Manhattan Contrarian ping
Good batteries-could it happen?
“Battery Storage For Grid Backup”
Hint: They have four wheels and a license is needed to drive one on a public road.
The best battery backup for wind and solar is a nuclear reactor.
Loads can be cut by cutting off water heaters.
Houses can have zoned HVAC. Zones can be isolated to reduce grid load.
Power plants might be placed in a forest and the forest used to suck up the CO2 and supply fuel.
The copper canisters will have steel inserts. They are five metres long and one single capsule will weigh about 25 tons when it is filled with spent fuel. The outer casing consists of five-centimetre-thick copper.
The sealed copper canisters will then be placed in a system of tunnels about 500 metres deep in the solid bedrock. Here they will be embedded in Bentonite clay.
This clay will act as a buffer and protect the canister from corrosion and minor movements in the bedrock. The clay buffer will gradually absorb water and swell to fill the space around it and any cracks in the rock.
https://skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repository/our-methodology/
Energy is — guess what — energetic. It resents being stored and will misbehave the first chance it gets. That’s why man-made storage batteries with high energy density can fail so spectacularly.
That’s also why fossil fuels are such a sweet deal, because confining energy is an expensive — and dicey — proposition. But in the case of fossil fuels, nature already has done the heavy lifting, converting fusion power transmitted from the sun into an energy-dense and relatively stable fuel. And it’s just lying there under the ground, waiting to be dug out.
All these piece-meal measures are intermittent at best and can’t supply energy with a density or cost-effectiveness to compare with nuclear. If we’re going to abandon fossil fuels wholesale, there’s nothing available except nuclear, supplemented by hydroelectric, that will allow our population to continue to grow and all of us to have a 21st-Century lifestyle. Spending on solar or wind or storage batteries for either does nothing but waste time and resources that were better spent on expanding nuclear and funding fusion research.
I like the water tower battery. Pump water to a high tower during excess generation and release it through fly wheels during down times.
Review
We’re about to hit our summer weather here in So Cal - temps common above 95 for the next few months, saw 102 in the near forecast.
Waiting for the warning texts from my city about NOT plugging in EVs and/or “large appliances” because the grid is over-capacity due to all the a/c’s.
We are looking at buying solar panels. My brother installed solar panels that heat his pools and Jacuzzi and run his a/c.
It’s stupid when we have thousands of years of natural gas in da Earf.
Not acknowledging this make the article moot.
Far better than trying to use inefficient batteries to make up for the fickle generation of solar and wind would be using the new small scale nuclear plants. They can supply power as needed without the need for trying to store energy. The resources needed to build batteries able to power even a small city are enormous and the inherent power loss in battery storage makes them impractical.
Battery tech is crap.
Day after day, day after day
We slept no breath nor motion.
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.