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> 1. Make them huge That more or less puts it out of reach for homeowners, condo dwellers, etc. You need a big expensive coordinated project to get that built.
by kardos 7y ago
> 1. Make them huge
That more or less puts it out of reach for homeowners, condo dwellers, etc. You need a big expensive coordinated project to get that built.
Meanwhile, as an analogy, solar panels are within reach for a homeowner. Seasonal thermal storage will need to be more modular / modest sized for it to be widely applied. The potential for storing heat by forcing endothermic reactions (where you later extract it by running the reaction in reverse) has a lot more potential to be "homeowner sized".
- dredmorbius 7y agoMany though not all passive energy designs do require a substantial ground-up redesign. The notion that single standardised designs can be spread across continents without consideration for local conditions will likely pass. Retrofits are possible, though with compromises to both extant structures and building envelope and passive energy systems. Since efficiency of storage scales with size, community-based (neighbourhood-scale) thermal storage is an option. This allocates storage across a number of local structures, at the scale of tens to hundreds of structures per storage structure. Similar notions apply to electrical storage, e.g., neighbourhood battery facilities. This works well for battery designs (e.g., liquid metal, molten salt), which are too technical and risky for safe household deployments, but could be deployed in clustered units with dedicated technical expertise.
- undreren 7y agoThey are not supposed to be located at homeowners, and in Denmark we already (mostly) have the infrastructure to support it.