Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet
by acidburnNSA on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:57PM
(#19564990)
Can you elaborate? How many TW-hours of energy storage are you talking about being not difficult? Imagine for example the US Midwest and northeast from October through May.
Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet
by beefield on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @02:01PM
(#19565600)
Wikipedia has a decent article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
At least this one seems to be commercially viable:
https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/denmark-52500-m2-a...
And here seem to be some numbers:
https://www.gsenergy.eu/central-solar-heating/
To me these numbers are a bit confusing, though, it seems like they are production and not storage numbers.
Anyway, heat storage capacity goes on third power of the size of the storage size while heat losses go only on second power. So after some point the heat losses are small enough. And as an order of magnitude, storage of tens of GWh seems to be in the commercially viable range. Today, that is.
Seasonal storage of heat is not that difficult a problem, given that you have large enough need of low enough temperature heat. Which at least district heating offers. And converging electricity to heat is not exactly expensive or difficult...