Tag: London underground

Battery Technoglogies

A while back I wrote about technologies being worked on for regenerating and saving energy that would otherwise be wasted.  This is the way hybrid vehicles work, and this is the way that the London Underground is experimenting with powering an underground station, using the energy regenerated when trains brake to come to a stop in a station.

At that time I pointed out that one of the major issues with using regenerated energy was the need to store the energy for later use.  Batteries that are used to store electric energy today simply do not do a good enough job when it comes to saving significant amounts of energy efficiently for long periods of time.  This is one of the reasons that solar systems that are used to power homes in the US today do not in general use battery storage.  Instead of capturing the excess energy that is generated during the day in batteries and then powering the home from the stored batteries during the night, these systems send the excess power back into the electric grid during the day, and draw power from the grid during the night.

It turns out that that there is actually quite a bit of work going on regarding new battery technologies.  A lot of this work is in the R&D stage.  I came upon an article recently about one such company.  As could be expected with some R&D work, this technology seems to have been given birth to in a university setting.  The more I read about the technology at that company’s website, the more fascinated I became.  There is quite a bit of innovation going on, and it is only a matter of time and investment before new technologies with far greater potential (no pun intended!) than today’s batteries will become real.  From the perspective of this particular company, such improvement in performance can be powered by a fundamental change in the way in which the layout of the battery takes place. It involves thinking about the layout of the anode and the cathode for the battery in a true 3D sense rather than the traditional 2D manner.  This kind of a layout is facilitated by newer technologies that were not available in the past, but that are more common today (think nanotechnologies!).

All of this made me interested in further investigating the playing field of battery technologies, and I came upon a few articles, some of them not that recent.

https://gigaom.com/2013/01/14/13-battery-startups-to-watch-in-2013/

There is much other work going on in battery technology, some of it along more conventional lines.  A lot of this work is motivated by real needs of today’s existing infrastructure, and also by other newer areas of development, including the ongoing emergence of the electric powered automobile as a real consumer product.

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/01/15/27-battery-storage-companies-watch/

What we will have to remember when some of these technologies mature is that unless they are used in the right context, they are likely to create additional problems that will need to be addressed and solved.  If quick recharging of high capacity batteries from the electric grid becomes a common need, the grid itself will have to change.

Types of Technology Initiatives that make Sense

Environmentally friendly approaches to technology development are important because they ultimately impact the future of our planet and the quality of life for the generations that follow.

In this context, when it comes to the technologies related to energy, we look for cleaner sources of energy, we look for technologies that generate energy more efficiently from these sources, and finally we try to design equipment that operate efficiently without wasting energy.

The article below pertains to technology that does not fall neatly into any one of the categories noted above.  It has to do with regenerating energy.  It is about saving the energy that might have been wasted and reusing it in some way.

The principle used in the system described below is in some ways similar to that in hybrid cars. In an hybrid vehicle, a traction battery provides power to a motor that supplements the gasoline engine as needed to move the vehicle.  This battery is recharged when there is either some braking action, or when the automobile its trying to increase speed and build up momentum on a down-slope.  Essentially what is happening is that the energy that is generated from braking, instead of being wasted as heat, is converted to electric power.  Kinetic energy generated on the downhills is also converted to electric power. There is no additional external source of power.  We are basically saving energy in the battery when possible and then using that energy later when it makes sense.

In the system described below, the trains provide electric power in real time to the underground stations when they brake to come to a stop in the station.   The numbers from the article are an indication of the tremendous amount of energy that is available from this process, and also an indication of the tremendous amount of energy we are wasting today.  It would be great if this kind of a philosophy – of taking advantage of the unused energy from an inefficient process and reusing it for either the primary process itself, or for a secondary purpose – be considered more widely in the design of all systems that consume energy, especially since we have many technologies in place today that are still quite inefficient.  Towards this end, the ability to store energy efficiently on a large scale at a reasonable cost point is still a significant technological issue to be addressed and solved.

“London Tube’s ‘regenerative braking’ tech can power an entire station“.