130: It’s a gas, gas, gas - CO2 Batteries
[Music] hey everybody on today's episode of still to be determined we're going to be talking about air bladders [Music] let that sink in for everybody it's not as awkward as it sounds we're actually talking about air bladders that are filled with co2 and can be used as a battery so who expected that as usual i'm sean farrell i write some sci-fi i write some stuff for kids and i'm curious about technology and luckily for me my brother is matt of undecided with matt farrell matt how you doing today i'm doing pretty well how about yourself i'm doing okay the heat wave has finally broken here in new york city and we are experiencing temperatures that while still warm don't feel like they're trying to melt my brain so i'm enjoying that we are of course talking about matt's most recent video this one dropped on august 9th 2022 how the co2 battery could be the future of energy storage question mark matt this one included an interview with an italian gentleman who had the most charming accent of any interviewee you've ever had on your on your channel really enjoyed his talking about this new technology which uses technology which is not new which i think is terrific it really is a a step forward to utilize air compression and as you pointed out and he pointed out the technology to do this is stuff that is used around the world through oil and gas technology that would be relatively easy to set up and start utilizing this technology and from that perspective this seems like well that's already kind of a like if you're looking in baseball terms that's already kind of a double like you've you've already you've gotten past first if the technology already exists to do this thing that's already a double then what gets you heading toward third is that in my in my eyes the idea that the the gases involved these are not explosive clearly somebody pointed out in the comments if there was a large enough leak you might have breathing problems that could be an issue but the the chances of that happening and happening in a way that would actually be that kind of dangerous i think you'd have to literally inadvertently open the wrong door and walk into the air bladder in order to experience that kind of thing so it's a relatively safe technology so now you're heading toward third and then when you get to the kinds of efficiencies that they are proposing that they could reach which would be on par with the higher levels of air compression technologies and water technologies yeah it sounds like you've got a got a home run and what i found fascinating very often in your videos you're talking about like so the plan for them is that they're going to have this up and running by 2030 20 35. they're talking about late next year or early the following year they're talking about within 18 months to two years so i mean this really seems like boy talk about flying under the radar just very quietly cobbling together like what do you got back there we got a giant air bladder it's full of co2 and we're going to use it as a battery and like how is this not getting more attention that that was my question when this news popped up about this like the articles i was reading about it was like how come this is not something that we're hearing more about already and after talking to them in my interview with them it was clear that they've been moving extremely fast so they were moving they've been working on this for you know five plus years but it was over the past couple years that things came together super fast and the amount of testing and the pilot facility they built it was very quick to spin that up it was very quick to iterate and try to improve the performance of the system so they're moving much faster than you might expect a typical startup at this phase to be moving so i think that's part of why because it's like they're like they're already sprinting when you'd expect a group like this to be just kind of walking along probably a year and a half before i talked to them i talked to a company called high view power which does liquid air energy storage and it's what you would expect it's like okay we kind of a pilot facility and it's going to be two or three years before we get the next facility built and all this kind of thing spun up and it was kind of the pace that you expect and so this this group is working at a much faster pace than that which is surprising but also pretty exciting i wanted to share some comments as we move through this conversation and there's this one which i'm going to clarify i'm not exactly sure about the source of the comment i will give you my interpretation of what i think is happening the post comes from ann josersky cauley but it has a signature line at the bottom which appears to be domenico barriali let me say that again barry lorrari i believe that is the last name i think what this might be is that domenico may have had a comment but not an account and somebody posted on his behalf i looked up domenico and if it is the same domenico i found there is a professor of engineering in canada who goes who has this name so i believe that this may in fact be this professor of engineering in canada who writes via androzzoski cauli first of all congratulations to my italian cousins for being first off the block with a significant product of this type it is sure to find a significantly big niche for any energy storage cycle that follows the day night latency i would caution in connection with scion's observations below that this sort of practical thermodynamic cycle only works well ie or ie near its peak efficiency near some such cycle time as it depends critically on the use of the so-called heat regenerator to recover the energy used in