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If we are heating with electricity and cannot use gas storage to make up for the seasons, chemical batteries are nowhere near price effective, or even physicall
by brnt 2y ago
If we are heating with electricity and cannot use gas storage to make up for the seasons, chemical batteries are nowhere near price effective, or even physically or projected to be available.
You can find out how much energy Europe stores in gas fields to get through the winter. You can divide that number by what you think is a reasonable sCOP for your heat pump. That number you can put next to total battery capacity ever produced, and I'll even let you add any other convertible energy storage capacity. You will find a gap off by orders of magnitude, and powerwalls in every home are not going to cover it. As you said, they'll cover a day, maybe a few, which leaves us 3 months short in the season where we have virtually no home solar.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoOf course burning that gas to generate electricity for use in heat pumps would get you the same heat for half the gas even before you include any wind power (or hydro etc.) That then doubles your storage for gas that you may or may not need to burn depending on the weather. So really the path to fully renewable just goes through a series of win-wins on the journey to fully phase out fossil fuels.
- brnt 2y agoSure, switching to heat pumps doubles (probably triples) your storage, or, cut the storage energy in the form of gas by 66%. But, I thought we were discussing decarbonzing the storage too. Looking at that amount of energy, (chemical) electrical storage isn't even in the right ballpark yet. And other forms neither.