climate change is Primarily due to loss of planetary carbon sink. the "end world hunger campaign" caused more loss of carbon sink capacity than the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
I am a merchant mariner and it would be cool to have one of these in an exhaust boiler so when in port or anchored we don't need to use a oil boiler to generate steam. On ships its one of the ways we use "waste" heat for power. Heating fuel and the ships.
@@cloggedpizza239 Steam has a limit to how hot it can get, exhaust too. You do not need graphite for those temperatures, oil will do just fine. Also at low temps getting work out of that lukewarm material is subject to the Carnot cycle efficiency of sub 15%. So unless you transform that heat into electrical at sub15% efficiency to heat the graphite to high temps you will not get much energy back. I suppose some engineers thought of this and found the oil tank to be the adequate and best case scenario for both usability, weight and price for what it returns.
@dragoscoco2173 I was more referring to heat storage in genral not nessarly grafite but I have heard of other companeis using ceramic with steam. But I beleave our ships exuast only reaches around 400c-600c after the turbo. But I guess it would be inefficient in weight to store enough energy for 3 days at port and may effect stabilty becuase of weight. But maybe the infared pannels could have use.
@@cloggedpizza239 Found a somewhat decent data source. I quote "The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius" and uses multi junction TPV tech which is the most expensive to date achieving 40% efficiency on a tabletop experiment, not the actual battery which is mostly theoretical. So i expect it to perform exponentially poorly below 1900'C and the real life efficiency to be less. TPV sound nice and it would be great to have some, but we do not have a decent way to make any in a usable temperature range.
Thanks, Z, and colleagues, for another well done video. I'm a 77 year old guy who is constantly encouraged by the brilliant, innovative thinking behind technologies such as this carbon battery and then having the knowledge and guts to start a game changing business. The young men and women of your generation have the future of our planet looking better and better. It's wonderful to see those who speak so negatively about our young people being proven completely wrong so frequently.
@tedbomba6631 - This is a fascinating video and very promising. I'm retired and it's wearying hearing the rising generation of younger scientists and engineers constantly disparaged and denigrated by old timers. For starters, the old timers are simply and demonstrably wrong. Their bias is unreasonable. I've been in the medical field for nearly thirty years and I've seen the medical and biomedical advances coming from fresh young faces for that entire time.
At 1700C you would get a theoretical conversion efficiency to electricity of about 75% with a Carnot cycle. It increases with the temperature. I was wondering if you could molten sand as perhaps another option. You have a boiling point of 2230C and in its molten state heat conductivity would increase, and another thing is you get some extra storage capacity from the latent heat when it melts. Also one thing totally left out in the video is leakage of heat. You are up agaisnt the Stefan-Boltzmann law of sigma T^4. How do you mitigate this as T rises?
Hmmm, I thought that solar plant in Nevada (Crescent Dunes) was molten sand, and I came here to post about it, except it's molten salt. Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmm.
The idea is a called solar thermal power plant, and the technology has been around since the 60s. Its efficiency is around 75% in ideal conditions too.
As long as it's not in the atmosphere as CO2, carbon is not a problem so yeah that's the idea. And it's a genius idea, especially if they use carbon from carbon capture
“Carbon Sequestration in Construction” (CSIC) / “Carbon Sequestration in Materials (CSIM) is a bit of a concept I thought of a bit ago. I have to dig for papers, but it could honestly be a method for CCS. There is a PILE of stuff on Enhanced Weathering in Concrete and all that, but using a PILE of Carbon Black or Carbon Fiber or even just *petrochemicals* made from *Sustainable* Biomass and/or Power-to-X tech. I can ramble about this all day, but I think it is a really interesting area, although LCA’s may make it less exciting as i think! Either way it’s worth more amazing coverage like this, at least in my book!
Alternative energy storage technology is a very interesting toppic. On the vid side itself. Clear presented, flowing script without any "breaks" in the narrative. Well chosen pictures for visual representation and the audio balance for voice vs background music is very well done too. Nothing to add but a round of praise.
I like how he's also literally taking carbon out of the carbon cycle to make these heat reservoirs. The IR mirror returning unused photons back into the reservoir is genius.
an IR mirror has been talked about by a TPV graphite energy using liquid tin to heat up the graphite and store it and using tungsten to radiate the glow of energy off the graphite and whatever is left you can cover other sizes using IR mirrors and their so good really this was from MIT from last year and I love it
This would be a good use of solid carbon precipitate from turquoise H2 production, in way it would produce short to medium energy storage with the thermal carbon batteries and long term seasonal / emergency storage with H2, especially when the H2 can be stored in a carbon matrix like some companies are pioneering. This would even be carbon negative if RNG is used.
How does this technology compare to water electrolysis, producing hydrogen and oxygen? From what I can read, the round-trip efficiency , electricity to electricity, is around 40%. Would love to hear the company compare themselves..
Solid graphite is also used for heavy duty arc plasma lances used in steel foundries, carbon arc steel cutting, high-powered searchlights (called arc lights), and more. Great use of this old tech!
Arc lights came to mind almost immediately as they can just run current through the graphite blocks to heat them up. No extra heating coils using Tungsten needed.
How efficient is it really? First the loss in the wind/solar device. Then the heating of the block. Then MOVING the block to where it is used. Then the 40% of turning it back to electricity. And depending on the use, there are several more layers of energy loss. It sounds better to me to just use it as a battery on side of generation, acting as a buffer. Not having to deal with transporting back/forth, batteries. How well does it compete in that with other battery tech?
It isn't more efficient, kind of dumb that they're reinventing something that doesn't need reinventing but simply done for the sake of decarbonization. If anything sounds like an easy money grab from investors who doesn't understand anything about thermal batteries (I remember there is a molten led thermal battery used with Stirling engine, don't know what has happened to it last time I saw it was 2017). Great example of this is concentrated solar plant, more efficient than photovoltaic. I'm waiting for thunderf00t to make a video and shit on this too lol.
The round trip efficiency was mentioned to be 30-40%, which for me is not very worth it. Even if the renewable energy LCOE is low (0.04-0.05 $ per kwh), with that efficiency you would need to sell it at 0.15$ per kwh just to break even. If they could raise it to 50-60% round trip efficiency, then we can talk. Because even with Lithium based batteries, the round trip efficiency is between 80 and 90%. With 50-60% efficiency and the low cost of storage, the overall LCOE would be less than $0.10 per kwh, which is about the same as fossil fuel and nuclear LCOE. And they would still be able to make money at $0.15 per kwh.
Efficiency does not matter, just money gained per cycle per dollar invested If the cheapest electricity price in a day is 0.00 and 0.25 - would you rather have one 100% efficient battery, or fifteen 40% efficient batteries? You'll make more money with the lower efficiency ones
Yeah I'm wondering if Power-to-Gas (use renewable to great H2) still beats this out. I've heard those systems are way more efficient than people realize. Plus there's no new tech and parts are standardized.
This seems like a brilliant thermal battery for use in heavy industry, and a suboptimal battery to get electricity out of. There are other ways to store energy & get electricity out, besides lithium ion (which really ought to be reserved for vehicles & the like that require its particular characteristics), that seem more promising to me for storage at grid scale & residential scale - liquid flow & sodium ion come to mind. Different tools for different jobs, and it's great to see how all of them are coming along.
That is indeed an oft-seen blind spot: not accounting for the continuous development of new technology. Lithium ion will not be used long-term for stationary storage, so comparing the heat battery to this technology doesn't feel right. And cars.... the first car using sodium ion is already for sale in China. I predict that sodium ion will be the standard for mass-market vehicles and lithium ion only used in the premium segment.
@@arnenl1575grid storage batteries are normally lithium iron (LPO4/LFP) a different technology which has a much longer life than the lithium ion batteries.
Liquid air and liquid metal batteries are looking like an interesting option for affordable and scalable grid storage, I'm sort of surprised that he didn't mention these as options at the end of the video sodium iron is looking exciting as well.
Thank you for another informative video. My son ans I were talking about the need to develop better large scale batteries for the future just yesterday. This sounds like another very effective option with versatility that other sources don't have. I first found out about the properties of heated carbon in welding class fifty years ago. With an arc welder, two carbon rods hooked up to the welder and brought almost touching together, creates the perfect brazing temperature. They glow like heated steel and last for an impressive time.
That was absolutely fascinating - thank you. You’re a great communicator with a way of describing relatively complex topics in a clear and accessible way.
Planck is going to be proud of those guys... That mirror in a cavity is real genius. One question though: how do they prevent glowing graphite to react with air and burn?
@@hansmuller1625 Yes of course changing the atmosphere inside solves the problem, however, they were talking about opening shutters to get the heat out, so I am puzzled.
They're probably going to use a refractory glass that is transparent to whatever band of the EM spectrum they need for a specific application. Maybe Quartz. Maybe Sapphire. Maybe germanium.
How they keep O2 out and what they use for insulation are almost certainly proprietary. OTOH, I'm sure the insulation is silicate or borosilicate glass bricks, like the tiles on the shuttle or starship.
