3 ms·
Batteries are just straight amazing, aren't they? Every other solution is just so complicated. Like pumped storage. You run power to a powerful electric pump, w
by thehappypm 6y ago
Batteries are just straight amazing, aren't they? Every other solution is just so complicated. Like pumped storage. You run power to a powerful electric pump, which moves water into a huge reservoir, which produces power through a hydro plant. Or a flywheel. You run electricity to a motor, which spins a huge piece of levitated metal, which then can run a generator.
A battery is an inert block you send electricity directly into and get electricity directly out of. It's quite literally a black box of electrical energy storage.
No other solution is ever going to be quite that simple -- electricity in, electricity out. There's always some other complexity, some other mechanism, some other pump, some shielding, some motor.
- outworlder 6y agoCapacitors are even simpler. Even supercapacitors cannot compete with old battery chemistries, but it really doesn't get much simpler than storing electrons in conductive material.
- jfengel 6y agoI'm used to thinking of chemistry as a one-way street. The "moving parts" of chemistry are untold gazillions of molecules. That introduces a lot of opportunities for entropy, and makes it very hard to reverse a chemical reaction at anywhere near the efficiency of the forward reaction. But modern battery chemistry upends that intuition. I'll be honest that I'm not 100% certain how. Whatever it is, it works unbelievably well.