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I am a merchant mariner and it would be cool to have one of these in an exhaust boiler so when in port or anchored we don't need to use a oil boiler to generate steam. On ships its one of the ways we use "waste" heat for power. Heating fuel and the ships.

At 1700C you would get a theoretical conversion efficiency to electricity of about 75% with a Carnot cycle. It increases with the temperature. I was wondering if you could molten sand as perhaps another option. You have a boiling point of 2230C and in its molten state heat conductivity would increase, and another thing is you get some extra storage capacity from the latent heat when it melts. Also one thing totally left out in the video is leakage of heat. You are up agaisnt the Stefan-Boltzmann law of sigma T^4. How do you mitigate this as T rises?

Let's de-carbonize with pure carbon!

Thanks, Z, and colleagues, for another well done video. I'm a 77 year old guy who is constantly encouraged by the brilliant, innovative thinking behind technologies such as this carbon battery and then having the knowledge and guts to start a game changing business. The young men and women of your generation have the future of our planet looking better and better. It's wonderful to see those who speak so negatively about our young people being proven completely wrong so frequently.

Solid graphite is also used for heavy duty arc plasma lances used in steel foundries, carbon arc steel cutting, high-powered searchlights (called arc lights), and more. Great use of this old tech!

Alternative energy storage technology is a very interesting toppic. On the vid side itself. Clear presented, flowing script without any "breaks" in the narrative. Well chosen pictures for visual representation and the audio balance for voice vs background music is very well done too. Nothing to add but a round of praise.

I like how he's also literally taking carbon out of the carbon cycle to make these heat reservoirs. The IR mirror returning unused photons back into the reservoir is genius.

Planck is going to be proud of those guys... That mirror in a cavity is real genius. One question though: how do they prevent glowing graphite to react with air and burn?

That was absolutely fascinating - thank you. You’re a great communicator with a way of describing relatively complex topics in a clear and accessible way.

I've watched many many videos like this for years, new breakthroughs, that never happens! This is that kind of video!

How efficient is it really? First the loss in the wind/solar device. Then the heating of the block. Then MOVING the block to where it is used. Then the 40% of turning it back to electricity. And depending on the use, there are several more layers of energy loss. It sounds better to me to just use it as a battery on side of generation, acting as a buffer. Not having to deal with transporting back/forth, batteries. How well does it compete in that with other battery tech?

This seems like a brilliant thermal battery for use in heavy industry, and a suboptimal battery to get electricity out of. There are other ways to store energy & get electricity out, besides lithium ion (which really ought to be reserved for vehicles & the like that require its particular characteristics), that seem more promising to me for storage at grid scale & residential scale - liquid flow & sodium ion come to mind. Different tools for different jobs, and it's great to see how all of them are coming along.

I am not sure what battery storage you say has a 4-6 year lifespan but Tesla’s Megapack has a 15 year warranty.

video suggestion - here you mention at one point the heat in these can be stored for days. could be explore the need for and solutions to seasonal storage be it heat or electricity. so keeping it half a year if we get more renewables in one season vs another. i guess wind and solar counteract each other somewhat but how much and what will we do about the difference. probably not the short term goal but eventually when almost all energy is not made by burning stuff they will need to balance out over seasons.

Thank you for another informative video. My son ans I were talking about the need to develop better large scale batteries for the future just yesterday. This sounds like another very effective option with versatility that other sources don't have. I first found out about the properties of heated carbon in welding class fifty years ago. With an arc welder, two carbon rods hooked up to the welder and brought almost touching together, creates the perfect brazing temperature. They glow like heated steel and last for an impressive time.

Concise, succinct, and clear enunciation conveying an interesting concept. This has excited my mind and curiosity. Well done.

Insulation. Very important part you left out. Very difficult at these very high temperatures.

I would be interested to know how they contain and insulate the carbon blocks if the are hot enough to melt steel.

Finally, someone focused on the problem of thermal conductivity. This is a brilliant idea. Thanks for the great content!

Has the heat extraction been tested in an industrial setting? If so, at what temperature?

could you develop on what materials are used to thermally insulate a 2000C graphite core and on the photocells able to survive at such temperature?

I could imagine one of these being installed at somewhere with a constant need of heat like a large swimming pool and its charging only turned on when "the price is right". This would save them moment and reduce their useage of natural gas and offer themselves as a power-sink to the grid

Great video. It was well produced and easy to follow. Thanks.

You mentioned that materials like concrete or sand are not effective because they can't transfer energy fast enough. This, while true, hides the fact that the biggest limiting factor for emitting/absorbing energy is the ratio of volume and surface. While sand is not great at conducting heat, you can exponentially increase its surface area by changing its form (for example, creating a shallow layer of sand just using gravity). Once it's surface area has increased, heating and cooling becomes way faster. This is something you can't easily change the shape of a graphite block, though, so you're limited to only use the pre-existing shape

A suggestion for a script edit: at 1:07 you say "...many magical properties..." I know it's just a figure of speech, but you are a science oriented channel. Maybe leave magic for other types of thinkers. Great video, though.

