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.