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A comment on July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa. Parent comment

Re:July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa by tomp on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @12:46PM (#12345131)
How many batteries can we build? How do we build them on such a large scale? Do we mine enough raw materials for so many batteries? Are there enough materials for so many batteries? How do we cool them? How do we replace the faulty ones? How long do they last? How many people do we need to maintain them? How do we train them? How do we dispose of the batteries?

Not all of these questions have have hard or problematic answers (e.g. especially the last one is probably much worse for nuclear), but they do need to be answered, at all. We've been answering these questions for nuclear for the past 50 years.

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Re:July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa by nl on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @06:00PM (#12348099)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery solves all of these problems.
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Re:July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa by tomp on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @07:43PM (#12348663)
Flow batteries are amazing for home use, but for industrial scale? I don't know... Also, IIRC, don't they have a fairly limited temperature range?
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Re:July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa by nl on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @11:47PM (#12349537)
They are currently being used in Africa and South America primarily for industry use (telecommunications mostly).

No, you won't run an aluminium smelter with them, but for load balancing during those (pretty rare!) times when you don't have either solar or wind they are fine.

I don't know about the temperature problem. I know they are used here in Australia at 40C+ and in Africa in similar climates.

I think that they are actually better for industrial use than home use. They aren't silent, and they need to be cycled. The noise isn't an issue in industry, and in home use I know the power cycling can sometimes be a problem because it is hard to find somewhere to dump the power (currently the solution is to dump it to heat, which isn't great - or alert the homeowner and get them to run a pool pump or something).

RedFlow (one manufacture) is in the same building as me, and they have an interesting report: http://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Diesel-Runtime...

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