Stormy weather sometimes produces excess or unsafe amounts of power for wind turbines. Northern Germany will soon be home to a gigantic facility that stores that energy and can convert it into heat.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 When complete, this will be the largest high-temperature energy storage system on the planet.
00:06 Capacity 20,000 kWh.
00:10 The steel at the heart of the unit has a number of advantages over conventional batteries.
00:15 The steel we use for storing energy is available worldwide,
00:20 and it contains no rare substances and isn't toxic or hazardous either.
00:25 So there are no extra factors to take into account.
00:30 The energy, or the electricity to be precise, is harvested via wind turbines.
00:36 It's used to heat the steel to temperatures of up to 650°C.
00:43 Heat can, if required, be released to generate steam, which is then used to power machines, for example.
00:52 In this case right next to the storage facility, at an organic food supplier that is eager to make production more sustainable.
01:01 It might sound weird needing steam while making frozen goods,
01:06 but for blanching or peeling vegetables beforehand, we use a steam peeler.
01:12 And generating steam involves extremely high temperatures.
01:19 These residential blocks in Berlin have been getting their energy needs from a steel storage system since 2020.
01:27 The system supplies 400 households with warm water.
01:32 When converting electrical energy into heat, we have an efficiency rate of over 90%.
01:41 So it's a very effective method for generating heat from electrical energy and then putting that energy to use.
01:50 But do these facilities make long-term financial sense?
01:54 The new supersized one will cost 5 to 7 million euros.
01:58 Right now in Germany it would be cheaper to carry on using natural gas to generate steam,
02:04 which is why the operator sources its own low-price electricity.
02:10 We want to buy energy directly from a nearby wind farm.
02:14 We'll also be building a photovoltaic system on top of our new building, which will alone produce some 1.3 megawatts.
02:25 So our storage unit is ideal for photovoltaic facilities.
02:33 And if operators don't have their own electricity supply? The steel energy storage concept is only slowly getting off the ground,
02:41 although demand in countries with a lot of industry is massive.
02:47 Industry consumes a lot of thermal energy, of course. And we need to phase out fossil fuels there, too.
02:56 Thermal storage is ideal for taking electrical energy at times when we can't use it and making it available later for industry.
03:08 Steel energy storage facilities could play a key role in countering the climate crisis.
03:15 Subsidies for green electricity would help to make the technology more established.
03:21 Although in Germany at least, those subsidies have so far failed to materialize.