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What are some promising solutions to solar power's lack of night time availability? Is "transoceanic power transportation" on the list? (lemmy.myserv.one)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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EDIT: Submarine power transportation is indeed on the list

Not transoceanic, but there are two projects currently proposed that will -- when constructed -- break the current record for the "longest undersea power transmission cable" (a record currently held by the North Sea Link at 720 km, or 450 miles.)

One of these projects is the Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project which aims to lay 3,800 km (2,400 miles) of cable and sell Morocco's solar power to England.

There is, as of yet, not enough cable in the world to even begin this project. The company proposing the project is building factories to produce this cable.

The other is the Australia-Asia Power Link, which aims to provide Australian solar power to Singapore using a 4,500 km (2,800 miles) undersea cable.

Where the Xlinks project ran into a "not enough cable in the world" problem, Sun Cable's AAPL has apparently been running into a "not enough money in the world" problem, as it has repeatedly gotten into trouble with its investors.

EDIT: But also, storage is scaling up

@[email protected] provided a fantastic link to a lot of energy storage mediums that are already in use in various grids across the world. These include (and the link the professor provided gives an excellent short summary on each)

Pumped hydroelectric
Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)
Flywheels
Supercapacitors
And just plain batteries

Also, this wasn't in the Gumby's answer, but Finland's Vatajankoski power plant uses a hot sand battery during its high-demand, low-production hours.

Hydrogen is projected to grow

@[email protected] noted that hydrogen has advantages no other energy storage medium possesses: duration of storage and ease of piping/shipping. This is probably why numerous governments are investing in hydrogen production, and why Wood Mackenzie projects what looks like a 200-fold increase in production by the year 2050. (It's a graph. I'm looking at a graph, so I am only estimating.)

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I like insane hypotheticals that are discussed as hypocriticals. Not an engineer on paper, but these are my thoughts.

I think a very heavy weight that fits neatly inside of a protective structure with room to raise and lower it would be the way to get a kinetic battery. I'm talking about a platform stacked with concrete and rocks and sand and building demolition debris until it has stacked up to 2 or 3 stories tall. Then build a basic shell around it to blend into the town and have that 6 to 8 stories tall. The weight would tug at cables or press down on a hydraulic cylinder at a constant rate. A motor would then spin a large set of extreme reduction gears to raise the weight when there's extra power coming in. Then, the tremendous weight could drive the reduction gears to spin the motor as a generator at a constant rate and make reliable power.

The less crazy version of this has been proposed, a set of cranes stacking up and lowering down more reasonably size blocks to store power inside of a tall structure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

None of this is practical. You can't build a tower like this for any real storage, it's just not efficient. The only effective method is running a train up a mountain, or pumping water uphill. If you have to actually build a mountain a first, it's not going to work.