Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

Well worth a watch. An idea (one of several in fact) to store waste heat, perhaps for later use. But the potential may be high enough / economical, to allow for the waste heat to be moved (by truck trailer) to a place in need of that heat/energy.

No idea if this is viable, but certainly sounds interesting.

Moving waste heat from industry to homes.

50% of global energy generation is heat, much of which is used for industrial processes. As much as 50% of that industrial heat is simply lost to the atmosphere each year. Industry is often too far from cities to be connected by pipework. So, how about a well insulated shipping container that can handle 1300 degrees Celsius and be delivered to small operators who need low grade heat, or to district heating systems to keep you toasty warm in the winter? Everyone's a winner!! Maybe we could call it 'Uber Heats'!

Which got me thinking about specific heat capacity. phase change and density of energy storage and whether we could have heat delivered on a lorry in a modular box where they would simply swap out the depleted module and replace with a fully 'charged' one?!

Thermal energy storage - Wikipedia

Salt Hydrate sounds interesting - potentially a winters worth of heat in a 4-8m3 volume

Yep, that's the idea being suggested, but not with phase change material. However, I recall Sunamp pondering the phase change transportation idea many yeras ago.

Sunamp to transport waste heat by barge in project with UK city council

The company has been in discussions with the local authority for months and is currently in the process of applying for funding from Innovate UK. Credit: Jen Jones/Moxy Inc
Sunamp is preparing a landmark project with the UK's Bristol City Council that will see the company take excess heat from waste treatment facilities by barge to be used in the city’s district heating scheme.

That was 2016, but in searching for it, I've found another Sunamp project contracting to move heat, agreed this year (news to me, thanks for the nudge):

Sunamp signs agreement with Sheen Parkside to move heat across the UK

Thermal battery company Sunamp has signed an agreement with Sheen Parkside, an infrastructure arrangement and operations group, to work together on establishing mobile heat networks across the UK. These will use Sunamp’s Plentigrade® phase change material technology in Central Bank container sized thermal batteries.

QrizB

Martyn1981 said:

Well worth a watch.

Or maybe not.

I got maybe 15 seconds in where he made the (il)logical jump from "waste low-grade heat" to "1300C in a shipping container".

Low-grade heat is called that because its, well, low-grade. Typically below 100C and so useless for generating steam etc. 1300C is process heat, useful for all sorts of things, and if it can be moved from A to B is far more useful within the chemical plant / incinerator / steam turbine where you've produced it.

And if you've produced a heat pump that can efficiently turn waste heat from eg. "hot" cooling water at 75C and turn it into 1300C, I congratulate you on your patent, the royalties that will shortly make you a billionaire, and your impending Nobel prize for physics.

NigeWick

Coastalwatch said:

UK Has £10 Billion Per Nuclear Reactor Decommissioning Bottomless Pit

It's not their money so politicians will spend it how their donors tell them?

zeupater

QrizB said:

Martyn1981 said:

Well worth a watch.

Or maybe not.

I got maybe 15 seconds in where he made the (il)logical jump from "waste low-grade heat" to "1300C in a shipping container".

Low-grade heat is called that because its, well, low-grade. Typically below 100C and so useless for generating steam etc. 1300C is process heat, useful for all sorts of things, and if it can be moved from A to B is far more useful within the chemical plant / incinerator / steam turbine where you've produced it.

And if you've produced a heat pump that can efficiently turn waste heat from eg. "hot" cooling water at 75C and turn it into 1300C, I congratulate you on your patent, the royalties that will shortly make you a billionaire, and your impending Nobel prize for physics.

Hi

That really is a fundamental issue .... of all of the 'waste' heat available as an energy source to tap into it would be interesting to see what proportion is from processes with temperatures above 350C where lead & tin are in a molten state and the majority of plastics are processed - above this you have gold, silver, copper etc processing at around /below 1100C so to have a process temperatures leaving a waste product at 1300C you're really limiting the industrial sectors to the likes of glass, steel and a few more exotic materials.

The issue is that the majority of industry uses little in the form of heat processing of materials and the by-product of heat is very often very hard to collect in a useful form, other than space heating of the work area .... for example, how do you collect the heat from a 2500C spot welding process, yes the initial spot temperature is high, but the energy content is low, so, apart from quenching (resulting in a low temperature by-product) how would it be possible to recover this in the range format required (~1300C) ....

Methinks someone is conflicting the total energy consumed by the industrial sector, which includes mundane things like office lighting and space heating with energy dense high temperature industries .... globally, I'd not be surprised that there'd be sites where these high temperature by-products could be tapped for local domestic heating, but they'd need to be in areas where heating is required for a considerable proportion of the year to become economical ... just think where the thermal energy would be available ... China produces ~52% of global steel and seems to have little issue with the plant being close to populated areas and has been using district heating system for decades, hence this form of heat provision accounts for ~7% of their total domestic heating demand .... furthermore, they've already been actively following a path to recovering 'low grade' industrial waste heat for around 15 years through the use of ground/water loop heat-pump technologies, so the idea's really nothing new when operated in-situ around a heavy-industry area, but finding those in the UK would be akin to finding a location where campaign groups can't find any newts ....

HTH - Z ...      

ABrass

Sodium ion batteries developed by Northvolt.

https://northvolt.com/articles/northvolt-sodium-ion/

160Wh/kg so only suitable for static storage, but they should be even cheaper than Iron Phosphate batteries.

zeupater

ABrass said:

Sodium ion batteries developed by Northvolt.

https://northvolt.com/articles/northvolt-sodium-ion/

160Wh/kg so only suitable for static storage, but they should be even cheaper than Iron Phosphate batteries.

