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what's even the calculation behind a projection like that, it even has a little spike in 2035!
The rather extreme losses associated with electricity > heat > heat engine > electricity seem like an absolute deal killer. Assuming they are at an extreme 50% round trip efficiency you need to be extremely cheap to have a hope of breaking even. Worse heat has fairly low energy density and cools over time so they can’t really scale the up or down that much. It might be possible if they where starting with heat, but f…
Additionally the molten salt may be good at insulating itself or at least easy to insulate against heat losses cheaply.
And maybe it can be fueled by energy forms other than electricity.
The rather extreme losses associated with electricity > heat > heat engine > electricity seem like an absolute deal killer. Assuming they are at an extreme 50% round trip efficiency you need to be extremely cheap to have a hope of breaking even. Worse heat has fairly low energy density and cools over time so they can’t really scale the up or down that much. It might be possible if they where starting with heat, but f…
Germany and California have both experienced negative electricity prices. The economics of this kind of battery could very well work with a low efficiency if it's cheap to build.
This is extremely exciting technology! Any energy science aficionado worth their salt knows that molten salt can have very high energy density.
I'm pretty naive about this stuff, but wouldn't an easy solution for storing energy to be, just use energy to lift something very heavy into the air, and then extract energy when it's lowered?
https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
The neat little graph showing the rise in global yearly investments up to 2040 is amusing. Nassim Taleb has made me very wary of these things. what's even the calculation behind a projection like that, it even has a little spike in 2035!
I'm pretty naive about this stuff, but wouldn't an easy solution for storing energy to be, just use energy to lift something very heavy into the air, and then extract energy when it's lowered?
It also doesn't contain a huge amount of energy - 1 ton of liquid NaCl contains about 700MJ of usable energy, you'd have to lift 700 tons of material 100m to contain the same in gravitational potential.