Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.

  • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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    2 days ago

    Abandon the model of buying and storing electricity when demand is low and reselling power back to the grid when demand is high. Instead, electricity should almost always be generated in excess of demand with the difference going to hydrogen and oxygen production for various medical, industrial, agricultural, and transport applications. If we ever run out of storage, they can be safely vented to atmosphere.

    • gens@programming.dev
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      9 hours ago

      Electrolisis is relatively inefficient and wears down the electrodes. While not as bad on an industrial scale, those are still problems. And then you have to convert it back, that is even less efficient.

      Good in theory, barely passable in practice. Growing sugar cane and making ethanol would be better, like brazil does it.

      • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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        3 hours ago

        What do you mean by “convert it back”? Convert it back to electricity for the grid? No. We need the hydrogen for important things, like making steel and fertilizer.

    • Yggstyle@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      You’re hard pushing hydrogen / oxygen pretty blindly. Do you happen to know what the best efficiency of it is? It’s not great. And it gets worse when you have to harvest it (typically electrolysis which is brutally energy intensive.) Worse still when you need to compress it - and don’t even start me on energy density. Oh and that compressed gas needs to be kept cold. More energy.

      Hydrogen cells have been around for ages and are still functionally worthless until the storage and generation problems are solved.

      • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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        3 hours ago

        As I’ve already explained, we need hydrogen. We need it not for energy storage, but as a useful, important product. Electrolysis of water is pretty much the only way to get it without emitting greenhouse gases. Therefore, the efficiency of it doesn’t really matter, especially if the energy to do it would otherwise go to some dangerous, battery based buy low/sell high scheme.

    • solrize@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Before you can can do that, you need enough renewable generation capacity to exceed peak demand. And of course that will never happen because of the bottomless appetite of AI and bitcoin mining for electric power.

      • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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        1 day ago

        We need an authoritarian figure to nationalize the energy supply, shut down these wasteful expressions of late stage capitalism, mandate rooftop solar, and build out our nuclear fleet.