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Oh, sure. There are all sorts of interesting ways to cache energy, besides batteries - hydro, gravity, compressed air, thermal, etc. Price, scale, and local con

by beat 8y ago

Oh, sure. There are all sorts of interesting ways to cache energy, besides batteries - hydro, gravity, compressed air, thermal, etc. Price, scale, and local constraints should create a rich market for a wide variety of solutions. (As an aside, a sufficiently large hydro storage is its own regulatory problem.)

bilbo0s 8y ago
>(As an aside, a sufficiently large hydro storage is its own regulatory problem.) ... Yeah, but as I said in the comment, those regulatory issues are far less onerous than the regulatory issues with building a nuclear power plant. So the investment is less, the maintenance costs less, the kwh is less, and the time to market is less. Which technology do you think the big finance guys are gonna put their money into? If you want money to go into nuclear plants, government has to agree to shoulder a lot of the risk. But there's drawbacks there too so... yeah, just a hard problem.
- beat 8y ago
  That's why I think we'll see a lot of small-scale distributed storage, rather than giant industrial storage plants that match our current concept of the power grid. If you're running, say, a big box store, buying your own local storage for the store can make economic sense if it can pay for itself by buying dynamically priced energy. And then it doesn't need to be huge, because it's not trying to power a city, it's just trying to power your warehouse/store. A block of batteries, or a thermal system, or a water tower starts looking pretty attractive financially.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    I agree. A lot of these storage solutions are starting to be so cheap that it's not hard to see different sorts of players investing in them. The benefit being, as you rightly point out, distributed storage. Such systems are "no-brainers" for entities like, say, hospitals.
    - beat 8y ago
      As I mentioned elsewhere, electric cars turn into pretty good storage systems, too. And with a smart distributed grid, it's not just storage that makes sense locally - it's generation. Put a solar roof on the big box store, attach a storage system, and have a mostly self-sufficient system. And if it's generating surplus, sell it! Buy only when it's needed. Meanwhile, poor developing nations or rural areas that don't have the capital or the chops to build giant nuclear plants can easily invest in very small scale projects. Go to some remote village, put up a wind turbine and a compressed air tank you can just bring in on a truck. Now that village has power! It may not be as financially efficient long-term, but by increasing the potential productivity of remote areas, it can pay for itself easily at the local level. It's an exciting thing to see.

by beat 8y ago

bilbo0s 8y ago

>(As an aside, a sufficiently large hydro storage is its own regulatory problem.) ... Yeah, but as I said in the comment, those regulatory issues are far less onerous than the regulatory issues with building a nuclear power plant. So the investment is less, the maintenance costs less, the kwh is less, and the time to market is less. Which technology do you think the big finance guys are gonna put their money into? If you want money to go into nuclear plants, government has to agree to shoulder a lot of the risk. But there's drawbacks there too so... yeah, just a hard problem.

beat 8y ago
That's why I think we'll see a lot of small-scale distributed storage, rather than giant industrial storage plants that match our current concept of the power grid. If you're running, say, a big box store, buying your own local storage for the store can make economic sense if it can pay for itself by buying dynamically priced energy. And then it doesn't need to be huge, because it's not trying to power a city, it's just trying to power your warehouse/store. A block of batteries, or a thermal system, or a water tower starts looking pretty attractive financially.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I agree. A lot of these storage solutions are starting to be so cheap that it's not hard to see different sorts of players investing in them. The benefit being, as you rightly point out, distributed storage. Such systems are "no-brainers" for entities like, say, hospitals.
  - beat 8y ago
    As I mentioned elsewhere, electric cars turn into pretty good storage systems, too. And with a smart distributed grid, it's not just storage that makes sense locally - it's generation. Put a solar roof on the big box store, attach a storage system, and have a mostly self-sufficient system. And if it's generating surplus, sell it! Buy only when it's needed. Meanwhile, poor developing nations or rural areas that don't have the capital or the chops to build giant nuclear plants can easily invest in very small scale projects. Go to some remote village, put up a wind turbine and a compressed air tank you can just bring in on a truck. Now that village has power! It may not be as financially efficient long-term, but by increasing the potential productivity of remote areas, it can pay for itself easily at the local level. It's an exciting thing to see.