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It's going to be tough to beat pumped water and thermal storage: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/03/electricity-storage http://www.economist.com/blo

• marcosdumay 11y ago
  What I don't get is why there's so little work on open flow batteries. Those should also scale with the size of your tank, but you'll need much smaller tanks. But well, last time I looked at plugging anything into the grid, the inverting hardware was the cost bottleneck, so maybe that's why. I just don't really know it anymore.
  • oconnore 11y ago
    There seems to be plenty of research, but making them economical seems quite complicated, and they don't have the density for mobile applications. The baseline for grid scale storage is pumping water up a hill. That's pretty tough to beat.
• afarrell 11y ago
  The problem with pumped hydro is that you need a suitable mountain to do it at a large scale. Those are rare and found mostly outside cities. Does it work at the scale of a water tower?
  • oconnore 11y ago
    Yeah, pumped water doesn't work everywhere. I think the water tower wouldn't be economical. The article I linked provides an existing alternative that doesn't require special geography.