[elbrodeur]

There are serious hurdles to decoupling ourselves from coal, but none of them are insurmountable. At least not hypothetically. :)

One interesting idea I've heard in regards to storing electricity is using electric cars as batteries. Granted, this would require a massive retooling of our grid and our transportation system -- not to mention the question of where we will find all the resources to make so many batteries -- but it's still interesting.

What's troubling to me is all the sensationalism surrounding nuclear, which seems to suffer from lots of near-religious objections. Nuclear is dangerous but even in the worst scenarios (like the Fukushima Daiichi plant) the damage is far less onerous than the continued operation of coal plants.

[xal]

all the batteries that we have ever build combined cannot store 10 minutes of the electricity that we currently use. We need order of magnitude breakthrough with batteries first.

[bobo888]

Usually a hydro power plant is used as a "battery". When the demand is low, the electricity produced by wind/solar power plants is used to pump the water uphill. When the demand is high, the hydro power plant releases that water to produce energy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_hydro

[Luyt]

That works in Norway, but would it work all over the globe?

[jbm]

They do it in Japan, and I think they do it in Quebec. Don't quote me on the second one.

They had to have rotating power outages for a week or two in Japan after the earthquake because of the need to replenish those reserves.

[rosser]

An article posted to HN some time back:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1708167/how-to-make-lithium-batte...

Discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986640

Summary: Infusing Li-based batteries with the Tobacco Mosaic virus could boost their storage capacity up to 10x. There's one order of magnitude...