Comment on Japanese experimental nuclear fusion reactor inaugurated
faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 11 months agoThey are, and they are good solution but they are not good all and end all solutions, both wind and solar cannot meet baseload and when you start talking about battery storage as solution, scaling it up requires more metal mining than will ever be sustainable, so pursuit of fusion, pursuit of tidal energy, pursuit of better nuclear, pursuit of better geothermal are viable exploration options as we need baseload generation substitute.
AnarchistsForDemocracy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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You do not need batteries to store potential energy. You can pump water up a hill into a reservoir and then harvest the energy when you need it using hydroelectric energy.
faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 11 months ago
Dams are a whole another story ecologically but even leaving that aside, we are talking 200-300GW capacity currently in the world for PHES, even if you construct damns on every possible lakes, estimates are around 1000GW that world can build. World currently consumes close to 8000GW on baseload. We won’t even cover 15% of baseload with PHES.
If you’re trolling with your storage as magical solution keep trolling.
AnarchistsForDemocracy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Not sure if you are being willfully obtuse, I’m going to assume good faith.
A dam is a hydroelectric plant. you need a river a ravine and a lot more conditions to be met.
This is what I was talking about: en.wikipedia.org/…/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit…
and technically speaking potential energy could be stored by lifting bolders and then harvest the released energy when they are allowed to come down. There are many ways to device systems like such. You could even go underground and use drilled wells with two reservoirs at different levels for this.
You are mistaken to dismiss this outright without at least looking at the wiki i linked.
faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 11 months ago
I’m not saying storing potential energy doesn’t work, it works and even though we lose some energy in conversion it’s still better than chemical batteries. No question there, my point is simple, we don’t have enough infrastructure to cover the world’s baseload demand by releasing stored energy. We need something that can produce baseload power 24x7. Geothermal and tidal(debatable but close enough) are the only viable renewable energy sources we have that run 24x7 and they’re not enough to cover the world’s energy demands. Adding PSEH doesn’t cover it either. We need something more and nuclear (fission or fusion) are the only other options that don’t emit CO2.