$13600 a day making air batteries? Deflate that

Id like to obtain grid power generation opportunities so I internet-wise evaluated several gasifier areas

Right now Im looking at air batteries. I try to be objective but if you are alone you’ll just think you are handsome.

The internet says Ill get 1000 kw from 1 kg of activted charcoal. Thats pretty good. Youll get $.05 per kw for $50 and a tax credit of $50. There are 136 kgs of charcoal from a ton of cooked wood plus the wood vinegar which has an ambiguous but positive value.

A ton of wood is 20 55 gallon drums.

Consider air batteries on a pallet six feet tall.

My investigation into methanol was disappointing. I found a gallon of wood vinegar on Etsy but the galllon only has 5% methanol.

Do you know about this?

Phillip

I made some batteries. I made a battery that looks like an open face sandwich and a battery that looks like a Ho Ho.

This reaction does work. Whats different this time is the availability of Aluminum foil so you can scale immediately.

The work inolved is dirty.

A classic battery is one layer a.foil one layer electrolyte fed via sponge and ine layer activated carbon.

The pieces of the battery hate each other. The more of one the less of the other. Expect half times two working ratio.

The carbon aspect is straight forward. Powdered carbon is best but its messy, blocks are cleaner but have less O2. Open carbon is best x2.

The a.foil is on the bottom and behaves well. There is argument for heavier plate to help with cleaning.

The wheels come off when approaching the sponge electrolyte layer.

You have to understand the reaction fully then you have to shop for a media like a paper towel to soak up the electrolyte enough to deliver useful amounts of electrolyte.

The massive failure comes from the evaporation of the electrolyte in the open face battery. Its good for four hours max. The clean up is Carbon dirty, electrolyte wet dirty and wet cardboard dirty. There will be lots of a.foil leftover You can practice this so its useful somehow.

The Ho Ho batteries are more chill but they make half as. much electricity. The good news is these spools can be put together real fast, they can he fed O2 and electrolyte from internally placed feed hoses. The lack of space keeps the sponge moist but it blocks O2 hence the O2 feed not air. The electrolyte needs to circulate somehow.

Finding the exact feed rate and feed condition is a goal. I think the sponge carbon tools might not be needed.

The reaction has two faces. One is bath and the other is superficial.

The bath reaction is a result of a deep punch reaction. This is when a small square of a.foil is added to a cup of electrolyte. and the a.foil reacts by hissing and moving and making smoke and hydrogen. If the volume of the liquid is reduced that reaction is lessened, the extra anions were needed but are no longer available.

The superficial reaction only teases the electrons but never really reacts. This is the electricity.

Exactly the best application on how the electrolyte is applied is not known but the sponge overkill and carbon overkill really helps.

The Ho Ho batteries can be spooled together and externally fed and require less maintenance and are much more dense. Thats alot.

1 Like

First post to this group, so hello all.

I saw a series of videos by Robert Murray Smith on YouTube that might be helpful. He’s a sharp mind about most things and batteries are something he’s produced commercially before.

His presentation about making most batteries, made me want to go make more money, so I could go buy them instead, but there are a few that’s less work .

Thermal mass batteries, such as is used in the homes I design, are definitely a great thing, as the passive sun charges the high amounts of almost free thermal mass (insulated Sand and clay) and the heat energy exchanges into the room as the room cools.

Sand batteries are also a variation upon this and have a place in storage long term of heat ( it’s being done commercially), as does the water heating compost digester arrangement, where not only do you get hot water (massive amounts) from the piped water that’s heating inside the compost pile, but thermal energy, can allow an easier digestion of plant material with a built-in digester producing methane, hydrogen, bio- gas. See ‘A Different Kind Of Garden’ a free French to English PDF from the 1980’s, for more on that too .

For electrical storage the Gravity battery seems the easiest chemical reaction battery shown and Robert Murray Smith has shown several experiments (backed up with their patents) on this, that look quite workable by the average D.I.Y.er.

I hope some of that helps you decide upon a path.

4 Likes

Welcome and using thermal mass is an easy way to keep the heat in the house.

The other things are BS. Nice for a video but start calculating the weight of your gravity storage.
Take a look at the efficiency of an airmotor, the same result.
At the end there is wood :grinning:. Sorry to blow your dream.

5 Likes

Gravity based storage is ok for power density, like if you need a surge of energy for a short period. It is terrible for energy density, IE kilowatt times hours, or power over long periods. Falling weights take only minutes, not hours, to reach ground.

Compressed air is generally terrible for round trip efficiency. The working gas is heats up when it is compressed. The more it is compressed, the more it heats up and that thermal energy is generally lost and with it pressure. The gas cools as it works through the expander spinning the genhead. That cooling reduces the pressure of the working gas… again the inefficiencies just stack up and it’s not an accident but basic PV=NRT thermodynamics the whole way through.