Coal power plants turning into Coal batteries

13:00 this is why the periscope vertical solar panel stack idea I've been playing with may be able to help resolve that issue, by reflecting unused solar radiation down a chute of angled PV panels.

When I was a kid we used solid carbon capture from the heating system. We called it soot, in the chimney

good thermal storage, but practically useless as energy storage. got it.

Great video, great technology; and a very cool sponsor! I signed up. Thanks Z!

Thanks for another informative video

Ok this is interesting, but why not just use nuclear power instead?

you could have made this video 5 minutes if you didn't repeat things

Just supersized storage heaters! Old tech upgraded!

For solar panels instead of reflecting the unabsorbed light out into space you could angle the mirror to bounce the light into some ultra-black painted solar water heater, or a heat block, or something akin to those to make use of the energy that'd otherwise be wasted. Just putting the water lines or whatever underneath the panels would be good, but with mirrors you could concentrate that heat.

Thermal battery heat could be used to enhance the expansion stage of a compressed gas battery system (eg. Energy Dome). In the preheat stage before expansion, additional heat from the heat battery (eg. Antora) increases energy input to the turbogenerator for higher power output. Energy is stored as compressed gas, recovered heat of compression, and thermal battery heat. Advantages include 1. a (resistively heated)thermal battery can absorb energy spikes that a mechanical compressor cannot 2. thermal battery heat can increase turbogenerator output on demand 3. thermal battery heat can "make up" for reduced gas pressure and lost reheat energy as a compressed gas battery system discharges. 4. colocated battery systems utilize the same grid connection. Therefore resistively heated thermal batteries are complementary to compressed gas energy storage and with the variability(intermittent wind/sun) of renewable energy production.

worked in energy and this would be a game changer for many industries even if the conversion back to electricity is only 30%. buying excess energy to fill up batteries at zero cost would not only net the company a profit but also help the grid.

So interesting!! And so many applications

Makes sense for heat applications but 40% efficiency is a big loss if the main use is to use it as storage

hmmm that reflection idea is very interesting, what if you mounted a mirror at the back of the PV and a one way mirror in front of the PV then the sun would deliver its light to the PV as it is allowing to pass thru at the front, but can never escape back into the air because of the mirror and one way mirror (loop), feasable? i got the idea from the old ruby lasers, wich has such a one way mirror to bounce the light continuesly making it more powerful

Any problem with materials (others than graphite/graphene) inside the "battery" reaching temperatures >2.000⁰C? I.e.: electricity>heat & heat>electricity converting system's materials?

Thanks, well done.

the clip about CA energy being worth zero or negative dollars at certain times of day brings a frightening thought into view. If the value of the power drops to zero because we got good at it, we're going to have one of two things: either the power companies will drag their heels to preserve their incomes, or the power companies are going to shrink, aggregate, and/or disappear. Nothing runs on no input. If we make renewable energy and storage too good, and it knocks out power companies' financial survival, I don't know what will happen after that. But it will be very unstable.

Great video!

I think this would work. I had a similar idea. Also, they have been using the idea of molten salt as it is also very prominent and can be extracted easier as it is a liquid and can be passed through a heat exchanger, although the system might be a little more costly it would be more efficient , With reflection, shiny surfaces and highly insulative materials about 1 foot of insulation would be totally enough also the larger the volume the less service area, shape also matters. A sphere has the lowest surface area per unit volume. A square cube is also decent. A container is not really that good but if you put two of them side-by-side or four of them, side-by-side t and two on top of them, you would only have to insulate the exterior walls. I’m guessing highly reflective, interior walls, high temperature insulatating bricks in the inner then Rockwool insulation then maybe regular fiberglass for total of about 16 inches should be very insulative. Of course you could go further as it is such a high delta T

thank you, very interesting

Okay you have been temporarily subscribed to. Make more really good videos like this one!

would it be possible that for solar pv panels, instead of reflecting the low energy photons, could you instead capture them as heat and further add to the heat in the batteries? Either using some kind of heat pump or heating water to turn a turbine to get more electricity.

Industries in the business of creating generators, motors, or motor applications typically use thermo-piles (carbon blocks shorting out the electrical output... and huge fan driven heat exchangers to ambient air) to "waste" the energy (i.e. load their systems being tested).

What I do know is that carbon has a really high melting point compared to other elements. Maybe could be used to make clinker used for cement manufacturing. From memory aluminium smeltering uses carbon as electrodes, so perhaps potential there? Less chance of fire than li ion. Already had 2 battery fires here in OZ in grid storage setups.

Great stuff Rob. Why not explore converting plastic into 3d printing filaments?

