So, let’s deal with those two S’s shall we: Storage and Solar. I’ll hit Solar first because it’s easier.
The last time I checked on my Solar-in-Development was about a year and a half ago. Most of the research was being driven in two areas: increased efficiency and reduced cost. What I mean by efficiency is how well the solar panel converts the sunlight it sees to electricity. In space, with the highest end solar panels NASA can buy, we get roughly 7-10% efficiency. On Earth, and with lower cost panels, the numbers are somewhat lower, in the 4-6% range. This means that, if your solar panel sees 1000kW worth of solar energy, you only get 40-60kw of electricity out of it. There is research into the area of making the efficiency a little better so that more solar heat energy is converted into usable electrical energy. The other area of effort is in trying to make solar panels less expensive. Currently, and I did this calculation via Google-based shopping, it takes nearly $30,000 to get roughly 8kW of electricity from solar cells. 8000 Watts might sound like a lot, but I urge you to read your electricity bill. It is likely that, on average, you use somewhere in the 1000kW range in a month’s time, so 8kW is not a large chunk of 1000kW. And with the cost being $30,000 for only 8kW, this is somewhat beyond the means of pretty much everyone but the upper echelons of society, which brings me to my next problem with Smart Grid.
One of the ideas behind Smart Grid is that more of the peak load will be picked up by individuals or communities via their own solar grids or wind turbines. However, these things are damn expensive, as seen above, for very little output. This I have said before. Now, granted there is research into the areas of More Power and Less Cost, but we aren’t there yet, and there is no guarantee when we’ll get there. All we have is what we have right now, and what we have right now sucks. The only individuals or communities that will be able to get themselves sufficiently off the grid for the purposes of Smart Grid will be those who are independently wealthy. Meaning, effectively, that you will need to be rich in order to have freedom in your choice of when to use electricity, otherwise you’ll be stuck to the timetable of electricity use provided to you by the government. Hence, less freedom for the common person.
Now on to storage. When I said there was no real efficient way to store large amounts of energy I lied…kinda. The electricity generators do use a technique involving hydroelectric plants. Basically, after the water has come through the plant and generated electricity, the water is then pumped back up the into the reservoir. If the energy you use to pump the water back into the reservoir is the same as the energy you get out of the water coming through the hydroelectric dam, then presto, you have just stored your energy via perpetual motion machine. Now granted, via the process of entropy, you do have losses of energy in the system, but it’s the closest thing we’ve got thus far. However, the problem with this kind of energy storage is that you need a hydroelectric dam. Currently in the US, we’re tapped out. We’ve got as many dams as we can have already, so this process of energy storage isn’t expandable past what we’ve got right now.
That being said, there is research going on into both the Better Battery and the idea of Heat as a Storage Device. The Better Battery area of energy storage is related to storing energy as chemical energy, in which a decent amount of research is occurring, but mostly in the batteries for electric cars area, and not in batteries for houses or the Grid. That might be the next step, but right now everyone is focused on getting cars off of gasoline and onto electricity, without thinking about the kind of extra demand that is going to cause the Grid…but that’s another rant. The Heat as a Storage Device runs along the same lines as the hydroelectric example above, you use electricity to add heat to a fluid, like water or hydrogen, and then use that heat to generate electricity later. This has a lot more efficiency problems when compared to the hydroelectric example, especially since heat has a natural tendency to bleed off over time, resulting in a loss of energy to the environment. Heat kinda has a “use it or lose it” property due to entropy.
There are a couple other research areas in the mechanical mtorage of energy, mostly involving attempted perpetual motion machines. My favorite is the flywheel. You have a wheel that spins in a magnetic field. You put electricity into the magnetic field resulting in the wheel moving faster. When you need it, you draw the energy out of the wheel by mechanically slowing the wheel down and converting that energy back into electricity. The hard part is that last bit. Getting the wheel spinning is easy as pie. 🙂
