Month: July 2021

Has This Start-up Solved Grid Storage?

Maybe.

Industry eyes have been on Form Energy, a battery start-up that includes an impressive array of tech alumnae on its roster.

The company signed a deal a year ago with the surprisingly progressive Minnesota Electric Co-op, Great River Energy, to provide a one megawatt demonstration battery, that would, according to reports, store grid energy and be able to release it for as long as 150 hours. A game changer if true.
It is, in any case, part of what one quoted expert below calls “..a Cambrian explosion” of grid storage technology.

Today, Wall Street Journal has this.

Wall Street Journal:

A four-year-old startup says it has built an inexpensive battery that can discharge power for days using one of the most common elements on Earth: iron.

Form Energy Inc.’s batteries are far too heavy for electric cars. But it says they will be capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.

The work of the Somerville, Mass., company has long been shrouded in secrecy and nondisclosure agreements. It recently shared its progress with The Wall Street Journal, saying it wants to make regulators and utilities aware that if all continues to go according to plan, its iron-air batteries will be capable of affordable, long-duration power storage by 2025.

Its backers include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate investment fund whose investors include Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. Form recently initiated a $200 million funding round, led by a strategic investment from steelmaking giant ArcelorMittal SA, MT -0.64% one of the world’s leading iron-ore producers.

Form is preparing to soon be in production of the “kind of battery you need to fully retire thermal assets like coal and natural gas” power plants, said the company’s chief executive, Mateo Jaramillo, who developed Tesla Inc.’s Powerwall battery and worked on some of its earliest automotive powertrains.

On a recent tour of Form’s windowless laboratory, Mr. Jaramillo gestured to barrels filled with low-cost iron pellets as its key advantage in the rapidly evolving battery space. Its prototype battery, nicknamed Big Jim, is filled with 18,000 pebble-size gray pieces of iron, an abundant, nontoxic and nonflammable mineral.

For a lithium-ion battery cell, the workhorse of electric vehicles and today’s grid-scale batteries, the nickel, cobalt, lithium and manganese minerals used currently cost between $50 and $80 per kilowatt-hour of storage, according to analysts.

Using iron, Form believes it will spend less than $6 per kilowatt-hour of storage on materials for each cell. Packaging the cells together into a full battery system will raise the price to less than $20 per kilowatt-hour, a level at which academics have said renewables plus storage could fully replace traditional fossil-fuel-burning power plants.

A battery capable of cheaply discharging power for days has been a holy grail in the energy industry, due to the problem that it solves and the potential market it creates.

Regulators and power companies are under growing pressure to deliver affordable, reliable and carbon-free electricity, as countries world-wide seek to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change. Most electricity generation delivers two out of three. A long-duration battery could enable renewable energy—wind and solar—to deliver all three.

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Climate Concern Climbs in Polls

Economist:

Joe Biden began his presidency by passing a massively popular economic stimulus and covid-19 relief bill. He ended his first 100 days, and will begin the rest of his presidency, trying to get Republicans in Washington on board with an ambitious infrastructure-spending bill, which the public also favours. Mr Biden has also pledged to find a leading role for America in tackling climate change, and has said he wants to to restore and strengthen America’s traditional foreign alliances. Each policy marks a break with the previous administration.

Also,

Axios:

A majority of Americans say they are in favor of transitioning to 100% clean energy by 2035, regardless of whether they’re living in a blue or red state, according to new polling provided first to Axios. 

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The Heat that Kills. Wet Bulb Temps explained

“It’s a dry heat” describes some real physics.
Appreciate this from Salon.

Salon:

What is wet bulb temperature anyway?

The normal temperature of a healthy human is about 98 °F (37 °C). So why don’t we feel most comfortable when that’s the temperature of the air around us? Because our bodies are engines, burning food to do work, and engines need to lose heat to their surroundings, or they overheat and stop working. As in, die. 

Fortunately, even if our surroundings are warmer than our bodies, we still lose heat if our sweat evaporates, by the miracle of the energy required to convert water from liquid to vapor. In dry air, this evaporative cooling system works great, even at air temperatures that sound really hot, because evaporation makes our skin feel cooler. But as moisture in the air increases, evaporation and heat removal slows, as anyone who has worked outside on a hot humid day knows.

But when do things go from uncomfortable to dangerous — and when will climate change take us there? 

Scientists have come up with more than 120 ways to quantify heat stress. One of the most useful is wet bulb temperature — the temperature that a wet thermometer in the shade measures as water evaporates freely off it. This temperature will be lower than the temperature on a dry thermometer in the same place (which is known as dry bulb temperature), and the difference between the two is a measure of humidity. So to get wet bulb temperature we can either measure it directly with a wet thermometer, or calculate it from dry bulb temperature and humidity. 

The usefulness of wet bulb temperature is it makes it clear how close conditions are to lethal. The closer wet bulb temperature gets to our body temperature, the less heat is lost and the closer we are to heat death.

It has been known for more than a century that wet bulb temperatures higher than 88 °F (31 °C) make it impossible to do physical labor, and a wet bulb temperature of 95 °F (35 °C) kills healthy humans within a few hours. Interestingly, reconstructions of wet bulb temperatures in hothouse periods of Earth’s past have also been used to interpret possible geographic limits and body temperatures of ancient mammals. 

Wet bulb temperature also explains why sky-high temperatures in places like Arizona are typically not lethal. Even a warm 100 °F (38 °C) May day in Tucson with relative humidity of 20% is a relatively comfortable wet-bulb temperature of 70 °F (22 °C). But the same dry bulb temperature with the average relative humidity in Jacksonville (75%) leads to a wet bulb temperature of 94 °F (34 °C), close enough to human body temperature to cause severe and potentially fatal heat stress. And while extreme temperatures usually get the headlines, globally, humidity dominates wet bulb temperature. 

Reuters: Chinese Rains are “Once in a Millennium”

Dam collapse in Mongolia

Lot of that going around.

Reuters:

Large swathes of China’s central Henan province were under water on Wednesday, with its capital Zhengzhou hardest-hit after being drenched by what weather forecasters said was the highest rainfall in 1,000 years.

In Zhengzhou, a city of over 12 million on the banks of the Yellow River, 12 people have died so far amid the floods, and about 100,000 people have been evacuated to safe zones, the official Xinhua agency reported, citing the local government.

The lives of millions of people in Henan have been upended since the weekend in an unusually active rainy season that has led to the rapid rise of a number of rivers in the Yellow River basin.

Streets in a dozen cities have been flooded, while dozens of water reservoirs and dams breached warning levels.
–

From the evening of Saturday until late Tuesday, 617.1 millimetres (mm) (24 inches) of rain had drenched Zhengzhou – almost on par with the annual average of 640.8 mm.

The level of rainfall in Zhengzhou witnessed over the three days was one seen only “once in a thousand years”, local media cited meteorologists as saying.

Dramatic video shared on social media since Tuesday showed commuters waist-deep in murky floodwaters on a lightless subway train and an underground station turned into a large, churning pool. 

Heavy Rains Bring Astonishing Chinese Flood

Stories about truly massive rain event. Trying to find out more.

Riders trapped in a collapsed subway. Not all reportedly made it out.

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