You mentioned that materials like concrete or sand are not effective because they can't transfer energy fast enough. This, while true, hides the fact that the biggest limiting factor for emitting/absorbing energy is the ratio of volume and surface. While sand is not great at conducting heat, you can exponentially increase its surface area by changing its form (for example, creating a shallow layer of sand just using gravity). Once it's surface area has increased, heating and cooling becomes way faster. This is something you can't easily change the shape of a graphite block, though, so you're limited to only use the pre-existing shape
worked in energy and this would be a game changer for many industries even if the conversion back to electricity is only 30%. buying excess energy to fill up batteries at zero cost would not only net the company a profit but also help the grid.
video suggestion - here you mention at one point the heat in these can be stored for days. could be explore the need for and solutions to seasonal storage be it heat or electricity. so keeping it half a year if we get more renewables in one season vs another. i guess wind and solar counteract each other somewhat but how much and what will we do about the difference. probably not the short term goal but eventually when almost all energy is not made by burning stuff they will need to balance out over seasons.
For very long term storage, the Finnish thermal sand batteries seem like a better solution. At least for stuff like domestic heating. Lower operating heat (500C) + even cheaper storage medium (sand)
Seasonal storage is where I think chemical fuel synthesis will have a strong chance. A chemical fuel can be stored with zero loss basically indefinitly and their are plenty of already existing peaking powerplants (basically big jet engine turbines connected to a generator) already in place which are going to lose market share to the short term renewable storage solutions. Repurposing these generators into a seasonal powerplant will be effectivly free, at that point it's just a matter of replacing fossil fuel usage with synthesized hydrocarbons made durring times of peak energy availability.
That is highly unlike to be cost effective and/or it won't pay back itself ever. If you think how many charge/discharge cycles you get out of your storage over its lifetime vs the cost to build and maintain it, getting only a single cycle in a year makes the equation super difficult...
@@DerMacko "cycles" is not a valid unit here. What you want to know is yearly returns, which is energy provided per cycle X number of cycles per year X average price per kilowatt (assuming you can completely discharge, which is another factor) If you can only do a single yearly cycle, but that one cycle provides steady heating for 6 months, know it doesn't sound that bad
You polished your data. 35% efficiency is only the one isolated step. Altogether the system gives you ~5% efficiency, so 95% of the energy you put in gets lost
When I was an undergraduate decades ago, an embargo led to a scarcity of oil. Solar panels were installed on the White House (and were torn off in less than five years when they stopped working); a grad student at my alma mater modeled the performance of an electric delivery van; nuclear power plants proliferated. A professor of an environmental engineering course hypothesized about the potential impact should carbon dioxide be considered a pollutant like sulfur dioxide. Tesla perhaps, a company that only manufactures EVs, is the most valuable car company in the world. The solar panels on the roof of my home for over a decade paid for the installation cost in electricity savings within seven years. Two new nuclear plants started up in the past year, the first plants built since the 1980s. Breakthroughs HAPPEN!
Probably it's a capacity lifespan that is so short. Worn out PV panels from a solar farm selling cheap are about 70-80% and cost effective to replace with new PV but still quite usable for many more decades; they just take up more space for the same production.
@@bussdriver - Using Batteries on almost ideal conditions, increases the life span by a LOT... when you have an ambient with very controlled temperature, zero vibrations and very careful charge and discharge, you can reach insane number of cycles... that is why Tesla's Megapack has 15 years warranty
Im not sure about anything about this video, everything he said smells bullshit... 40% efficiency solar panels? no specifics on how the reflection works on practice and ZERO details on how the energy goes in and out.
The latest Megapacks have a 15 year warranty as their design moved to lithium iron phosphate cells, which is a game changer for the lithium based storage market. Any solution based on lithium ion batteries will have a much lower lifespan for any solution that cycles the battery daily.
I could imagine one of these being installed at somewhere with a constant need of heat like a large swimming pool and its charging only turned on when "the price is right". This would save them moment and reduce their useage of natural gas and offer themselves as a power-sink to the grid
Article suggestion: Energy Dome CO2 energy storage. The first full scale dome is under construction right now, and they reckon they can hit 75-80% RTE to in a 20MW/200MWH configuration, IOW solving overnight solar storage, which is 'good enough' for most of the world's population which are reasonably close to the equator, and darn handy for the rest of us.
a lot of effort to build a giant barbecue grill. I want to see how they reliably guarantee that no air can enter the "battery" over a life span of 30 years. At these temperatures, they would need argon as an inert gas to prevent the graphite from igniting. If air will enter those red-hot "batteries", they will just go up in smoke (or CO2, that is, besides probably some not-so-healthy nitrogen compounds). Hence they also will need a completely IR-transparent but very durable "window" to harvest the heat. Mixed materials, mixed thermal expansion coefficients, frequent heating cycles over a wide range... that's what makes mountains crumble and housings rupture. I don't say it's impossible, but it's surely not as cheap as announced.
Yeah, what seems easier is burning natural gas to heat air in a turbine and produce electricity (unfortunately). I think the clean tech dark horse to watch out for is a lead cooled nuclear reactor moderated with Yttrium Hydride. Perhaps with a supercritical CO2 turbine to produce electricity.
Industries in the business of creating generators, motors, or motor applications typically use thermo-piles (carbon blocks shorting out the electrical output... and huge fan driven heat exchangers to ambient air) to "waste" the energy (i.e. load their systems being tested).
The round trip efficiency was mentioned to be 30-40%, which for me is not very worth it. Even if the renewable energy LCOE is low ($0.04-$0.05 per kwh), with that efficiency you would need to sell it at $0.15 per kwh just to break even. If they could raise it to 50-60% round trip efficiency, then we can talk. Because even with Lithium based batteries, the round trip efficiency is between 80 and 90%. With 50-60% efficiency and the low cost of storage, the overall LCOE would be less than $0.10 per kwh, which is about the same as fossil fuel and nuclear LCOE. And they would still be able to make money at $0.15 per kwh.
If it ends up being used "just" to provide high heat for industrial processes (while removing the need from fossil fuels) that's already a big wiin, anyway.
@@RandomGuy-nm6bm well, the first 2 still apply. Conversion loss and heat loss during storage and there is also heat loss during transfer. It will still make it only 40% efficient. Although I will say that that matters less when they use the heat for things like steel manufacturing, considering they were going to use electricity for heat anyways. But it still is not ideal. Using electricity for heating steel is quite inefficient and this doesn't change it. This just adds another step in-between with extra loss but with slightly cheaper electricity. Which I suppose evens it out a little.
Thermal battery heat could be used to enhance the expansion stage of a compressed gas battery system (eg. Energy Dome). In the preheat stage before expansion, additional heat from the heat battery (eg. Antora) increases energy input to the turbogenerator for higher power output. Energy is stored as compressed gas, recovered heat of compression, and thermal battery heat. Advantages include 1. a (resistively heated)thermal battery can absorb energy spikes that a mechanical compressor cannot 2. thermal battery heat can increase turbogenerator output on demand 3. thermal battery heat can "make up" for reduced gas pressure and lost reheat energy as a compressed gas battery system discharges. 4. colocated battery systems utilize the same grid connection. Therefore resistively heated thermal batteries are complementary to compressed gas energy storage and with the variability(intermittent wind/sun) of renewable energy production.
13:00 this is why the periscope vertical solar panel stack idea I've been playing with may be able to help resolve that issue, by reflecting unused solar radiation down a chute of angled PV panels.
Hello! I discovered your channel a while ago, and I think it’s fantastic. I really appreciate how you analyze different ideas, essentially checking them for physical or chemical feasibility. That inspired me to share one of my own ideas with you, to see if you think it’s feasible. Some time ago, I gifted Saudi Arabia an idea for creating a hydrogen cycle. Here’s a rough breakdown of the concept: First, the brine left over from reverse osmosis is used to generate energy in an osmotic power plant. That energy, in turn, is used to produce hydrogen. As a third step, the brine could be utilized to extract rare earth elements. Finally, the remaining salt could be used for chemical or food processing. I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this! By the way, I just wanted to add that your channel is great, with incredibly interesting topics. Although I only discovered it a month or two ago, I have to say it’s full of fascinating content. Keep up the excellent work!
the clip about CA energy being worth zero or negative dollars at certain times of day brings a frightening thought into view. If the value of the power drops to zero because we got good at it, we're going to have one of two things: either the power companies will drag their heels to preserve their incomes, or the power companies are going to shrink, aggregate, and/or disappear. Nothing runs on no input. If we make renewable energy and storage too good, and it knocks out power companies' financial survival, I don't know what will happen after that. But it will be very unstable.
A suggestion for a script edit: at 1:07 you say "...many magical properties..." I know it's just a figure of speech, but you are a science oriented channel. Maybe leave magic for other types of thinkers. Great video, though.
Calcium chloride has better potential for energy storage. Melting point 750 C; Boiling point 1935 C. So if you have high temperature pipes, pumps and valves (eg aluminium oxide) you can pump the liquid salt into heat exchanger or industrial furnace etc. It has great potential for solar thermal because sunlight can be focussed by mirrors straight into a CaCl2 heater. Very efficient.
Absolutely. "Climate change." How many people have to die of starvation or freezing to death before we stop our governments from spending our tax dollars on this scam.
The economics of nuclear don't make sense when you can take virtually free energy from excess renewable energy and "store" it in heat form for industrial uses, far cheaper than even natural gas.
i used to know someone at union carbide and he told me of a proposal for them to make graphite blocks which would be heated up and power a car for 1/2 hour. I wonder what the numbers were and why if didn't work out. I remember hearing about the closure of union carbines graphite block/anode plant in anmore WV. I knew eventually graphite would be used for energy storage. I guess people look for far more cheaper quicker returns on their money. that plant was built righ like oldschool
For solar panels instead of reflecting the unabsorbed light out into space you could angle the mirror to bounce the light into some ultra-black painted solar water heater, or a heat block, or something akin to those to make use of the energy that'd otherwise be wasted. Just putting the water lines or whatever underneath the panels would be good, but with mirrors you could concentrate that heat.
