Comment by sippingabonedry
4 hours ago
Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".
> Energy storage is required along with solar farms
How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.
There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example. It consists of heating something very big that holds a lot of heat and releases it slowly, then using that stored heat to generate electricity while it cools down. This isn't suitable for home use, but at the city scale, or larger, it's quite efficient:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
> There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example.
Yeah, there's also pumped water storage, and other forms of gravity/kinetic storage, various means of chemical energy storage, and all kinda other neat battery-like ideas folks have been trying/using.
The UK has Dinorwig power station, a pumped hydro station capable of storing over 9 GWh of energy. This alone rivals the entire combined 10.5 GWh of battery storage across the whole country. It certainly seems much more feasible when you have the terrain to allow it.
Enough to store the energy between gaps, plus a buffer?
Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.
Fear really IS the mindkiller! Stop being afraid and start educating yourself. You are on HN, you are supposed to be smart.
Smart people understand pragmatism, which means not throwing the baby out with the bath water in the name of ill thought-out feel-good measures.
You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other systems have new challenges to overcome.
That is literally what you are doing right now.
Oh yes, as opposed to the famously free from abuse oil and gas industry.
Fox brain alert!
We have batteries for this. See Texas and California.
This gets tiring. No, china has no electricity problem in the night and their share of solar is off the roof.