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ARPA-E helps fund 40 advanced energy research projects across the US

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ARPA-E helps fund 40 advanced energy research projects across the US

Highlights

One project could provide 10 hours of energy storage at low cost

Research could lead to larger, cheaper more efficient wind turbines

  • Author
  • Jared Anderson
  • Editor
  • Rocco Canonica
  • Commodity
  • Electric Power

New York — A US Department of Energy research program is providing $98 million in funding for 40 projects including energy storage, advanced wind power generation and other energy technologies that could have considerable market impacts if they can be commercialized.

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The projects were selected as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy's OPEN 2018 solicitation process, which is an open call to scientists and engineers for transformational energy technologies, the agency said in a statement Thursday.

"ARPA-E's open solicitations serve a valuable purpose. They give America's energy innovators the opportunity to tell us about the next big thing," US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said. "Many of the greatest advances in human history started from the bottom up with a single person or idea, and OPEN 2018 provides a chance to open our doors to potentially the next great advancement in energy," he added.

The selected projects are in 21 states and fall within nine technical categories, the agency said. Approximately 43% of the research and development projects selected will be led by universities, 35% by small businesses and the rest by large businesses, non-profit organizations or federally funded research and development centers.

PUMPED HEAT STORAGE

The Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, was selected to receive $2 million for research on Pumped Heat Electrical Storage. The technology uses electricity to drive a storage engine connected to two large thermal stores, according to the trade group Energy Storage Association's website.

To store power, the electrical energy drives a heat pump, which pumps heat from the "cold store" to the "hot store" similar to the way a refrigerator works, the ESA said. To recover the energy, the heat pump is reversed to become a heat engine.

The ARPA-E project, which is focused on grid-scale electricity storage at the lowest possible cost, is working on the development of an advanced PHES storage system "based on a novel thermodynamic cycle to store energy in hot and cold fluids," according to the statement.

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The energy storage system will help integrate renewables with the electric grid, ARPA-E said. The technology relies on "system simplification, high round-trip conversion efficiencies and low plant costs to surpass existing state-of-the-art energy storage technologies." Once fully scaled, the technology would provide over 10 hours of electricity at rated power and the research institute will build a small kW-scale demonstrator to validate the technology, according to ARPA-E. PHES can address markets that require response times of minutes, the ESA said, and the technology applies to all markets currently addressed by pumped-hydro storage.

"Thermal storage in general is an area of great potential for storage, but it faces a different set of challenges than batteries," Eric Hittinger, professor and graduate program director at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in an email Friday.

"The challenge for thermal storage is getting the energy in and out of the storage reservoir efficiently without too much thermodynamic losses or expensive equipment," he said.

"So the critical research here is in thermodynamics, heat exchangers, and heat engine design. These aren't glamorous topics and real breakthroughs are hard because the topics have been well-studied, but a breakthrough design that can efficiently extract stored energy from heat would be a big deal in the storage space," Hittinger said.

ADVANCED WIND POWER

Two projects focused on advanced wind power technology were selected. Wind power research company Aquanis in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, received $3.5 million for work on active aerodynamic load control for wind turbines.

The company will develop advanced plasma actuators and controls to reduce aerodynamic loads on wind turbine blades, which could facilitate the next generation of 20+ MW, smarter wind turbines, according to ARPA-E.

The system can change the "lift and drag forces on wind turbine blades" to reduce mechanical fatigue and enable larger and cheaper blades to be designed, ARPA-E said. The technology is currently effective at laboratory scales, but Aquanis plans to "improve the plasma actuator capabilities" and field test a larger prototype system on an actual wind turbine.

The other wind power related project is a megawatt-scale power-electronic-integrated generator with controlled direct current output for which the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign received $2,056,280.

The university aims to "create the world's most efficient, reliable, and compact wind energy conversion system," ARPA-E said. The team will co-design the generator and power electronics converter portions of a wind turbine to greatly reduce system size and weight.

"The expected results are a significant reduction in the cost of the turbine's main structures (i.e., tower, nacelle, foundation), and an increase in turbine efficiency and reliability," ARPA-E said.

-- Jared Anderson, jared.anderson@spglobal.com

-- Edited by Rocco Canonica, newsdesk@spglobal.com