03-11 Energy Storage

It was the spring of 1953, and I was a first-year engineering student looking for a summer job. My father, who operated a men’s clothing business, came to my rescue. He called one of his customers, who was the President of Ontario Hydro. And within an hour I had a job in their planning department.
That is when I began to understand the challenge utilities face matching supply of electrical power with demand. Homeowners, naturally, use less at night. The attached shows surplus power going into a battery-operated energy storage system. Not something they were doing back in the 1950s.
What the engineers were doing at that time was regulating the flow of water through the dam at Niagara Falls which determined the output of their electrical generators. Not complex.
But, in 1953 they were adding a coal-fired generating station in Toronto to their system, and this was a technology that was difficult to regulate.
What one of the engineers explained was how utilities in other countries with surplus power from a mix of hydro and coal used that surplus to pump water up into their reservoirs at night.
It was a simple form of energy storage. And it is used all over the world, because nations with hydro, also have wind and solar technologies that are not stable. Wind when it is windy. That kind of thing.
Enormous wind turbines are being installed today in the North Sea and power is being supplied to Norway, Denmark and Germany which have grids that are all inter-connected. So, what is happening with the surplus power generated at night? Norway is using it to pump water into their reservoirs.
This photo shows large scale energy storage next to a wind farm. Research and development of energy storage systems is taking place around the world. Lots of technologies at play besides lithium-ion batteries.
This photo shows utility storage and solar together. Solar systems only produce direct current, so these energy storage systems also include what are called “inverters” which convert direct current to alternating current, which is what you need to power motors.
This may be an oversimplification. But I believe that if the world becomes free of fossil fuels, it will be because of energy storage.