Water lines attached to the bottom of solar panels are a thing. They get used to heat water that can then be used for things like heating a pool. And come with the additional benefit of increasing the efficiency of the solar panel meaning more electricity.
When I was a glassblower, I accidentally ruined my graphite mold by placing it in a kiln. It became porous after glowing red for a while. The heat was at 1050C
The excess energy generated by renewables can be redirected to plants that remove CO2 from the air and store in solids or other forms before they find ways to store the wasted energy
Any problem with materials (others than graphite/graphene) inside the "battery" reaching temperatures >2.000⁰C? I.e.: electricity>heat & heat>electricity converting system's materials?
Thermal does look like a pretty good option. If nothing else, during the night when people are asleep, money is being spent on getting wind plants to curtail. Actually increasing demand overnight would be helpful for the folks who have to balance the grid. "Filling the bath" they call it.
Interesting to think early nuclear tech used giant piles of graphite bricks - it was a nice material to work with - soft enough to be machined but with good physical properties, and a lot of interesting things are coming out of that research. A yield of 40% on light to electricity is awesome! Graphite thermal storage sounds like a winner....cheers.
16:00 I wonder if they would be useful in the cement making industry. There they are "burning" waste tires to generate heat for their process. As with most "fired" processes, the heat generation and the heat loads must be in sync. That's probably not the case in the cement industry unless they run all processes 24/7.
What I do know is that carbon has a really high melting point compared to other elements. Maybe could be used to make clinker used for cement manufacturing. From memory aluminium smeltering uses carbon as electrodes, so perhaps potential there? Less chance of fire than li ion. Already had 2 battery fires here in OZ in grid storage setups.
This sounds like the perfect battery system for Australia, in suburbs due to amount of roof top solar then these thermal batteries can release energy when needed.
It was always going to eventually be stupid to use lithium in grid energy storage but pretty smart at the time it started just because it got done with what we have. Super high round trip efficiency stuff needs to be used in transport and mobile applications, but even then, it just isn't sustainable. I know we have to use what we have until we figure out how to circularise it, but then well I pretty much intend to circularise it all. Let's hope I succeed along with the others doing their part in the field.
Now what would be the cost of a 100 kWH version for home use? I have lots of solar power for weeks at a time...but my main cost is storage for the cloudy weeks.
15:28 "especially if you're buying that electricity for next to nothing", except as energy storage takes off, that price spread will decrease. the price spread will settle at "whatever price spread the most efficient operator is selling at" and if your storage can't match that, no one will buy it. so efficiency does matter; hopefully the market will be properly regulated (setting fixed rates, or forcing operators to price based on levelized cost of storage, with regular audits on that calculation) to prevent an endless revolving door of lithium startups throwing a bunch of capital into batteries, pricing everyone else out of business, and then collapsing a few years later as the batteries wear out and replacement costs come due.
40% conversion rate sounds good until you realise that pumped storage of water operates at 70-80% efficiency. You need a hill with at least some water, and it isn't modular... hint: editorial perspective > the next greatest thing to "fix" stuff
you are not wrong, but you pointed out the only part in the process that wasn't inefficient ^^ heating something with a resistance is 100% efficient because there is no waste heat, since the heat is what you actually want and yes, power-to-heat is a lossy process, it would be better to heat the carbon as directly as possible, but this heat-battery is supposed to be something that you plug in a traditional powergrid as storage, not as it's own powerplant (although that may be possible)
The problem with solar concentrators is that the conveyed solar radiation needs to get to the material to heat it up. In order to minimize the heat loss, these carbon batteries must be heavily insulated, and thus the carbon core cannot be reached by solar radiation. Also, if we were to find a way to let the solar radiation in, like a transparent section, the heat would disperse as radiation through the same way. Making a selectively transparent window that only allows radiation to get in would require an extremely high melting point and resistance to thermal stress (expansion/contraction, high energy state...). I don't know of any material that can do that, though I don't exclude that we might be able to create one. Silica glass would be out of the question due to its relatively low melting point. Maybe alumina glass, if that's even a thing?
Also, the inefficient part wouldn't be the resistive heating, which has a theoretical yield of 100% (Joule effect & conservation of energy). The inefficient part is converting whichever renewable energy source into electricity before the resistive heating can happen.
@@nicholas_obert Depends to optical configuration entry hole can as small as few centimeters in this case even if this open hole loss rate will insignificant and when no sun you simply close it.
But then you need to transport heat from the battery to whatever industrial process needs it. And AFAIK transporting heat over long distance is much less efficient/expensive than transporting electricity. And those carbon batteries are compact enough that you can keep them right next to consumer.
Impressive technology, but you’ll need a lot of trailers to have a meaningful impact for most industrial processes. A standard 40 foot trailer is 67m2. Even if we assume 50m3 graphite at 2 ton/m3 density and a 2 MJ/tonC specific heat with a 500C working temperature range, you get a maximum of 100GJ or 28 MWh of heat storage. This may be 5 times the ~5MWh capacity of the best containerized LFP battery storage systems, but with
Its possible I missed this in the video, but couldn't these be used to convert existing conventional thermal power plants (burning coal or natural gas) in cheap batteries for peak loads? Install these big carbon blocks where the furnaces exist now and charge them up on surplus power then discharge when theres demand. And those sites are already connected to the grid in just such a way to help load balance the grid.
This is genius. The reflecting of low energy photons back into the heat battery so as not to waste what little it does have, in particular. That's GENIUS. Now, if we can also use heat pumps and more advanced insulation and reflection technologies, it seems to me, we could get close to 100% efficient. The sun and the earth both store a massive amount of ancient heat and the vacuum of space is very bad at conveying that heat. There are three ways heat moves: 1. conduction (electrons and protons transfer energy through photons at short ranges; molecules stay put but transfer energy as short-range jiggling) 2. convection (entire molecules move as a fluid, transferring energy as long-range molecular motion) 3. radiation (photons carry energy through transparent mediums or empty space, and deposit it elsewhere) All three of these need to be trapped somehow. And if the sun and earth can trap the energy for billions of years, then we should be able to trap it efficiently too. Insulation is the art of doing so. The question is how to transfer the energy at the end when we need to use it. For that, they have chosen number 3: radiation. The cool thing about radiation is that 1 and 2 do not work at all in a vacuum. For 1 and 2, you need a medium. Thus, the vacuum of space is an excellent insulator and is the reason why the sun has retained its heat these billions of years. Meanwhile, number 3, radiation works great in the vacuum of space: in fact, it works better than in a medium. The sun can radiate a small fraction of its energy on its surface, but its volume is so much bigger than its surface area, being cubic rather than square. (For similar reasons, animals were bigger when it was colder, and warm-blooded water animals in the cold parts of the oceans are bigger for the same reason.) But, additionally, heat transfer via radiation is slow, even though the individual photons are moving at the speed of light. This is useful for storage purposes, giving you control over the release of energy. However, for times when you need higher power generation, you could always also fall back on conduction and convection to more quickly release the energy, via turbines. You could also instead open more apertures OR conduct the heat to another area where you have more such apertures. The flexibility in working with heat is pretty neat and it comes from the 3 diverse ways of transferring heat energy. It's for this reason and many more I have been a firm believer that heat energy storage IS DEFINITELY the future of energy. If we could figure out how to use vaccuum chambers to further improve the efficiency, that would be nice. If we could also figure out how to release ONLY the higher-energy photons and either trap all lower-energy photons completely so that none ever leak at all, OR reflect all them back reliably, we should be able to get close to 100% efficiency. So there is a LOT of room for practical improvement that can happen here. I am hopeful, because in my lifetime I watched as things like refrigerators became impressively efficient. This is because of improved insulation and heat-pumps. We talked about the insulation part. But what about heat pumps? Resistive heating is more or less 100% efficient at transferring electricity to heat. BUT heat pumps can move heat that already exists, and so can be MORE than 100% "efficient" or "effective," or whatever you want to call it. What if instead of using resistive heating, we pump waste heat out of other processes? The heat pumps themselves would run off renewable energy of course. If for whatever reasons there is no waste heat to work with for a while, then you switch to resistive heating instead. But it seems a bit silly to get a 1:1 electricity -> heat transfer when you could get a much better over-1:1 electricity -> heat transfer by pumping pre-existing heat. Obviously, by pumping the heat, we are concentrating it, to reach those higher temperatures that we need. We do need materials that can withstand these high temperatures, and that's the most important part of this whole problem. If we can get good at that, then we can have a HUGE revolution in energy that makes energy so much better than it ever has been before.
There must be clever ways of avoiding energy losses. If the environment where the heating occurs heats up too (so not only the carbon)- then that heat could be used, perhaps for pre-heating. If the glowing medium is a plate with infrared cells on both sides, the escaping not converted infrared heats up the space around it and could be used again too. But it seems hard to find a perfect and yet cheap and practical insulating method. The heat lost to the environment will be lost....I have actually no idea how good insulation can be this days.
I use resisitively heated silica sand to store excess daytime solar energy and then release the heat into my house by diverting the furnace plenum through pipes embedded in the sand... I never even considered graphite as an alternative.
