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by 8bitsrule
902 days ago
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>Storage and demand shaping infrastructure will catch up Storage in particular could be MUCH cheaper. (And still be centralized to conserve public-utility oversight and dangers from all those saboteurs out there somewhere.) Battery storage is VERY expensive and hard on the environment. I continue to see little attention being paid to merely simple gravity storage. Yes, traditional large-scale pumped hydro exists (usually using expensive turbines to pump water uphill, like the plants used in the UK for decades to get past tea-time. There are many more in the U.S.) They're usually expensive (good for getting tax-payer dollars into constructor pockets) ... time-consuming as well ... and need a hill for a reservoir and a water-source. (Of course we have -all the time in the world- right?) But on a large scale, electricity can also be stored much more simply and economically by moving VERY heavy weights uphill ... or lifting VERY heavy weights out of a hole. Already existing and proven steel cables can lift 'barrels' containing hundreds or thousands of tons of (very cheap) rocks. Construction times and $/MW cost savings over high-tech 'solutions'? might be 10-1000 times lower. |
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