this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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of course it's a furry shitposting about it.
They aren't wrong though, storage technology is only starting to come to market in significant enough capacity to be beneficial.
And for storage plants to be financially viable energy costs during the day need to be really cheap, so they can raise them at night and make a significant enough profit to break even.
Solar generation is kinda saving our asses here in Ukraine though, and was even more in the summer. So I guess all you need for solar to be viable is to have most of your other power sources to get bombed
this is actually something that still fascinates me. The fact that i can just buy a market accessible product, point it towards the sun, and i just get electricity is fucking insane to me.
We truly live in the best timeline.
2 giant lakes. 1 uphill from the other, or one underground. When there's excess energy you pump water uphill. When you need more you let it back down
There's a lake in the UK that does this
We can use Niagara Falls for that!
yeah, good luck with that one though. it tends to be ecologically problematic, and very, very hard to find places good for this. It has happened, but you can't just build these things as demand desires.
This is why battery based and thermal based energy storage is taking quite the aggressive focus on research and development right now. Batteries are more of a side effect, and very easily accessible, and thermal storage is probably a lot less popular than it should be.
Generally you can do a similar thing with traditional hydro anyway, plus it produces a base level of power anyway.
You're telling me we can't dig big holes and use them? What about using old mines and quarries?
Is it a problem that they can't find anything, or just that it would be a bit expensive and they would rather use batteries as an excuse to keep using oil?
you could, theoretically. You cold also create man made natural lakes in places where it's convenient, but again, you need the rough shape of a lake high up, and the rough shape of a lake near enough, and lower to the other lake, that you can generate significant amounts of power.
You might be able to use an old quarry, most old quarries are flooded anyway, but idk of many quarries that exist near the base of a mountain with the ability to have a higher elevation storage pond. Most quarries are probably going to be pretty close to ground on account of being a quarry, so that doesn't really help much. You could also use a mine, but the problem there is going to be getting water out of it trivially. It's just not really conducive to that use case.
Another big problem is going to be pollution to the water supply, especially in something like a quarry or mine. That's a non improbable issue.
Ok so TL;DR here, is that you need an incredibly rare formation of geological features, and the ability to use them. If you've ever played minecraft you can think of it like finding a 3x3 formation of bedrock on the top layer of bedrock in the overworld. If not you can think of it like staring at a TV displaying static waiting for it to suddenly emerge an image that isn't just indecipherable noise. Or better yet, the monkey on a type writer example, given enough time, it will produce the entire works of shakespeare.
It's theoretically possible, but practically, when possible, it's probably already been done, and if it hasn't there's probably a good reason for it.
If you're analyzing this from a mathematical perspective, the problem here is not finding two lakes, or finding two lakes at different elevation levels, it's finding two lakes, at different elevation levels, sufficiently close enough to be practically uesful for pumped hydro.
The reason why we're using batteries right now, as i've said is partially two fold, it's a lot simpler, you can invest the majority of your capital into an energy storage medium, the remainder is for infrastructure, land, buildings, power equipment, which makes it a very low risk investment. The second primary reason is simply accessibility. Chemical batteries are simply the most prevalent, cheapest, and most accessible form of energy storage right now. They work anywhere, they can be built to any scale, they work no matter what time of day it is, or what time of year it is. They literally just work.
If you're trying to do something like pumped hydro you're going to need a massive, multi billion, possibly hundreds of billions of dollars of capital, probably close to about a decade of construction, and only then after the construction can you start it up and start to generate power.
With a battery storage system, once it's built and approved for use, it can immediately start providing power storage. And for the cost of a few million, to a few hundred million. And again it scales basically infinitely.
There are also a few other problems, Digging a big hole and filling it with water while it sounds simple is more challenging than it would seem. You need a geologically suitable area for it, and at this point you're probably going to be flooding a dammed mountainous area anyway, so it's probably redundant. There are earth fill embankment dams, however they have issues with subsidence for example, and that tends to be rather spooky. You would experience a similar issue here, the only difference is that it's below ground, instead of above. What do you do with the removed material? What do you do if you're in an area with a lot of bedrock? You've basically just created a quarry now.
Sounds like quitter talk
shit man you got me, fuck it lets blow up a nuke in a mountain to create a pumped hydro plant.
How efficient is making hydrogen? If you don't need a huge facility, it might be easier to just store it that way, so you don't need giant lakes everywhere.
Less efficient than pumped hydro. Appears to be about 40% for green hydrogen in the round trip vs 80% for pumped hydro with a quick google search.
I am curious what's involved in the "round trip"? Do you mean to fuel other machines directly with hydrogen?
directly storing electricity as a chemical battery system is likely going to be more efficient (way more optimized and generally a lot simpler) and something like thermal energy storage (really, really simple, and very, very effective, plus pretty cheap, there just isn't much accessible tech out there at the moment, though it suffers from the same conversion problem, it's certainly a lot simpler than hydrogen.)
Energy to hydrogen back to energy, so electrolysis to a hydrogen fuel cell. I think burning hydrogen directly is even less efficient.
ok so funny problem, storing hydrogen is currently the next nobel prize. And uh, generating it while theoretically easy, is very power hungry. (less of a problem here though tbf with cheap solar power)
Also producing power from hydrogen is more complicated than you would think. You could do a hydrogen fuel cell, or possibly burn it directly, but since hydrogen tends to sort be very spicy, it's a little hard sometimes.