I think this would work. I had a similar idea. Also, they have been using the idea of molten salt as it is also very prominent and can be extracted easier as it is a liquid and can be passed through a heat exchanger, although the system might be a little more costly it would be more efficient , With reflection, shiny surfaces and highly insulative materials about 1 foot of insulation would be totally enough also the larger the volume the less service area, shape also matters. A sphere has the lowest surface area per unit volume. A square cube is also decent. A container is not really that good but if you put two of them side-by-side or four of them, side-by-side t and two on top of them, you would only have to insulate the exterior walls. I’m guessing highly reflective, interior walls, high temperature insulatating bricks in the inner then Rockwool insulation then maybe regular fiberglass for total of about 16 inches should be very insulative. Of course you could go further as it is such a high delta T
hmmm that reflection idea is very interesting, what if you mounted a mirror at the back of the PV and a one way mirror in front of the PV then the sun would deliver its light to the PV as it is allowing to pass thru at the front, but can never escape back into the air because of the mirror and one way mirror (loop), feasable? i got the idea from the old ruby lasers, wich has such a one way mirror to bounce the light continuesly making it more powerful
Perovskite panels are coming soon and function well using IR radiation - I wonder if those would function well/ better in this application. They are also mooted to be cheap to produce once they hit mass production.Just a thought.
to be honest you would really want to have double the temperature unless your using phase change, really that would be the ideal battery one that can get to 2000 degrees and the phase changes a meterial dumping a bunch of that energy into phase changing the material which can be extracted later.
I'm very sceptical of this battery. It leaves a lot of efficiency on the table, by using resistive heating instead of heat pumps. Also it uses graphite, which is a highly valuable material required for building lithium ion batteries.
Yeah the presentation was pretty lacking in technical details,. I want to know how much electricity has been produced and what price? How fast is it ramping up, is it going to be exponential growth rate??
I think it might still be unimpressive and they’re working on that. The project is inspired by the properties that are already promising, and they try to improve the yield/capacity/safety/modularity.
Because it's technological pop video, monetising people's need to hear about ever new magical technologies. There are so many of these on RUclips, it's incredible.
You mentioned reflecting back "at the sun" is not a great idea but how about dual layer behind PV? a storage medium and a reflective medium behind? Basically any low-energy photon that passes through the semiconductor can get absorbed and given a chance to reemit at a higher energy after, but only emission towards PV matters because any other direction is reflected back. Or would something like that cost more than the yield increase is worth?
These trunkey carbon energy pods could be sold as investment packages. I heard buy energy when it is cheap and sell it when it is needed for higher prices. That is what it will take to make a better world. Profit. What is the total cost installed. How much can you make and how fast can you get the initial investment back. How many can you produce and deliver how soon.
Sounds great but the thorium fuel cycle is the real solution, not least because it's the best for generating industrial process heat. Far more efficient than solar, than wind, and sustainable unlike legacy nuclear. Batteries have their place, but thorium-cycle power is for process heat as well as critically needed isotopes and plain old baseload electricity.
I wanted to use slate tiles, because the color would be useful for the thermal mass of the walls of my earthship, but it seems that I could also use them in direct contact with the metal parts of my rocket mass heater. Slate tiles would be really good, but it's rather expensive in France, probably because it's a fashionable color and material. The only problem is that it's difficult to find for free or really cheap, compare to all the materials I already have (stones and clay tiles). Maybe I already have stones with similar properties, but in a temperature range lower than 1000°C (pyrolysis)
Salt is another way to store heat. When the salt melts it takes in a lot of heat. When it freezes, it gives up that heat. The trick is to get a substance that has a very high melting point - and of course, a way to contain it in something that doesn't melt or dissolve.
@@acmefixer1 I know but I want low tech and solid. A lot of hassle for a few m² of surface area. I will probably keep it as simple as possible and after enough testing I will make modifications if I find that the heat is escaping too much too quickly or other problems.
Question: efficiency means - by definition - the percentage of energy supplied that's converted to useful work, the rest being converted to heat. How is it possible, then, for resistive heating to be only 99% efficient? Where does the 1% of energy that's _not_ converted to heat go?
I have one major question: Why resistive heating and not a heat pump? I mean, you can easily pump four times the energy input this way, so what is it that I'm missing here? Also, instead of using a mirror, couldn't you put the photovoltaic panel _between_ two chunks of graphite?
My guess is these components cannot handle 2000°C. Amirite? Also, a heat pump needs heat around it to work. You could use sunlight and a bunch of mirrors, but that definitely complicates this quite a bit.
I wonder whether, with such high temp levels, a thermodynamical electricity generation would not be more advantageous from an efficiency point of view. The Carnot efficiency of a 1500°C heat source is ~~ 0.75, the real efficiency o c being a lot lower.
Problem with that is low efficiency of thermophotovoltaic sitting around 40 %, which can be beaten easily with other systems. For example, my thesis goal was to design low-cost thermal storage battery from of the shelf components and i get to efficiency around 50 % with maximal temperature just 600 °C. Now then i added posibility of 2000°C my system efficiency would be around 75 %. Yeah, my system had moving parts and so on, but still, that low efficiency bothers me. Key information here is levelized cost of storage [USD/MWh] for that system and at what roundtrip efficiency [%] it can achieve.
Would it be possible to bundle light with mirrors and inject that hot beam straight into this battery? It's being done in other setups, but can it be done here? Because if that is the case, energy collection becomes massively more efficient, the efficiency of PV solar panel still lacks plenty. Just imagine charging the battery basically straight from the sun.
You put together great vids. Thanks. That 2000 C temperature is the really big ticket item cause it makes steel and concrete customers. It really can displace a chunk of fossil fuel usage which to now no-one has had an answer. Thanks for the news.
Add copper nanoparticles for increased heat emission, copper nanoparticles really like graphite so it would be easy to impregnate it during production.
Thanks for watching! Don't forget to get started in Onshape for FREE: Onshape.pro/Ziroth - You won't regret giving it a try!
Actually in Roman times they were lead.
When I have 1m³ Block i have 6 surfaces 6m² but how far can the TPV panels placed?
another climate change propaganda
You missed that fossil fuels is a feedstock in petrochemicals (plastics) and cement making (flyash); not just heat.
climate change is Primarily due to loss of planetary carbon sink.
the "end world hunger campaign" caused more loss of carbon sink capacity than the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
I am a merchant mariner and it would be cool to have one of these in an exhaust boiler so when in port or anchored we don't need to use a oil boiler to generate steam. On ships its one of the ways we use "waste" heat for power. Heating fuel and the ships.
Would not work at all.
@@dragoscoco2173 why not? Instead of using resistive heating you could use steam or exhaust right?
@@cloggedpizza239 Steam has a limit to how hot it can get, exhaust too. You do not need graphite for those temperatures, oil will do just fine.
Also at low temps getting work out of that lukewarm material is subject to the Carnot cycle efficiency of sub 15%.
So unless you transform that heat into electrical at sub15% efficiency to heat the graphite to high temps you will not get much energy back.
I suppose some engineers thought of this and found the oil tank to be the adequate and best case scenario for both usability, weight and price for what it returns.
@dragoscoco2173 I was more referring to heat storage in genral not nessarly grafite but I have heard of other companeis using ceramic with steam. But I beleave our ships exuast only reaches around 400c-600c after the turbo. But I guess it would be inefficient in weight to store enough energy for 3 days at port and may effect stabilty becuase of weight. But maybe the infared pannels could have use.
@@cloggedpizza239 Found a somewhat decent data source. I quote "The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius" and uses multi junction TPV tech which is the most expensive to date achieving 40% efficiency on a tabletop experiment, not the actual battery which is mostly theoretical. So i expect it to perform exponentially poorly below 1900'C and the real life efficiency to be less. TPV sound nice and it would be great to have some, but we do not have a decent way to make any in a usable temperature range.
Thanks, Z, and colleagues, for another well done video. I'm a 77 year old guy who is constantly encouraged by the brilliant, innovative thinking behind technologies such as this carbon battery and then having the knowledge and guts to start a game changing business. The young men and women of your generation have the future of our planet looking better and better. It's wonderful to see those who speak so negatively about our young people being proven completely wrong so frequently.
@tedbomba6631 - This is a fascinating video and very promising. I'm retired and it's wearying hearing the rising generation of younger scientists and engineers constantly disparaged and denigrated by old timers. For starters, the old timers are simply and demonstrably wrong. Their bias is unreasonable. I've been in the medical field for nearly thirty years and I've seen the medical and biomedical advances coming from fresh young faces for that entire time.
74 year old here and I think about that as well.
ruclips.net/video/kx1Jxk6kjbQ/видео.html
This appears to be a very promising technology. I have one question: where does the carbon come from? Hoping it is sustainable…
Hey , old man, I have a lot of knowledge about these subjects, ask me if you have doubts
At 1700C you would get a theoretical conversion efficiency to electricity of about 75% with a Carnot cycle. It increases with the temperature. I was wondering if you could molten sand as perhaps another option. You have a boiling point of 2230C and in its molten state heat conductivity would increase, and another thing is you get some extra storage capacity from the latent heat when it melts. Also one thing totally left out in the video is leakage of heat. You are up agaisnt the Stefan-Boltzmann law of sigma T^4. How do you mitigate this as T rises?
I also felt the lack of these points. It seems like a laboratory idea that won’t be at the market, maybe never.
Hmmm, I thought that solar plant in Nevada (Crescent Dunes) was molten sand, and I came here to post about it, except it's molten salt. Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmm.
The idea is a called solar thermal power plant, and the technology has been around since the 60s. Its efficiency is around 75% in ideal conditions too.
itsa moltel salt.@@herzogsbuick
Double metal walled insulation won't work?
Let's de-carbonize with pure carbon!