the compression phase not an insignificant part of the energy stored is locked up in the regenerators and any attempt to rush or prolong the storage time means going off cycle to accommodate or lose that heat anyway any good tech has its optimal operational constraints nice report matt thank you and then signed demand that's awesome so i thought that was gonna miss that one yeah i thought that was a great comment very knowledgeable clearly and a sharing of you know some of the details behind the scenes of like okay you've got your setup and you're trying to reach that peak efficiency there could be a somewhat narrow window in getting to that peak efficiency as he points out if you're if you're doing things at a slightly different cycle you're trying to move the gas a little faster than your normal production of energy might allow you're going to be losing some of that energy that could be used for electricity production because you're going to be using it to actually change your gas from state to state so was there anything in your discussions and your research around this that indicated that there's a zone where this technology is most efficient is this something where you know the closer to the equator you get the better because then you're dealing with more sun you're dealing with a more optimal temperature where the gas is being transferred back from state to state a little easier because of ambient temperatures or is this something that they foresee as being able to use regardless of climate regardless of how close or far away you are from optimal sun well based what we were finding and my conversation with with them it would correlate the two what we found on our own matched with what they were telling us which is this is really and i love that comment that you read because this is right along these lines there's a specific setup where this makes the most sense and they point blank said to me like this is meant for grid scale utility because there's a certain scale you have to get to yeah where this makes sense so it's anything smaller than a certain size will not make sense at that point it's better to use lithium-ion batteries and other technologies but once you hit a certain threshold this is where it makes sense and it's for these long cycle long duration bits of energy that you're storing to recover because of that it's it's not just the kinetic energy of you're using the co2 compression coming back out to spin a turbine you're also recovering the heat because those two things combined actually create a system that's very efficient if you take the heat out of the equation then suddenly this becomes a completely inefficient no good it's it's not gonna work so it's it's about capturing multiple forms of energy you're talking about heat thermal you're talking about kinetic and combining those where you end up with this this kind of sweet spot for a great energy storage system so this is kind of like think about pumped hydro energy storage this is like a competitor to that and from what we found there's really no difference in climate so you can basically build one of these things pretty much anywhere and it will work and you can get it to work and you can you can get it to be efficient so it's not climate that would be the limiting factor it sounded like and what we found was that it's more about scale size that kind of a thing is what's the limiting factor there was also this comment from john who wrote there's another company ess in the united states that developed the iron redux flow battery either is effective i don't know which would be cheaper or take up more space and neither uses elements that are under high demand for other uses other than iron but that's the most common element so no big deal there actually after watching the process and efficiency the ess system is more effective and i'm sure it takes up less space so he apparently started his comment then went and did some research and came back and i wanted to get your thoughts about the iron redux flow you've talked about that before i believe i've touched on it in a video in the past actually a couple different videos i brought it up but i've never done a dedicated video on flow batteries but i'm currently working on one so there's going to be one coming up in the weeks ahead around this technology specifically because flow batteries are fascinating they are absolutely fascinating and amazing energy storage technology that's very efficient it's made from materials that you don't have to do rare earth mining for it's like it's got a bunch of kind of win-wins for it yeah but there's a whole host of controversies around it because like not iron but like vanadium redox flow batteries are one of the more promising looking things and china basically has the that kind of cornered because of manufacturing and production and all those kind of things and there's another story that we're digging into around how the united states had a major breakthrough for the chemistry of a specific of the specific electrolytes used in a flow battery that don't degrade over time and they're incredibly amazing and we basically gave the patent away to china yeah that's good u.s tax dollars health in china that's great um so there's a there's a fascinating story around that i want to dive into as well so like i'm going to be talking about this in the future but yes he's 100 correct that flow batteries do have greater efficiencies the question is in my mind costs so it's like i brought this up before of yeah you may have a technology that's more efficient than technology x may be more efficient than technology y but if it costs twice as much or three times as much it's it doesn't make sense it's like you can't just take efficiency