Solution for storing renewable energy?
Hi,
over here in Germany we do have a lot of renewable energy - mainly from wind. Storing energy gets more and more important. Unfortunately we don't have many mountains to store energy using pump storage stations.
It would be interesting to calculate if Project Better Place could become a solution for this problem that will in the near future limit the portion of regen energy. How many batteries would be required to store the energy of a single 5mw windmill? Would it make sense to use the stored energy not only for cars but also to bypass times of no winds?
Hi
It's quite easy to calculate that!
Estimate 25 to 50 kWh Storage Capacaty and estimate that a normal homeplug has in Germany about 5 kW and a 3-Phase AC 400 V can have about double or triple the power.
In the Moment we habe about 5-7 GW of regulative powersupply, mainly pumpstorages.
As windenergy can supply up to 50 GW (130 GW is the max. output of power in the German Grid, wehen we take all sources into account) in Germany, when the wind is blowing very strong, you'll need about 10 Mio. Cars connected to standard outlets to store the complete Windpower. After 5 to 10 hous the cars are completly filled up (if they were completly empty).
So you can see, if all the cars werde Electric, we could supply the energy for a half day from EVs, if all powerplants would be disconnected. This will never happen!
So the real interesting question is, how many cars are needed to be able to completly hold the powerdemandlevel constant over a day, a week and so on, when you take all the variantions in sun und wind into account.
My personal opinion is that, even 1 Mio. Cars could offer a huge potential of regulative powersupply.
With 10 or even 50 Mio. EVs, we would never have to thing abut blackouts, windchanges, clouds or anything else.
50 Mio Cars would offer more 2,5 TWh of storage, which is more than enough.
*German*: Schäne Grüsse aus München! ich hoffe ich konnte ein wenig für Klärung sorgen. Ich denke es wird interessant, sobald man bei Regelleistungen im GW ankommt, dann ist der Effekt auf die Verbesserte Nutzung von Regenerativen Energie deutlich spürbar*German*
Gruß
Daniel