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by Mistletoe 1309 days ago
What kind of batteries? And that’s not rhetorical I just want to hear about large neat batteries.
2 comments

Pumped hydro is the obvious answer here, and today accounts for by far the majority of stored renewable electricity. There are geographies in Germany (natural and artificial) that can easily accommodate a lot more pumped hydro.

Second option (and also a boring one) is distributed home storage using traditional led-acid or lithium-ion batteries. This is already rolled out and can be increased to scale pretty easily.

A more exciting answer is liquid metal (or molten salt) batteries that works as large scale grid storage by heating the batteries elements (Calcium and Antimony) to very high temperature that keeps them separated while charged slowly mixing into a new liquid alloy as it discharges. You can read more about the technology here https://ambri.com/technology/ However I think before 2035 this will at best be a distant third from the two (boring) storage options above.

Pumped water storage as we have had for about a hundred years now.

I imagine something like this as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack

(but my understanding is that there are many other battery technologies in development that work too, e.g. older chemistries and/or mechanical/gravity/heat batteries)

> Pumped water storage as we have had for about a hundred years now.

Won't happen all geographically advantageous places are already taken.