A few years ago, I much enjoyed reading (although certainly didn’t always agree with) Jeremy Rifkin’s book, “The Hydrogen Economy“. One part though that stuck in my mind was his reference to hydrogen from wind powered electrolysis. On page 189 of the paperback edition he said:

“When wind power drops to 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour in the next few years, electrically generated hydrogen, using wind power, will be competitive with gasoline.”

5 years on, wind power prices - as measured by the installed cost per megawatt - have actually gone up. And even with one of the best sites and the lowest possible installation costs, the levelised cost per kilowatt hour over a 20 year period is still pretty much 5 cents per kilowatt hour, excluding all other externalities (additional transmission lines, grid-reinforcing, load-balancing, avian mortality rates, etc. . . . all of which rise with an increased wind penetration). From today’s standpoint, 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour looks a very long way off.

But the concept is still alive.

That’s why I was intrigued and very grateful to learn from an AEI reader based in New Zealand of a new company seeking to IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange next month (10th August), called Wind Hydrogen Ltd.

The company says it holds international patents over hydrogen-based technology that is complementary to wind power generation, able to overcome the issue of variable output from wind farms, considered a key long-term barrier to the commercialisation of wind power. They also believe their technology opens access to markets for hydrogen and hydrogen-based products. This last bit is important - they think they can sell off the surplus hydrogen to downsteam chemical companies who would otherwise take it from natural gas, releasing CO2, for the production of ammonia.

What I found particularly interesting though is that they have patents pending on wind monitoring and prediction. Combine accurate wind forecasting to an electricity spot market in short supply of power and very quickly you could get a profitable business model.

But hydrogen has to be most expensive form of energy storage so they are dependent - and I suspect taking a bet on - rising and unpredictable gas prices affecting the electricity and chemical industries. Meanwhile, Hydrogenics has just opened a wind-powered hydrogen fuelling station in Dakota.

Wind Hydrogen is definitely a company to watch. Still, the cynic in me thinks if this energy storage is so good, why not combine their storage technology with a fully amortised and rainfall-deprived hydro power plant?

This would be a lot cheaper - and more profitable, as well as renewable.

I’ve been thinking some time about energy storage and how one should compare in a competitive manner the different technologies available. Here incidentally, is a very good page on the different technologies and their technological comparisons produced by the Electricity Storage Association.

Still, my blog-sized and financially biased interpretation of what are the 4 performance metrics of energy storage should be are as follows;

1. Watt hours per installed dollar - pretty fundamental, the upfront capital expenditure cost.

2. Lifetime discharge/recharge cycles - this varies hugely from perhaps 1000 for lithium ion based batteries, 10,000 for Vanadium Redox Batteries and 15,000 for some others.

3. Watt hours per kilo - this determines how portable it is. Lithium ion batteries about 200. Petrol or gasoline about 13,000. By the way, laptops are getting lighter, so why don’t they just double the size of the battery?

4. Time required for full recharge - 6 hours for lithium ion to 10 minutes for nanosafe batteries.

So there we have it. I also have to say that if Altairnano’s nanosafe technology is as good as they say it is, a revolution is in the offing.But only if metric # 1 comes in at a low enough cost.

Here is a highly informative and readable article just published by Environmental Health Perspectives on the potential impact of flow batteries on wind energy. I’d have to say - from where we are now, that impact is just possibly massive. And I must admit, I also like the article because they have given me 3 quotes.

On the business case for this type of energy storage though, I have yet to come across an up-front capex figure on the cost of 1 megawatt hour capacity vanadium redox battery - as made by VRB Power Systems. This would make a transparent case for the investment - or not - in windfarms around the world.

As one might expect from an Environmental Health magazine, they were very keen about the low environmental footprint of the technology. These are the greenest of the batteries because they lack potentially toxic metals like “ . . .lead, cadmium, zinc and nickel which can contaminate the the environment at all phases of the conventional battery life cycle”.

I also keep thinking about nanosafe batteries, which can 80% recharge in 1 minute and achieve 15,000 charge/discharge cycles, which compares very favourably to 1,000 for lithium ion.

Energy storage really is making progress, something a couple of years ago I would have dismissed as fantasy. Now it is coming out of the lab and is deploying to the field, I think we may see some even more radical innovation unfold.

I keep thinking about this video clip from early April on 4 WNBC.COM - the 5 minute new story is about plug-in hybrids, hybrids and all-electric vehicles. CEO Michael Reed of Electro Energy makes a bullish forecast for the accompanying battery technology, estimating that in 5 years, a typical plug-in battery will have a range of 100 miles on a full charge, compared to just 20 today.

That would be very impressive. After all, if your better than average Nickel Metal Hydride battery delivers 70 watt hours per kilo, we are looking at a battery in 5 years time that delivers 350 watt hours per kilo of power. That is a very big jump which - if the cost is reasonable - would lead to a slam-dunk case for plug-in-hybrids. That’s because the average american auto journey is no more than 24 miles and in the UK, more like 15. So you quickly see how big the potential is. For all that, Electro Energy is small and by market cap., over the last 12 months, getting smaller and now stands at $26 million.

What Electro Energy believes it offers over other battery manufacturers, is it’s proprietary bipolar technology. They anticipate that this should deliver advantages in volume, weight, production cost and power presumably when their Florida manufacturing plant in Gainesville kicks in.

The need and demand for better rechargeable batteries is clear. The technology though has yet to catch up.

VRB Power Systems, has just been granted USD 1.5 million to deploy small scale energy storage systems in remote solar and wind applications across Australia.

Recently, a lot of interest about VRB’s energy storage technology has been focussed on their large scale storage technology to be deployed at Sorne Hill in the Republic of Ireland, which to give you an idea of size, will look something like this existing plant in Utah, although at a capacity of 12 Megawatt hours, 6 times bigger.