on its own you have to look at the whole picture so that's the big question mark for me is are flow batteries not only more efficient are they more more cost effective are they you know easier to maintain like what's the operational cost it's like there's a whole bunch of host of things but even that in taking that into account doesn't mean that these co2 batteries won't have a major role to play because there's definitely scenarios where this may make far more sense than a flow battery and vice versa so it's like i'm a fan of throw everything against the wall and seeing what sticks yeah so it's like i'm definitely a fan of this i think too that there's real value in the speed of setup of something that is using these technologies that already exist and could very quickly you know if they're able to get their out of their testing phase and into their real world this is now a functioning thing they've got you mentioned the the deals they have set up including with the second largest energy producer in italy the idea that they could start farming this out to other locales and have these things set up rather quickly yeah the real estate being probably the biggest question mark and from what you said in your video it sounds like less than 10 of the land for a power supply site would be used by the bladder effectively like the rest of it could be your solar panels um it's a small add-on it's a very small pattern right and there was this comment in that vein from jim who wrote regarding the space requirement of the storage bladder yes that uses up quite a bit of surface area as shown here but that doesn't have to be a problem because this is just a pilot plant once the maximum extent of inflation of the dome is established you could simply design a solid structure to be built over the dome which then could be fitted with photovoltaic panels thereby reclaiming some of the surface area for energy production on top of the energy storage and i was wondering had they spoken to that in particular because it did really seem like okay you've got this dome and i was thinking about some of the other technology you've talked about like basically flexible solar panels the idea of some kind of surface you can wrap up that but you could wrap it with something and it could be one gigantic panel which would also have the advantage of looking like a really giant beetle and i think that'd be kind of cool but there was no discussion of that and in my mind i'm thinking well then you're not really talking about a loss of seven to eight percent of your terrain to the storage facility you're just talking about the type of photovoltaic capture as opposed to like you've got panels over there we've got a storage over here but our storage is also capturing sunlight so win-win yeah we we didn't talk about it they didn't talk about that at all yeah we did yeah we didn't talk about that but that is something that makes a lot of sense and it wouldn't surprise me if they went down that path the other i i didn't bring it up in the video but another aspect was when we were talking when i was talking to him he was saying when you talk about renewables he said you typically see an image of a wind farm yeah he said i want i want this technology to be so ubiquitous that when you talk about renewables you see that photo of wind farm and then you see one of our domes at the base of one of the turbines that's what they're striving to get to to make this just ubiquitous technology which i really admire that view yeah but when you're talking about like land area i didn't talk about it in the sense of a wind turbine farm because you can't build wind turbines right next to each other they have to be a certain distance apart right this could sit right between some wind turbines it's like so it's there's there's all this kind of ways that you can look at it to make efficient use of space and lining it with solar panels which would also help offset whatever energy costs it takes to run the facility so it's yeah there's there's a whole bunch of win-wins and different ways you could look at it but yeah i love that comment yeah and the the idea of of you know wanting people to have in their mind when you say renewable energy and they see a wind turbine and then maybe one of these domes next to it it's sort of evocative for me of when you say something like imagine a farm and somebody's got their image of a farm and you ask them to describe it they're not going to say well it's a barn by itself maybe it's going to be a barn and a silo and some cows and some chickens there's all sorts of details within that one concept that people carry within them i think it's very interesting and i think it's it speaks of his vision in saying i want us to be a part of that imagined concept that overall thing as opposed to just we want to make this product they want to be identified as part of the solution in that way and i think that that speaks well of the the vision with which they're moving forward i also like this comment and i wanted to bring it up because i don't i did and let me clarify i do not expect you to have numbers at the ready to be able to answer this question oh but i think it would be really cool if you did this is from damon off who writes i think it's extremely noteworthy that using this for grid storage as opposed to batteries has the advantage of freeing up more of the batteries for things like vehicles here's my question which i do not expect you to be able to answer okay do we know what percentage of like lithium batteries are headed toward these large scale storage versus those materials being able to be used for other purposes in effect if this does become more ubiquitous how much of the demand for lithium shifts completely over to car manufacturing and other forms of lithium battery storage which would make more sense you're not going to have one of these air bladders in your car although imagine driving down the road with one of these air bladders dragging behind you and again to go back to my beetle image imagine you've got one of these bladders behind you and you've got little mechanical legs on the side so as you're driving down the highway it looks like your car is being chased by a gigantic beetle they would clear the road anyway is a majority of lithium-ion battery storage of this large scale or is a majority of the lithium-ion battery storage already on the smaller scale i.e your cars your home your power wall