As long as it's not in the atmosphere as CO2, carbon is not a problem so yeah that's the idea. And it's a genius idea, especially if they use carbon from carbon capture
Lol, was going to write the same - Carbon; this time it’s good for the environment.
In batteries seem like the best place for it! Haha
“Carbon Sequestration in Construction” (CSIC) / “Carbon Sequestration in Materials (CSIM) is a bit of a concept I thought of a bit ago.
I have to dig for papers, but it could honestly be a method for CCS. There is a PILE of stuff on Enhanced Weathering in Concrete and all that, but using a PILE of Carbon Black or Carbon Fiber or even just *petrochemicals* made from *Sustainable* Biomass and/or Power-to-X tech.
I can ramble about this all day, but I think it is a really interesting area, although LCA’s may make it less exciting as i think!
Either way it’s worth more amazing coverage like this, at least in my book!
That’s actually the goal, lots of carbon in one spot is the best way to decarbonize the air and water around us
Alternative energy storage technology is a very interesting toppic.
On the vid side itself. Clear presented, flowing script without any "breaks" in the narrative. Well chosen pictures for visual representation and the audio balance for voice vs background music is very well done too.
Nothing to add but a round of praise.
These words mean more than you think! Thank you 🙏
Decarbonization is 21st century cathedral/pyramid building.
It is orchestrated human sacrifice for a superstition.
AGW is a superstitious bunk.
I like how he's also literally taking carbon out of the carbon cycle to make these heat reservoirs. The IR mirror returning unused photons back into the reservoir is genius.
Maybe carbon doping to alter frequency of light emission to make solar panel work better. Or tuned antenna solar capture instead of just bandgaps.
that's being looked into I believe I mean we made stuff like mirrors for solar @@brodriguez11000
an IR mirror has been talked about by a TPV graphite energy using liquid tin to heat up the graphite and store it and using tungsten to radiate the glow of energy off the graphite and whatever is left you can cover other sizes using IR mirrors and their so good really this was from MIT from last year and I love it
This would be a good use of solid carbon precipitate from turquoise H2 production, in way it would produce short to medium energy storage with the thermal carbon batteries and long term seasonal / emergency storage with H2, especially when the H2 can be stored in a carbon matrix like some companies are pioneering. This would even be carbon negative if RNG is used.
How does this technology compare to water electrolysis, producing hydrogen and oxygen? From what I can read, the round-trip efficiency , electricity to electricity, is around 40%. Would love to hear the company compare themselves..
Solid graphite is also used for heavy duty arc plasma lances used in steel foundries, carbon arc steel cutting, high-powered searchlights (called arc lights), and more. Great use of this old tech!
Arc lights came to mind almost immediately as they can just run current through the graphite blocks to heat them up. No extra heating coils using Tungsten needed.
How efficient is it really?
First the loss in the wind/solar device.
Then the heating of the block.
Then MOVING the block to where it is used.
Then the 40% of turning it back to electricity.
And depending on the use, there are several more layers of energy loss.
It sounds better to me to just use it as a battery on side of generation, acting as a buffer.
Not having to deal with transporting back/forth, batteries.
How well does it compete in that with other battery tech?
It isn't more efficient, kind of dumb that they're reinventing something that doesn't need reinventing but simply done for the sake of decarbonization. If anything sounds like an easy money grab from investors who doesn't understand anything about thermal batteries (I remember there is a molten led thermal battery used with Stirling engine, don't know what has happened to it last time I saw it was 2017). Great example of this is concentrated solar plant, more efficient than photovoltaic. I'm waiting for thunderf00t to make a video and shit on this too lol.
The round trip efficiency was mentioned to be 30-40%, which for me is not very worth it. Even if the renewable energy LCOE is low (0.04-0.05 $ per kwh), with that efficiency you would need to sell it at 0.15$ per kwh just to break even.
If they could raise it to 50-60% round trip efficiency, then we can talk. Because even with Lithium based batteries, the round trip efficiency is between 80 and 90%.
With 50-60% efficiency and the low cost of storage, the overall LCOE would be less than $0.10 per kwh, which is about the same as fossil fuel and nuclear LCOE. And they would still be able to make money at $0.15 per kwh.
Efficiency does not matter, just money gained per cycle per dollar invested
If the cheapest electricity price in a day is 0.00 and 0.25 - would you rather have one 100% efficient battery, or fifteen 40% efficient batteries? You'll make more money with the lower efficiency ones
Yeah I'm wondering if Power-to-Gas (use renewable to great H2) still beats this out. I've heard those systems are way more efficient than people realize. Plus there's no new tech and parts are standardized.
Only use case i see is where you cant bring power otherwise because of.. reasons..
This seems like a brilliant thermal battery for use in heavy industry, and a suboptimal battery to get electricity out of. There are other ways to store energy & get electricity out, besides lithium ion (which really ought to be reserved for vehicles & the like that require its particular characteristics), that seem more promising to me for storage at grid scale & residential scale - liquid flow & sodium ion come to mind. Different tools for different jobs, and it's great to see how all of them are coming along.
Yep
That is indeed an oft-seen blind spot: not accounting for the continuous development of new technology. Lithium ion will not be used long-term for stationary storage, so comparing the heat battery to this technology doesn't feel right.
And cars.... the first car using sodium ion is already for sale in China. I predict that sodium ion will be the standard for mass-market vehicles and lithium ion only used in the premium segment.
@@arnenl1575grid storage batteries are normally lithium iron (LPO4/LFP)
a different technology which has a much longer life than the lithium ion batteries.
Liquid air and liquid metal batteries are looking like an interesting option for affordable and scalable grid storage, I'm sort of surprised that he didn't mention these as options at the end of the video sodium iron is looking exciting as well.
Thank you for another informative video. My son ans I were talking about the need to develop better large scale batteries for the future just yesterday. This sounds like another very effective option with versatility that other sources don't have. I first found out about the properties of heated carbon in welding class fifty years ago. With an arc welder, two carbon rods hooked up to the welder and brought almost touching together, creates the perfect brazing temperature. They glow like heated steel and last for an impressive time.
That was absolutely fascinating - thank you. You’re a great communicator with a way of describing relatively complex topics in a clear and accessible way.
Finally, someone focused on the problem of thermal conductivity. This is a brilliant idea. Thanks for the great content!
Planck is going to be proud of those guys... That mirror in a cavity is real genius.
One question though: how do they prevent glowing graphite to react with air and burn?
I'd be guessing CO2
Surround it with inert gas, such as nitrogen, CO2 or something else.
I realize those gases are not strictly inert, but they are in this context.
@@hansmuller1625 Yes of course changing the atmosphere inside solves the problem, however, they were talking about opening shutters to get the heat out, so I am puzzled.
@@markotrieste The heat shutters could open to another controlled atmosphere with a radiator?
They're probably going to use a refractory glass that is transparent to whatever band of the EM spectrum they need for a specific application.
Maybe Quartz. Maybe Sapphire. Maybe germanium.
Insulation. Very important part you left out. Very difficult at these very high temperatures.
How they keep O2 out and what they use for insulation are almost certainly proprietary. OTOH, I'm sure the insulation is silicate or borosilicate glass bricks, like the tiles on the shuttle or starship.
You mentioned that materials like concrete or sand are not effective because they can't transfer energy fast enough. This, while true, hides the fact that the biggest limiting factor for emitting/absorbing energy is the ratio of volume and surface.
While sand is not great at conducting heat, you can exponentially increase its surface area by changing its form (for example, creating a shallow layer of sand just using gravity). Once it's surface area has increased, heating and cooling becomes way faster.
This is something you can't easily change the shape of a graphite block, though, so you're limited to only use the pre-existing shape
worked in energy and this would be a game changer for many industries even if the conversion back to electricity is only 30%.
buying excess energy to fill up batteries at zero cost would not only net the company a profit but also help the grid.
When I was a kid we used solid carbon capture from the heating system. We called it soot, in the chimney
video suggestion - here you mention at one point the heat in these can be stored for days. could be explore the need for and solutions to seasonal storage be it heat or electricity. so keeping it half a year if we get more renewables in one season vs another. i guess wind and solar counteract each other somewhat but how much and what will we do about the difference. probably not the short term goal but eventually when almost all energy is not made by burning stuff they will need to balance out over seasons.
For very long term storage, the Finnish thermal sand batteries seem like a better solution. At least for stuff like domestic heating.
Lower operating heat (500C) + even cheaper storage medium (sand)
Seasonal storage is where I think chemical fuel synthesis will have a strong chance. A chemical fuel can be stored with zero loss basically indefinitly and their are plenty of already existing peaking powerplants (basically big jet engine turbines connected to a generator) already in place which are going to lose market share to the short term renewable storage solutions. Repurposing these generators into a seasonal powerplant will be effectivly free, at that point it's just a matter of replacing fossil fuel usage with synthesized hydrocarbons made durring times of peak energy availability.
@@CaemmYsWoed it was all around the news last year, but haven't heard about it since. I wonder how much progress they've made, by now.
That is highly unlike to be cost effective and/or it won't pay back itself ever. If you think how many charge/discharge cycles you get out of your storage over its lifetime vs the cost to build and maintain it, getting only a single cycle in a year makes the equation super difficult...
@@DerMacko "cycles" is not a valid unit here. What you want to know is yearly returns, which is energy provided per cycle X number of cycles per year X average price per kilowatt (assuming you can completely discharge, which is another factor)
If you can only do a single yearly cycle, but that one cycle provides steady heating for 6 months, know it doesn't sound that bad
Has the heat extraction been tested in an industrial setting? If so, at what temperature?
