Excellent roundup of grid-scale energy storage solutions by
Conversation
Lithium chemistry seems like a bad solution at scale. Green hydrogen seems cleanest overall but it can… explode I guess.
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Pumped hydro takes up too much room, but I’m intrigued by the railroad car systems (not yet covered by Sarah). Rocks are ~3x the density of water. Steel is ~8x. So on average a railroad car filled with rocks can replace an elevated lake of 5x the volume.
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I think dynamic balancing (eg German wind + Spanish solar in European super grid) as opposed to local baseload substitution will be a big deal. Baseload is a bad mental model unless you’re running a lot of steady heavy industry. In which case nuclear is the best substitute.
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In consumer and office type load environments I think BTM storage is better than grid-scale. Manage variability at last mile rather than collocated with generation.
I suspect has good thoughts on all this
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I'm hoping that grid-scale liquid-metal batteries will work out, and leave lithium for the electrification of transportation (which makes much more sense), and that more electricity production will come from nuclear (the best source that we're under-using the most).
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Here's MIT prof Donald Sadoway on liquid-metal batteries:
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Hydrogen is not as dangerous as petrol. it does not explode. When it meets oxygen it becomes water,,heat is released. That reaction is easily controlled. We are working on myths about hydrogen because we have failed to look carefully at the reality that this biosphere has oxygen
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At scale, we don’t care about the weight of lithium (unlike phones).
Seems like latching onto existing manufacturing tech rather than starting with a better solution to the problem?




