Science of Energy Storage – Video

Transcript:

[Dr. Scott W. Tinker] Electricity is the flow of electrons, sort of like the flow of water and, like electricity, to get water to flow, I have to pump it. But what if we had a way to store it? Today’s batteries are too expensive and low-powered to work at a huge commercial scale. If we could invent a giant, affordable way to store electricity—like water in a tank—then we wouldn’t have to generate electricity at the same time that we use it. We could have it whether the generators are going or not. And, as much as we want as long as we put enough water in the tank beforehand. Think about what this would do. Solar and wind only produce electricity when it’s sunny or windy. That a regular output doesn’t match the way we use electricity. That’s one of the great challenges of solar and wind today. But suddenly this wouldn’t matter. They could feed electricity into storage when they make it and we can use it when we need it. Now, think about this: today we have a whole fleet of power plants and we ramp up and turn off to follow electricity demand. It’s inefficient and expensive, keeping plants running continuously like we do with baseload power is efficient and cheaper. With affordable energy storage, we can generate power wherever and however it’s cheapest, and then use storage, not power plants, to follow demand. There are some places that actually pump water when they have excess tricity, and they let it flow through generators when they don’t. The same can be done with compressed air, flywheels, or advanced capacitors. But, as with batteries, they’re inefficient and expensive. This is a very difficult challenge. and we’ve been working on it for 150 years. But, if we could invent affordable, utility-scale storage it would completely change the way we make, and use electricity and the person who invents it could become our first trillionaire.