ColdFusion - Energy From Mountains | Renewable 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 solar power. using solar energy and battery storage systems. Tesla are also installing systems in South Australia to sort out their power troubles and more Tesla power packs are set to be

Starting point is 00:00:47 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 U-TOPE. At the utility scale, battery technology does have the distinct advantage of a rapid 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.

Starting point is 00:01:34 It involves the storage and release of energy using mountains as natural pressure vessels. This method, achieved by the company Alikai's, promises relatively low cost and high efficiency. 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 the fluctuations in electricity production due to the nature of renewable energy.

Starting point is 00:02:09 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 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 Zangenna and I'm the managing director of Alakais, 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.

Starting point is 00:02:48 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. 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?

Starting point is 00:03:22 Basically, the system uses excess energy from the grid to pump pressurized air into a cavity within a mountain. 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

Starting point is 00:04:02 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 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,

Starting point is 00:04:39 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 for, I don't know, doing picnic or providing the gas for cooking. This is a small container that has a pressure as gas in it. However, if it's a small container, it's relatively easy and cheap to do. But if you want to have a very large container,

Starting point is 00:05:15 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 geology and then the weight of the mountains, the weight of the earth, to contain this earth, the air. In 2016, the company completed, the company completed their first pilot plant. Located in the Swiss Alps, the plant is the shape of a 120-meter long

Starting point is 00:05:45 and 5-meter diameter tunnel with an energy capacity of 1 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

Starting point is 00:06:09 is still cheaper than batteries. The tools from machinery have been around for a long time, and right now, the technology is at a lot of, a factor of 4 to 6 times less than batteries on a per kilowatt hour scale. However, the falling cost of batteries are a risk and the company would be keeping an eye on that. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:41 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. 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

Starting point is 00:07:03 that you use the energy 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 before. So there is two plants already running in the world. One of them is in German. it was built in 79 even and the other one is in is in USA in Alabama it was building 91

Starting point is 00:07:29 both of them used 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 a bicycle pump when you when you pump the tire you feel that the pump is 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

Starting point is 00:08:12 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 So it goes with producing CO2, it goes with a reduction in efficiency and so on and so forth. And the reason for that is that at the time, 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 tool 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 then 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 00:09:03 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 true partially due to technological development in the last decades. Let's talk about costs. So according to Give, it costs about $100 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.

Starting point is 00:09:38 This kind of technology isn't really something that a small startup or a set of consultants 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 Give 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 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've 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 | Renewable Energy Solutions

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