this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Your electricity usage isn't equally distributed. You use more power during the day - primarily for cooling your house - than you do at night.
We also get a glut of wind power in the mornings and evenings, during big swings in temperature. Plenty of opportunity to harness cheap energy at the moment it is available.
And even after that, battery prices have been falling for years. Current EV batteries are $133/kWh with expectations of $100/kWh by next year and under $80/kWh by 2030.
That's before we get into the benefits of High Voltage DC transmissions, which can move large volumes of electricity across regions with minimal loss. Peak production on one coast can offset higher than expected usage on another.
And just like that you've shown that gravity batteries aren't feasible.
Storage is going to be a big part of the solution going forward. But it's going to be chemical batteries and thermal batteries, not gravity batteries.
Give it a few years and I've got my hopes up for batteries.
The calculations showed the absurdity in gravity storage today, not batteries in the future.
Gravity just isn't a good store of energy relative to chemical and nuclear alternatives.
It's a simple method for storing energy but not an efficient method. That's why the human body uses ATP instead of a bunch of pebbles that get lifted to our heads and dropped to our perineum.
But hey, we'll always have Dams. And tidal generators are gaining momentum. They're basically gravity batteries.