Technology

Do you want the math or would you prefer less reading and more pictures?

Nothing like an ignoramus to try and make someone else feel stupid for asking a question.

Since you are all knowing, explain to me exactly how deep earth mining is less costly and better for the environment than deep earth drilling.

Or did you think we just magically pull batteries from thin air at 0 cost?

Batteries have infinite energy now? No storage issues due to electrical surges, heat, cold, or anything else that makes batteries sub optimal? While seemingly by magic, mining rare earth minerals spreads its environmental impact over 10-15 years of the lifetime of the battery with 0 negative impact to the area the mine is located?

Oh wait... None of that is true so I guess you can try again.

I enjoy how much effort it takes to ignore how batteries are produced in order to argue for them in a comparison with natural gas.

Cool story. How do we pull rare earth minerals, needed for batteries, from the ground?

A potential solution here is to dramatically limit or eliminate protections for fracking, but still allow it. If they can pay for any damage they cause, they should be allowed to do it. The problem is that we're subsidizing these efforts in a number of ways, and giving these orgs way too many protections. We should remove those, but IMO not ban fracking itself, since it can be a very useful way to produce energy in our transition away from coal.

That said, we should absolutely be investing in clean energy. I want to see a renewed push for nuclear power, expansion and optimization of hydro, etc. But we're not going to switch to green energy overnight (and the US is improving on emissions faster than many other countries), and fracking works well in the short-term as we move away from coal. As renewables get built out, we can reduce how much fracking we do.

yeah this is fine, but these need to run at high temperatures last time i've checked. that makes it a bit more complicated to use

at least it works at scale relevant to grids. there are other interesting devices that store high grade heat in things like molten silicon or sand, then convert it to electric energy again, but it's rather at prototype scale now i think. power to hydrogen is fine if it's replacing hydrogen from natural gas, but it's wack for storage of energy

Pumped hydro is both very geologically limited and environmentally detrimental.

If you are willing to live with the very considerable impact and are willing to do a costly megaproject, one possibility that I've raised before: it'd be possible to go implement Atlantropa, but instead of using it (exclusively) to generate hydroelectric power, as its creator envisioned, use it for pumped storage. The world will never need more energy storage than that could provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

Atlantropa, also referred to as Panropa,[1] was a gigantic engineering and colonisation idea that German architect Herman Sörgel devised in the 1920s, and promoted until his death in 1952.[2][3] The proposal included several hydroelectric dams at key points on the Mediterranean Sea, such as the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bosporus, to cause a sea level drop and reclaim land.

The central feature of the Atlantropa proposal was to build a hydroelectric dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would have generated enormous amounts of hydroelectricity[4] and would have led to the lowering of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by as much as 200 metres (660 ft), opening up large new areas of land for settlement, such as in the Adriatic Sea. Four other major dams were also proposed:[5][6][7]

• Across the Dardanelles to hold back the Black Sea
• Between Sicily and Tunisia to provide a roadway and to lower the inner Mediterranean further
• On the Congo River below its Kasai River tributary, to refill the Chad basin around Lake Chad, provide fresh water to irrigate the Sahara, and create a shipping lane to the interior of Africa
• Extending the Suez Canal and locks to maintain connection with the Red Sea

Sörgel saw his scheme, which was projected to take more than a century, as a peaceful pan-European alternative to the Lebensraum concepts that later became one of the stated reasons for Nazi Germany's conquest of new territories. He envisioned Atlantropa as a way of providing land, food, employment, electric power, and, most of all, a new vision for Europe and neighbouring Africa.

There are two very considerable issues there:

• First, dropping the Mediterranean Sea by 200 meters is going to have a very large impact on the coasts of northern Africa and southern Europe. Sörgel considered that desirable, but obviously there are going to be a lot of people who don't like such a change.

• Second, if it's permitted to build structures in this new area -- as was originally intended -- then a rupture of the dams would produce cataclysmic flooding; we would essentially have recreated the Zanclean flood:

  Ninety percent of the Mediterranean Basin flooding occurred abruptly during a period estimated to have been between several months and two years, following low water discharges that could have lasted for several thousand years.[3] Sea level rise in the basin may have reached rates at times greater than ten metres per day (thirty feet per day). Based on the erosion features preserved until modern times under the Pliocene sediment, Garcia-Castellanos et al. estimate that water rushed down a drop of more than 1,000 metres (3,000 ft) with a maximum discharge of about 100 million cubic metres per second (3.5 billion cubic feet per second), about 1,000 times that of the present-day Amazon River.

  The Royal Air Force bombed two dams in Germany during World War 2 to flood an industrial area in Germany. Russia just blew up a hydroelectric dam in Ukraine that caused a mess and water to drop upstream by 2 meters. If such a dam were to be attacked in a war like that, it would be horrendous. We'd be talking about a water depth difference a hundred times that and a far larger area.

EDIT: And a third, I suppose -- if you take water out of the Mediterranean via evaporation and pumping, it will eventually wind up elsewhere, and we live in an era where sea level rise is already a concern, so it'll cause sea level rise elsewhere. Would eliminate concerns about sea level rise for the Mediterranean, though...

i think that in order for that to happen we have to change the way we think about energy. more of use it when it's available, and less use it on demand

Since most energy is used for heat, storing it as heat makes a lot of sense, and there are sand thermal storage systems that can scale from single household to whole neighborhoods.

redox flow doesn't have that much better energy density. granted, it's great for long term storage, but it's still not there, plus it takes stupidly large amounts of vanadium to run. there's also zinc bromide flow battery but this one deposits zinc so it's limited on one side

i have a sneaking suspicion that if 80%+ of energy is used on heating anyway then storing that heat at point of use and topping it up when excess energy is available is the easiest, least wasteful way to go