| > Incorrect. First of all, utility scale power storage can be done many ways, such as pumping water up a hill in the daytime and then letting it flow back down the hill at night. This requires specific geography (natural elevation and water reservoirs that can be used for this purpose without affecting the local environment and without creating a flood risk for local residents) which is not available everywhere in the world where we would need to generate power (and if we're playing the game where every negative externality is an issue with the technology, there's also the general environmental concerns with dams). I think it's disingenuous to argue that the primary plan at the moment is not batteries -- that is where an enormous amount of time and resources are being invested, and the entire conversation about the reliability issue with renewables is usually hand-waved away with "batteries". > These are called "kinetic battery towers" or more generically "gravity batteries" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery These sound reasonable when you first hear the idea, but they're unworkable for a few reasons (wind, you don't get that much storage from each block, and if the blocks are concrete you're probably going to be net-negative when it comes to CO2 for a long time). Pumped-storage hydro is a far better solution where you can use it (with the caveats above). > When considering nuclear we're always told to look at the currently nonexistent small scale next gen advanced nuclear of the future. Then it gets compared to renewable energy technology from 15 years ago. Maybe that is what other people argue, I am not arguing that. But I do find it funny you go out of your way to talk about a technology (sodium-ion batteries) which the Wikipedia article you linked explicitly says has basically no market share and has very significant drawbacks (limited energy density and very limited recharge cycles) -- if we can't talk about non-existing nuclear technology then we also shouldn't talk about currently-non-viable battery technology. > It's either intellectually sloppy or dishonest. Either way it's bad engineering. I don't understand why you're arguing against things I am not saying. The original criticism I was responding to argued that nuclear power has many negative externalities that nobody talks about (the list even included the usage of concrete) -- my point was simply that if that is the metric you wish to use, then no form of renewable energy can be considered green (any power station immediately becomes non-green purely because it uses concrete!). My point was simply that's a ludicrous metric to use. |