AGES Of Renewable Energy Storage

March 3, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 26 Comments

As society transitions toward renewable energy sources, energy storage inevitably comes to mind. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found one way to store renewable energy that re-purposes existing fossil fuel infrastructure.

While geothermal electricity generation shows a lot of promise, it’s currently limited to a select few areas where hot rock is close to the Earth’s surface. Advanced Geothermal Energy Storage (AGES) stores energy underground as heat and recovers it later, even in places without high subsurface temperatures. For this study, the researchers located an old oil well and instrumented it with “flow meters, fiber optic
distributed temperature sensing (DTS) cable, surface pressure and temperature gauges, and downhole pressure and temperature gauges to monitor the thermal and hydraulic changes during the injection test.”

This field study found that AGES system efficiency could be as high as 82% and yield an “economically viable” levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of $0.138/kWh. Using existing deep hole infrastructure speeds up site selection and deployment of AGES when compared to developing on an undisturbed location, making this a very interesting way to deploy grid-scale storage rapidly.

We’ve covered reusing fossil fuel infrastructure before as well as challenges and unusual solutions to the energy transition if you’re looking for more about what might be on a future smart grid.

Dancers Now Help Power Glasgow Nightclub

October 24, 2022 by Lewin Day 60 Comments

Humanity thus far has supplied most of its electricity needs by burning stuff, mostly very old stuff that burns great but is hard to replace. That stuff is getting increasingly expensive, and the pollution is a bother too, so renewable sources of energy are becoming more popular.

While wind or solar power are commonly used at the grid level, one Glasgow nightclub has taken a different tack. It’s capturing energy from its patrons to help keep the lights on.

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Geothermal System Is A Real Gold Mine

May 25, 2022 by Al Williams 57 Comments

What do you get when Pacific Northwest National Laboratories takes over what was once the largest and deepest gold mine in North America? The answer might be enough energy to power 10,000,000 homes. The enhanced geothermal systems project includes the lab and several partners from academia and industry and aims to test sending fluids down boreholes so the Earth can heat them up. Hot fluids, of course, can easily create electricity.

At 4,100 feet underground, the old mine is not very convenient to get to. However, modern technology means that the equipment is largely automated so workers can carry out experiments from home using a computer or even a phone. The system itself is 7 feet long by 7 feet wide and 30 feet long. It was assembled above ground, tested, and then split into 4×4 sections for transportation deep below the surface.

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Heating A Home With Sunlight… And Water

April 22, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 64 Comments

The sun is a tremendous source of energy, and while photovoltaic panels are an easy way to harvest some of that energy especially now that prices for them are incredibly low, there are plenty of other ways to tap into that free energy as well. [Engelbert] was looking for alternative ways to heat his house since traditional methods were prohibitively expensive, and ended up building a heat exchanger using solar-heated water to cover his home heating needs. (Google Translate from Dutch)

The system uses several large roof-mounted hot water heating panels. The heat captured by them is then pumped into an underground pipe network which is able to warm up a large area of earth in the summer. In the winter, that heat is able to be extracted back out of the earth and used to heat his home. The system includes almost three kilometers of pipe which are buried two meters below grade, so this will probably not be a weekend project, but it still cost much less than the €80,000 to install gas heating in his home.

[Engelbert] is able to use this self-built system to keep his home and another smaller building at a constant 23°C all year. He actually overbuilt the system slightly and has since disconnected almost half of the pipes, but we certainly understand the desire to over-engineer things around here. The only problem he has had is with various government entities that are slow to adopt energy-efficient systems like these. Perhaps the Dutch government can take some notes from the Swiss when it comes to installing geothermal systems like these.

Thanks to [Jero] for the tip!

Beating The Heat With Geothermal Cooling

July 23, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

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A while back, [Erich]’s oil heating system was due for a few repairs. Given the increasing price of fuel oil, and a few incentives from his Swiss government, he decided to go with a more green heating solution – geothermal heating. The system works well in the winter, but it’s basically useless in the summer. [Erich] decided to put his 180 meter investment to work for the summer heat, and made his geothermal heating system into a cooling system with a fairly low investment and minimal cost.

The stock system works by pumping cold liquid from [Erich]’s under floor heating into the Earth. In winter, the surface is always colder than the ground, thus heating [Erich]’s home. In the summer, the situation is reversed, with the cool earth insulated by the baked surface. All that was required to reverse the heating system was a few slight modifications to the heating controller.

Stock, [Erich]’s heat pump controller doesn’t have the capability to run the system in reverse, so he turned to a Freescale board to turn the compressor off and the pump on. With the additions, [Erich] is using 50 Watts to pump 1.5 kW of heat directly into the Earth below, a fairly efficient cooling system that’s basically free if you already have a geothermal setup.

Heat Your House With Propane (but Not In The Way You’re Thinking)

March 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 87 Comments

geothermal-heat-pump-charged-with-propane

[Ralph Doncaster] has a geothermal heat pump which is responsible for providing heat for his home. He’s been looking into some hacks that would make it more efficient and decided that the freon (R-22) needed to be tweaked. Some would say the stuff is bad for the environment, so he decided to go a different route. He replaced the Freon with propane, using this rig to make the fuel-grade propane more like cooling-grade propane called r-290.

He purchased the gauge set which is used whenever a technician services an A/C system (but you can also see it in this other A/C propane hack). That’s important because it’s responsible for making sure the old coolant is recaptured (his hose failure nixed this part of the plan) and the new coolant goes where it should at the correct pressure. But before dumping in propane from the local hardware store he needs to dry it out. Fuel-grade propane can have moisture in it, which can be bad for the cooling system. He bought a drier device, the grey bulb seen above, and soldered it on one end to a propane torch fitting and to a valve connection on the other. Now he could remove moisture as he pressurized the system.

Everything is working again, and the cooling side of the system gets much colder. He plans to do more testing as time goes by.

PC Cooling Using 1000 Ft^2 Geothermal

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

Are you still using heat sinks and fans to cool your computer? Lame. Tearing up your property to bury geothermal coils is definitely the way to go. [Romir] has been working on this for about a month and is just getting back data from the first multi-day tests. Take some time to dig through his original post. It includes something of a table-of-contents for the 35 updates he’s posted so far. Closed loop cooling seems to be trendy right now, we just didn’t expect to see a system this large as part of a personal project. The last one we looked at used just six meters of pipe.