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MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

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Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#91

Post by nerpderp82 »

nostrademons wrote: post #66
hbossy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could avoid building the machinery and just pump water up and down. Then to lower the cost you could drop the tower idea and use a natural hill with reservoir on top. Surprise, surprise you just invented a pumped-storage power station.

Pumped hydro is great, but there are relatively few geographic areas where the terrain is suitable. You need a valley that can be dammed to fill a reservoir, enough water that it actually becomes a reservoir, and then a gentle enough slope coming out of the dam that you can build a secondary reservoir with enough water to capture the outflow of whatever period of time you're storing the energy and pump it back in. Ca…

Dig a 1300m shaft in the ground. Robots would be ideal for construction, as a large cistern would need to be built at the bottom.

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#92

Post by nerpderp82 »

imtringued wrote: post #47
harry8 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>assume you build a tower 120 meters I think the more popular approach is to use a deep hole, like a mine shaft. Maybe depth measured in kms. Because you're suspending from above you might be able to get a bit heavier than 60 tons.

A kilometer deep hole is not very cheap.

Lets make them cheap. What is the minimum shaft size to get construction equipment to the bottom?

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#93

Post by AlexandrB »

bumby wrote: post #85
labster wrote: post #13

Typical university press release: this technology can revolutionize our energy grid by storing energy in a building’s foundation, because we powered an LED with some tiny cells we made.

Tbf, that's often how science progresses. The first sustained artificial nuclear reaction [1] managed to produce...half a watt. I'm glad they weren't overly cynical about future possibilities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

Examples like this are outnumbered by "revolutionary" technologies that never left the lab. It's ok to be skeptical about something so early in development. If they're able to scale the technology and make it practical then it will be time to get excited.

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#94

Post by [deleted] »

AlexandrB wrote: post #93
bumby wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf, that's often how science progresses. The first sustained artificial nuclear reaction [1] managed to produce...half a watt. I'm glad they weren't overly cynical about future possibilities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

Examples like this are outnumbered by "revolutionary" technologies that never left the lab. It's ok to be skeptical about something so early in development. If they're able to scale the technology and make it practical then it will be time to get excited.

[deleted]

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#95

Post by BizarroLand »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #63
ggm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those sort-of hyperbolic put downs which goes to "we need" encompassing the entire western worlds power requirements. No, you can't replace all existing power sources now and into the future by pumped hydro. Pumped hydro has a massive role to play in power supply, time shifting electricity from renewable sources, providing system resiliency, black start, inductive and inertial load, you-name-it. It als…

No at all. No one is suggesting it must cover all power needs. Sure, there may be municipalities that are advantaged by it due to the unique and perfect nature of their geography. But that's not going to be enough to put any realistic dent in the problem at a national level. Many people have done the math. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

Unfortunately, many people are unrealistic.

People in general demand quick, simple, easy and singular solutions to complex problems that cover massive ranges of financial, geographical, political, cultural, and individual variances with no tolerance, and they honestly believe they are being fair and reasonable when they do so.

Example:

Idea: "New houses could have cheap batteries built into their foundations, cheaply decreasing the load on the electrical grid and providing a backup source to cover temporary power outages."

Response: "Well, that's not going to completely solve the energy crisis, restore CO2 to pre-industrial revolution levels and avert the polar ice caps from melting, so what's the point?"

And they think that this response is rational.

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#96

Post by BizarroLand »

ilyt wrote: post #84
bilsbie wrote: post #82

This is neat. Every house could have its own energy storage built into its foundation. How coool is that. Maybe dams could store excess energy in their structure.

Replacing it wouldn't be great tho...

How often do you replace the foundation of your home?

Worst case, the battery function drops to unusable levels and then you just have a plain old house foundation.

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#97

Post by sashank_1509 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #77
sashank_1509 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No their research is much better than most. In my field of Robotics, Russ Tedrake, Alberto Rodriguez regularly get out impactful work (and I have a disdain for most work especially the kind Google does). I think they kind of lost out in Deep Learning to Berkeley and Stanford but they’re slowly building their expertise in it (frankly most of Academia doesn’t compare to industry outputs in Deep Learning so I don’t thin…

> No their research is much better than most. Yeah, so good they were extensively faking their research and demos for a "personal food computer"...and even selling the fucking things to unsuspecting schools. Literally snake oil scamming. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=MIT+med... Then there's your robotics team, backed by millions of dollars in free products and "consulting" (ie doing work for th…

Sadly scams happen in every school, and I think it may only increase in academia moving forward but what’s the issue with their robotics team?

Russ’s student Scott later went on to make Atlas (Boston Dynamics Humanoid) backflip. They were the first to come up with a backflipping quadruped. Alberto’s team won the Amazon pick and place challenge (also demonstrated a robot playing Jenga). Recently Pulkit showed how to rotate any arbitrary object with a dexterous robotic arm. I’d honestly find it hard to name universities better than MITs at robotics

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#98

Post by Tade0 »

keepamovin wrote: post #54
Tade0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lighting rods are actually there to discharge without lighting. In any case 10kWh worth of li-ion batteries is about the size of a water cooler tank, so the whole system - bms, inverter and all - is no larger than a water cooler.

Just a heads up, Chrome flags your HN profile homepage as a "Deceptive site" !!

Thanks. Yeah, my fault - I was hosting a WIP Wordpress site for a client on a subdomain and forgot to set a strong password there.

A week later there were already ChatGPT-generated posts in English, German and Russian.

Well, at least the client got a demonstration regarding the consequences of having weak passwords.

I've filled the form you gotta fill in such situations, but I'm not hopeful I'll ever get this domain back.

Shame, because this started out as CV padding but over time evolved into this one place I link people to for quick solutions to stuff.

Re: MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

#100

Post by Twirrim »

javcasas wrote: post #90
Twirrim wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love comments like the one above yours "just do this eyesore/expensive/impractical thing instead!" Good enough is good enough. There is no one size fits all, and we really need to start leveraging everything we can to tackle energy storage. Each thing used doesn't need to be perfect for energy density, it just has to be good enough. > assume you build a tower 120 meters tall. vs sticking a concrete block in the gro…

All right, now assume making a 120m deep hole is cheaper than building a 120m tower. BTW, how many 120m deep holes have you seen in your life? You seem to be expert at them. I have seen a few 120m towers. They call them skyscrappers. Anyway, all this for 20Kwh. I can get a Nissan Leaf with a 40/60Kwh battery for way less than a skyscrapper. Most likely for way less than what it costs to make a 120m deep hole. Long st…

Sorry, I guess I'm coming across wrongly somehow? I think 120m towers are crap as an energy storage solution. Maybe they could shove them inside skyscrapers that are being built, but that seems like a reach, especially given the size of the blocks needed for things to be practical. Leveraging existing mine shafts for it seems relatively sane. The work is done, it's unused, might as well get some ongoing value out of it, vs building a whole sodding great tower.

Static concrete being able to store power like a battery, like the article is talking about, is ideal if it works (possibly with caveats depending on how quickly it degrades). It's a ubiquitous material, used all over the place. It'd be getting value out of something that is going to be used anyway.

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