61–70 of 136 posts
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?
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…
If energy is free or nearly free and it’s being wasted currently, then how much does the efficiency really matter?
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!
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!
Reading the article beyond the neat little graph tells you of California's plans. Governments and companies make long term investments in their own structure over multiple years. This is also the basis of the bond market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Energy in the form of electricity is fleeting. If you don't convert it to a persisting potential energy form, it isn't there when you want it. Loss in the system is well understood by the engineers, financiers, planners. This is true, but it only makes sense if you are talking about generation sources that can’t be controlled (e.g. solar, wind). It’s a complete waste if you’re just storing energy from something like…
The cost moment to stop and start spinning metal is huge. These devices can't bid at 5min intervals let alone 30sec. They are precisely the ones which benefit from a method to store electricity, because making steam not exist means then spending time making it exist again, to spin the turbine. They bid into 30 minute supply price moments and then try to run at the highest contract bid price for as long as possible. G…
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…
My take is thermal storage is going to become really important once we start taking coal and nat gas plants off line causing the daily power price curve to invert. Power goes from cheap at night, expensive during the afternoon to cheap in the morning and expensive in the early evening. Once that happens thermal storage becomes balance sheet economic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar can generate heat directly, using Concentrated Solar Power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
Those are horrifically expensive relative to PV and largely abandoned tech. A core issue is you can’t concentrate sunlight on a cloudy day making them even less dependable than PV. The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility even reverts to natural gas, this is while costing 4x what PV does. PS: By abandoned the worldwide concentrating solar power installed over the last 20 years is ~1/2 the amount of PV added every month.