Railways Could Be a Key 'Utility Player' for Backup Power

 Berkeley Lab News Release:

Berkeley Lab researchers demonstrate trains can cost-effectively dispatch grid-scale batteries in emergencies

MEDIA RELATIONS | (510) 486-5183 | JUNE 12, 2023

(Credit: David Routt/Paint It Black TV Productions)

– By Christina Nunez The U.S. electric grid faces simultaneous, evolving pressures. Demand for power from the grid is increasing as people adopt electric cars and building energy is transitioned from gas to electricity. At the same time, climate change is driving more extreme weather. Events like the 2020 heat wave that led to rolling blackouts in California are relatively infrequent, but they are happening more often – and utilities need to be ready for them. New research points to a flexible, cost-effective option for backup power when trouble strikes: batteries aboard trains. A study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) finds that rail-based mobile energy storage is a feasible way to ensure reliability during exceptional events. Previous research has shown that, in theory, rail-based energy storage could play a role in meeting the country’s daily electricity needs. Berkeley Lab researchers wanted to take this idea further to see whether rail-borne batteries could cost-effectively provide backup power for extreme events – and whether the scenario was feasible on the existing U.S. rail network. “There’s a lot of uncertainty around when extreme supply shortfalls are going to happen, where they will happen, and how extreme they may be,” said Jill Moraski, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley, a researcher at Berkeley Lab, and the paper’s lead author. “We found that the U.S. rail network has the capacity to bring energy where it’s needed when these events happen, and that it can cost less than building new infrastructure.” The paper, “Leveraging rail-based mobile energy storage to increase grid reliability in the face of climate uncertainty,” was published recently in the journal Nature Energy. A Ready Resource in Freight Rail The idea for the study came to Amol Phadke, a Berkeley Lab staff scientist and co-author of the study, while he was watching a long freight train trundle past at a railway crossing. He began counting the cars and tallied over 100 on that single train. “A thought then struck me – how many batteries could such a massive train carry? If those were used for emergency backup power, how significant would their contribution be?” Phadke writes in a briefing on the study.” A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation revealed an astounding capacity, potentially sufficient to provide power to every household in Berkeley for a few days.” To meet electricity demand and build capacity for backup power, the U.S. is building long-distance transmission lines and installing stationary banks of batteries. “While both of these resources are necessary, we wanted to explore additional, complementary technologies,” said Natalie Popovich, a Berkeley Lab research scientist and co-author of the study. “We have trains that can carry a gigawatt-hour of battery storage, but no one has thought in a cohesive way about how we can couple this resource with the electric grid.” The U.S. rail network is the largest in the world, covering nearly 140,000 miles (220,000 kilometers). The study looked at historical freight rail flows, costs, and scheduling constraints to see whether railroads could be summoned to transport batteries for high-impact events, given that grid operators typically have at least a few days’ notice, and sometimes up to a week, when extreme weather is coming. The analysis found that mobile energy storage could travel between major power markets along existing rail lines within a week without disrupting freight schedules. What About Stationary Options? The researchers compared the cost of deploying batteries on rail for low-frequency events with the investment costs of stationary energy storage and transmission lines. In cases where the trains need to cover distances of about 250 miles (400 kilometers) or shorter – roughly equivalent to a trip from L.A. to Las Vegas – rail-based energy storage could make more sense cost-wise than building stationary battery banks to fill supply gaps that happen during less than 1% of the year’s total hours. At those shorter distances, transmission lines remain cost-effective compared to batteries on rail if they are used frequently. When the travel distance grows to more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) – say, a trip from Phoenix to Austin – rail becomes cheaper than transmission lines for low-frequency events. This third option could save the power sector upwards of 60% of the total cost of a new transmission line or 30% of the total cost of stationary battery storage, the study concludes. The study points to New York State, with its robust freight capacity and current transmission constraints between upstate clean energy generation and downstate load centers, as an example of where rail-based mobile energy storage could work well. In other cases, it may make sense for multiple states to share the additional capacity from a rail-based battery bank. “This is not necessarily a resource that needs to be in one region,” Moraski said. “It can operate similar to an insurance policy, where you spread the coverage across risks for a wide geographic region.” A Train of Thought Worth Following Regulatory and infrastructure hurdles exist, the authors note. The U.S. lacks adequate interconnections to take power off the train and essentially plug it into the grid. And current electricity markets have no framework for approving, pricing, and regulating a mobile energy asset the way they do for conventional power plants. Policies would need to be revised, and efforts to deploy the storage would need to capitalize on existing interconnections where possible, such as retiring coal plants, which have existing rail lines and interconnection rights. The researchers see further opportunities to quantify the benefits of rail-based mobile energy storage beyond the scope of the current study, taking into account larger territories, a decarbonized grid, and future climate conditions. They emphasize that extending energy storage across the rail network is not a replacement for important infrastructure such as transmission lines, but could be an important complement. “Our paper gives a top-level overview of how rail-based mobile energy storage could benefit today’s grid, in today’s climate,” Moraski said. “As we look toward a future with more electrification, more fluctuating renewable energy, and more frequent extreme events, the case for adding rail-based energy storage to the mix may become even stronger.” This research was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

### Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.   DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

He Uses NO Fossil Fuels To Work His 1/2 Acre Market Farm

Tesla's supercharger deals with GM, Ford are 'the cheapest forms of adve...