Yet energy storage for microgeneration in remote sites is still dominated by noisy, dirty, diesel generators and unlike much of Africa, a wealthy country like Australia could easiily do far better. So here’s a picture of VRB’s 10 kwh small system, which clearly doesn’t take up much space at all, not that anyone wants for room in Australia.

To quote VRB’s CEO from this piece in Renewable Energy Access,

We believe that Australia is a great market for our products with lots of opportunities in solar and wind applications both on and off grid. We are also pleased to see the Australian government recognizing the need for energy storage in order to maximize Australia’s renewable resources.

Maybe we’ll start to see non-government private Australian funds pouring into this technology following a successful deployment. That will be the test. I’ve always though that with all alternative energy technology, the hurdle is not how much money the government gives you, but how ready consumers are to part with theirs.

Around the world, utilities and government regulators are watching very closely the first mass energy storage device to be tied to a windfarm - VRB Power Systems flow batteries and Sorne Hill in the Republic of Ireland.

If you want to know why Ireland is the first country in the world to pioneer energy storage by wind farms this seriously, I reckon there are three reasons;

i) They have pretty much (except possibly New Zealand) the best sites in the world for windfarms - where windspeeds are so high, load factors of 35% are commonplace. So wind is cheaper in Ireland than almost anywhere else, incentivising developers to build more of it.

ii) A few years ago, TSO, who were in charge of Ireland’s national grid (they are now called Eirgrid Plc), demanded a moratorium on new grid connections to wind farms at 775 MW to overcome the technical challenges of integrating large amounts of unpredictable power. So in order to progress, energy storage started to loom far larger in the minds of irish developers than in other nations, where it has clearly not actually happened at all.

iii) Ireland has grown by on average 7.5% per annum for each of the last 10 years and they need lots more power, which as island they can’t easily import from abroad. Dell’s Computers European headquarters are run out of Ireland and the country has been a magnet for foreign investment, requiring even more power.

So there you have it - if Sorne Hill’s energy storage is seen to work, I can well imagine regulators around the world will be tempted to start mandating some degree of energy storage for future wind farms.

And it’s hard not to see VRB Power Systems doing well out of that.

Active Power, a maker of flywheels, has just opened a Tokyo office in order to serve the burgeoning Asia-Pacific markets.

I’m sure there are good reasons for being in Tokyo, but by far and away the greatest growth in electricity consumption is going to be in China, which plans a 6 fold increase in electrification by 2020. Still, many high-tech firms - including I would guess, Active Power - remain nervous of locating in China. They worry that their intellectual property will not be protected, either by the business culture and especially by the courts. A quick glance at the internet suggests there are more than a few companies in China that are engaged with flywheel technology who wouldn’t mind getting together with AP or for that matter Beacon Power.

As I wrote recently here in Power Engineer Magazine . . .

“A breakthrough in multi-megawatt class energy storage is at least a possibility in the next 10 years. At the moment, only a few megawatts can be stored using various energy storage technologies, and at great cost. Wind power would make a huge contribution if perhaps 1000MW could be stored overnight (when it is almost worthless) and sold back into the spot market during the day – when prices are at their highest.”

So I was very taken to learn of Sorne Hill windfarm in Ireland, which will shortly have 12 megawatt hours of vanadium flow battery storage, courtesy of VRB Power Systems. Just view all the technical detail here in this January07 piece in New Scientist.

If I’ve got my doubts still though, there is as yet absolutely no mention of cost for this technology - hard figures like cost per installed watt. The plan for this windfarm seems to be to sell back into the spot market, which would make sense if the technology was expensive and the spot prices were high. And I’m just trying to imagine how big these vanadium flow batteries are. If - as per the article - 70,000 litres of vanadium sulphate solution delivers 800 kilowatt hours, that means 87,500 litres gives you 1 megawatt hour. 12 megawatt hours then requires 1,050,000 litres - or (assuming a similar volumetric density to water) 1,050 cubic metres of space or 37,500 cubic feet of space needed to hold the batteries. That seems like a lot of space, but it is certainly much less than the total surface area required for a 12 megawatt windfarm.

If all goes well at Sorne Hill windfarm, I think we’ll see a vast increase in this kind of energy storage. Selling into a spot market with supply shortfalls has to be the most cost-effective way to make this technology pay. So I’m wondering when this will take off in California . . . if it had been around in 2001 in scale, I’m sure that enron traders could not have made anything like the profits they did.

VRB is definitely a company to watch - it has an energy technology that can actually bring prices down.

Beacon Power, dropped 18% today on over $10 m of sales to finance ongoing operations, including the expected completion of Beacon’s Smart Energy 25 flywheel development and the design of the first 20-megawatt frequency regulation power plant.

My general view is that flywheels are much closer to widespread commercial application than fuel cells, but that’s not saying much. I was particularly intrigued to read earlier this year that research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories indicates that 10 MW of fast-responding flywheel energy could provide the grid with the equivalent energy of 20 MW or more of traditional slow-responding power plant energy.

I’d like to know what kind of slow-responding power plant they are referring to. A semi warmed-up combined cycle gas turbine can start up in 3 minutes, a coal station perhaps 12 hours. 20 MW though is a really decent amount of power - the highest quantity so far for high-tech energy storage.

Active Power closed down 12.12% on Friday - the worst performing AEI stock of the day. It appears that a central cause is that preliminary findings showed it backdated certain stock option grants, and that it expects to incur additional stock-based compensation charges.

And the article continues;

“… it has not been determined whether any such charges would require a restatement of prior financial statements”.

This is a great shame for a company which produces the largest commercially available flywheels - which has enjoyed some success, as I blogged about here last August. And the fact that flywheels still have enormous potential in the hybrid vehicle market.