8/22/2016

Headline August 23, 2016/ ''' ELECTRICITY - *DOODLING* ''''


''' ELECTRICITY - *DOODLING* '''




THE PAKISTANI STUDENTS  -I have often inferred speak for the emotions of the entire  *Developing World* - when they sigh or scream-

That without reliable and cheap electricity their future could most easily be anything but bright.  This scream, I dare remind  the leaders, is the students daily life staple.

!WOW! -just for their sake hopes, that the students  screams register, for in the developing world, life has slowed to a crawl. 

The tragedy is, that in the developing world myriad problems hold sway : lousy infrastructure, unreliable electricity,  compounding population growth, red tape, political instability, sluggish economies, readily warring neighbours, global warming, to name a few.

It is very hard, if not impossible to isolate the growing, and complex economic effects and implications.

So, in the developing world, when real life problems get  *put asunder* the new virgin ideas on progress and quality of life, turn doodle and diddly 

The Energy storage, therefore, in Sisyphus's  train set, is a total new dimension in new thinking and  progress..Political instability would be a terribly distracting problem.

It bears repeating that the rocks stand in for the water in a pumped storage system. They are carried up and downhill by a train that is thus the equivalent of the turbines.

The track the train runs on is equivalent to the tunnel. And the motors that drive the train act, like the electrical kit of a pumped storage turbine, as generators  when they run in reverse as the train rolls backwards downhill, pulled by gravity.

ARES  built a prototype of this arrangement in 2013, near a wind farm in a Tehachapi, California.

Linking a storage system with an intermittent source of supply such as a wind farm is useful, because it can be employed to bolster the farm's output when the wind is not strong enough, a process called load balancing. 

The prototype proved the principle, and now the company has bigger plans. In March it received approval from  America's Bureau of Land Management to lease land to build a track near Pahrump, Nevada.

This would run larger trains than at Tehachapi, and these would carry their rocks in concrete boxes, rather than loose.

Once at the top of the track, the boxes would be raised by jacks built into the wagons carrying them, rotated and then lowered back down into supports on either side of the track, so that they straddle the track above the height of train, like bridges.

Freed of their burdens, the trains would then run back downhill to fetch more loads. When the time came to generate power, the process would be reversed.

The hill  ARES  has chosen has a gradient of about  8% . The track itself is just under 9 km  [about 5 and half miles long]

The company estimates that its proposed system will be able to store 12.5 MWh  of energy,  and deliver it back to the grid at a rate of up to 50 MW.

That is still small compared with pumped storage    -[the Dinorwig facility in Britain,  for example,  has a capacity of  10.8GWh ],     but  ARES's engineers think it is enough to make commercial sense, at least in principle.

And if principle turns to practice, it can be enlarged.

Such a  Sisyphean solution is unlikely to beat pumped storage in places where that is possible,  but in parched landscapes,  like  Nevada's it has every chance of doing so.

And, since deserts often host power stations that rely on the renewable but intermittent fuel of sunlight, this might give it quite a comfortable niche in a world where using fossil fuels to generate electricity is increasingly frowned on.

At the moment  ARES's  plan is simply to draw power from the grid when it is cheap and sell it back when it is expensive.

But the logical end of the line for such a railway is as a load  balancer for local  solar-power stations.

*Indeed, a novel idea for storing electricity*.

With respectful dedication to the  Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and !E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:


''' Rock & Roll '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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