There are clever attempts at keeping the gas hot or staging the compression and expansion with intercoolers (inter"warmers"?) to improve round trip efficiency but it’s never going to top batteries. Air batteries make the most sense when you have power that would otherwise be wasted, like too much wind at night in the North Sea. Efficiency doesn’t matter much if the energy to charge the storage is “free”.

edit: deleted extra word

10 Likes

We can spend a night discussing if this is a fact or not. :grinning:

4 Likes

More efficient is always better, I’ll agree there. 20% efficient probably never works but 65% efficient vs 95% efficient? If the 65% version is cheap enough per kwhr… it could have a place.

Some compressed air projects intend to use existing underground caverns for the air storage. They are “free” in the sense that the storage volume already exists and that storage volume is vast. Even at 65% round trip efficiency projects like that could be valuable for power shifting across weeks and even months.

You’d want a different, more efficient solution for power shifting across a single day, IE the “home from work” power bulge around 5-7pm. Power use at that time of day doesn’t align well with solar production and would benefit from grid-based storage. You would be cycling that power daily so efficiency becomes more important.

6 Likes

No harm in discussion. :slight_smile: What is really important is the overall cost for the roundtrip. IE how much does it cost per kwh to store and retrieve the energy over the life of the project. It is the looming problem over storage for decades. For a very long time, it was just cheaper to make more electric. Even currently most ‘large’ grid scale storage is ‘profitable’ not from the cost of the energy by itself but by other avoided costs. It hasn’t been until very recently, the cost structures have shifted to make it worthwhile.

There are several issues that have to be solved yet especially as far as compensation. But we can still get a lot of solar and wind installed before those issues are show stoppers in the US.

I don’t think, the storage options we have today is what we will have in 10 years. It may just be subtle changes, but the overall costs will be lower.

4 Likes

Yes, storage will be on a day base. Long term is the holy grale and besides wood, things get really complicated.

H2 making with excess windpower is a thing but the same as the gravity fairy tail a no go.

What about the EROI? Not only the financial aspect but also the energy involved.

Like I said, you can fill the evening at the bar and some beer :grinning:. So many people, so many wishes

3 Likes

I don’t think EROI is that big of a deal if the ROI is decent. :slight_smile: If you figure you paid off your investment then getting more energy per dollar isn’t a big deal.

I am okay with short term storage for now. maybe someday we come up with something better but if the daylight hours for solar goes to zero. Then knock down the morning and evening peaks, that knocks probably 50% of the energy out. I am good with that.

I don’t think decarbonizing energy is going to fix global warming though so I am good with half. Maybe tech improves and comes down in price for long-term storage but it isn’t a deal breaker for me at this point.

4 Likes

I know what you mean, but for me (someday), long-term storage is a water-tight barrel of charcoal or wood chunks.

Someday is a lot sooner for these than a lot of the higher-tech inventions, at least for me.

6 Likes

I just stumbled on this one…
Philip… its 1 KwH or 1,000 watts , electrical, for 1 Kilogram Charcoal from / with a generator, in normal case, where as in good case you’l have 2 KwH per Kg

Energy content from 1 Kg Charcoal = about * KwH cooking / heating power…

6 Likes

I’m included on this thread. I don’t know why. I don’t want to drive my car on wood. I want some GD money. That title is from me. I evaluated pumpkins for Methane and a pumpkin can make lots of Methane but pumpkins don’t make much methane since they need so much grow space. If you want biogas without cows use high wood distillates like fomate or acetate and use swamp mud as a substrate. My get rich schemes are now green Hydrogen from woodgas water gas shift cryogenic separation and active battery acid recycling. Utility scale contracts are at 5MW per hour or $4.5 million USD. Good wholesome idealistic money too!

Show quoted text

Error Icon\ 72x72

Address not found

Your message wasn’t delivered to [email protected] because the address couldn’t be found, or is unable to receive mail.
LEARN MORE
The response from the remote server was:

550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. For more information, go to Fix bounced or rejected emails - Gmail Help 98e67ed59e1d1-2ea08a272c2si107084a91.0 - gsmtp

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Phillip Manske <[email protected]>
To: “Sean Omalley via Drive On Wood!” <[email protected]>
Cc:
Bcc:
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2024 19:56:03 -0500
Subject: Re: Drive On Wood! | $13600 a day making air batteries? Deflate that
----- Message truncated -----

That looks bad it has to be 1000 watt…pay is $.05 per kw plus $.04 per kw tax credit. Thank you for pointing that out

I’ve moved on to recycling battery acid and cryogenic gas separation of hydrogen from syngas and water gas shIft.

I remember that phase I went through:0