And, at what scale.
Always "Heat batteries! Renewable!" never "Heat batteries! Usable!"
You polished your data. 35% efficiency is only the one isolated step. Altogether the system gives you ~5% efficiency, so 95% of the energy you put in gets lost
I've watched many many videos like this for years, new breakthroughs, that never happens! This is that kind of video!
Same here.
When I was an undergraduate decades ago, an embargo led to a scarcity of oil. Solar panels were installed on the White House (and were torn off in less than five years when they stopped working); a grad student at my alma mater modeled the performance of an electric delivery van; nuclear power plants proliferated. A professor of an environmental engineering course hypothesized about the potential impact should carbon dioxide be considered a pollutant like sulfur dioxide.
Tesla perhaps, a company that only manufactures EVs, is the most valuable car company in the world. The solar panels on the roof of my home for over a decade paid for the installation cost in electricity savings within seven years. Two new nuclear plants started up in the past year, the first plants built since the 1980s. Breakthroughs HAPPEN!
It all sounds great for utility scale storage. So why isn't it already widespread? Something about the economics must not have been explained.
The GIGANTIC WINDMILLS….HAVE happened!!! MORE of them EVERY SINGLE DAY!!!
I am not sure what battery storage you say has a 4-6 year lifespan but Tesla’s Megapack has a 15 year warranty.
Probably it's a capacity lifespan that is so short. Worn out PV panels from a solar farm selling cheap are about 70-80% and cost effective to replace with new PV but still quite usable for many more decades; they just take up more space for the same production.
@@bussdriver - Using Batteries on almost ideal conditions, increases the life span by a LOT... when you have an ambient with very controlled temperature, zero vibrations and very careful charge and discharge, you can reach insane number of cycles... that is why Tesla's Megapack has 15 years warranty
Im not sure about anything about this video, everything he said smells bullshit... 40% efficiency solar panels? no specifics on how the reflection works on practice and ZERO details on how the energy goes in and out.
@@bussdriver The 15 year warranty is a capacity guarantee, soo no there is no massive capacity loss.
The latest Megapacks have a 15 year warranty as their design moved to lithium iron phosphate cells, which is a game changer for the lithium based storage market. Any solution based on lithium ion batteries will have a much lower lifespan for any solution that cycles the battery daily.
I could imagine one of these being installed at somewhere with a constant need of heat like a large swimming pool and its charging only turned on when "the price is right". This would save them moment and reduce their useage of natural gas and offer themselves as a power-sink to the grid
If you got a swimming pool full of water, you already have a huge thermal battery. Heat it slightly warmer when energy is cheap.
Considering they do not hold energy for more than "days" it is kind of wasteful for a small size house energy storage.
@@Oktokolo true, I was thinking that battery could help them activate that whilst keeping a steady pool temperature
Always massive losses when trying to make electricity from stored thermal anything. So this is the BIG problem here in trying to do anything amazing
I would be interested to know how they contain and insulate the carbon blocks if the are hot enough to melt steel.
yea that question also arose to me.
he said 3000 celcius stable, steel is 1500
Non metallic storage Like heat shield tiles, ceramics. stuff like that.
Silica aerogel fiberglass around the graphite, steel around the silica aerogel.
Also ... what do they use as their heating element so it doesn't melt or oxidize. And howcome graphite doesn't burn in the air?
Article suggestion: Energy Dome CO2 energy storage. The first full scale dome is under construction right now, and they reckon they can hit 75-80% RTE to in a 20MW/200MWH configuration, IOW solving overnight solar storage, which is 'good enough' for most of the world's population which are reasonably close to the equator, and darn handy for the rest of us.
a lot of effort to build a giant barbecue grill.
I want to see how they reliably guarantee that no air can enter the "battery" over a life span of 30 years. At these temperatures, they would need argon as an inert gas to prevent the graphite from igniting. If air will enter those red-hot "batteries", they will just go up in smoke (or CO2, that is, besides probably some not-so-healthy nitrogen compounds). Hence they also will need a completely IR-transparent but very durable "window" to harvest the heat. Mixed materials, mixed thermal expansion coefficients, frequent heating cycles over a wide range... that's what makes mountains crumble and housings rupture.
I don't say it's impossible, but it's surely not as cheap as announced.
Yeah, what seems easier is burning natural gas to heat air in a turbine and produce electricity (unfortunately). I think the clean tech dark horse to watch out for is a lead cooled nuclear reactor moderated with Yttrium Hydride. Perhaps with a supercritical CO2 turbine to produce electricity.
Just supersized storage heaters! Old tech upgraded!
Makes sense for heat applications but 40% efficiency is a big loss if the main use is to use it as storage
Industries in the business of creating generators, motors, or motor applications typically use thermo-piles (carbon blocks shorting out the electrical output... and huge fan driven heat exchangers to ambient air) to "waste" the energy (i.e. load their systems being tested).
The round trip efficiency was mentioned to be 30-40%, which for me is not very worth it. Even if the renewable energy LCOE is low ($0.04-$0.05 per kwh), with that efficiency you would need to sell it at $0.15 per kwh just to break even.
If they could raise it to 50-60% round trip efficiency, then we can talk. Because even with Lithium based batteries, the round trip efficiency is between 80 and 90%.
With 50-60% efficiency and the low cost of storage, the overall LCOE would be less than $0.10 per kwh, which is about the same as fossil fuel and nuclear LCOE. And they would still be able to make money at $0.15 per kwh.
The video addressed this, I believe. The thermal battery would be charged with waste solar or wind generated during high supply/low demand periods.
If it ends up being used "just" to provide high heat for industrial processes (while removing the need from fossil fuels) that's already a big wiin, anyway.
and the purpose is not electricity but industry heat
@@RandomGuy-nm6bm well, the first 2 still apply. Conversion loss and heat loss during storage and there is also heat loss during transfer. It will still make it only 40% efficient.
Although I will say that that matters less when they use the heat for things like steel manufacturing, considering they were going to use electricity for heat anyways. But it still is not ideal. Using electricity for heating steel is quite inefficient and this doesn't change it. This just adds another step in-between with extra loss but with slightly cheaper electricity. Which I suppose evens it out a little.
Thermal battery heat could be used to enhance the expansion stage of a compressed gas battery system (eg. Energy Dome). In the preheat stage before expansion, additional heat from the heat battery (eg. Antora) increases energy input to the turbogenerator for higher power output. Energy is stored as compressed gas, recovered heat of compression, and thermal battery heat.
Advantages include 1. a (resistively heated)thermal battery can absorb energy spikes that a mechanical compressor cannot 2. thermal battery heat can increase turbogenerator output on demand 3. thermal battery heat can "make up" for reduced gas pressure and lost reheat energy as a compressed gas battery system discharges. 4. colocated battery systems utilize the same grid connection. Therefore resistively heated thermal batteries are complementary to compressed gas energy storage and with the variability(intermittent wind/sun) of renewable energy production.
could you develop on what materials are used to thermally insulate a 2000C graphite core and on the photocells able to survive at such temperature?
More graphite. Just thicker so it’s only hot in the middle. After that, glass fibres
There's Starlite and silica aerogel.
@@JohnDoe-ji5wgone is getting wasted as it isolates, the other is super expensive.
@@niceshotapps1233?
@@theairstig9164 graphite as very well described in the video is a very good thermal conductor, in deed as good as aluminum, not an insulator.
13:00 this is why the periscope vertical solar panel stack idea I've been playing with may be able to help resolve that issue, by reflecting unused solar radiation down a chute of angled PV panels.
Coal power plants turning into Coal batteries
Hello! I discovered your channel a while ago, and I think it’s fantastic. I really appreciate how you analyze different ideas, essentially checking them for physical or chemical feasibility. That inspired me to share one of my own ideas with you, to see if you think it’s feasible.
Some time ago, I gifted Saudi Arabia an idea for creating a hydrogen cycle. Here’s a rough breakdown of the concept: First, the brine left over from reverse osmosis is used to generate energy in an osmotic power plant. That energy, in turn, is used to produce hydrogen. As a third step, the brine could be utilized to extract rare earth elements. Finally, the remaining salt could be used for chemical or food processing.
I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this! By the way, I just wanted to add that your channel is great, with incredibly interesting topics. Although I only discovered it a month or two ago, I have to say it’s full of fascinating content. Keep up the excellent work!
Future is bright,we just have to survive till then!🙌🏼
good thermal storage, but practically useless as energy storage. got it.
Efficiency doesn't matter as long as it is economically sustainable, ultimately money matters,so it may work
the clip about CA energy being worth zero or negative dollars at certain times of day brings a frightening thought into view. If the value of the power drops to zero because we got good at it, we're going to have one of two things: either the power companies will drag their heels to preserve their incomes, or the power companies are going to shrink, aggregate, and/or disappear. Nothing runs on no input. If we make renewable energy and storage too good, and it knocks out power companies' financial survival, I don't know what will happen after that. But it will be very unstable.
A suggestion for a script edit: at 1:07 you say "...many magical properties..." I know it's just a figure of speech, but you are a science oriented channel. Maybe leave magic for other types of thinkers. Great video, though.
Science is magic! Just because we understand (almost) exactly how it works doesn't make it any less magic!
Calcium chloride has better potential for energy storage.
Melting point 750 C;
Boiling point 1935 C.
So if you have high temperature pipes, pumps and valves (eg aluminium oxide) you can pump the liquid salt into heat exchanger or industrial furnace etc.
It has great potential for solar thermal because sunlight can be focussed by mirrors straight into a CaCl2 heater. Very efficient.
