From liquid air to supercapacitors, energy storage is poised for a breakthrough

Re:From liquid air to supercapacitors, energy storage is poi... by stcredzero on Friday February 05, 2016 @01:33PM (#11043535)

Contextually relevant question: How much would it cost to do a major revamp of the North American electrical grid? (For various values of "major revamp" of course.) I found this article that mentions a $2 Trillion figure from Rocky Mountain Institute, but I take that with a big grain of salt. [1]

Since the patents around Tesla's Supercharger are open, what about the idea of giving the US highway commission a few hundreds of millions to double the number of Supercharger stations? (This would create more demand while not improving the infrastructure, but I would benefit personally.)

    [1] - http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/04/us-power-grids-2-trillion-upgrade-needs-european-efficiency.html

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Re:From liquid air to supercapacitors, energy storage is poi... by mikeash on Friday February 05, 2016 @01:39PM (#11043584)

Superchargers only work with Teslas, and Tesla is doing fine when it comes to doubling the number of installations on their own (there are currently 270, and they installed 113 of those last year), so having the government come in and install them doesn't seem like a good use of money.

Further, what's the relevance of Supercharger stations to electrical storage? Maybe I'm missing something but that seems like an irrelevant tangent here.

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