this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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There are plenty of alternatives for lithium batteries, chiefly sodium and a redox flow. Heating/cooling is good as well to store, but not every structure is energy efficient enough that it would make much sense. Good thing to work towards, but grid batteries would probably be faster and easier to implement. I have reservations towards pumped hydropower, in part due to watching how hard it is to decommission a lot of hydroelectric dams these days in US as well as the cost to create the areas to hold the water (a lot of the areas that are geographically advantageous for pumped hydropower tend to be nature reserves or national parks, soo...).
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.
But then you're just having another system for storing energy, which probably isn't very easy to implement. An easier solution if you don't want to use grid batteries is just to improve housing insulation and schedule heating/cooling for non peak hours, so that you are just using less energy overall. The problem in my mind is that that would require a lot of renovation on older homes, which is just more expensive and slower than adding grid batteries. Don't get me wrong, those changes should be mandated for newer housing, but expecting it to be implemented in older housing probably isn't gonna happen.
They're already using them in Finland. And there's a company building them for residential applications
If you take something not unlike a water heater and fill it with sand that you then heat to about 1,000 degrees farenheit. Then when you need heat you just pump some air through it and use that feed of hot air to provide heat where you need it. And unlike heat pumps, this can be added to the sort of baseboard heat you find in a lot of older homes.
And since the heaters are just simple resistive coils with 100% efficiency, it's a simple and cheap way to store electricity that you're going to use for heating anyway. Remember that every time you change energy from one kind to another you're going to lose some of it in the process.
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
Heating/cooling probably, but renovation of older structures is generally expensive and complicated, whereas grid batteries can scale until newer construction (which should be more insulated) can keep up. It's not an either or, but more of both that will compliment each other as time progresses.
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