PV Thermal Battery

Concept

• Photovoltaics and other renewables are not gaining traction like they should be because of intermittency - what do you do with PV if there is no sun at night?
• Batteries are expensive. To store enough energy, say in winter when there is little sun - for 5 days - would require a tremendous amount of storage. About $50k [1]
• But here's how we do it - store the heat in thermal mass - water - not battery storage.
• Water is less expensive than batteries. In fact, about 100,000x less expensive per kg. [2] - 1/20 cent vs 2500 cents
• What if we just store water? Yes!
• You can use a heat pump to heat water. Hot Water Heat Pump costs $6k for 60k BTU. More than enough for hot water, whole house heating.
• How it works: during day, heat pump uses PV energy to heat water - or cool it in summer. This water is stored in IBC Totes as a $50/pop solution.
• A heat exchanger extracts the heat or cool from the water - blowing it through the house
• That's it.
• If this is connected to underground tubing - you have just created a geothermal cooling system that can cool in the summer as it is cool underground - and you don't even need to run a heat pump to do the cooling - so you use 25x less energy.
• And we can do all of this for $10k - free heating and cooling for a lifetime using PV - and 16 IBC totes store enough energy for 5 days of heating in winter or cooling in summer. This is especially useful in winter if it's snowing all the time and you hardly have any sun.

What have we just accomplished?

• PV would not suffice to heat or cool a house. While there is plenty of energy in the day, you're out of luck at night.
• We buffer the energy in water as a storage medium - completely obviating battery storage which is really the only other option
• We store energy for 5 days.
• Thus, we can say that water is the secret here - it is a storage medium.
• That's like the entire earth - it is warm and regular on earth because 75% of the earth is ocean - which regulates temperature to make it mild and without extremes. How about we do that on the scale of each house?
• Did you know that heating, cooling, and hot water are 70% of a building's electricity needs?
• Therefore, we have just come up with a way to displace 70% of all human energy needs! This is major for pollution and global warming.

Try 2

Detailing the scenario, 20 sq meters of IBC totes 2 high, raised only 30C from 20-50C - or in the negative direction in summer - stores heat/cool for 12 days, and takes 6 days to produce that heat with PV! 1 MWhr of heat stored.

https://chatgpt.com/c/685b1c5e-83c8-8010-a0e4-bbd8923c8845

Initial

See in https://chatgpt.com/share/6858a32a-d328-8010-8c0b-3268127ba2f1

Result 1:

Result 2:

Internal Links

• Power-to-Heat
  • Power-to-Heat-to-Cooling
    • Via Absorption Cooling
• Power-to-Heat-to-Power
  • Also known as Pumped Thermal Energy Storage