this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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I imagine you, like many, just don't understand the insane engineering feat that is an electrical grid. Everything is realtime - Every time someone's AC kicks on the grid must adapt and provide more power immediately. Power storage is a godsend to this process and in terms of relative age ... is very new. With regard to power storage - there are very few ways to hold it that don't run some risk of fire or other calamitous failure mode. That includes water - but I was being coy when making my statement implying it wouldn't burn.
To your comment: you could use salt/sea/undrinkable water for energy storage but it comes with regional requirements (elevation change typically) in addition to the water. It's not one size fits all and definitely doesn't work in many regions.
Regarding your two options which you offered to create potable water (not to store energy:) Both are wildly inefficient and have one or more major drawbacks to them. Topically - one of these drawbacks is their massive energy requirement. So you provided a way to burn energy faster - not store it ;)
If we build out our GHG-free power capacity beyond our electricity demand, efficiency isn't an issue. We need fresh water. We need hydrogen and oxygen. I'm sure there are other convenient things to produce whenever electricity demand falls off. These energy storage and reselling schemes are just destroying value.
We have sufficient generation. It's a question of cleanliness, efficiency, and consistency. Consistency comes with storage and enables cleaner methods, while inconsistent, to be used.
Using your example: what need do we have for food storage? We have grain right now - and we're growing more! Who needs water storage - we have wells!
Hydrogen and oxygen? Yeah we have that. What technology, currently available, are you suggesting we all switch over to, again? While I'm at it: last I checked stored hydrogen and oxygen have a tendency to uh... burn... and very "energetically."
You seem fond of the tin foil - you are apparently worried about "big lithium" or some such... wait until you hear about "big energy."
If you are genuinely posting and not acting in bad faith I imagine you need to broaden your view a bit.
I'm not sure what you mean. Natural fresh water supplies are stressed in many regions. We need hydrogen to fuel vehicles and for the production GHG-free steel and fertilizer. Oxygen of course is necessary for medical and industrial applications. Safely handling hydrogen and oxygen is a solved problem and these gases are not polluting if you have to vent to atmosphere. It only makes sense from a wasteful, financially extractive perspective to store extra electricity by environmentally questionable means instead of actually using that energy right away.
We've been talking about energy and energy storage up till now. You've been mostly 'on track' with said responses up till this point - albeit overly generic and somewhat disconnected from reality... In the last couple responses you've jumped from water care to what I can only imagine was the first two Google results when looking up hydrogen / oxygen paired with energy.
Is the other guy okay or did his shift end?
Look. Here's a sobering bottom line: if it were technologically feasible to "replace batteries" we would have already. Hydrogen powered x isn't functionally acceptable because:
a) It stores like shit.
b) boom (pressure or rapid combustion - take your pick)
c) It is shockingly (hah) hard to get oxygen and hydrogen to split efficiently. Very few sources of hydrogen are actually energy positive or more efficient than what we already have in more convenient, safer, higher density forms.
I'm all for progress... but armchair warriors that claim the "moral high ground" by shitting on what works currently - while not being able to provide a single other suggestion beyond what they got drip fed from their feed and distilled by their echo ~~group~~ chamber need to sit the fuck down. Want to "stick it to big battery?" Go back to landlines. Put a crank back on your car. The list goes on.
I digress. Back to energy storage: if you've got some brilliant solution - get to it. We're waiting.
No to storing joules in environmentally questionable batteries. Use the energy immediately to produce useful, necessary stuff like fresh water and hydrogen.
That's only a solution for when energy demand won't spike or increase.
The issue is that currently energy demand does spike and increase.
The solution is to make sure the electricity supply always exceeds demand even during spikes.
Yes, except that takes a long time, and in the meantime electricity usage fluctuates with spikes and continued growth. That's without counting other possible issues, like dropped outputs due to weather (hurricanes, lightning strikes, winter in a northern latitude, etc). Tell me, how do we build enough energy production to cover usage when both lines go up? And what about while water creation plants are constructed?
Ideally, we end up in the situation you describe, yes, but even then we would need back up storage because things can and do go wrong, and output won't always be consistent and neither will use. And then there's the whole issue with using solar at night.
Play something like Factorio or Satisfactory with certain mods, and you'll get a small idea of how difficult it is to keep load balance even with machines running to use extra energy.
Start with policies requiring technology companies to use computational work as a sink for excess electricity, compelling grid operators to prioritize sharing of intermittent renewable power, and mandating rooftop solar. That will hold us over while we start shutting down fossil fuel power plants and ramp up production of emissions free thermal alternatives and productive power sinks like electrolysis and desalination plants. Small back up power systems can be installed as needed at sensitive sites (similar to what we already do) and the roof top solar requirement will facilitate that. We would never expect PV solar plants to run at night. We'd just reduce computations or hydrogen and fresh water production as the PV solar output falls off.
I've never played the games you mentioned. Are there mods for automatic productive power sinks?
... Do you mean turn OFF everything at night? Because you do realize that the output of solar power at night, you know, when the solar part is missing, is zero, right???
And wind can't get anywhere near the difference, even assuming it's running at 100%. Not to mention many things need to continue running at night. Like hospitals.
And that's before I even got to the absurdity of tech companies using computational work as a sink. Computational work doing what, exactly? Rendering 3D farting fairies??? And that's not even getting into how they're the main cause of increased energy usage recently preventing us from catching up with demands in the first place, mostly because of AI.
And the back up batteries only at sensitive sites - so you just expect people to freeze to death in Winter or during a heatwave? To not eat because they can't heat anything up? What about comms. Most towers are in places where there's not enough space for local battery sites. "Mandating rooftop solar" sure, but you'd still also have to "mandate" that it's free because many weight be able to afford it.
As for the reason I said you should play this games, it's to make you realize how difficult it would be to run everything purely on solar and wind and without batteries, EVEN WITH future tech and perfect weather with no inhabitants like in Satisfactory. You'll either need good sources of hydro in every possible spot on the map (at which point, in real life, you'd definitely be altering the environment, + climate change is affecting that too in reality) or a massive battery storage site / so many distributed batteries you've accomplished the same thing anyhow. You'll fucking realize energy demands can be so damn high, the struggle isn't "what to do with all this power" but "I need more power / need power at night", constantly, even with magic future solar tech on a planet with a binary system.
You're clearly both too uninformed AND misinformed to continue this conversation. At best what you do now is help the fossil fuel industry with how ignorant you are - at worst you're a troll willingly doing so.
Who said anything about running everything purely on solar and wind?
Hydrogen electrolysis is great, but its something to do with "too much" renewables, and also supports having too much batteries, which are more convenient for daily electricity needs from renewables, but also using up high battery storage capacity every day.