A team of researchers at the University of Newcastle has come up with a way to keep the lights on at thousands of coal power plants across the globe. Wait, it’s not what you think! They mean keeping the lights on at retired coal power plants. Those old power plants may be dead to coal, but they are still parked on many dollars worth of land, turbine equipment, and grid infrastructure, which means they could make suitable locations for large scale energy storage systems.
This New Energy Storage System Looks Like Bricks, Acts Like High Tech Battery
The Newcastle energy storage system basically consists of bricks that can hold energy in the form of heat, then discharge it to run steam turbines at retired coal power stations. Or, for that matter, at any power station.
The thermal storage approach is a bit different from battery-type systems, which hold an electrical charge. Thermal storage can also involve more simplicity in engineering and a longer span of charge-discharge cycles, which generally translates into lower costs.
If you’re wondering why nobody ever thought of storing thermal energy in bricks before, well, they have. A lot. The issue is efficiency. Until recent years, the state of materials science did not allow for fabricating bricks that can act as highly efficient batteries.
The Newcastle breakthrough involves a new two-component material they call MGA, for Miscibility Gaps Alloy.
Without giving too much away, the head of the research team, Professor Erich Kisi, explains that the team has “sourced abundant and readily available starting ingredients for our block so that it can be produced at a very low cost to accommodate for the scale of energy storage that’s required – they are 10 per cent of the cost of a lithium battery of the same size, yet produce the same amount of energy.”
“It offers near to 100 per cent conversion of electricity to heat and the lowest levelised cost of storing electricity – a measure of the total lifecycle cost of a facility compared to the amount of energy it is capable of storing,” Professor Kisi adds.
To ice the sustainability cake, Newcastle states that the blocks consist of “non-toxic, 100 per cent recyclable material so there is no risk of explosion or combustion in hazardous environments.”
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