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Tech-Op-ed August, 2018 SOUNDING OFF


By Michael Skinner Editor


Recently, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power made plans to out- fit the Hoover Dam with a $3 billion pump station that would return water to Lake Mead at the top of the dam. This excess water would flow back down through the existing hydroelectric generators when demand is high — creat- ing a functional, giant battery. California generates huge amounts of excess solar and wind power,


Big Dam Batteries W


which can cause blackouts in the energy grid in the same way that insufficient power can. The state deals with this by either shutting down those solar and wind plants, or by offloading the power to other states, often at cost. Instead, this power could be used to pump water to the top of the Hoover Dam, effec- tively storing the energy for later use. The project, scheduled for completion by 2028, will battle a host of polit-


ical challenges. Cities and communities for hundreds of miles down the Col- orado River depend on the river as a source of drinking water, revenue from tourism and recreation, and transportation. If the regularity of the opening and closing of dams along the river were to be disrupted, it would severely af- fect thousands of local residents. As far as the cost of energy storage, there’s a lot of money to be saved. It


costs about 15 cents per kilowatt hour for hydro storage, compared with 26 cents for utility-scale lithium ion storage, according to financial advisory firm Lazard.


Other iterations of enormous batteries exist and have been in use for


many years, such as flywheels and compressed air. In 1978, the Huntorf air storage gas turbine power plant in Huntorf, Germany, was the first plant to use compressed air on a large scale as energy storage. The plant pumps com- pressed air into nearly 11,000,000 ft3 (311,000m3) of salt caverns half a mile below ground during the night. When it is needed, the air is released, heated with natural gas and sent through a turbine to generate power. The Crescent Dunes solar energy facility in Tonopah, Nevada, is a sci-


ence-fiction-like spiral of massive mirrors that focus sunlight to heat molten salt in a roughly 640 ft (200m) tall central tower. The molten salt remains a liquid at higher temperatures than other fluids, which allows it to retain ther- mal energy for up to 10 hours past sundown. It flows through a storage tank with a steam generating system, which then drives a turbine to create elec- tricity.


Flywheel energy storage systems use the acceleration of a rotor to trans-


fer energy from one source to another. NASA’s G2 flywheel was developed in 2004 and designed for spacecraft energy storage. The earliest version was lim- ited to 250 lb (113 kg) and mounted on magnetic bearings. Beacon Power ap- plied this concept to grid balancing in 2011, using 200 flywheels to store 5 MW of energy at a power plant in Stephentown, New York. Benefits of flywheels include a wider operating temperature range than electric batteries, none of the same possible chemical breakdown issues and easy measurement of stor- age capacity, since the only variable is their speed of rotation. Recently, Advanced Rail Energy Storage was approved to build an ener-


gy storage system similar to pumped hydroelectric power, but without the wa- ter. As ingenious as it is simple, the company is building an installation of sev- en trains loaded with rocks and concrete in Pahrump, Nevada. These train cars are driven up a steep hill with the aid of a diesel generator. When they are allowed to roll back down, their turning wheels are used to generate elec- tricity. This installation is expected to generate enough energy to power 14 av- erage homes for a month. While fossil fuels still make up at least 80 percent of U.S. energy con-


sumption, the lowering cost of renewable energy, combined with innovations in energy storage are opening the floodgates to the future of alternative bat- teries. r


hen Benjamin Franklin coined the term “battery” to describe his set of linked capacitors charged by static electricity, he probably wasn’t envisioning future energy storage devices the size of the Hoover Dam.


PUBLISHER’S NOTE


By Jacob Fattal Publisher


building an infrastructure of data centers and servers to bring its cloud serv- ices to the country. Chinese laws passed in 2017 mandate that data must be stored within


Behind the Great Firewall A


the country and give the government greater control over the movement of in- formation. Apparently Google is now working on search and news apps that can be censored locally to comply with the government. The project has been codenamed Dragonfly. If the project continues, a precedent will be set for reversing a hardline


stance against censorship. However, this development also throws into stark relief the global saturation of the tech marketplace. There are roughly 772 million untapped internet users in China, as well as a huge number of talent- ed engineers that would jump at the chance to work with Google on some of its more ambitious projects, such as artificial intelligence (AI). The problem is that Google has been out of China for eight years. In the


interim, China’s own Baidu search engine is doing better than ever. Also, con- vincing the authorities in China will likely take time and may consist of a few false starts. Facebook’s recent stop-and-go attempt to open up a division in China is a good example. For U.S. Tech, and for any company that would rather see a freer global


environment for the spreading of information, this could be a step in the right direction. Even if Google is forced to censor its platforms and offer only care- fully tailored news and search results to Chinese citizens, the power and in- fluence of the company will slowly grow in the country. Interactions between Google and its partners in China would be a leaky pipe of censored interac- tion, one that the Chinese government is surely wary of. Google’s battle with China is ideological, but the reality is that China holds


the world’s largest population of internet users. This number grows by the day and is impossible to ignore. China’s own citizens, many of whom are young and make up part of the country’s growing middle class, play a sort of cat-and-mouse game with government censors. A genera- tion with the influence of a company like Google, and the many other international tech companies that would likely follow, could finally begin to break through the country’s firewall. r


fter pulling its search engine from the country in 2010, Google is in talks to return to China. The company is currently vetting partnerships with Chinese tech giants, such as Tencent and Inspur, with the goal of


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