There's a detailed article here at the Washington Post (gift link) about how close we may be to electric cars becoming routinely part of domestic renewable energy storage.
It's pretty impressive sounding, and it's easy to imagine it happening to a large scale in large parts of Australia, where the sun shines a lot.
4 days electricity is something
ReplyDeletePretty wishful thinking. More generally this moving battery fetish has to be euthanised. It leads to unacceptable fire hazards, catastrophic environmental damage and outrageous energy inefficiency. Diesel wins wars not batteries. Diesel and overhead wired electricity is the answer for bulk cargo land transport and cannot be replaced any time in the next thousand years.
ReplyDeleteIf you are interested in fuel efficiency, in the next 200 years the answer is coupling flat rail saturation with medium density housing. And if you have a 5000 year perspective it’s saturation canals.
It’s getting oppressive where you people insist on being evil and stupid and will not accept the truth.
If you want something to be dirt cheap you must make it with dirt. Not rate earths. So for example, optical fibres will always be a great idea and the problem with our domestic scheme was mismanagement, impatience, debt financing and consulting with usury criminals. But the underlying idea of tricking the continent out with optical fibres is and inherently good idea. Doing so using debt is inherently bad.
ReplyDeleteSame with canals. Canals are inherently good and cheap. But any impatience, fast-track gigantism or Keynesian economics fraud makes a good thing bad.
With batteries for bulk usage you must make them out of dirt. Or rather you look at the periodic table and exclude any rare earths from the design. That way mass production, and even communist glutting of the market, can lead to dirt cheap pricing.
Think of Ukraine and how easy it is for the Russians to bring down much of their grid? One day if we are serious, the government will buy one level of basement on any new building for batteries, and they may buy the top floor for water storage. That’s if we ever get to be a serious country.
Water storage, landing dirigibles, anti-aircraft placement. This sort of thing.
ReplyDelete