things like that if you're talking if you want to split it up i don't have these numbers off the top of my head but in general if you're talking about the number of lithium batteries that go into electric vehicles versus the number of batteries that go into grid storage electric vehicles dwarfs grid storage at the moment um if you just want to look at one example you look at tesla who's obviously the largest eva manufacturer in the world and they're also one of the larger manufacturers for utility scale grid storage systems there was a period where they were when they were make ramping up the tesla model 3 that they basically they didn't shut it down but they basically stopped really producing power walls and their mega packs because they had to funnel almost all of their cell production into the model 3 because they didn't have enough production to satisfy the needs for the electric vehicle side of the business right that just kind of illustrates right now there is not enough manufacturing just to meet demand period i don't care what company you're talking about and so because of that depending on the company they're going to pull those levers and they're going to drive put those cells to where they're going to make the most money the quickest so for a company like tesla they're constantly pulling that lever and changing that ratio of how much they're directing to cars versus the grid and the grid and power walls has gotten the short end of the stick again and again and again and again right because it's a smaller side of the business for them right now that's going to change as they're building more of these plants and increasing production but we're always going to be chasing that demand yeah demand is just outstripping production and it's going to be that way for years to come so yeah i don't see that shift changing which is another one of the reasons why i love things like the co2 battery because it sidesteps the lithium issue completely yeah and it has the you know going back again to some of the things we said at the very beginning of the video not only are the components of this not dangerous in the form of explosive flammable the human rights aspect that you talked about in your video and that's an extremely i think that is a critical part of this is that we have technologies that are utilized in our daily lives and we have to turn a blind eye to human rights violations that are going on because they happen in other parts of the world we don't see them so out of sight out of mind but there are real impacts in people's lives and technology like this where you're utilizing a readily available gas you're utilizing a technology that is largely already existent and you're talking about energy production and storage on site using these things as opposed to having to dig into the sides of mountains in parts of africa or expecting things to be mined and processed that are so toxic that anybody working in those industries is guaranteed to get ill something like this is a real benefit and a win from that perspective yep and i wanted to end on this note i spotted a comment part way through in response to some other discussion on your channel and somebody weighed in to say everything on this channel is bs and i was like all right thank you sir yeah but then i saw this one from jay coop j coop writes i love all the options presented on this channel the future looks bright thanks to technology innovators and risk takers despite the claims of science deniers i thought that would be a nice note to end on so with that we appreciate you listening and i hope you noticed as we were having our discussion the discussion is really driven by the comments so these are comments not only on this channel which we invite you to weigh in here about what you think about what you just listened to do you think that you expect to see air bladders anytime soon they're going to be popping up in italy we know that so if anybody's planning on taking a vacation in 2024 keep an eye out you might spot some things that look like giant beetles giant albino beetles exciting but the comments on matt's channel are a huge part of the discussion here so make sure you weigh in there as well you can of course jump into the comments directly below this video you can jump into the comments by writing to us via the contact information in the podcast description you'll find that description wherever you found this podcast apple podcast google spotify wherever that was and while you're going there take the time to review us there subscribe there share your friends not share your friends you can't share your friends with us but you can share us with your friends that's how logic works and if you'd like to more directly support us don't forget you can go to still tbd dot fm click on the become a supporter button and it allows you to throw quarters at our heads we enjoy the welts thank you so much and if you'd like to do that via youtube you 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2022-08-21 04:43
