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
why is BTM better?
(does it escape all the regulatory incentive weirdness associated with having your customer be a power company?)
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More flexibility in responding to local demand load patterns at block or building level. The basic duck-curve load shaping stuff at grid scale is responding to aggregate load shapes. Those are not immutable.
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Material science is getting ever closer to usable superconductors. A usable, room temp, super conductor that can scale for mass production would change everything.


