plants, but at a lower cost and easier to build than pumped storage power plants, because it does not require a reservoir to store water. If this energy storage method becomes mainstream in the future, Switzerland may really be the originator of gravity batteries.
The advantage of a gravity battery is that it is sustainable and cost-effective. Bricks are relatively inexpensive and readily available building materials that are relatively inexpensive to build. Moreover, this kind of system can store and release energy at any time according to power demand, providing more flexible power dispatch. In addition, it has a high potential for renewable energy integration, which can efficiently store fluctuating energy sources such as solar and wind. So you see, it's not impossible for gravity batteries to really become the mainstream of energy storage in the future.
China's Tianying has signed an agreement with Energy Vault to deploy five gravity-based energy storage systems in addition to the Rudong project in Shanghai, adding 1.2GWh to the already announced 2.1GWh.
Energy Vault said that with the massive use of lithium batteries in energy storage systems around the world, leading to a sharp increase in fire accidents, gravity-based brick batteries could play a huge role in the global renewable energy market as a long-term energy storage solution, along with mainstream pumped storage power plants. China's Tianying believes that this breakthrough technology will make it easier for intermittent wind and solar energy to replace other fossil fuels, helping to accelerate China's clean energy transition and achieve net carbon emissions.
What do you think of the future of this technology? Welcome to discuss in the message area.