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everyone on hackernews knows this stuff. yet every renewable posts gets these "but there is no sun at night" posts to the top. build large scale energy storage

• PuffinBlue 8y ago
  Won't even be that hard I think, or less hard than we imagine. Electric vehicles will bring widespread distributed storage 'organically'. At least in the UK the National Grid is doing a huge amount of work to prepare for this[0]. There is also work to install large battery installations commercially in public EV charging areas and National Grid sub-stations[1] - first ten multi-dozen MWh installations should be ready Q2 2019. So, for instance, installing MWh of battery capacity at (lets say) a current Fuel Station and that is constantly trickle charged at say 350KW from the grid, then discharge that to cars at super high rates - smoothing out delivery to EV's but having the added benefit of acting like a distributed storage system in periods of lower use (say at night) when things like wind generate surplus. This specific example isn't covered in the videos linked but the installations at sub-stations are. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLE2SrDNPZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLE2SrDNPZc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUlaDbckmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUlaDbckmo