Interesting: CO2 gets pressurized, cooled to liquid temperatures via refrigeration, then uncompressed to spin a turbine when energy is needed.
Concerning:
> The engineer explains that Energy Dome does not want to build projects itself.
> “We don’t have the capability to grow as fast as the market requires,” he says. “So our model is to license the technology to EPC companies or IPPs, utilities, the final user, because that is the best way for us to expand geographically and by sector.
They are so confident in the economics of this tech that they'd rather someone else invest in it. How generous and not at all suspicious.
> They are so confident in the economics of this tech that they'd rather someone else invest in it. How generous and not at all suspicious.
This is not an entirely uncommon business model, and there are numerous examples of the developers of a technology licensing it for production and distribution. ARM is itself one example of this.
It is entirely valid for a technology inventor to commercialize their invention by partnering with a manufacturer that already has the necessary production capacity, rather than by raising outside money to scale up their company and build new production capacity. The former can often be a lower-risk, higher-reward approach compared to the latter.
The real question is whether the technology actually works. If they can prove it works, the fact that they would license this technology to third parties for manufacturing and distribution is not itself suspicious at all.
Basic thermodynamics doesn't prevent you from cooling something reversibly.
That said plenty of the steps involved here are likely not 100% efficient, and I'm somewhat unsure where they're recovering the energy involved in the gas-liquid phase-transition, if at all.
The whole article is leaning a little bit too much on the "what if"-part of things. First it will be important to see whether their first at-scale Prototype actually works next year.
Honestly I don't see why it wouldn't work. All the steps of the process seem like old and proven technology to me. Perhaps the only innovation is this "elastic" CO2 storage for ambient temperature/pressure ?
However, the key information will be performance numbers actually coming out of it
My understanding is that the energy released comes from the CO2 being heated back up and turning into a gas, causing it to expand. This spins turbines.
It doesnt need refrigeration for storage, CO2 is stored at higher pressure
The refrigeration is needed because the process of compression produced huge amount of heat. And because of that, this method of storing energy is twice less efficient than batteries are
However, I imagine you could wait for your too-hot-to-condense gas to cool and condense. That would probably be vastly more efficient than adding refrigeration.
It would depend on the materials used for the pressure tank, whether you can add more surface area and the external temperature.
You could even put the CO2 Tank under water in a deep lake/ocean. Then you don't have to have such thick materials to contain the pressure. The CO2 could be dissipating its heat and pressurizing as you pump it down (use a flexible tube so the water is compressing the CO2). For the return journey, use a rigid pipe so it doesn't lose energy pushing outward on a flexible pipe.
Charging batteries also produces a huge amount of heat. In general, storing energy is never free. It's the tyranny of the second law of thermodynamics.
Demonstrably not true. In fact you can refill your Sodastream canister with dry ice, google it. 400 grams of it sure as heck doesn't stay solid and I'm pretty sure it can't be gas at that pressure in that amount of space.
Such confidence. Will make…. Unprecedented….
5bere would be so many ideas that have not scaled, run into technical problems, ……. Would be nice if they had data from a pilot plant that was representative
Concerning:
> The engineer explains that Energy Dome does not want to build projects itself.
> “We don’t have the capability to grow as fast as the market requires,” he says. “So our model is to license the technology to EPC companies or IPPs, utilities, the final user, because that is the best way for us to expand geographically and by sector.
They are so confident in the economics of this tech that they'd rather someone else invest in it. How generous and not at all suspicious.