Bill Gates makes the argument that energy storage is way behind. If you used all the batteries currently in existence you would only have minutes of energy, not enough to make it through the night.
If he really made that exact argument, he was very much beside the point. Nobody is planning to use batteries to buffer grid energy production. Batteries are for small-scale storage. For large-scale storage, there are much better mechanisms. Pump-storage hydro is already widely deployed but can't be built up arbitrarily. There are other technologies in development, such as storing energy in the form of compressed air, or as heat inside huge concrete blocks.
Interesting -- do you think the idea of pumping tons of water up and down a mountain for long-term, high-capacity energy storage could help bridge that gap?
People are... completely out of touch with the scale of our industrial infrastructure.
Cities us 3% of the Earth's land surface. Fossil fuels inject power into earth at a rate 3x the tides. We intercept about 30% of the total power generation we could get from rainfall.
On the topic of energy storage, for the USA you'd need a lower reservoir approximately the size of Lake Erie, and a flow rate 150x that of Niagara Falls.
I'm not saying it can't be done -- energy storage at this scale has to be done for a switch to renewables -- I'm saying that the scale is absolutely immense.
I've thought about this before but the issues is that the energy is dinged 3 times by inefficiency losses. First when you capture it from the sun(or whatever), then when you pump it and convert it to potential, then when you let it out and use it to generate.
They actually already do this to some extent, I think the "St. Lawrence Pump Station" is one facility.
they already do this a lot more than to some extent, it is quite common. Batteries have an internal impedance as well which means losses putting energy in and taking it out. 15% loss on a battery is a reasonable estimate
