Each sphere has an estimated lifespan of between 50 and 60 years, with partial replacement of components every 20 years or so.
The concept is fascinating, but what I’m most curious about is how they achieve that longevity in seawater. Benthic life really loves to settle and build on hard surfaces.
Benthic Life needs to be band/album/movie title.
Narrated by Sir Attenborough.
I would imagine it wouldn’t matter how many barnacles and stuff are on it. That’s the outside. Everything important is inside, I’m assuming the intake water will be screened or filtered in some way.
Most benthic life (by number) start as tiny, motile creatures. Screens would reduce head pressure and require maintenance. Barnacles of all kinds, as an example critter, settle on everything to which they can adhere. I’m guessing the engineers considered these complications since there have been past power project failures because of sea life. I wish the article went into those mitigations. If it’s somehow a non-issue by nature of the design, my curiosity is even more piqued.
I would like to know what is the % of loss when storing power as any energy conversion is not lossless.
Regular pumped hydro has an overall efficiency of about 80%. I would guess these sphere things would be similar, assuming you can put them near a high-voltage line, since the underlying technology (pump and turbine) is the same.
Interesting concept, but not very scalable. It’s basically a reversed dam - when it’s full, there’s 0m head of water. Then with excess energy, you lower the level inside, storing the energy in the water outside. E.g -2m head. Water then flows in to equalise head, and doing so, regenerates electricity. Adding depth to supercharge pressure differentials is a good idea, although I wonder how they limit the flow rate, or otherwise prevent cavitation shocks each cycle.
Could be useful as a private industrial battery, but a dam would still be better on an infrastructural level.
Dams have issues around silt buildup over time and to the best of my understanding the US is already dammed to the max (within reason).
I’m keen to see how it pans out. Seems like a very interesting concept.
Plus the places most suited for dams also tend to be natural wonders. Rip Glen Canyon and Hetch Hetchy
Silt did not magically disappear because your dam is spherical, and there is a lot of it on the sea floor. They need to install some kind of filtering system anyway.
Also, the lifetime of a sphere is estimated to be 60 years, while the traditional dam is engineered for 100+ years of service.
The main advantage is that the sea floor is unused and unregulated like the dry land , but then you could as well build an actual scuba diving underwater base with a hydro dam instead of a sphere, it will also be easier to clean and repair, but I guess that would be too much evil moustache twirling to get funded.
Did they say it was intended to be on the seafloor? I didn’t see that but assumed it would be moored deep enough for water pressure to turbo boost the turbines, but well clear of silt from the sea floor. That would also be a key benefit if you can moor it at the most useful depth but in any depth of water
Like a battery, it’s not scalable as a one off, but it may be as a modular mass produced item.
Or maybe like a wind turbine. You’d have a field of them comprising a power plant. If you lose some individuals, who cares. If you need to do maintenance you can take one offline or entirely replace it without really impacting the power plants output
I’m pretty skeptical about this- wouldn’t a 30m sphere be incredibly buoyant when empty? I get its concrete, but it’s displacing huge amounts of water. So you’d need some massive anchoring, maybe that’s not a big deal. Second, I don’t know what depths we’re talking about here, but I feel like the stress from cycling these things daily would be insane- in high pressure salt water no less. I also wonder what the efficiency of this system would be compared to other similar batteries, like pumped hydro storage. It seems to me pumping out water to near vacuum while under crushing outside water pressure would be a significant power hog.
… you’d need some massive …
from the srticle :
… a sphere nine metres in diameter and weighing 400 tonnes will be submerged …Can you calculate the weight of a sphere of 9 m of displaced water ?
No ? Well, it is 382 tons.
So, the concrete sphere is already massive by itself. “You” don’t need any complicated anchoring.
Same goes with the rest of your mechanical engineering intuitions : you did not work in this domain or study it, did you 😆 ?
Also, stress cycling is bad on most material, yes. But here it is compressive stress and the geometry is symmetric. Without further study, i want to believe this thing has good potential and my intuitions tells me it looks nice. Time will tell 😁 !Thanks for the insight, I’m not a mechanical engineer, I’m a software engineer :) The walls on these spheres have got to be pretty thick- 400 tonnes is no joke. 3/4 of a meter if I had to guess.
Perfect guess ! (afaik) ρ(concrete) ≈ 2.5 tons/m³
so full sphere ≈ (2.5 x 382) tons = 955 tons
they have 400 t so the cavity removes :
955 - 400 = 555 t … so 7.51m diam. cavity
… so, yes 3/4m thick wall 😌👍 !That’s exactly the way I would have calculated it, glad someone beat me to it though. Thanks!
… a sphere nine metres in diameter and weighing 400 tonnes will be submerged off the coast of California at a depth of 500 to 600 metres. It will have a storage capacity of 0.4 megawatt hours (400 kWh) …
i will try a rough calculations : suppose we can have concrete at $100 per ton, then it’s a minimum investment of $40,000. Also suppose electricity is stored with a large added value of 10 cents per kilowatt hour, so, for every cycle a rough gain of $40. By these numbers, 1,000 cycles would pay for the concrete … so, it may look good considering they plan a life of about 50 years for such devices.
On the other hand if competitive battery storage cost only one cents per kilowatt hour (temporary in and out storage) and if concrete and fabrication goes up 10 times to $1,000 per ton then it is not economically viable anymore.A good calculation of profitability would need to take into account the less than 100% energy efficiency of batteries cycling and of hydraulic energy cycling, … and so many more parameters which have to be studied.
Add to this: The chemical process of creating concrete is itself a significant contributor to CO2 emissions. So assuming the goal is to reduce CO2eq, that also needs to be accounted for.
They describe these as giant concrete spheres, but there are (obviously) pumps and turbines involved too, and that those are aimed at a 20-year partial part-replacement lifespan. There’s no indication as to how much these pumps/turbines will cost but I’m gonna guess probably more than the cost of the concrete since it’s relatively cheap in comparison, and that’s before you consider that the major wearing components (which is to say, the expensive stuff) will have to be replaced twice within the intended lifespan. And that’s not accounting for things that break and need to be replaced, inside of a giant concrete sphere on the bottom of the ocean where maintenance will be absurdly expensive. Needless to say I’m pretty skeptical of the economic viability of this project. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
i agree with all of this except, you know, when they will have to do maintenance … i guess they will be (they would be) more simply hauling the whole thing out to work at the surface of the sea … in this scenario the mechanical components would be at the top of the sphere and out of the water.
Yeah, so instead of sending down divers with equipment you’re hauling hundreds of tons of concrete out of the sea, which means aside from a ship and crew which you’d need anyway you’re still going to need specialized equipment (some big honkin’ chains and winches at a minimum) and tools and such, and that stuff isn’t cheap either. Also they’re aiming at a 20 year partial replacement cycle for parts that are going to be submerged in or otherwise exposed to sea water which is notoriously corrosive, some of which will be at fairly high pressure (otherwise the turbines will be less efficient), that seems optimistic at best, even if nothing breaks before the scheduled replacement time, and you certainly can’t count on that.
Why not submerge a tank with a hole at the bottom and blow air in the tank via a hose to store energy?
