An old criticism, in the early days of wind turbines and solar panels for electrical generation is the famous quote "The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine." Technology moves on and people work hard to create new inventions and new discoveries are made, proving old sayings wrong. In this case obviously the saying will always be true, the wind will not always blow etc. But, there is a solution to make up for some of that downtime.

Big Scale New Battery Technologies Store Excess Energy

Batteries are increasingly being used to store energy from renewable sources such as wind turbines. When there is excess electricity power being generated compared to the demand, as is often the case, even though the wind is blowing companies have had to stop their wind turbines. This is done remotely and is a loss of profit for the turbine owner. Now, they can instead keep them running to charge batteries.

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Then when demand increases or when there is less power being produced by the wind, the company can switch on the batteries to feed in to the electricity network. This gives the turbine owner additional profit and additionally is another handy option for the supply companies to utilize.

Sudden increases in demand are a problem for electricity supply companies. Battery storage on a large scale would be very welcome to these companies because of the speed at which batteries can supply power. With a flick of a remote switch from a control room, batteries can supply power in mere seconds. Compare that with taking the brakes off a wind turbine (20 minutes to reach full power), or opening a dam Sluice Gate to let water flow to a hydro electric generation station (30 to 60 minutes), or increasing the capacity of a gas fired power plant (hours). You can see that batteries are a great asset.

Most countries do not as yet implement batteries in a quantity cumulatively large enough to make a significant difference to that country's supply needs. However, this is set to change and with some technological improvements batteries will become an important addition to overall electrical supply facilities. Especially in countries that utilize uncontrollable renewable energy like wind and solar.

Lithium Ion Batteries Are Not The answer

Until now, the ubiquitous lithium ion batteries have been used for large scale electrical storage. There are well documented problems with this technology, mainly because the sourcing of the materials used in the creation of this type of battery is expensive and detrimental to the environment. Work is being done to produce an alternative. For example, St. Andrews university in Scotland, UK has invented a battery that is ideal for large scale storing of electricity.

These new batteries use sodium ions rather than lithium. Although a rare occurrence, lithium ion batteries can get in to a thermal runaway scenario that can result in hard to control fires or even explosions. This is bad enough in electric vehicle sized batteries, but potentially catastrophic in the much bigger battery banks required to store excess power generated from a wind farm. Sodium is also much cheaper and readily available compared to lithium. There are considerably less environmental concerns regarding the production of this new type of battery.

Why Haven't We Been Using Sodium Ion Already?

As always, there is a drawback, and with sodium ion based batteries it is their weight. They are considerably heavier. This is a barrier to use for most portable battery powered devices including electric vehicles, but is not a problem for stationary batteries like those being used for storing electrical power from a wind farm.

About The Author
Helena Montgomery
Chewells Contributor

Helena is our longest serving contributor. She lives in an area heavily dependant upon the oil industry. She... »

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