How Can We Store Renewable Energy?: Crash Course Climate & Energy #4

Decarbonizing our power production is vitally important if we want to curtail climate change, but there are some major logistical issues we’re going to have to overcome before we can do that. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll take a look at the challenges we face when creating, distributing, and storing electricity from renewable sources.

Chapters:
Introduction: Storing Carbon-Free Electricity 00:00
Electricity As An Energy Carrier 1:10
The Electric Grid 2:10
Electricity Supply & The Duck Curve 3:30
Electrochemical Storage of Electricity 6:20
Chemical Storage of Electricity 7:28
Mechanical Storage of Electricity 8:20
Thermal Storage of Electricity 8:57
Transmitting Carbon-Free Electricity 9:52
Review & Credits 11:28

Sources:

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[AuditLogg]

Really sad how Crash Course gets so little views compared to the tremendous amount of work everyone of the Crash Course Team puts in to each video.

[ccasto]

Remember when we decided to let kids out of school for the summer to help on the family farm or how we literally shift the clock to deal with changing light levels in winter? We could imagine creative ways to deal with the duck curve, too - say by changing working hours so people get out of work with enough daylight left to cook and do their energy-intensive activities while solar is still being generated!

[trevinbeattie]

As Matt Ferrell explained in a recent Undecided video, “rare earth minerals” aren’t called that because they are rare to find, but because they are difficult and expensive to extract and process; they also result in hazardous byproducts.

[joewilson]

There is a technique used for house cooling here in Az called Thermal Mass storage. Basically, you insulated your house really well. Then overnight when electricity is cheap you crank the Ac way down. I mean really cold. The house stores the cold air in the walls, furniture, ect. Theen, when the electricity is expensive again in the morning you turn the thermostat up to like 80, and the house slowly releases the cold for most of the morning into the afternoon.

[stevieinselby]

Pumped storage is a great way to manage the problem of storing electricity generated at times when it is not needed.
Dinorwig power station in Wales (also known as the Electric Mountain) is such a system, which can spin up to 1800MW from nothing in just 16 seconds, and run for 6 hours at a time. It isn't perfect, it's about 75% efficient, but that's still a much better bet than having a load of fossil fuel stations running to meet the same demand.

[williamsutter]

Makes me a little prouder to be Aussie. Our east coast has an interconnected grid, including the island state of Tasmania and even the coastal areas of the central state of South Australia is connected to this grid.

[CitiesForTheFuture]

Liquid Metal Batteries (Ambri) for grid-scale storage... modular & no rare metals.

There are also carbon dioxide battery storage, sand batteries, heat pumps. In Finland, data banks draw off heat from the servers using heat pumps with the heat being used for district heating. Renewable energy has so many options that a local energy strategy using the most appropriate geo-physical assets can be devised & deployed. Japan is using snow to generate electricity!

And there is also community storage... excess community energy is stored locally (no private battery storage) for a nominal fee.

There are so many options now.

[FairMiles]

Human collaboration at the global scale looks like the biggest challenge we face. It doesn't seem to be working very well with oil & gas…

[ShortVersion]

We added solar and batteries to the house in 2021. Something that rarely gets mentioned when people discuss the scale of what's required- we now use net 1/6 of the energy from the grid that the house used 3 years ago.

It would cost probably $20k for us to fully eliminate our grid dependance. There are diminishing returns for the consumer. However, our remaining cost of energy is %99.7-99.9 lower once annualized. That's all thanks to load shifting and energy arbitrage.

As the grid gets cleaner anyway, hopefully with wind to complement our solar, the problem will shrink with compounding factors reducing not just the COST but also the demand.

If you figured 3 years ago how much battery the world would need, our contribution wouldn't yet be factored in. Refigure the problem now...and it looks quite different. Granted, that's just one house, but the crew that installed our system is working 12 hours every day since.

[cpi]

I love this series so much.
My only complaint is that we need to get you a new suite of synth sounds for the screen transitions. :)

[Mr.RobotHead]

I was hoping this video would include the the Nant de Drance water battery in Switzerland. It went online last summer, after quite a massive engineering and construction effort. At least the video did discuss the concept under the Mechanical Storage chapter.

[MusicalRaichu]

you mentioned water for gravitational storage of energy, but there's been experiments with using solid masses as well.

if we've figured how to ship coal, oil and gas between continents, surely we can work out ways to ship electricity.

[brucea]

This is the first video of this course I watched (it just popped up in my YouTube feed after watching a Crash Course video on another subject). This is the first Crash Course series I've watched in which the narrator speaks at a reasonable speed. In the three other Crash Course series I've seen so far (on astronomy, computing science and physics respectively) the narrators speak so fast it's difficult to keep up with them without slowing down the video to 75% normal speed. It's as if they are in a hurry to finish because they have something more important to do.

[AdityaMehendale]

There is a big gaping hole in this explanation: Hear me out:

HVAC accounts for 80% or more of household energy-usage. If designed properly (e.g. with floor heating + heat-pump), the heating/cooling can EASILY be shifted +/- 12 hours. Flattenning the duck would be a breeze. The problem is when energy companies refuse to incentivize the consumers to cooperate to achieve this goal, although this is gradually changing. The bigger problem is summer/winter variability (which is a bigger problem for the "West" which is mostly in the far North).

[florinadrian]

Renewables can also balance each other: if there's not sun, there might be wind and the other way around. The duration of periods where there's neither (dunkelflaute) is actually quite limited in most places.
Add renewables harnessing reliable sources like the tides or the waves and you reduce or even eliminate that duck shape.

[DavidJamesHenry]

Obviously, we need a healthy mix of storage strategies, but mechanical energy storage is by far my favorite.

[johnnyrivas]

Fantastic video, thank you so much. I learned so much, and I want to know more.

[Eastwood]

Connecting grids is an important step, but I think you should have mentioned the difficulties of doing this. Especially over vast distances as you suggested. Both logistically as well as just the basic physics of it.
Otherwise, great video and I'm really enjoying the series so far.

[joeldurr]

What about using sand to store heat? Very efficient and you avoid the corrosive issue of salt.

[VinnieGer]

Yes!! Wait, I didn’t even know this was a problem. I must learn more!!