Ok this is interesting, but why not just use nuclear power instead?
Absolutely. "Climate change." How many people have to die of starvation or freezing to death before we stop our governments from spending our tax dollars on this scam.
The economics of nuclear don't make sense when you can take virtually free energy from excess renewable energy and "store" it in heat form for industrial uses, far cheaper than even natural gas.
By the time we have enough nuclear up and running we are already screwed (including modular)
i used to know someone at union carbide and he told me of a proposal for them to make graphite blocks which would be heated up and power a car for 1/2 hour. I wonder what the numbers were and why if didn't work out. I remember hearing about the closure of union carbines graphite block/anode plant in anmore WV. I knew eventually graphite would be used for energy storage. I guess people look for far more cheaper quicker returns on their money. that plant was built righ like oldschool
you could have made this video 5 minutes if you didn't repeat things
I agree, but the repeat was varied and endurable. I liked the video--a lot--overall. Thank for the video. Itis great. Keep up the good work. :-)
5 minutes would mean less video to watch
No way in 5 minutes. This is a very detailed and complete video. Very well done
u cud av mad ths cmnt shrtr
Come again?
For solar panels instead of reflecting the unabsorbed light out into space you could angle the mirror to bounce the light into some ultra-black painted solar water heater, or a heat block, or something akin to those to make use of the energy that'd otherwise be wasted.
Just putting the water lines or whatever underneath the panels would be good, but with mirrors you could concentrate that heat.
Water lines attached to the bottom of solar panels are a thing. They get used to heat water that can then be used for things like heating a pool. And come with the additional benefit of increasing the efficiency of the solar panel meaning more electricity.
References, sources, links?!?! C'mon...
Is it really so difficult to type in google "Antora"? Really?
When I was a glassblower, I accidentally ruined my graphite mold by placing it in a kiln. It became porous after glowing red for a while. The heat was at 1050C
Depends on how much air got in to burn the poor thing. This will be a major issue in this type of energy storage too.
The excess energy generated by renewables can be redirected to plants that remove CO2 from the air and store in solids or other forms before they find ways to store the wasted energy
Concise, succinct, and clear enunciation conveying an interesting concept. This has excited my mind and curiosity. Well done.
Any problem with materials (others than graphite/graphene) inside the "battery" reaching temperatures >2.000⁰C? I.e.: electricity>heat & heat>electricity converting system's materials?
How do you put energy in the block? Around 2000°C you cannot really use electrical wires, right?
Tungsten filaments in bulbs went up to 3000K.
@@markotrieste but it is also conductive, so must all cables leading in and from the battery be tungsten? 🤔
@@JasperNLxD Outside the container you increase the gauge of the wire to reduce heat generation to a minimum. Same as with light bulbs.
@@markotrieste nifty! Makes sense 😎
Great explanations spoken with wisdom and clear understanding, making this video very rewarding and educational. Thankyou for your time.
Thermal does look like a pretty good option. If nothing else, during the night when people are asleep, money is being spent on getting wind plants to curtail. Actually increasing demand overnight would be helpful for the folks who have to balance the grid. "Filling the bath" they call it.
I can't wait to see it being mass produced and implemented. The cheapness and efficiency is very promising. 😎💯💪🏾👍🏾
Interesting to think early nuclear tech used giant piles of graphite bricks - it was a nice material to work with - soft enough to be machined but with good physical properties, and a lot of interesting things are coming out of that research.
A yield of 40% on light to electricity is awesome!
Graphite thermal storage sounds like a winner....cheers.
16:00 I wonder if they would be useful in the cement making industry. There they are "burning" waste tires to generate heat for their process. As with most "fired" processes, the heat generation and the heat loads must be in sync. That's probably not the case in the cement industry unless they run all processes 24/7.
What I do know is that carbon has a really high melting point compared to other elements.
Maybe could be used to make clinker used for cement manufacturing.
From memory aluminium smeltering uses carbon as electrodes, so perhaps potential there?
Less chance of fire than li ion. Already had 2 battery fires here in OZ in grid storage setups.
This sounds like the perfect battery system for Australia, in suburbs due to amount of roof top solar then these thermal batteries can release energy when needed.
It was always going to eventually be stupid to use lithium in grid energy storage but pretty smart at the time it started just because it got done with what we have. Super high round trip efficiency stuff needs to be used in transport and mobile applications, but even then, it just isn't sustainable. I know we have to use what we have until we figure out how to circularise it, but then well I pretty much intend to circularise it all. Let's hope I succeed along with the others doing their part in the field.
What are the mirrors made out of so they don’t melt if you’re dealing with temperatures hot enough to melt steel?
They are cooled because the "solar" cells/electric interconnections.., also won't resist these temperatures.
Now what would be the cost of a 100 kWH version for home use? I have lots of solar power for weeks at a time...but my main cost is storage for the cloudy weeks.
Power-to-Heat and Power-to-Heat-to-Power are really neat methods!
15:28 "especially if you're buying that electricity for next to nothing", except as energy storage takes off, that price spread will decrease. the price spread will settle at "whatever price spread the most efficient operator is selling at" and if your storage can't match that, no one will buy it. so efficiency does matter; hopefully the market will be properly regulated (setting fixed rates, or forcing operators to price based on levelized cost of storage, with regular audits on that calculation) to prevent an endless revolving door of lithium startups throwing a bunch of capital into batteries, pricing everyone else out of business, and then collapsing a few years later as the batteries wear out and replacement costs come due.
40% conversion rate sounds good until you realise that pumped storage of water operates at 70-80% efficiency. You need a hill with at least some water, and it isn't modular... hint: editorial perspective > the next greatest thing to "fix" stuff
Using resistance heating is inefficient better if they use Solar concentrators and directly heat heat battery.
you are not wrong, but you pointed out the only part in the process that wasn't inefficient ^^
heating something with a resistance is 100% efficient because there is no waste heat, since the heat is what you actually want
and yes, power-to-heat is a lossy process, it would be better to heat the carbon as directly as possible, but this heat-battery is supposed to be something that you plug in a traditional powergrid as storage, not as it's own powerplant (although that may be possible)
The problem with solar concentrators is that the conveyed solar radiation needs to get to the material to heat it up. In order to minimize the heat loss, these carbon batteries must be heavily insulated, and thus the carbon core cannot be reached by solar radiation.
Also, if we were to find a way to let the solar radiation in, like a transparent section, the heat would disperse as radiation through the same way.
Making a selectively transparent window that only allows radiation to get in would require an extremely high melting point and resistance to thermal stress (expansion/contraction, high energy state...). I don't know of any material that can do that, though I don't exclude that we might be able to create one. Silica glass would be out of the question due to its relatively low melting point. Maybe alumina glass, if that's even a thing?
Also, the inefficient part wouldn't be the resistive heating, which has a theoretical yield of 100% (Joule effect & conservation of energy).
The inefficient part is converting whichever renewable energy source into electricity before the resistive heating can happen.
@@nicholas_obert Depends to optical configuration entry hole can as small as few centimeters in this case even if this open hole loss rate will insignificant and when no sun you simply close it.
But then you need to transport heat from the battery to whatever industrial process needs it. And AFAIK transporting heat over long distance is much less efficient/expensive than transporting electricity.
And those carbon batteries are compact enough that you can keep them right next to consumer.
Impressive technology, but you’ll need a lot of trailers to have a meaningful impact for most industrial processes. A standard 40 foot trailer is 67m2. Even if we assume 50m3 graphite at 2 ton/m3 density and a 2 MJ/tonC specific heat with a 500C working temperature range, you get a maximum of 100GJ or 28 MWh of heat storage. This may be 5 times the ~5MWh capacity of the best containerized LFP battery storage systems, but with
How is that different to coil burning plant? How often do they need to replace the carbon cubes?
Its possible I missed this in the video, but couldn't these be used to convert existing conventional thermal power plants (burning coal or natural gas) in cheap batteries for peak loads? Install these big carbon blocks where the furnaces exist now and charge them up on surplus power then discharge when theres demand.
And those sites are already connected to the grid in just such a way to help load balance the grid.
i feel like a certain Tim Cast Host might explode from excitement watching this
This is genius. The reflecting of low energy photons back into the heat battery so as not to waste what little it does have, in particular. That's GENIUS. Now, if we can also use heat pumps and more advanced insulation and reflection technologies, it seems to me, we could get close to 100% efficient.
The sun and the earth both store a massive amount of ancient heat and the vacuum of space is very bad at conveying that heat. There are three ways heat moves:
1. conduction (electrons and protons transfer energy through photons at short ranges; molecules stay put but transfer energy as short-range jiggling)
2. convection (entire molecules move as a fluid, transferring energy as long-range molecular motion)
3. radiation (photons carry energy through transparent mediums or empty space, and deposit it elsewhere)
All three of these need to be trapped somehow. And if the sun and earth can trap the energy for billions of years, then we should be able to trap it efficiently too. Insulation is the art of doing so.
