Hi there, I graduated engineering and am currently applying for professional licensure. I took only one course focused on energy, but I've never heard of E=Fx. Googling it brought up no relevant results. Could you expand on what it is?
This all sounds well and good, however it’s highly unclear that utility scale pumped hydro is viable. To make it work you need to have plentiful water, limited evaporative loss/other losses, and two large basins to store both the charge, and discharge of water.
In the event of drought, these facilities could become impractical. Hydro facilities have their own environmental concerns. Combined with shifting climates and rainfall patterns there are many challenges to be solved. (some of which go away if the hydro storage is in underground ceiled chambers… which also has a cost associated)
Pumped hydro is practical in many, many more places than have hydro generation today, because unlike those, it does not need a watershed. It can use a deep underground cavity where a hill is not forthcoming. Where water is scarce, other methods will be used.
Other applications of Fx include (but are not limited to) compressed air, and buoyancy.
Places that run low on storage resource can import and burn fuel, as they do now, or schedule power from a transmission line, where they have one. Soon, liquified anhydrous ammonia will be cheapest and most practical, but liquified hydrogen may be cheaper and sufficiently practical for bigger utilities. Ammonia has the advantage that it does not need cryogenic treatment. These will be available from numerous tropical sources.
If you get a professional engineering license without recalling basic Newtonian physics, that just tells us the licensing process has utterly failed us.
I may, but I live in a country that doesn't use the word freshman, so I don't know which year physics text that would be.
I assume from context you were meaning to refer to gravitational potential energy, which is generally represented as ∆U=mg∆h (change in gravitational potential energy equals mass times gravity times change in height). The variables you used (E=Fx) would mean energy equals force times (variable). From dimensional analysis the variable would have to be units of length (m), however it clearly only applies in the vertical dimension so it's better to use a specific variable like ∆h
Regardless, energy storage via gravitational potential energy (i.e. pumped storage) has been in use for about a century, and still makes up a rsmall proportion of grid operations. It has very specific requirements that aren't available everywhere. It's not an end-all solution for energy storage.
However a more general formula would be the integral of net force over distance.
Even without local "freshman" classes, you may look it up in any dictionary. Or, just stop pretending.
F may be water pressure, as in pumped hydro (which is growing) using elevated or underground reservoirs, or air pressure, as in CAES underground or underwater compressed air, or buoyancy using sea-floor pulleys and floats. No doubt as a soon-to-be Licensed Professional Engineer you will soon be able to think of other persistent forces.
Springs and flywheels will not be used for bulk utility-scale storage.
Generally, utilities will use what is cheap and reliable at the time they build it. Building storage before you have enough spare renewable capacity to charge it would be a bad misallocation of capital
Anhydrous ammonia will not be the cheapest medium, but has advantages of transportability and fantastic usefulness. Any unused overbuilt capacity will be put to work synthesizing for sale.
1. https://google.gprivate.com/search.php?search?q=E%20=%20Fx%2...
> And as has been pointed out numerous times, no existing alpine lake is needed for hydro storage. And, the site does not need substantial "transportation infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1920s via roads a car cannot use.
Such as? How did they get heavy machinery to these dams to build them? All of the dams I can find like the Shasta dam, Orville dam, etc are in fact close to major transportation infrastructure.
Source? I'm only aware of pilot programs in Japan and Germany, not commercial operators.
Who do you imagine you are fooling?
They are not generally made of concrete, not being deep enough to need it. Their high pressure is confined in the penstock well downslope.
No such inaccessible dams exist, and if they do they hold an inconsequential amount of hydroelectric energy. Just exercise a modest amount of reasoning: no transportation infrastructure means all work is done by hand and all material transported manually as well.
Pre industrial dams did exist, but they were very shallow and used for irrigation rather than power. Moving enough earth and concrete to make a usable gradient is not possible without heavy machinery.
The key principle of bulk energy storage is E = Fx, applied liberally worldwide for centuries. It is taught to every freshman engineering student. Nothing blocks further application of the principle, at any scale.
And as has been pointed out numerous times, no existing alpine lake is needed for hydro storage. And, the site does not need substantial "transportation infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1920s via roads a car cannot use.