Four ways to stop Australia's surge in rooftop solar from destabilising electricity prices

“Ok, switching gears and going along with you premise...We are still moving cargo/freight the same exact way we have since the covered wagon”

Interesting timing. Just today a group of former SpaceX engineers announced a new company that aims to revolutionize cargo.

https://moveparallel.com/

The plan is autonomous, battery powered, single car freight wagons. We have a lot of factories that are still next to rail lines even if they don’t use them. A solution like this could be very useful.

The motion is not “perpetual”. The weight is driven up through electricity generated by solar panels.

And how do get the power to the rest of the world not to mention terrorists destroying the solar systems.
Solar power satellites make better sense.

The weights and the flywheels would need to be massive. One horsepower is 3300 foot pounds per minute. That means a 3300 pound weight would produce one horsepower as it descended one foot over an interval of one minute. That would 746 watts. Half a day is 720 minutes, so the tower would need to be 720 feet tall to get just 746 watts. Of course, if you wanted a 25 foot tower you'd need a 99,000 pound weight. (50 tons) Increase the whole thing again if you want more power.

The entire world would be given over to weights and towers.

Solar to liquid energy carriers such as ammonia which has a higher density of hydrogen per gallon than liquid hydrogen without needing to be at nearly absolute zero to be liquid. Ammonia stores like propane at 100psi it is liquid you can make ammonia from nitrogen in the air and water salt water at that. You could also make any number of synthetic fuels using captured carbon from the air or seawater both technologies have been done already and the Germans figured out in WWII how to make liquids from carbon dioxide/monoxide and hydrogen gas. You could also refine any number of metals that have bi or tri valent states zinc,aluminium,iron would be the first choices all are trivalent and carry more energy per lb than hydrocarbons metal to air fuel cells have the highest energy density of any known means of energy storage more than gasoline or diesel particularly aluminum it’s almost double the energy density per lb. There are deserts on each continent over distances less than 2000 miles it’s more efficient and cheaper to just use HVDC transmission lines at 500,000 volts the losses are a few percent over two thousand miles and HVDC are rated in the multi gigawatts already used to send power under the oceans from Sweden to Denmark, Norway to the UK it would be just as easy to cross the Strait of Gibraltar with cables carrying Saharan power to the EU , you could also go directly from Tunisia to Italy that’s a doable distance for HVDC. in the USA HVDC could take power from the desert southwest all the way to Canada if.it needed too with a few percentage loss by the gigawatts a 6 wire HVDC tower carries 3 full circuits in bipolar mode each can be 5 gigawatts going to unipolar that’s 6 circuits at 5 gigawatts each and that’s just one normal sized transmission tower I have seen power corridor with double or triple 6 wire towers in the right of way they are currently HVAC at 400,000 volts with triple phase AC at 60 Hz but you can retrofit HVDC at each ends to massively increase the power flows and not worry about reactive power or inductive losses.

It’s not if humans go solar it when and how fast we get there. 8+ billion people cannot live at USA standards of living energy consumption rates with the resources this planet has using only fossil fuels. China added 500 MILLION to the middle class in less than a decade and will add another 500 in a decade or so India is also adding 500 million to their middle class and Africa also is growing as people modernize their energy consumption skyrockets there is simply no way to fuel that with fossil fuels even burning every bit of coal everywhere won’t cover it and the ash piles and air pollution with sulfur dioxide, Mercury, and particulates even with the best scrubbers would be an environmental catastrophe. Coal is best left in the dust bin of history there is no economical way to clean it’s emissions up to the level demanded by modern society even with hundreds of millions of dollars in scrubbers a coal plant still emits 10% of the Mercury in its coal which is measured by the tons per year in stack emissions, 5% of its sulfur get past the scrubbers and into the rain. Coal will never be as clean as gas it’s ten to 100 times dirtier even with scrubbers. There is a reason the Chinese are adding 150 new nukes it’s to replace all the coal plants they hastily built they plan to use the same turbines just replace the boilers with reactors on the existing brownfield sites. Even the chicoms know it’s killing their air and as people move to the middle class they demand cleaner air.

The only power source on the planet that can sustain 10 billion people with middle class energy consumption is solar that’s simple math fossil fuels will be depleted on 40 years or less with a middle class in the 2 billion range let alone the other 8 demanding industrialization and middle class standards of living. If all 10 start using resources fossil fuels go in less than a generation the bidding wars and shooting wars will be apocalyptic as humanity fights and scrambles for the last drops of oil and lumps of coal. The sooner we as a species move to the unlimited amounts of power our local star dumps on the planet the better off we will be. Oil should be reserved for petrochemicals and viewed as a precious resource that took our planet millions of years to accumulate . It’s should be seen as a gift from God not to be burnt to the sky spending it like drunken sailors. We should use it to boot strap into a solar powered world that will never run out of power for 5 billion years not running through our precious resource in under 250. Oil makes a small few very rich and concentrates that wealth in the hands of dictators,Middle East zellots,corrupt politicians and their business cronies in the west, the whole system is a giant ponzi scheme with a race to the bottom which is coming regardless of shale oil and gas that bought a few decades at most less with the giant middle classes of Asia and India and soon to be Africa all sucking the same straw.

Bulk energy storage is the future, there are a half dozen technologies that are capable of storing multiple gigawatts of power. Pumped hydro,thermal energy storage,liquid flow batteries,molten silicon, molten metal batteries.

Look up thread MIT has two technologies that can store for weeks multiple gigawatts. Bill Gates is funding one of them. He is also funding the first generation four nuclear reactor in the USA which will also have on site energy storage to not only load follow but also boost it’s output doubling it for a peaker plant role as well.

The smart way is to over build cheap solar 3x to 4x then store it right next to the panels and release it at a constant rate 24/7 this maximises the power line usage as well since they are designed to be run flat out at their max rating 24/7 it’s a myth powerlines need to cool down at night they are designed for a load point in the daytime under full solar illumination at STP only during abnormally high heat waves do you lower the total capacity that’s an environmental factor and not all that common in most of the world. If heat is forecast to be an issue in the future you increase the conductor size to compensate for higher than standard temps adding a percentage of increased costs but the payback is increased power flows which generate additional revenues.