Hi

Don't forget that sodium-ion battery chemistry likely has half the cycle life of LiFePO4, so we'd really need to see prices not only below those currently available for lithium, but well below to satisfy lifetime economics in a static storage environment ...

HTH - Z

70sbudgie

zeupater said:

QrizB said:

Martyn1981 said:

Well worth a watch.

Or maybe not.

I got maybe 15 seconds in where he made the (il)logical jump from "waste low-grade heat" to "1300C in a shipping container".

Low-grade heat is called that because its, well, low-grade. Typically below 100C and so useless for generating steam etc. 1300C is process heat, useful for all sorts of things, and if it can be moved from A to B is far more useful within the chemical plant / incinerator / steam turbine where you've produced it.

And if you've produced a heat pump that can efficiently turn waste heat from eg. "hot" cooling water at 75C and turn it into 1300C, I congratulate you on your patent, the royalties that will shortly make you a billionaire, and your impending Nobel prize for physics.

Hi

That really is a fundamental issue .... of all of the 'waste' heat available as an energy source to tap into it would be interesting to see what proportion is from processes with temperatures above 350C where lead & tin are in a molten state and the majority of plastics are processed - above this you have gold, silver, copper etc processing at around /below 1100C so to have a process temperatures leaving a waste product at 1300C you're really limiting the industrial sectors to the likes of glass, steel and a few more exotic materials.

The issue is that the majority of industry uses little in the form of heat processing of materials and the by-product of heat is very often very hard to collect in a useful form, other than space heating of the work area .... for example, how do you collect the heat from a 2500C spot welding process, yes the initial spot temperature is high, but the energy content is low, so, apart from quenching (resulting in a low temperature by-product) how would it be possible to recover this in the range format required (~1300C) ....

Methinks someone is conflicting the total energy consumed by the industrial sector, which includes mundane things like office lighting and space heating with energy dense high temperature industries .... globally, I'd not be surprised that there'd be sites where these high temperature by-products could be tapped for local domestic heating, but they'd need to be in areas where heating is required for a considerable proportion of the year to become economical ... just think where the thermal energy would be available ... China produces ~52% of global steel and seems to have little issue with the plant being close to populated areas and has been using district heating system for decades, hence this form of heat provision accounts for ~7% of their total domestic heating demand .... furthermore, they've already been actively following a path to recovering 'low grade' industrial waste heat for around 15 years through the use of ground/water loop heat-pump technologies, so the idea's really nothing new when operated in-situ around a heavy-industry area, but finding those in the UK would be akin to finding a location where campaign groups can't find any newts ....

HTH - Z ...      

Also, industries that have high levels of waste heat (because their processes require things like steam) often already have CHP plants, where they get an extra revenue stream by selling the electricity generated from their waste heat. I don't believe the economics of a CHP plant stack up if the site doesn't already have a process requirement for high heat.

zeupater

70sbudgie said:

Also, industries that have high levels of waste heat (because their processes require things like steam) often already have CHP plants, where they get an extra revenue stream by selling the electricity generated from their waste heat. I don't believe the economics of a CHP plant stack up if the site doesn't already have a process requirement for high heat.

Hi

Agree, that's pretty common, but not as common as waste heat recovery. I've been in a number of manufacturing sites where waste flue & other process heat was recovered to run space & office heating systems ... things are moving forward quite quickly on this front since the government's IHRS  programme started offering incentives a few years back, but for UK businesses actively following ISO14001 environmental philosophies this kind of approach was either on the radar or in place ar least 25 years ago, with many currently active solutions having their original roots in the energy price hikes back in the 1970's ...

HTH - Z

Martyn1981

Large grid expenditure, accepting all recommendations. Sounds good, but a little (dare I say) political, but hopefully it's real and positive.

Though I don't quite understand the cheap shot at imports - afterall, we're massively expanding interconnectors this decade (from ~5GW to ~15GW), and hoping long term to sell a vast amount of excess wind to mainland Europe.

‘UK grid measures to unleash £90bn of investment’

Measures that include reforming connections and creating capacity on the UK power grid are expected to bring forward £90bn of investment over the next 10 years.

The plans have been set out in the Autumn Statement alongside £960m of investment in green industries. 

Launched by the Chancellor and the Energy Security Secretary, the government has published its response to Electricity Networks Commissioner, Nick Winser, accepting his recommendations in all areas.

Energy Security Secretary Claire Coutinho (pictured) said: “As we move away from unreliable imports to cheaper, home-grown energy, we’re boosting the grid so that it can meet our expanding electricity needs which are expected to have doubled by 2050.

70sbudgie

Martyn1981 said:

Large grid expenditure, accepting all recommendations. Sounds good, but a little (dare I say) political, but hopefully it's real and positive.

Though I don't quite understand the cheap shot at imports - afterall, we're massively expanding interconnectors this decade (from ~5GW to ~15GW), and hoping long term to sell a vast amount of excess wind to mainland Europe.

‘UK grid measures to unleash £90bn of investment’

Measures that include reforming connections and creating capacity on the UK power grid are expected to bring forward £90bn of investment over the next 10 years.

The plans have been set out in the Autumn Statement alongside £960m of investment in green industries. 

Launched by the Chancellor and the Energy Security Secretary, the government has published its response to Electricity Networks Commissioner, Nick Winser, accepting his recommendations in all areas.

Energy Security Secretary Claire Coutinho (pictured) said: “As we move away from unreliable imports to cheaper, home-grown energy, we’re boosting the grid so that it can meet our expanding electricity needs which are expected to have doubled by 2050.

Isn't the reference to unreliable imports because we import a lot of the gas used in electricity generation? Rather than the electricity interconnectors?