German Company Creates a Wind Farm That Includes a Water Battery

November 3, 2017 – Max Bögl Wind AG is a Bavarian company with the biggest wind turbine on the planet. It stands 246.5 meters (808 feet) in height and is located in the Limpurg Hills near Stuttgart. Besides its enormous height, this wind turbine sits on top of a water battery.

A water battery? What are we talking about?

The company is combining wind power with pumped-storage, a subject I have written about in past postings to this website.

In this case, the pumped storage is part of a four wind turbine installation in the Limpurg Hills. Each wind turbine has at its base a large water storage reservoir. The turbines power 3.4 Megawatt generators. The water storage reservoirs at each increase total energy capacity by up to 70 Megawatt hours and when released to the grid deliver 4 continuous hours of electricity. The technology is designed to switch between continuous energy production and storage within 30 seconds.

As a pumped storage reservoir, the water gets released and flows through penstocks to a hydroelectric power station located 200 meters (approximately 660 feet) below in a nearby valley (see illustration below).

Besides the unique combination of both a wind turbine and pumped storage, Max Bögl’s tower design is aimed at maximizing the harvesting of wind power.  That’s why the towers are so high. Every meter of additional height increases power yields by between 0.5 and 1%. And the additional height also decreases turbulence with blade hubs exceeding 130 meters (426 feet) to ensure maximum wind yield.

The pumped storage technology is designed for use with both fresh and salt water. The footprint is small and company rates the durability of its facility estimating a 60-year lifetime. Construction time versus regular wind turbines is not significantly longer.

Max Bögl’s hybrid technology can use a mix of renewable sources other than wind and combine them with pumped storage. This ensures there is no natural limitation to the technology.The facility in the Linpurg Hills is expected to generate 10 Gigawatt-hours annually, enough power for 2,500 homes. States Josef Knitl, Board Member at Max Bögl, “with the water battery and hybrid towers, we are making wind energy a more attractive and efficient source of clean energy while also setting new records.”

In Germany, hybrid power solutions are seen as an answer to achieving their goal of 80% of the country’s electricity requirements from renewable sources by 2050 compared to today’s 30%. There is lots of potential with so many different ways to generate and harvest energy.

For example, waste heat, an underutilized energy source, if captured from industrial sites and then integrated with wind and solar, creates a combination that overcomes the intermittent nature of these latter sources.

Geothermal is nature’s equivalent to industrial waste heat. And then there is storage which does the same thing and isn’t limited to just the pumped storage described in this posting.

Storage includes large-scale lithium-ion technology and other battery types which are already being added to the energy mix.

And so is using the surplus electricity produced by renewable sources to break down water into its molecular components harvesting the hydrogen for fuel cells.

These combinations along with microgrid and smart grid innovations should, over the next two decades, be more than enough to end global fossil fuel dependency.