I Got The Power! How Can I Store It?
Yes, indeed, sustainability is still about creating the capacity to endure – for profit, planet, and people. Sustaining energy is critical to all three. The eastern states recently witnessed, once again, a demonstration of our inefficient power grid and just how urgent uninterruptable power development must become. People were temporarily without essential securities: food, lights, safe transportation, etc. Businesses suffered lost worker productivity and other downtime that translate into lost revenue. Figuratively, the planted stood by, watching this volley for energy power, while clutching its precious resources.
Blackout Protection Needed
These temporary catastrophic events make us pay attention to our energy dependence. Essentially, we’re enslaved. Fortunately, smart people working for profitable businesses are discovering how to better tap and store energy from our only planet, without depleting its natural resources. Renewable energy, we’ve concluded, is all the rage!
Now, if only we could harness it for later use, as we demand it. If the wind is going to blow that fiercely, let it generate energy by pushing through a wind turbine. And, if that river is going to crash downhill, rig that current to hydro-electric power for our lights. Well, if the earth is hot anyway, let’s heat our homes with its geothermal power. Placing all of this natural energy on demand whenever we need it has created a booming industry in battery technologies.
Leverage for Cheetah Power “Project Energy Professionals” www.cheetahlearning.com/pep
If you’ve been running with Cheetah for a while, you’ll know the power storage dilemma isn’t a new roadblock in our journey to be energy independent. So many interesting sustainability topics arise like brilliantly shining objects, and we temporarily lose sight of the battery issue. Here is a full-time battery innovation watcher, the Battery Power Magazine (www.BatteryPowerOnline.com). Contributors keep track of our energy grid, the largest supply chain without a warehouse.
Flywheel Technology
Like choosing the best child in the family, the latest online issue focuses on Flywheel energy storage. All progress in the direction of improved energy storage is good, but the Flywheel is noted for extending the run time within batteries and prolonging its stored energy. The flywheel spins a mass around its axis, thus operating like a mechanical battery, storing energy kinetically. You can get excited reading all of the technical term and formulas here, http://tinyurl.com/BattryPowerFlywheel.
Consumer Affordable Flywheels
Energy storage can help us shift the times we get energy from renewable sources to the times we need to use that energy; store now, use later. But the cost of this storage convenience is exorbitant. For example, the leading storage contender is the lithium battery with capacity to store 1 MWh of electricity for $2 million. Our hope is someday Wal-Mart will carry these batteries at a more economical consumer price. In the meantime, your pursuit of power self-sufficiency using a Flywheel can cost $50,000 (http://tinyurl.com/CopmputerWorld).
POWERTHRU designs and manufactures advanced flywheel energy storage systems and will be available to the general public beginning in 2013 (http://www.power-thru.com/). We love it when technology is developed FAST and made available to the consumer to help us in our quest for energy self-sufficiency.
10/2/06 ComputerWorld