3 ms·

I'm thinking more in terms of availability, cost, volume and portability. I might be wrong but wouldn't a oil tanker full of diesel fuel contain a great deal mo

I'm thinking more in terms of availability, cost, volume and portability. I might be wrong but wouldn't a oil tanker full of diesel fuel contain a great deal more potential energy than the same volume of the best battery cell we can produce for this purpose?

cinquemb 9y ago
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14668163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14668163 Long term wise, there is more energy that we can collect store and extract from CSP technologies compared to oil (and lng/coal/etc on the grid/plant level), without all the exposure to market risks being exposed to oil (ie. volatility [0]). http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart[0] http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-char...
Dylan16807 9y ago
Storage doesn't much care about volume and portability; batteries are good enough. Availability is important for pumped storage, but after that everything scores pretty similarly. So you're left with cost dominating the equation, along with the lesser factor of round-trip efficiency. And it costs a lot of money to store excess energy as hydrocarbons.