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A comment on Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt. Parent comment

Re:Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to stor... by proee on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @11:24PM (#18722499)
Generating heat from electricity is nearly 100% efficient, so the round trip is probably a lot higher than you think. Plus, we're dealt with some pretty competent engineers here. I'm pretty sure they ran through the napkin calculations more than once on the targets they need to hit.
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Re:Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to stor... by londons_explore on Thursday December 20, 2018 @06:15AM (#18723960)
An electric heater's efficiency is "100%", but there are known ways to get much more than 100 percent for typical use cases. For example, heating your house with a heat pump can easily be 300% efficient, since you are also cooling down the outdoors.

"Electric heaters are 100% efficient" should really be "Electric heaters are only 33% as good as this other way of doing it".

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