So much potential! Get my CocaCola on the line! Heck give me Heineken too!
CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
281–290 of 320 posts
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 1 watt is 1 joule per second then, honestly, what are we doing with watt-hours? Why can’t battery capacity be described in joules? And then charge and discharge being a function of voltage and current, could be represented in joules per unit time. Instead its watt-hours for capacity, watts for flow rate. Watt-hours… that’s joules / seconds * hours? This is cursed.
1 Wh = 3600 Ws = 3600 J It is not more cursed than km/h (1 m/s = 3600 m/h = 3.6 km/h) Both those units are more convenient than their SI equivalent and their "cursedness" come from the hour/minute/second time division. If we had decimal time, as it was initially proposed with the metric system, we wouldn't have this problem, but we weren't ready to let go of hours/minute/second.
Yeah. I get this is all kind of silly. I think what trips me up is that a watt doesn’t represent a timeless amount of something the way a meter does. A watt involves a unit amount of time.
Imagine if the distance between you and I was 438 kiloflerp-hours. And to get to you in one hour I have to drive at a speed of 438 kiloflerps. It works, it kinda makes sense. It just feels inconsistent with all the other units I work with.
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#283The round-trip efficiency comparison (60-75% vs lithium-ion's ~90%) is interesting but somewhat misleading without context. For grid-scale storage, the relevant question isn't efficiency in isolation - it's lifecycle economics including capex, degradation, and replacement cycles. Lithium-ion has superior efficiency but degrades significantly after 5,000-7,000 cycles, typically reaching 80% capacity in 7-10 years. If…
I think it is generally polite to flag when you are using an LLM to write your comment, some people tire of reading the same style of writing over and over - even if the content of your comment is interesting!
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pumped hydro is just not a valid comparison. I wish people would understand that already… it’s only good for long term storage in certain key geographical regions. Its use case is very limited. You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear. In these d…
It's cute you think short cycles are somehow better in gas turbines and compressors and that you will restart the whole thing constantly to fill short term demands > In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs. The comparison is valid; If you want to fill hour to hour demand or add some frequency regulation, an i…
> It's cute you think […]
Don't do that here.
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#285I wonder how much Google is factoring in the implicit cooling cycle? Because any pressurized gas energy storage is either including some advanced heat storage or is just venting the heat created during compression (the ancient Huntorf facility in Germany is infamous for that, super wasteful) Usually you want to keep the heat and put it back into the compression medium during decompression and hope that losses from th…
I'm sort of thinking out loud here but could you have two batteries running simultaneously but on opposite cycles, so while one is cooling the other is heating? Obviously it wouldn't be 100% efficient but it might reduce some wasted energy.
Why would you be charging one battery while discharging another? That would just be wasting energy.
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#286Peacetime technology from people who ignore the shooting war next door. Do you really want to build your energy system on huge soft targets? This looks much more vulnerable than solar arrays or battery installations to small-to-medium warheads (i.e anything from $500 FPV drones with an RPG round to $100k middle strike drones with 100 kg of payload).
Customers will evaluate the risks. Thermal power plants are an easy target too, and oil and gas pipelines. And the oil tankers, according to the news of the last weeks. By the way, nobody cares about oil spills anymore. I guess all those ships were sailing empty /s
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#287I don’t know much about chemistry, but is there a reason why they are using CO2 as the gas medium instead of something else? I was thinking ambient air would be readily available, and you don’t have to worry about suffocating people if it ruptures. Is CO2 particularly efficient to compress?
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 Wh = 3600 Ws = 3600 J It is not more cursed than km/h (1 m/s = 3600 m/h = 3.6 km/h) Both those units are more convenient than their SI equivalent and their "cursedness" come from the hour/minute/second time division. If we had decimal time, as it was initially proposed with the metric system, we wouldn't have this problem, but we weren't ready to let go of hours/minute/second.
Yeah. I get this is all kind of silly. I think what trips me up is that a watt doesn’t represent a timeless amount of something the way a meter does. A watt involves a unit amount of time. Imagine if the distance between you and I was 438 kiloflerp-hours. And to get to you in one hour I have to drive at a speed of 438 kiloflerps. It works, it kinda makes sense. It just feels inconsistent with all the other units I wo…
You're right. If you really want to mess with speed and distance, just rename "nautical mile" to "knot-hour". In fact, that might be a great idea for trolling – it is fewer syllables (4 vs. 2), and aviation pilots definitely use knots for speed, so why not simplify the vocabulary and ditch the unique term "nautical mile" in favor of pairing two existing words?
Another place where the cursed unit of hour crops up is describing the amount of electric charge that you can pull out of a battery (especially rechargeable ones) in terms of millamp-hours (mA⋅h). Note that in actual SI, 1 mA⋅h = 3.6 C (coulombs). Even more cursed is high-capacity lithium-ion USB power banks that are advertised like 10,000 mAh (or even "10K mAh"), which should at least be simplified to 10 A⋅h (ampere-hours). But mA⋅h isn't a good way to describe batteries because you also need to multiply by voltage (3.7 V for Li-ion, I think 1.2 V for NiMH) to figure out the energy (usually expressed in W⋅h).
One more fun fact - photographic flash units are advertised in watt-seconds (W⋅s) for the maximum amount of energy delivered in a flash pulse of light. But that just simplifies to joules, which is a shorter and less confusing unit name. People really need to stop multiplying watts with time and use joules as designed in the SI.
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I get this is all kind of silly. I think what trips me up is that a watt doesn’t represent a timeless amount of something the way a meter does. A watt involves a unit amount of time. Imagine if the distance between you and I was 438 kiloflerp-hours. And to get to you in one hour I have to drive at a speed of 438 kiloflerps. It works, it kinda makes sense. It just feels inconsistent with all the other units I wo…
You're right. If you really want to mess with speed and distance, just rename "nautical mile" to "knot-hour". In fact, that might be a great idea for trolling – it is fewer syllables (4 vs. 2), and aviation pilots definitely use knots for speed, so why not simplify the vocabulary and ditch the unique term "nautical mile" in favor of pairing two existing words? Another place where the cursed unit of hour crops up is d…
[deleted]
Re: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
#290The round-trip efficiency comparison (60-75% vs lithium-ion's ~90%) is interesting but somewhat misleading without context. For grid-scale storage, the relevant question isn't efficiency in isolation - it's lifecycle economics including capex, degradation, and replacement cycles. Lithium-ion has superior efficiency but degrades significantly after 5,000-7,000 cycles, typically reaching 80% capacity in 7-10 years. If…
I think it is generally polite to flag when you are using an LLM to write your comment, some people tire of reading the same style of writing over and over - even if the content of your comment is interesting!
Oh good point; I wouldn't have noticed if you didn't point it out. The last ~5 comments from yoan9224 are all in 4-paragraph format. A few comments before that are in 3-paragraph format. They all look suspiciously uniform in writing style, and very mechanical.