ColdFusion - Energy From Mountains | Eco-Friendly Energy Solutions

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Welcome to another Cold Fusion video. In the world today, there's a growing shift towards renewable energy such as solar and wind. Because of this shift, there needs to be a way to store the energy received to be released later when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. On this channel, we've already covered Tesla's grand energy storage plans for their utility battery power pack systems. So far, there's successfully powered Kauai, an island on Hawaii, using some of the solar energy storage plants for their utility battery power pack systems. So far, there's successfully powered Kauaii, an island on Hawaii, using some of solar energy and battery storage systems.

Starting point is 00:00:41 Tesla are also installing systems in South Australia to sort out their power troubles, and more Tesla power packs are set to be installed in New South Wales as well. These solutions are all based on lithium iron technology. In just the previous episode, we've seen how the underlying technologies of lithium iron batteries are improving. The charging speed is drastically increasing, along with the long-term cycle battery life. The same is true for energy density. In addition, on a utility scale, battery technology does have the distinct advantage of a rapid

Starting point is 00:01:11 install time and a rapid response time to energy fluctuation needs. But despite all of this, when it comes to the application of utility energy storage, there are still some questions, namely the long-term cost and the real long-term battery cycle life in terms of current generation batteries. As you'll soon see, there's another energy storage method that's a pretty interesting take on the problem at hand. It involves the storage and release of energy using mountains as natural pressure vessels. This method, achieved by the company Alikais, promises relatively low cost and high efficiency.

Starting point is 00:01:47 In this video, we'll take a look. As a side point, this isn't a sponsor video and I wasn't paid for any of this. I just like to search out innovation that I think is interesting. So let's get into it. In a nutshell, energy storage solutions like Alikaze is planning to do are an attempt to smooth out the fluctuations in electricity production due to the next. nature of renewable energy. I had the privilege of meeting Giv Zangenna, the man in charge of this project while I was in Switzerland. I've invited him to talk about his technology and how it fits

Starting point is 00:02:17 into the current backdrop of energy needs. Unfortunately for this interview, the sound on my side wasn't working, but there's still a lot of valuable information here. My name is Giv Zangenne, and I'm the managing director of Alakaes, which is a company based in Switzerland, aimed to develop a new kind of storage technology. So electricity storage technology that is aimed at storing large amounts of energy. So you basically only have a lot of renewable energy in the mix in your electricity grid. Due to the intermittency of these sources, which means unpredictability, so you don't know when the sun is exactly going to shine, how much the wind is going to blow.

Starting point is 00:02:57 So when you have a lot of these kind of sources in the energy mix, you want to have a way to compensate these fluctuations. And the storage technology that we're working on is a method that can with low costs and relatively high efficiency be one of these key components for a grid that is run on renewable energies. So how does it work? Basically, the system uses excess energy from the grid to pump pressurized air into a cavity within a mountain.

Starting point is 00:03:28 The air is then cooled down, using specialized technology called thermal energy storage and then stored within the pressure cavity. When it's time to generate electricity, this air is then heated up again and pushed out to run a turbine that produces electricity. With this system, Alachai's claim over 72% round-trip efficiency. In our interview, give mentions that although geology has to be taken into account, the markets that would be suited for this technology include the continent of Europe, America, Canada, but especially India and China. For those last two markets, looking at recent trends, it's not hard to see why

Starting point is 00:04:11 they'll be a fit. These two countries have had very aggressive goals in providing renewable energy to help run their country's infrastructure. To give you an idea, by 2027, India is aiming for 60% of its energy to be provided by sources outside of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in China, they've decreased their coal usage by 5% year over year and have just overtaken the United States as a leader in renewable energy and with populations of about 1.3 billion apiece that's a huge market for electricity storage solutions for renewable energy. Maybe just to say why we need the mountain is you need a container basically to store pressure to store pressure right there. You probably know like even from small gas containers that you use or I don't know doing picnic or providing

