Re:Heliogen, backed by Gates, says it has achieved a solar b...
by jerry292 on Saturday January 04, 2020 @02:08PM
(#21956704)
Yeah true. I heard of another Bill Gates backed startup that actually stored the energy in a form of potential energy which was way more cost effective. Keep in mind though dams are super catastrophic to the environment as far as water flow which can be detrimental to moisture and animals that depend on water in certain areas
Re:Heliogen, backed by Gates, says it has achieved a solar b...
by beatgammit on Sunday January 05, 2020 @12:31AM
(#21959840)
I'm sure you could do it with a closed system, e.g. pump water up a cliff, and when you need power, bring it back down. I'm guessing using dams on existing rivers is just more convenient than building a closed system from scratch since it can double dip on hydro infrastructure.
And even if we overcome this, we will need so much solar panel and batteries that we simply don't have enough raw materials to do so (to replace a 1GW nuclear core you need to cover half of Paris with solar panels, source http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/15/rap-enq/r2195-t1.asp).
In France, 95% of the stored electricity is done using reversible-damns (you pump water up to store, you empty the water and generate electricity when you need it), only 2% using batteries. We basically put damns everywhere we could on the territory. We have 2 days max of storage. How can we now store weeks/months of solar-panel/wind electricity we don't need to use it when we need it?
Batteries are inefficient for grid storage, oversized, heavy and too short term. That's it. We now know for decades that damns are the easiest way to do it and we can't do more than a few days of storage.
At one moment we simply have to face the maths and physics. Trusting the "next big thing" in battery storage/solar production, even if we do 5x more energy, even if we develop long lasting ones, will not work in the end. Our needs are too big and the amount of minerals and other raw materials we need is way too big. That's it.