Comment on Elements of Renewable Energy
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 week agoI think you’re reading into it correctly. It’s an inaccurate depiction. The hydro line is what makes it fuzzy. A dam is a source but has no storage. A reservoir is not a source but has storage. They are separate devices meaning this needs two separate lines for hydro.
I imagine biomass is exactly the same situation, but I have no idea what OP is trying to use. Maybe I’m just uneducated, but it doesn’t sound like common knowledge. Still my assumption would be that there’s a source system to grow/maintain biomass and a separate system to extract that energy.
If those two items stayed as-is, then I can strap a battery directly to wind or solar and give them green check marks in both categories.
gandalf_der_12te@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
My idea is that most Hydro-Power plants can be used as reservoirs with little modification.
And biomass can be burned at whatever moment you like (provided you have the plants to do so), so it is “on-demand power” in some sense.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Modifying the dam isn’t the issue, you need to make sure the upstream area can be flooded. Not all rivers are in a canyon. You need a sizeable lake and consider how catastrophic an overflow would be. Then you also have to consider the effect downstream because you will likely cause a minor drought persistently since not all dams will dump into the ocean. So yes, I understand that “hydro” is both a source and a battery, but they are really 2 entirely different systems based on your other categorizations.
Same thing with the biomass. One system makes trees, one system burns wood.
The graphic isn’t particularly wrong, it’s just splitting some items and combining others inconsistently.