The question is how to transfer the energy at the end when we need to use it. For that, they have chosen number 3: radiation. The cool thing about radiation is that 1 and 2 do not work at all in a vacuum. For 1 and 2, you need a medium. Thus, the vacuum of space is an excellent insulator and is the reason why the sun has retained its heat these billions of years. Meanwhile, number 3, radiation works great in the vacuum of space: in fact, it works better than in a medium. The sun can radiate a small fraction of its energy on its surface, but its volume is so much bigger than its surface area, being cubic rather than square. (For similar reasons, animals were bigger when it was colder, and warm-blooded water animals in the cold parts of the oceans are bigger for the same reason.) But, additionally, heat transfer via radiation is slow, even though the individual photons are moving at the speed of light. This is useful for storage purposes, giving you control over the release of energy. However, for times when you need higher power generation, you could always also fall back on conduction and convection to more quickly release the energy, via turbines. You could also instead open more apertures OR conduct the heat to another area where you have more such apertures. The flexibility in working with heat is pretty neat and it comes from the 3 diverse ways of transferring heat energy. It's for this reason and many more I have been a firm believer that heat energy storage IS DEFINITELY the future of energy.
If we could figure out how to use vaccuum chambers to further improve the efficiency, that would be nice. If we could also figure out how to release ONLY the higher-energy photons and either trap all lower-energy photons completely so that none ever leak at all, OR reflect all them back reliably, we should be able to get close to 100% efficiency.
So there is a LOT of room for practical improvement that can happen here. I am hopeful, because in my lifetime I watched as things like refrigerators became impressively efficient. This is because of improved insulation and heat-pumps.
We talked about the insulation part. But what about heat pumps? Resistive heating is more or less 100% efficient at transferring electricity to heat. BUT heat pumps can move heat that already exists, and so can be MORE than 100% "efficient" or "effective," or whatever you want to call it. What if instead of using resistive heating, we pump waste heat out of other processes? The heat pumps themselves would run off renewable energy of course. If for whatever reasons there is no waste heat to work with for a while, then you switch to resistive heating instead. But it seems a bit silly to get a 1:1 electricity -> heat transfer when you could get a much better over-1:1 electricity -> heat transfer by pumping pre-existing heat.
Obviously, by pumping the heat, we are concentrating it, to reach those higher temperatures that we need. We do need materials that can withstand these high temperatures, and that's the most important part of this whole problem. If we can get good at that, then we can have a HUGE revolution in energy that makes energy so much better than it ever has been before.
There must be clever ways of avoiding energy losses. If the environment where the heating occurs heats up too (so not only the carbon)- then that heat could be used, perhaps for pre-heating. If the glowing medium is a plate with infrared cells on both sides, the escaping not converted infrared heats up the space around it and could be used again too. But it seems hard to find a perfect and yet cheap and practical insulating method. The heat lost to the environment will be lost....I have actually no idea how good insulation can be this days.
12:44 I love the fact that this guy knows really well what he's talking about.
I use resisitively heated silica sand to store excess daytime solar energy and then release the heat into my house by diverting the furnace plenum through pipes embedded in the sand... I never even considered graphite as an alternative.
Aerogels have a heat resistance of up to 3000 and are excellent insulators. I wonder if they could be used to make these more efficient?
I think this would work. I had a similar idea. Also, they have been using the idea of molten salt as it is also very prominent and can be extracted easier as it is a liquid and can be passed through a heat exchanger, although the system might be a little more costly it would be more efficient , With reflection, shiny surfaces and highly insulative materials about 1 foot of insulation would be totally enough also the larger the volume the less service area, shape also matters. A sphere has the lowest surface area per unit volume. A square cube is also decent. A container is not really that good but if you put two of them side-by-side or four of them, side-by-side t and two on top of them, you would only have to insulate the exterior walls. I’m guessing highly reflective, interior walls, high temperature insulatating bricks in the inner then Rockwool insulation then maybe regular fiberglass for total of about 16 inches should be very insulative. Of course you could go further as it is such a high delta T
なるほどね、今までレンガの蓄熱は知っていたが炭素の塊は初耳。
日本でも春と秋の晴天時は太陽光発電のエネルギーが余り始めているからその余剰電力を蓄熱して冬の暖房に使えれば理想なんですけどね。
秋から冬まで熱エネルギーを蓄えなくても良い、冬の晴れた日の日射による熱を夜の暖房に回せるだけでも結構CO2は削減出来ると思うがそこまでは難しいでしょうね。
hmmm that reflection idea is very interesting, what if you mounted a mirror at the back of the PV and a one way mirror in front of the PV
then the sun would deliver its light to the PV as it is allowing to pass thru at the front, but can never escape back into the air because of the mirror and one way mirror (loop), feasable? i got the idea from the old ruby lasers, wich has such a one way mirror to bounce the light continuesly making it more powerful
Why not use heat pumps instead of resistive heating?
Perovskite panels are coming soon and function well using IR radiation - I wonder if those would function well/ better in this application. They are also mooted to be cheap to produce once they hit mass production.Just a thought.
to be honest you would really want to have double the temperature unless your using phase change, really that would be the ideal battery one that can get to 2000 degrees and the phase changes a meterial dumping a bunch of that energy into phase changing the material which can be extracted later.
Can I use OnShape offline? Can I save the files in a standard format locally?
This is the most logical way I have ever seen
I'm very sceptical of this battery. It leaves a lot of efficiency on the table, by using resistive heating instead of heat pumps. Also it uses graphite, which is a highly valuable material required for building lithium ion batteries.
I missed how much kwh of heat a cube with 1mx1mx1m can store and how long?
Yeah the presentation was pretty lacking in technical details,. I want to know how much electricity has been produced and what price? How fast is it ramping up, is it going to be exponential growth rate??
I think it might still be unimpressive and they’re working on that.
The project is inspired by the properties that are already promising, and they try to improve the yield/capacity/safety/modularity.
Because it's technological pop video, monetising people's need to hear about ever new magical technologies. There are so many of these on RUclips, it's incredible.
VERY few materials can insulate 2000C. I'm curious about how much heat is lost, and how expensive/polluting/durable the insulation for 2000C will be
Okay you have been temporarily subscribed to. Make more really good videos like this one!
You mentioned reflecting back "at the sun" is not a great idea but how about dual layer behind PV? a storage medium and a reflective medium behind? Basically any low-energy photon that passes through the semiconductor can get absorbed and given a chance to reemit at a higher energy after, but only emission towards PV matters because any other direction is reflected back. Or would something like that cost more than the yield increase is worth?
These trunkey carbon energy pods could be sold as investment packages. I heard buy energy when it is cheap and sell it when it is needed for higher prices. That is what it will take to make a better world. Profit.
What is the total cost installed. How much can you make and how fast can you get the initial investment back. How many can you produce and deliver how soon.
Sounds great but the thorium fuel cycle is the real solution, not least because it's the best for generating industrial process heat. Far more efficient than solar, than wind, and sustainable unlike legacy nuclear. Batteries have their place, but thorium-cycle power is for process heat as well as critically needed isotopes and plain old baseload electricity.
Coal was also the past of energy storage.
I wanted to use slate tiles, because the color would be useful for the thermal mass of the walls of my earthship, but it seems that I could also use them in direct contact with the metal parts of my rocket mass heater.
Slate tiles would be really good, but it's rather expensive in France, probably because it's a fashionable color and material.
The only problem is that it's difficult to find for free or really cheap, compare to all the materials I already have (stones and clay tiles).
Maybe I already have stones with similar properties, but in a temperature range lower than 1000°C (pyrolysis)
Salt is another way to store heat. When the salt melts it takes in a lot of heat. When it freezes, it gives up that heat. The trick is to get a substance that has a very high melting point - and of course, a way to contain it in something that doesn't melt or dissolve.
@@acmefixer1 I know but I want low tech and solid.
A lot of hassle for a few m² of surface area.
I will probably keep it as simple as possible and after enough testing I will make modifications if I find that the heat is escaping too much too quickly or other problems.
Question: efficiency means - by definition - the percentage of energy supplied that's converted to useful work, the rest being converted to heat. How is it possible, then, for resistive heating to be only 99% efficient? Where does the 1% of energy that's _not_ converted to heat go?
Heat loss in the connecting wires
I have one major question: Why resistive heating and not a heat pump?
I mean, you can easily pump four times the energy input this way, so what is it that I'm missing here?
Also, instead of using a mirror, couldn't you put the photovoltaic panel _between_ two chunks of graphite?
My guess is these components cannot handle 2000°C. Amirite?
Also, a heat pump needs heat around it to work. You could use sunlight and a bunch of mirrors, but that definitely complicates this quite a bit.
I wonder whether, with such high temp levels, a thermodynamical electricity generation would not be more advantageous from an efficiency point of view. The Carnot efficiency of a 1500°C heat source is ~~ 0.75, the real efficiency o c being a lot lower.
Problem with that is low efficiency of thermophotovoltaic sitting around 40 %, which can be beaten easily with other systems.
For example, my thesis goal was to design low-cost thermal storage battery from of the shelf components and i get to efficiency around 50 % with maximal temperature just 600 °C. Now then i added posibility of 2000°C my system efficiency would be around 75 %. Yeah, my system had moving parts and so on, but still, that low efficiency bothers me.
Key information here is levelized cost of storage [USD/MWh] for that system and at what roundtrip efficiency [%] it can achieve.
Would it be possible to bundle light with mirrors and inject that hot beam straight into this battery? It's being done in other setups, but can it be done here? Because if that is the case, energy collection becomes massively more efficient, the efficiency of PV solar panel still lacks plenty. Just imagine charging the battery basically straight from the sun.
You put together great vids. Thanks. That 2000 C temperature is the really big ticket item cause it makes steel and concrete customers. It really can displace a chunk of fossil fuel usage which to now no-one has had an answer. Thanks for the news.
Great video, great technology; and a very cool sponsor! I signed up. Thanks Z!
Add copper nanoparticles for increased heat emission, copper nanoparticles really like graphite so it would be easy to impregnate it during production.