this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
406 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2773 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They are, and they are good solution but they are not good all and end all solutions, both wind and solar cannot meet baseload and when you start talking about battery storage as solution, scaling it up requires more metal mining than will ever be sustainable, so pursuit of fusion, pursuit of tidal energy, pursuit of better nuclear, pursuit of better geothermal are viable exploration options as we need baseload generation substitute.
Dams are a whole another story ecologically but even leaving that aside, we are talking 200-300GW capacity currently in the world for PHES, even if you construct damns on every possible lakes, estimates are around 1000GW that world can build. World currently consumes close to 8000GW on baseload. We won't even cover 15% of baseload with PHES.
If you're trolling with your storage as magical solution keep trolling.
I'm not saying storing potential energy doesn't work, it works and even though we lose some energy in conversion it's still better than chemical batteries. No question there, my point is simple, we don't have enough infrastructure to cover the world's baseload demand by releasing stored energy. We need something that can produce baseload power 24x7. Geothermal and tidal(debatable but close enough) are the only viable renewable energy sources we have that run 24x7 and they're not enough to cover the world's energy demands. Adding PSEH doesn't cover it either. We need something more and nuclear (fission or fusion) are the only other options that don't emit CO2.