How Fiber-Optic Sensing and New Materials Could Reduce the Cost of Floating Offshore Wind

 Berkeley Lab News Release:

Researchers are giving floating offshore wind turbines abilities to self-monitor and self-heal

MEDIA RELATIONS | (510) 486-5183 | JUNE 1, 2023

Shake table tests at the Richmond Field Station are used to mimic ocean waves and test turbine stability. They also test the ability of fiber optic sensing to measure the response of the turbines. (Courtesy of Yuxin Wu)

– By Julie Bobyock and Christina Procopiou In shallow waters, offshore wind turbines are fixed to the ocean floor. However, in deep water areas where winds are typically stronger and have the capacity to reap more than double the energy, floating offshore wind turbines must be moored to the seabed where the ocean is too deep for fixed structures. Floating offshore wind (FOSW) is one of the most promising clean energy technologies with a potential market worth nearly $16 billion – but science and technology solutions are needed to help reduce the cost of developing, deploying, and maintaining these complex systems.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are developing sensing technologies consisting of fiber-optic cables, which could be installed on FOSW structures that have been planned off the California coast. This would allow structures to self-monitor damaging conditions that could lead to costly repairs and would also help gauge how FOSW impacts marine mammals by detecting their activity.  In collaboration with experts in materials science, engineering, geophysics, and FOSW developers from around the world, Berkeley Lab scientist Yuxin Wu is developing solutions to reduce the cost of FOSW development and deployment, while minimizing potential environmental impacts.

Yuxin Wu (Courtesy of Yuxin Wu)

Q. What is the biggest obstacle to expanding floating offshore wind technologies? Wu: So far, there have been few FOSW deployments because the technology is in the early stages of development. Currently, no such systems have been deployed anywhere near 1000 meters in depth. We want to leverage scientific innovation by co-designing structural materials that are better able to withstand harsh marine environments and extreme weather events. And we want to add distributed fiber optic sensing to FOSW systems to enable systems to self monitor in real time for potential problems, a capability that could prolong a system’s lifespan and lower operating and maintenance costs.  Q. How does your team apply fiber-optic sensing to these innovations? Wu: A fiber cable has a glass core that allows you to send an optical signal at the speed of light; when there is any vibration, strain, or change in temperature of the material that is being monitored, that information will be carried in the light signal that is scattered back. When attached to or embedded within the wind turbine structure, this gives it a “nervous system” which allows it to “hear” and “feel.” The fiber is able to monitor surrounding acoustic signals, such as whale calls, which can help scientists assess potential impacts to large marine mammals from FOSW operations.  We’ve been testing the deployment of this sensing technology to structural components – such as towers and turbines – to monitor physical and mechanical conditions experienced by the structure itself, like temperature or strain. Our research so far has focused on testing fiber optics on the tower and gearbox, some of the most expensive components where there is benefit to identifying damage before it leads to problems.  Q. How important is materials science to reducing the cost of floating offshore wind systems? Wu: By revealing what is happening within a FOSW system in real time, fiber-optic sensing gives us the knowledge needed to develop more resilient, cost-effective materials at the system level. Designing FOSW systems at lower cost and to withstand harsh marine environments requires cutting-edge materials science combined with computing science to produce better materials and to effectively simulate how the materials perform. Materials can be developed to give the structures self-healing capabilities; for example, seawater intruding into a crack in concrete triggers reactions to seal the crack without interventions. We are partnering with experts in materials science and simulations from the molecular to structural scale to bring about innovations that have great potential for future deep-water floating systems because of their large cost-saving potential, local producibility, better performance, and environmental sustainability. DOE Office of Science user facilities at Berkeley Lab, such as the Molecular Foundry, Advanced Light Source, and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), play key roles in facilitating innovations in our research.  Q. These systems are far offshore, making them challenging to access for maintenance. How can technology help track and predict their performance when people aren’t nearby to monitor operations? Wu: Digital twins are representations of structures made using advanced computer modeling, often jointly with real-time monitoring data, that scientists can use to control, simulate, and monitor how the FOSW system would respond to different weather or marine conditions. For example, we can simulate conditions of a hurricane and see exactly how the system would function under this extreme weather – right from our desktop computers. With real-time data feeding into the digital twins, system response to actual “on-the-water” field conditions can be monitored to support decision-making, for example when to send a crew to conduct system inspection. This could significantly reduce costs by avoiding unnecessary trips, and by allowing proactive maintenance of the system before larger, expensive failures.  Last summer, our team used shake table testing of an actual turbine at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station, to test the ability of the fiber optic sensing to monitor how the turbines would respond to wave movements far offshore. The shake test helps evaluate and optimize deployment of sensors which eventually will be sitting on structures in the middle of the ocean and autonomously communicating data to land via fiber cables. Q. How important is collaboration to reducing the cost of floating offshore wind? Wu: DOE’s floating offshore wind earthshot has an ambitious goal of 70% cost reduction by 2035. This requires a system-level approach that optimizes all steps through the entire lifecycle of FOSW from material design, structural construction, deployment, operation, and maintenance. Partnering with institutions and industries with different expertise allows us to efficiently develop these new and complex technologies that can help shift the nation’s energy economy to one built on clean, renewable sources.

### Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.   DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.