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.
5
10
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.
3
4
20
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.
2
11
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
2
3
why is BTM better?
(does it escape all the regulatory incentive weirdness associated with having your customer be a power company?)
1
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.
Also something bothers me about the solution being yet another centralized aggregation of storage type solution. In many process industries there are important "efficiencies of concentration" that I'm not sure exist in electric storage.
2
1
Which is also why I like ideas like using the idle EV fleet as a grid storage mode. Just park all the unused teslas plugged in.
2
Show replies