Starting point is 00:05:04 the gas for for cooking. This is a small container that has a pressure as gas in it. However, if you want, if it's a small container is relatively easy and cheap to do, but if you want to have a very large container, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of cubic meter of air, it is unpaidable to make a steel container to hold that or any other kind of container. So basically that's why we want to exploit the geology and then the weight of the mountains, the weight of the earth, to contain this earth, the air. In 2016, the company completed their first pilot plant, located in the Swiss Alps, the plant is the shape of a 120 meter long and 5 meter diameter tunnel

Starting point is 00:05:47 with an energy capacity of one megawatt hour. The Swiss Federal Office of Energy financed 40% of the cost of the plant as they could see a benefit to the country from this kind of technology. Gives states that economically, mechanical storage that uses compressed air is still cheaper than batteries. The tools from machinery have been around for a long time, and right now the technology is at a factor of 4 to 6 times less than batteries on a per kilo. what hour scale. However, the falling cost of batteries are a risk and the company would be keeping an eye on that.

Starting point is 00:06:28 On the sustainability part, there's a couple of interesting studies that look at actually how much energy you can store in a storage device compared to how much energy was used to create that storage device. So actually for batteries lithium ion, you can now store 10 times the amount of energy that you use to make the battery during the whole lifetime of it. And with compressed air, is 250 times. So there's a huge difference. It's something that needs to be kept in mind if you want to have a general grid that is sustainable also in the long term. Otherwise, if you have to every 10 times that you use damage to create it, you need to change it. You can think about it will also have ecological problems or sustainability problems. Yeah, well, actually it has been used

Starting point is 00:07:19 before. So there is two plants already running in the world. One of them is in Germany. It was building 79 even and the other one is in is in USA in Alabama it's was building 91 most of them use salt caverns on the ground so you basically dig on the ground your big salt formations and they compress the air there there's two problems with that one of them is that which I didn't mention before which was quite important is when you compress the air it naturally heats up it's a physical phenomenon if you have experience with the bicycle pump when you when you heat when you pump the tire you feel that the pump

Starting point is 00:07:53 warming up so this happens at a much stronger extent when you're working with higher pressures and this heat needs to be needs to be also kind of stored because it can be up to 60% of the energy that you use to compress the air and these plants that exist don't use this energy don't use the heat they they just discard it and then when they need to expand the air again to produce electricity they use gas burners so it has goes with producing CO2 it goes with the reduction in efficiency and so on and so forth. And the reason for that is that at the time,

Starting point is 00:08:28 there were not machines who were able to also kind of store this heat or resist the heat that is produced during the compression. So they were pulled down to kind of protect the machines. And this has now changed. So the machinery, two machinery is available that you can use to compress at the same time also use the heat that is being created. And we, what we do is we have them one component. inside of our cavern which is called the thermal storage which then stores all of this heat and gives it back to the air when we are going to expand it

Starting point is 00:09:02 And like this you don't need the gas burning anymore so we don't have the CO2 emissions and we have much higher efficiencies and we have lower costs And this has also come through partially due to technological development in the in the last decades Let's talk about costs So according to give it costs about 100 million to 200 million to 200 million US dollars for about 200 to 500 megawatt hours output. But the larger the scale of the project, the more it makes sense and it becomes more value for money. This kind of technology isn't really something that a small startup or a set of consultants

Starting point is 00:09:42 can tackle. Alikai's are targeting big institutions as partners for new projects. So I guess that's about it. So I want to thank Giv for coming on Cold Fusion and talking with us and I also want to thank you for paying attention and watching through the whole video. I hope you learnt something interesting and in a wider kind of way, it kind of of shows that you can't really just throw renewable energy out the window saying that it's not going to work.

Starting point is 00:10:07 There are a lot of people working on different ways to make the technology more feasible right now, today. So anyway, thanks for watching. This has been Degogo, you've been watching Cold Fusion. If you just stumbled across this channel, feel free to subscribe. Cheers guys, and I'll see you again soon for the next video. Have a good one.

ColdFusion - Energy From Mountains | Eco-Friendly Energy Solutions

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.