We grow up in a world in which it seems like we already know the answers to all of the questions, like we have already arrived at our destination. That's not true, and Things Can Be Different. This blog post describes an unanswered question about electricity and makes clear our current inadequacy in trying to grapple with it.
> Storage is everywhere. Your gas tank stores fuel for your car. Your fridge and the supermarket store food. Your bank and wallet store money. Dams and water towers store water. Your computer stores photos, documents, and other data. Grocery stores, and other retail stores, store merchandise waiting for consumers.
> Imagine a world without storage. You’d have to glean food directly from the fields. You’d drink from the stream. Your car would need a hose running all the way to an oil field. We depend on storage for daily life in the modern world.
> And yet, the electric power grid has no storage. For over 100 years, the grid generates power for immediate consumption. Any excess is lost, and any shortage results in a brownout.
It isn't really true though. The electric power grid stores its reserve of power not in the electrons generated (other than pumped storage, maybe) but in the reserves of various fuels waiting to be turned into electrons with action potential. The only sources where the transfer is direct from producer to consumer is with solar and wind, every other means of generating power has some kind of intermediary storage and a transformation mechanism (coal burner, nuclear power plant, gas turbine, etc) powering a generator of sorts.
The blog post is right that storage is the key problem if you are trying to eliminate hydrocarbon fuels from electricity generation and electrify all the things at the same time. And also right that there is no "one size fits all" magic solution for carbon-free energy storage.
For all the self-congratulation that European countries do (and the US is starting to do, with the IRA's energy provisions) about their progress, no policy maker seems to understand how woefully short of what is needed we are.
I don't actually completely agree with that premise. The problem is not just one of storage, but one of uneven distribution and by combining a significant overcapacity on the generation side with a massive high voltage DC transmission network you could reduce the storage requirement to a small fraction of what it would be otherwise.
HVDC allows you to transmit power across distances that were so far not economical and that in turn allows you to move solar and wind power around from one place to another across multiple timezones. This would go a long way towards offsetting the effect of the length of the day and the existence of dead zones in wind generation.
Electrons are far easier transported than stored and we should use that fact to our advantage rather than to try to blockheadedly aim for the exact configuration that is the hardest to make viable.
Yeah, I know those arguments. I like the overcapacity approach, but policymakers seem to struggle with it.
In principle you could install a world-circling transmission grid and obviate the need for storage entirely. But long distance transmission carries its own risks and costs. The radius of loss arising from adverse events goes up a lot, for example. And new-build long-distance projects take decades, which we can ill afford.
In the world in which we live, storage will be important and there is no panacea.
> Storage is everywhere. Your gas tank stores fuel for your car. Your fridge and the supermarket store food. Your bank and wallet store money. Dams and water towers store water. Your computer stores photos, documents, and other data. Grocery stores, and other retail stores, store merchandise waiting for consumers.
> Imagine a world without storage. You’d have to glean food directly from the fields. You’d drink from the stream. Your car would need a hose running all the way to an oil field. We depend on storage for daily life in the modern world.
> And yet, the electric power grid has no storage. For over 100 years, the grid generates power for immediate consumption. Any excess is lost, and any shortage results in a brownout.