That’s the big, trillion-dollar question, right? Pumped hydro or air is the solution that definitely works, but air is extra lossy and hydro requires a huge reservoir. A battery system would be great, but Li-ion is expensive, so you need a new chemistry. For grid storage, density, hazard and even operating temperature and pressure are not strict requirements, only cost, so it seems likely they exist, and at least sodium is in the early stages of commercialisation already.
We do not yet have effective and economical means of storing energy in grid scale quantities that are readily deployable near where that power is consumed.
It’s a huge problem actually, the biggest one facing renewables like solar.
This is a problem I’d very much like governments to sink a bit of money into. Sure, we don’t have 100% efficient energy storage, but we certainly have technology that does the job. Liquid air energy storage, fly wheels, thermal sand batteries etc, can be installed anywhere and are available right now. Not to mention pumped hydro if you have suitable terrain.
There’s a lot of stuff that we could build, and honestly, we just need to build it, now, even if it’s not profitable, or super efficient. There’s a bunch of solar and wind around the world not being built, or curtailed because prices go negative when there’s no one to store it.
The free market sucks. We need government intervention to do the things the profit motive won’t.
but we certainly have technology that does the job.
Absolutely not if we’re talking about nation-wide energy storage. The world’s largest STEP, Hongrin-Leman, Switzerland, which occupies a considerable amount of space, has only a capacity of 100 GWh, which represents less than 1h15 of the winter night consumption of a country like France which consumes 70 GW at that time.
It would take 10 to sustain one night without wind, as you can have several each year. Then we would have to fill them entirely in one day for the next night which is impossible.
And that’s just for the problem of capacity, such a STEP generates less than 500MW of power, so it would actually take 140 STEPs of that size to provide enough power.
And we’re talking about today, where most cars and heating are still fossil-fueled and need to be replaced by electric.
Unless you find a technology that is now a miracle, running a country on solar and wind without hydro-electricity or nuclear is science fiction.
This is the entire reason why countries like China are investing hard into ultra-high-voltage transmission lines.
While regions like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have immense wind and solar potential, getting that electricity to the population centers is challenging.
Selling electricity to Eastern Europe, to Northern Africa, hell even to the Middle East is an option if Europe is truly operating an electricity surplus.
A supercapacitor is defined by low voltage but high potential for energy storage, as in high capacitance. It’s energy per unit of mass is far greater than regular batteries. Therefor we have low voltage storage solutions and high voltage energy distribution across a grid, which results in the witicism of the above comment.
If potential meant voltage in every context then we wouldn’t need the word voltage.
Power being priced negative is awesome. We need more of it imo, make energy so abundant that it makes processes that were previously too energy-intensive viable, and enables a massive increase in both residential and grid storage capacity.
My opinion is that Na-ion batteries are the way for bulk grid storage and apartment/home storage nya.
They use hyper abundant materials and are now reaching the point of decent endurance, and if you arent bothered by them being heavy (as is the case for grid and residential storage), they’re fairly comparable to Li-Ion without the usage of relatively rare Lithium.
The problem with energy storage isn’t a lack of incentives, it’s a lack of solutions. There are currently no proven, grid scale, economical, and robust energy storage solutions.
There are lots of storage solutions that work within limited geographical areas (ie. Pumped hydro). But past that it’s a crap shoot.
Batteries are absolutely nowhere near the capacity or longevity needed for grid scale storage.
The largest battery storage system in the world is primarily used for grid leveling and emergency power. And would be depleted in minutes under its maximum load.
If you can actually get them. According to the article, it appears that an end user with his own battery system cannot actually get paid to store energy.
Sure they do all they need to do is a bit a regulatory capture and free electricity for them means more profits while you continue to pay the same or higher prices.
It gets even more absurd. The southern states blocked building large power lines to transport cheap wind energy south. Now they struggle because the chea renewable energy cannot go there. So while there is plenty of renewables in the north the south still runs coal plants to provide local energy. But then the people in the north have to pay for “network fees” because the South couldnt take their energy.
Because of this it was suggested to split the German energy market in two, where the south which fought against renewables would have to pay the actual electricity costs instead of leeching of the North that properly build up renewables. This was fought teeth and nails because the South of Germany is like Texas but with an even worse superiority complex.
Aktuell wird doch ne Stromtrasse durch BW gebaut. Diese lächerliche Nummer von wegen, wir hätten gerne Strom, aber keine Trasse, war eine astreine CSU Nummer.
A manufacturing company around here is currently building their own energy solution involving solar panels and three wind generators, iirc. They do set up a hydrogen generator because they need the hydrogen for some processes but they are not building it bigger than necessary for that, citing that using it for energy storage as well would be less cost efficient than some short term energy storage using battery buffers on site and relying on the grid for the rest.
I only think that this proves that its can be though. Just because batteries and the grid are cheaper for their exact needs, doesn’t prove that it’s useless. Still, it the idea of stopping the harvest of energy when it is too cheap to make money on, that is wrong. There are other methods to store electricity, like pumped storage (gravity storage), heat, compressed air, flywheel energy storage etc.
People here are getting rid of their hydrogen cars, because there are no places to refuel them. (Danish articled)
Yes of course. Almost everything is blocked by stupid politics, not tech limitations. Unfortunately stupid politics is all we got. And that means if we want to make progress, it’s stupid politics that needs overcoming.
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