Location:
Rm D/E, Alrick Building, Kings Buildings
Date:
Speaker: Dr Dimitri Mignard
Title: Storing renewable energy - how much does it cost?
Abstract: In remote areas North and West of Scotland, the cost of connecting wind farms and other renewable energy converters to the grid is not cheap, especially if you are on an island. As an alternative, or for the purpose of lessening the contraints on connectors, energy storage in various guises is being proposed. This may also have advantages including conversion to services like transport or heating. However costing these options is fraught with difficulty, not least because the technologies that may help often have not reached full commercial or even technical development at the appropriate scale for this type of application. Nevertheless this is what we attempted here for advanced adiabatic compressed air storage. We compared this figure with estimates for a handful of other technologies, including flow cell batteries, lithium ion batteries and hydrogen storage. Aspects of these technologies that are particularly advantageous or challenging are also briefly discussed.
Bio: Dimitri Mignard is a chemical engineer who graduated from ENSIGC (Toulouse) and Birmingham University in 1994. He got his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 1999, and so he can just about recall what research was like in a previous century. Amongst other things, he has worked on bioreactors and cell culture, fluidised beds for plastics recycling, conversion of carbon dioxide and renewable energies to fuels and chemicals, and currently biochar and hydrogen storage.