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Batteries for Large Stores of Power Just Don’t Work
I am just going to say it:
Batteries are one of the most inferior ways to store large amounts of energy that we have. The best stores of energy are hydrocarbons. A gallon of gas is lighter than batteries for the power it holds. It is easier to transport than batteries are. It is less toxic to the environment when burned than to dispose of Lithium batteries. It is far easier to “Recharge” a car with this store of energy. And finally, the energy for batteries almost all comes from transfer of hydrocarbon energy into the battery, which means it is even more energy intensive to move around.
Granted, you can transmit power through existing infrastructure and gas has to be put in a truck, and that truck burns hydrocarbons to move hydrocarbons. But, batteries won’t give you power when off the grid, and trying to use solar to give you adequate power in most cases is not going to work. Hydrocarbons bring you power on the spot, anywhere, anytime.
Batteries for large stores of power just don’t work.
Published in General
Just discussing this with the husband the other day. At this point, I don’t think you can provide ‘regular’ energy through solar, wind. The storage and transportation don’t work or use more energy than is ‘saved.’ Individual use of solar and wind might work and help with limiting pollution (not carbon). I’m thinking of the road signs using solar panels or small windmills that would run your outdoor house lights or something like that. Trying to force wind and solar to provide big power doesn’t seem viable to me.
Exactly. Solar to keep a street light on, maybe. The little lights the person next door used to have did not last the whole night, but maybe that is enough. Most people do walk up your path to the front door at 2am.
Here in Georgia, we have Carter’s Lake. Great place for recreation. We take the Scouts and canoe out to a “island” (really a peninsula, but you don’t have any land access to it) and set up camp. Great fun. However, you have to really drag the boats up the bank, because at night, when the power demands are low, they pump water back up from below the damn and fill up the lake by several feet more. Then, during the day, the hydroelectric damn generates more power at peak times. The lake is a big “battery”. I have no idea how efficient this is, but seems darn clever to me.
Scalability and dependence on weather conditions are big issues when addressing other than hydrocarbon sources. Wind and solar are destructive of vast amounts of surface land or water and are dependent on ideal weather conditions for effectiveness. Too many question marks.
Whatever happened to tidal power? Ought to be reliable and inexhaustible.
Takes up beachfront. NIMBYs don’t want it.
And storms/hurricanes/typhoons never happen.
I remember that, too.
What is wrong with dams for water and electricity? Supposedly, the Sierra Nevada could have five more dams.
See”Environmental Impact Study, Endless Red Tape”
Like wind power the generation location is too far from the usage location. Texas has lots of wind, but the people don’t live in the windy areas and tens of billions are spent putting in lossy transmission lines for hundreds of miles. Fossil fuels are great, because they give you power on-demand and where it is needed. You can put a combined cycle nat gas turbine in any neighborhood without NIMBY problems. Try putting a 500 foot windmill in a bedroom community.
I forget how to look this up, but Victor Davis Hanson had a brutal discussion about California in this sense. It was 40 minutes long. It was probably the best podcast I have ever heard. It was one of his old networks, I forget, I think one was Hoover and I can’t remember what the other one was, maybe it was ricochet.
I literally had a Democrat electrical engineer shoot me an article from NPR saying this isn’t true. I’ve decided I can’t win every policy argument on this topic on Twitter anymore. They have too much propaganda working for them.
A long time ago, I heard a physicist explain why wind was so bad. It was just math.
I think dispersed solar is OK. Solar on individual buildings. I think it works south of Oklahoma City. The problem is if we start using compact nukes like we should, nobody needs no damn solar anymore.
Energy policy for the left has long since abandon the physics aspect of assessing what trade offs are best between availability and costs.
It has become a matter of religion for them.
I’m not a scientist, but it seems to me that any energy storage system that relies on a chemical reaction (batteries) is inherently inefficient.
If we had energy storage systems like huge capacitors, that would be far better.
We don’t And imagine what a, um, spontaneous discharge would look like?
One nice thing about hydrocarbon storage is that is relatively safe. Yes gas burns (well its fumes burn) and it can start fires and even explode. But, unlike Li+ batteries, a gas fire can be put out.
Of course, the most dense form of energy storage we have is the most safe and produces the least amount of pollution.
@T_Extinguishers
http://www.tyreextinguishers.com
Website owners should be prosecuted.
Also, slashing ties should be a felony with mandatory year.
The issue is how would you stop them? If anybody walked up and started deflating your tire any action you take would be considered assault, battery or some other thing that will leave you with a criminal record. We have fetishised Leftist protest to the point they can do no wrong.
This might be it https://ricochet.com/podcast/the-classicist/california-at-dusk/
I think this is the other one but not the one I primarily had in mind.
Same with offshore wind turbines. They ruin the beautiful ocean views.
And the inland rubes where most of the turbines are located don’t count.
The Climatists are trying to have our plentiful hydro dams in the Northwest destroyed so we can return to pristine Nature.
I believe you’re allowed to take action to stop property damage. The question is, how much?
The wind turbines on land ruin the views too. When we were driving back from out west, the beautiful fruited plains had their vistas marred by the presence of those huge stuctures.
It’s about salmon runs in the northwest.
Offshore wind is a maintenance disaster. Seawater is harsh too.
No, any wind or solar is bad for the grid.
The issue is not where the power is produced versus consumed, but when is the power produced versus consumed.
The grid doesn’t store energy for more than a fraction of a second. Power into the grid has to match power consumed from the grid every second of every day. Nukes and combustion-based generators can throttle up and down during the day to follow consumption. As can hydro. Wind and solar cannot. They are fundamentally destabilizing to the grid and can never match a day’s consumption pattern.
Just say no to wind and solar on the grid.
Right. I did not mean feeding it back into the grid. I just saw a really good article about this.