Customer Reviews

Energy Storage: A Nontechnical Guide

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As a management consultant in the power industry for more than 10 years, I can appreciate when a good desktop reference book comes along. I find Baxter's descriptions of Energy Storage technologies to be clear and to the point for someone who needs to gain an understanding very quickly. When I need more depth, it is there too, providing thorough descriptions of the technology's relevance, potential applications, and, most importantly, its limitations.

This is a book that I would recommend to anyone needing quick but complete access to all of the significant energy storage technologies on the market or in development. I would especially recommend the book to anyone working in the renewable energy field, as it provides quick guidance on how energy storage could enhance the economics of a renewable energy project.

I found this book to be an excellent guide and reference. The book first explains the role of energy storage within the broader electricity market, and I found the author's way of illustrating the role-and potential role-of these technologies to be particularly effective and insightful. The author then presents a detailed overview of ten energy storage technologies, some familiar, like various types of large-capacity batteries, but he also covers pumped hydro, compressed air, flywheels, electrochemical capacitors, and superconducting magnetic energy storage. For each technology, the author explains the technology, assesses its costs and applications, analyzes its place in the market, and highlights major developers and installations.

For me, however, the best part of the book was the chapter dedicated to the role of energy storage in supporting renewable energy development. One of the persistent drawbacks to renewable energy is that it is not perceived as reliable (e.g., it has to be windy for wind and sunny for solar), but the author clearly explains how renewable sources can be integrated with large-scale energy storage to make them even more commercially and technically viable.

In the tradition of PennWell's other excellent non-technical guides, the large number of exhibits and detailed index will also make this a very handy reference.

This book should be considered by anyone interested in the new generation technologies or their applications in the energy industry. I like the way it is organized, including sections on electric, petroleum, and coal power storage. Electricity storage technologies and applications are discussed in depth in addition to renewable energy and storage.

It is written in clear language and structured in a straightforward manner. It contains numerous examples and insights from the actual developers throughout. The author also includes useful graphs and diagrams and a 12-page bibliography with numerous references as an easy next step for anyone interested in going deeper.

I've been active in evaluating new generation and transmission technologies in the electric power industry for many years, first with a major utility, and later as a Principal at my own consulting firm. Utility-scale electricity storage technologies have been around since the late 1970's, but only as demonstration units because of the limitations of the lead-acid batteries at the core of the projects. The technologies described in this book have shown progress since I've last looked into them, with some of them seeming to be on the cusp of real commercial utilization.

All in all, this is an essential reference book to quickly get up to speed on any of these technologies or understand how they are used. Buy it, trust me - I own a lot of these kinds of books and this is a good one.

One of the characteristics of our power grid and large electrical supply systems is that electricity is generally consumed the instant it is generated. That is radically different from all other forms of energy where storage is used to balance demand with supply by storing excess supply for delivery later when demand increases. Liquid fuel and LNG tanks can be found everywhere, including in our "back yards", houses, and automobiles. Even our water systems have local water and pressure tanks to absorb pressure and flow variations. Only about 2% of electrical energy is stored in some way, usually in the form of lakes behind hydroelectric dams and batteries dispersed in many low power applications. There is very little storage availabe today to absorb local large scale power fluctuations. Many of the reacent rolling and some total blackouts may have been prevented if stored energy could have been added to the power grid in critical high power usage situations where transmission lines were congested and generators stressed to the max. The inability to provide sufficient power to the grid when desperately needed seems to invoke the laws of supply and demand to result in significant electricity price fluctuations -- even greater than the fluctuations found with fossil fuels, which do take advantage of substantial storage.

The fluctuations and mismatches between power generated and power consumed are, and will continue to be aggravated by the introduction of renewable resources where not only do loads fluctuate, but so do the sources.

Richard Baxter does an excellent job describing some of the emerging technologies that may be able to bring economical energy storage capabilities to the power grid, This book is written in an easy to understand manner. As any good reference book, the sections are self contained and can be read and understood without having to read the whole book. Nontechnical power grid stakeholders will be able to address the issues with a working understanding of energy storage

This book should be used as reference by any stakeholder interested in improving grid reliability and increasing renewable energy penetration in our grid.

This book would have been much more interesting if it had included more technical description. It might not have resulted in a non-technical book, but the majority of its audience is probably very interested in the technical bits. The devil is ultimately in the details, and this book could give the reader more without scaring away too many of us.

Pour tous ceux qui veulent avoir une vision générale des différentes possibilités de stockage d'énergie, ce livre est indispensable.

Et bon, you'll have to read it in english;-)