Was thinking of it more as an urban/industrial thing. Makes sense if you have to do power storage with this technology to do a lot of it at the street level if

Was thinking of it more as an urban/industrial thing. Makes sense if you have to do power storage with this technology to do a lot of it at the street level if you can, rather than on the power generation site, as it gives you multiple redundancy and you have to supply cities with water anyway. So when you have excess electrical power you dry pellets. When you want power you give them water vapour which then gives you heat, which can give you motive power from heat engines, and from that electricity from induction generators. All three of which are needed in a typical urban environment, so you are not having to convert all the way back to electric for a large percentage of the power used. Now I know that this is not by any stretch the most thermodynamically efficient arrangement, but I suspect that it could be a relatively cheap and very robust approach that could store a hell of a lot of energy in a widely distributed network. [edit] looked into this a bit, and the temperature rise you tend to be able to achieve from adsorption in zeolite is not going to be enough to do anything much more than direct heating, from what I can find. On reflection, that should have been fairly obvious. Sulk. ;) http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~yuen/references/ref-2.pdf http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~yuen/references/ref-2.pdf