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A very expensive battery made from a material we likely don't have enough of to scale for the world.
by merpnderp 9y ago
A very expensive battery made from a material we likely don't have enough of to scale for the world.
- yellowapple 9y agoEven that's not necessarily true; your run-of-the-mill lead-acid car battery works fine for this at small scales, and a collection of them can be good enough for household-wide use. Not the most environmentally-friendly option, but such batteries are cheap and abundant. You're right that at large scales (neighborhood-wide, city-wide, nation-wide, etc.) we don't really have the battery infrastructure in place quite yet. I'd guess that said lack of infrastructure could be resolved well before 2025, though.
- michaelsbradley 9y agoIt's not impossible that someone could make a breakthrough in Flywheel Energy Storage for domestic use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
- dredmorbius 9y agoModelling energy densities and costs tends to suggest that's not a viable option. Flywheel energy storage is useful as a substitute for spinning reserve (that is, the inertial mass of extand thermal generation turbines), but other than serving to dampen grid fluctuations, it's not good for more than a few minutes', perhaps at the outside a few hours', storage.
- Tade0 9y agoThere's so much lithium in the earth's oceans that if you manufactured batteries out of it would be enough to store 50 years worth of the world's electricity consumption.