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A near 100pct renewable grid for Australia is feasible and affordable, with just a few hours of storage
(reneweconomy.com.au)
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
172 points (99.4% liked)
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Check this out: https://raygen.com/projects/raygen-power-plant#resources
Batteries were a stopgap until we worked out something better. This plant gets 70% efficiency and more than enough energy storage by refrigerating a cold block, then using stored waste heat + the cold block to create a temperature differential, creating steam (in a closed loop, don't need a big water supply) to spin a turbine that generates power when the sun goes down. Absolutely genius, already deployed and operating and yet nobody is talking about it.
What's the advantage of that solution over existing solutions like heating molten salts?
Efficiency. You're collecting 70% (potentially 80%) of the available energy. The best PV is below 30% and the best molten salts are 35% max.
I thought molten salt storage gets like 90% efficiency. What's the advantage of storing energy by cooling blocks?
To run a heat engine you need a temperature difference in order to generate work. When your system generates heat as a byproduct you can amplify the amount of work by increasing the temperature difference. This is how the cold block "stores" energy.
What's your source on 90% efficiency? Here it's stated 35% max.
I'm just talking about storage. Molten salt energy storage is mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
I am listening to a The Solar Insiders Podcast, which is interviewing the CEO of RayGen (thanks for intoducing it to me, really cool).
the 70% is the efificency of the energy storage, which is similar to pumped hydro. ie, they put in 1MWh to the chiller, and will recover 0.7MWh from the organic rankin cycle turbine.
so, they get the 30% of the solar (or whatever it is), plus the recovery of the heat. They were saying that for 1 tower, they get 1MW of solar and 2MW of heat. but they never said how much of the 2MW of heat gets converted to electricity, or what the efficiency is, but it sounds like they need to consume electricity to use the ORC (ie for the chiller).
one other thing is that they ORCs can provide grid inertia which is a cool outcome too.
Hi mate, I think you misunderstood me.
It captures 30% of energy as PV and 60% as heat energy. The whole system itself is about 80% efficiency in terms of the energy captured from the sun, not the PV itself.
This makes it more effective than if you somehow had a molten salt and a normal PV plant in superposition on the same site.
i haven't been able to find the actual insolation to electricity efficiency anywhere. Do you have a link that shows the incoming energy to output electricity?
Here: https://arena.gov.au/assets/2021/05/raygen-commercial-assessment-report.pdf
Page 7.
I could not see where the 70% comes from, apart from the round trip efficiency of the heat capture. I dont know if that is what you are referring to. Do they have a input v output energy comparison somewhere?
i haven't read about your link yet, but as for storage, the study states
so the majority of the energy is used without being stored, and having the round trip losses.
... now back to reading ray-gen