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Wind? Solar? Hydro? Tide? Geothermal?
by DFHippie 3y ago
Wind? Solar? Hydro? Tide? Geothermal?
- bejebus8 3y ago[flagged]
- DFHippie 3y agoAnd that balance is changing.
- bejebus8 3y agoIt is a little bit for a bunch of reasons, but how does improving battery storage change the generation mix?
- macintux 3y agoNot an expert, but the biggest downside from renewables seems to be the swings in production. Solar is obviously not useful at night. Wind comes and goes. Batteries and other forms of energy storage to normalize distribution are more important for renewables than fossil fuels.
- speedgoose 3y agoBatteries can also help to handle peak demand.
- smaudet 3y agoIndeed. Assuming you have a sustainable source, the next most important thing is distribution and storage. The cleanest candidate (Hydrogen-from-electrolysis) suffers from storage and distribution issues. These can be overcome, but at high cost. The easiest (batteries) suffer from a combination of storage and distribution issues (heavy batteries have to be transported, you can't pipe them around, energy grids have power transmission costs/depend on batteries to work, an ouroborian problem) as well as toxicity issues. Given that batteries cannot indefinitely become cheaper, and likely that demand will outpace supply, clean hydrogen, not batteries, seem the logical ultimate choice.
- smaudet 3y agoThe bigger issue with "battery" technology is that it is unsustainable/toxic. https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/poison/dry-cell-battery-poisoning https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/poison/dry-cell-ba... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01735-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01735-z Fossil fuels are OFC also toxic, I'm not advocating for indefinite use of those either.