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> "but muh batteries" Thanks for arguing in such bad faith by default. But let's just say there are other ways of storing energy that don't need huge amounts o
by davedx 3y ago
> "but muh batteries"
Thanks for arguing in such bad faith by default. But let's just say there are other ways of storing energy that don't need huge amounts of processed lithium.
Have you perhaps heard of "muh pumped hydro", "muh flow batteries", "muh hydrogen", and the myriad of other less mature storage technologies currently being developed?
- mrmlz 3y ago[flagged]
- davedx 3y ago[flagged]
- bluGill 3y agoThe world has already used most of the useful locations for hydro. It works well where there are abundant resources, but there are no more areas to put in hydro (even ignoring the local environmental disaster that hydro often is which means we probably wouldn't build it if it could). The locations that have and use it don't have any to spare for the rest of us to live places that are not a good location for hydro.
- Workaccount2 3y agoOk, then we can use hydrogen, or thermal storage, or non-litium chemistry batteries. The point is that there are many ways to store energy. The fact that there isn't enough lithium or not enough hydro sites doesn't change much.
- mrmlz 3y agoThe problem is scale. Since the other responder didnt want to do napkin math - you could give it a go w.r.t to hydrogen. It gets very very expensive rather quickly. So very expensive you might start to wonder if you shouldn't have built a nuclear plant instead. Local factories etc. might see a need/use for hydrogen production (Swedish Hybrit comes to mind) but as a national grid stabilizer.. I'm doubtful
- bluGill 3y agoThey all have something in common: they are very expensive at the scale we need. Hydro is one off the cheapest we have, and if you had a good location you would still be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars (or likely billions!) to build it.
- mrmlz 3y agoHaha well then, just build some more why don't ya. Fucking mong.
- _huayra_ 3y agoWhen those solutions don't wreak environmental havoc (dams [0]) or are out of the experimental stage, I'll be interested. I'm actually following Ambri for this reason [1]. Even if you go with "muh flow batteries" or "muh hydrogen", we would require far more land with wind/solar to fill up those storage technologies than just use nuclear plants. Even if I were to concede that covering every last surface with solar cells is a good idea (or what to do when recycling them), this doesn't take into account the enormous amount of energy currently used to make process heat. Neither wind nor solar are able to generate the hundreds of degrees necessary for so many chemical and manufacturing processes. Don't let yourself get bamboozled by shiny futuristic graphics of storage or generation solutions without at least doing some basic napkin math about feasibility. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... [1] https://ambri.com/ https://ambri.com/