Thermal does look like a pretty good option. If nothing else, during the night when people are asleep, money is being spent on getting wind plants to curtail. Actually increasing demand overnight would be helpful for the folks who have to balance the grid. "Filling the bath" they call it.

Could this be used to store energy for neighborhoods? In The Netherlands we have for instance exces heat from factories being used to heat the homes of neighboring houses. If this could be used for that aswell then you can utilise the high efficincy of heat capacity over the lowe elctricity one.

The math isn't making sense to me. In one place it says this storage uses TPV cells which are up to 40% efficient in converting the IR radiation into electricity, which implies 8% total efficiency (20% from solar to heat, then 40% from that heat to electricity), in another place it says they're 95% efficient? It makes sense for heat storage, but the electricity storage seems pretty inefficient.

When I was a glassblower, I accidentally ruined my graphite mold by placing it in a kiln. It became porous after glowing red for a while. The heat was at 1050C

Calcium chloride has better potential for energy storage. Melting point 750 C; Boiling point 1935 C. So if you have high temperature pipes, pumps and valves (eg aluminium oxide) you can pump the liquid salt into heat exchanger or industrial furnace etc. It has great potential for solar thermal because sunlight can be focussed by mirrors straight into a CaCl2 heater. Very efficient.

What is the resistive element made out of? Tungsten? How is it mounted? Interesting idea. I wonder what the LCOE for this actually works out at (or more significantly, would with a bit of volume)

I wanted to use slate tiles, because the color would be useful for the thermal mass of the walls of my earthship, but it seems that I could also use them in direct contact with the metal parts of my rocket mass heater. Slate tiles would be really good, but it's rather expensive in France, probably because it's a fashionable color and material. The only problem is that it's difficult to find for free or really cheap, compare to all the materials I already have (stones and clay tiles). Maybe I already have stones with similar properties, but in a temperature range lower than 1000°C (pyrolysis)

Now what would be the cost of a 100 kWH version for home use? I have lots of solar power for weeks at a time...but my main cost is storage for the cloudy weeks.

How is that different to coil burning plant? How often do they need to replace the carbon cubes?

its sounds like a great idea . where do they get the carbon from ? do they dig it up or make it ?

Hi, sounds like a really neat technology. Great video the only thing I would query is where you got a lifespan of 4-6 years for Lithium Ion storage? Most consumer batteries come with a 10 year warranty to be at 80% capacity same as EV's. There is no way they are going to give a 10 year warranty on something that will only last 4 years. I suspect the two technologies would complement each other rather than replacing either.

Impressive technology, but you’ll need a lot of trailers to have a meaningful impact for most industrial processes. A standard 40 foot trailer is 67m2. Even if we assume 50m3 graphite at 2 ton/m3 density and a 2 MJ/tonC specific heat with a 500C working temperature range, you get a maximum of 100GJ or 28 MWh of heat storage. This may be 5 times the ~5MWh capacity of the best containerized LFP battery storage systems, but with

Impressive project

Can I use OnShape offline? Can I save the files in a standard format locally?

What are the mirrors made out of so they don’t melt if you’re dealing with temperatures hot enough to melt steel?

Okay, I'm convinced. Where do we buy this?

I'm just thinking about how nice would be to have a couple of blocks of these in your floor. Heated up real good and warm the house all winter.

Did you know that fissile material heats up and you don't need to wait for a windy day for it to happen! Also has an energy density 35,000 times greater than gasoline.

Lithium Ion storage also has the inconvenient habit, at high currents, of spontaneously combusting into a flamethrower that can't be stopped and gets more intense the more energy is stored in the battery. Hot enough to break the bonds in concrete or melt steel. And that's before we start talking about the damage to the environment.

I have one major question: Why resistive heating and not a heat pump? I mean, you can easily pump four times the energy input this way, so what is it that I'm missing here? Also, instead of using a mirror, couldn't you put the photovoltaic panel _between_ two chunks of graphite?

16:00 I wonder if they would be useful in the cement making industry. There they are "burning" waste tires to generate heat for their process. As with most "fired" processes, the heat generation and the heat loads must be in sync. That's probably not the case in the cement industry unless they run all processes 24/7.

Awesome!

This is almost like a thermal IR carbon laser - I am very excited by this. Is there a shortage of high-grade graphite - I thought it was kind of rare? How does this tech function at lower grades of graphite? I've also signed up for onshape - this might be the tool I have been looking for if I can run it on my ipad.

You put together great vids. Thanks. That 2000 C temperature is the really big ticket item cause it makes steel and concrete customers. It really can displace a chunk of fossil fuel usage which to now no-one has had an answer. Thanks for the news.

Aerogels have a heat resistance of up to 3000 and are excellent insulators. I wonder if they could be used to make these more efficient?

Two things I didn't see in the video: 1) What is the source of the carbon? 2) How is the intense IR radiation kept in the battery containment without heating everything?

Problem with that is low efficiency of thermophotovoltaic sitting around 40 %, which can be beaten easily with other systems. For example, my thesis goal was to design low-cost thermal storage battery from of the shelf components and i get to efficiency around 50 % with maximal temperature just 600 °C. Now then i added posibility of 2000°C my system efficiency would be around 75 %. Yeah, my system had moving parts and so on, but still, that low efficiency bothers me. Key information here is levelized cost of storage [USD/MWh] for that system and at what roundtrip efficiency [%] it can achieve.

The storage and heat emission is absolutely groundbreaking. Possibly combining the solid carbon heatsource with the Ambri liquid metal batteries could be a thing. From memory they are about 70 odd percent efficient at converting from heat to electricity.

Impressed, but my big question is the durability of the carbon blocks in use in their "charging" and "discharging" cycles. Is the 30 year claim valid ? Would it be useful for district heating?

each home should be equipped with such a device, and have a way to use the stored heat either for electricity generation or actual heat (cooking, HVAC, etc)

Article suggestion: Energy Dome CO2 energy storage. The first full scale dome is under construction right now, and they reckon they can hit 75-80% RTE to in a 20MW/200MWH configuration, IOW solving overnight solar storage, which is 'good enough' for most of the world's population which are reasonably close to the equator, and darn handy for the rest of us.

Interesting to think early nuclear tech used giant piles of graphite bricks - it was a nice material to work with - soft enough to be machined but with good physical properties, and a lot of interesting things are coming out of that research. A yield of 40% on light to electricity is awesome! Graphite thermal storage sounds like a winner....cheers.

Would it be possible to bundle light with mirrors and inject that hot beam straight into this battery? It's being done in other setups, but can it be done here? Because if that is the case, energy collection becomes massively more efficient, the efficiency of PV solar panel still lacks plenty. Just imagine charging the battery basically straight from the sun.

Can you give some more explanation on those TPV panels if they absorbs 40% of a 2000C source, we still have a 1200C heat source behind them which can be used to power a steam turbine.bringing total efficiency to around 60%. tt would work as well for natural gas power plants where the flame is burning at 1980C but they completely ignore the TPV which would greatly reduce the energy cost.

I missed how much kwh of heat a cube with 1mx1mx1m can store and how long?

Its possible I missed this in the video, but couldn't these be used to convert existing conventional thermal power plants (burning coal or natural gas) in cheap batteries for peak loads? Install these big carbon blocks where the furnaces exist now and charge them up on surplus power then discharge when theres demand. And those sites are already connected to the grid in just such a way to help load balance the grid.

great video dood :)

There must be clever ways of avoiding energy losses. If the environment where the heating occurs heats up too (so not only the carbon)- then that heat could be used, perhaps for pre-heating. If the glowing medium is a plate with infrared cells on both sides, the escaping not converted infrared heats up the space around it and could be used again too. But it seems hard to find a perfect and yet cheap and practical insulating method. The heat lost to the environment will be lost....I have actually no idea how good insulation can be this days.

VERY few materials can insulate 2000C. I'm curious about how much heat is lost, and how expensive/polluting/durable the insulation for 2000C will be

I wonder whether, with such high temp levels, a thermodynamical electricity generation would not be more advantageous from an efficiency point of view. The Carnot efficiency of a 1500°C heat source is ~~ 0.75, the real efficiency o c being a lot lower.

How do you put energy in the block? Around 2000°C you cannot really use electrical wires, right?

You don't mention the insulation between the carbon and the container. Maybe that is proprietary information? It must have some pretty amazing properties.

How does one get started on helping with the clean energy movement? I have ideas, but lack funding for materials to prototype or design projects.

How about the insulation for one of these? About the only thing that I know of that works at this temperature range is the ceramic fiber family. These are not inexpensive. Also, is there a vacuum gap required like in a thermos bottle to stop conduction to the housing? And, what kind of heating element has a useable lifetime at these temperatures?

You mentioned reflecting back "at the sun" is not a great idea but how about dual layer behind PV? a storage medium and a reflective medium behind? Basically any low-energy photon that passes through the semiconductor can get absorbed and given a chance to reemit at a higher energy after, but only emission towards PV matters because any other direction is reflected back. Or would something like that cost more than the yield increase is worth?

Future is bright,we just have to survive till then!🙌🏼

I see the advantages for industrial processes, but if you talk about grid storage you need to compare it to pumped hydro. I can't find a LCO for pumped hydro right now. Also, is a carbon battery more efficient than an electric arc furnace or an electric arc furnace plus pumped hydro storage? Granted pumped hydro takes up a lot more space and is harder to site than storage containers.

@16:33 even cheaper than pumped hydro storage or concrete block gravity storage?