this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Theres tons of ways that people with even a little brains could figure out, the problem is often cost or feasability.
A big burried water tank in my yard could be heated during the day and used to warm the house via underfloor heating at night, could do the reverse with chilled water in the middle of summer plumbed to an air recirculator with a heat exchanger. Its really simple engineering but expensive to implement.
I think an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems, not the fundamentals.
Sheer scale is why we're in this mess to begin with. Coal power for a population of 50M people living on either side of the Atlantic isn't what caused climate change. It's the scale up to provide power for 8B people that's broiling the planet.
"Ah, but you don't understand! There will be engineering obstacles to upgrading the grid!" is shit you can say when you aren't spending billions to maintain the existing fossil fuel infrastructure that's currently in place.
We have the capacity to reorient our economy around a predictable daily regionally glut of solar electricity. We already exploit time variable ecological events to optimize consumption. And we built out a global grid 40 years ago to handle logistics at this scale. You can move electricity from coast to coast and we routinely do. This isn't an impossible problem, it's just one that Western financial centers in particular don't want to invest in solving.
It’s always economics.
There’s a joke I’ve heard that says something like anybody can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build one that just barely stands (i.e., one where the materials and labor actually cost money).
That also reminds me of my first router - it was my PC. 10x the cost and 1/10 the features of a purpose built router, but I already had the computer and just needed to provide internet to 1 or 2 more via Ethernet.
Likewise, it’s easy to design energy storage concepts of all kinds. It’s a lot more tricky if you want it to be economically viable and see mass adoption.
A lot of energy storage solutions do exactly that - use heat as energy. i.e. solar heads rock, sand, salt etc. and then later on that heat is turned back into useful energy - either pumping water around households to heat them, or to drive a steam turbine. The bigger the volume of rock / sand / salt, the more efficient the process is.
I think salt would be easier than water, mostly due to water expansion characteristics, but that's just my opinion.
Oh yeah,I'm no expert. I can see salt being problematic if the system sprung leaks and contaminated the soil which wouldnt be uncommon once you have tens of thousands of houses rigged up. Im pretty sure most water based systems just use water and antifreeze.
Point is that the fundamentals are simple, when theres excess electricity and nobody is home convert it into stored thermal energy that can be used later when people are home, the devils will be in the details.
Viable solutions with sand or rock have been developed and I expect over the next few decades a large number of such projects will be produced.
The sand silo heating projects that I've read about are used to feed the excess energy from electricity to central heating. The heat can be stored for months, but converting it back to electricity wouldn't be very efficient. It's "only" viable in places with district heating.
There are other power-to-x technologies out there, like splitting water to hydrogen and oxygen, and these are all good ways to use excess energy, but they won't help on stabilizing the electricity production. Hopefully these technologies can create enough demand for electricity that the prices will always be worth it for the producers, so they can begin (over)producing enough renewable energy to cover the baseload at all times.
The gas production in early 1900s sort of did the same. The gas was produced for heating and light, but the byproducts of gas production lead to all kinds of other very cheap chemicals and products. Similarly we need to think of excess electricity as a very cheap byproduct and invent uses for it, instead of attempting to "balance" it.
In my opinion, this shows why privatization of electricity production is an obstruction. It would have been easier to transition completely to renewable energy if it was a state monopoly setting a fixed price to enable overproduction without regard to price fluctuations.