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I guess every ship is shipping electrons right? I don't think you can call storing chemical potential energy 'electrons'. This is an interesting concept - I gu

• anamexis 3y ago
  Electric cars don't transport energy, they transport people.
  • ALittleLight 3y ago
    They do both. Imagine driving to pick up someone who charges their phone in your car.
    • jxf 3y ago
      But that's not unique to an electric car, and that's also not fundamentally different than if the passenger were 2 kg heavier.
      • ALittleLight 3y ago
        Nobody said it was unique to an electric car. If you put a giant battery in the back of a gasoline powered truck and drove it to your friends house, you could say you were transporting energy. Or if you put a tank of gas for that matter. Seems very similar.
• jsnell 3y ago
  > I guess if electric cars make sense then this also makes sense for transporting energy? I don't see how that follows. The point of a electric car isn't to transport the electricity, it's to transport matter. There's no shortcut here: the only realistic way (short of Star Trek transporter beams) we can get the cargo from point A to point B is by physically moving it. In contrast, we already have other ways to transport energy which work quite well. It's hard to see how this absurd concept could possibly be competitive with them.
  • Null-Set 3y ago
    You can put matter on grid powered trains instead of battery powered self propelled vehicles.
  • trashtester 3y ago
    I'm sure there are edge cases where putting batteries in ships can make sense. Let's assume the following is true: 1) Two islands exist relatively close to each other. 2) Both have enough wind power to meet demand on windy days. 3) Deep waters, strong tidal currents, tsunami risk or some combination make power lines between the islands somewhat expensive or unreliable. 4) Battery storage is required to meet demand on days with little wind. 5) Storing these batteries on ships is not significantly more expensive than storing the batteries on land. (Maybe real estate prices are high, regulations are stricter on land, etc.) In such a case, it may be more economical to move the ship holding the batteries than to set up cables intended just for low wind periods. And if there are many islands involved, an ecosystem of ships may scale better than cables, for instance if demand is seasonal or varies for other reasons. Basically, these are similar reasons to why LNG regasification ships exist, instead of just building fixed land-based facilites where needed.
• adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  Tangentially, the book The Vital Question is fascinating: it explains how life on earth is basically just proton-moving machines with flair (and how such machines could have come to evolve in the first place).
  • morkalork 3y ago
    Every living thing is just trying to tap into the great waterfall of entropy to spin their wheel for the little time they can.
    • iancmceachern 3y ago
      We're all little water wheels on the river of time
• NickM 3y ago
  I think most people just don’t realize that when you charge a battery you’re not literally just filling it up with electrons.
  • colechristensen 3y ago
    You are not. When you charge a battery you are pushing electrons from one chamber in the battery to another. A discharged battery is like two tanks of water at equal levels, charging is like pumping water from one to the other so one has a higher level and thus potential energy.
  • usrusr 3y ago
    My guess would be that pretty much everybody knows that this mental model is wrong, which is why the author considered it appropriate to jokingly play naive, because just calling it "bizarre" felt too weak.
• nrp 3y ago
  On your first point, ‘electrons’ is an example of synecdoche: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche