Headline August 22, 2016/ ''' DEARER ELECTRICITY : DEAR SQUIRRELING '''

''' DEARER ELECTRICITY :

 DEAR SQUIRRELING '''

IN THE ROUGH and addressing the world:

WITH MOST RESPECTFUL DEDICATION  -to all the countries of the developing world,  -the whole world then,  its Leaders, its Students, Professors and Teachers

THE EASIEST WAY TO SQUIRREL ELECTRICITY away in times of plenty, for use when it is scarce, is to pump water uphill with it.

Such pumped storage is widely employed where where local geography and hydrology permit, but it does need two basins, at different heights to act as reservoirs, and a supply of water to fill them. 

At least one of the basins is likely to have to be artificial. 

The two must be connected by a tunnel that lets water flow between them. And the tunnel must house turbines attached to electrical devices that can do double duty-

As motors to turn the turbine blades   when they are pushing water from the lower reservoir to the upper one,  and as generators when the blades are rotated in the opposite direction by an aqueous downrush after the upper sluices are opened.

When geography does  not favour pumped storage, though, the search is on for alternatives.

These range from giant batteries, via caverns filled with compressed air, to huge fly wheels made of  carbon-fibre-composites. But one firm looking into the matter eschews all these.

It has stuck with the logic of pumped storage, which is to move large amounts of matter up and down hills. The difference is that in its case the matter is solid.

The firm in question calls itself  ARES,which stands for  *Advanced Rail Energy Storage*. 

A more apt figure from Greek mythology  than the god of war, though, might be Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to push a rock to the top of a mountain-

Only for it to roll back down again so that he had to repeat the punishment for eternity. ARES does indeed push rocks uphill, only to help them roll down again.

The rocks stand in for the water in a pump storage system. They are carried up and downhill by train that is thus the equivalent of turbines.The track the train runs on is equivalent to the tunnel.

And the motors that drive the train act, like the electrical kit of a pumped-storage turbine, as generators when they run in a reverse as the train rolls backwards downhill, pulled by gravity.

ARES built a prototype of the arrangement in 2013, near a wind farm in Tehachapi, California. 

Linking a storage system with an  intermittent source  of supply such as a wind farm is useful, because it can be employed to bolster the farm's output when the wind is not strong enough, a process called  Load balancing.

The prototype proved the principle, and now the company has bigger plans. 

The Honour and Serving of the latest  Operational Research  on *Power and Energy*  continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing.  and see you on the following one.

With respectful dedication to all great students of Malaysia and for their support:  Outstanding among them : Students,Dusyarn Tini, and all her classmates, and  Majeed, and  Umer.     

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Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless