Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

• SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Giant springs are fucking scary. Energy is dangerous when you store a lot in one place.

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  • aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Large flywheels are well known to be terrifying mechanical monsters, despite just being a spinning disc

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  • Zink@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A couple decades ago I worked at a place that did power generation turbine controls.

    One thing I worked on was a redundant sync check for connecting turbines to the grid. A turbine has to be brought up to speed, about 3600rpm in the US, before being connected to the grid. The sine wave coming out of the generator needs to match the sine wave on the grid.

    If they are mismatched when the huge breaker closes, it’s not a shock or fire hazard, it’s an explosion hazard.

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  • pearable@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Dams are scary too, I just hope people are able to decommission them slowly when the time comes. Otherwise the deluge is going to suck.

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is it even possible to have energy storage of any kind that is truly safe and stable? Some are better than others, of course.

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  Kinetic energy of a body in orbit, I suppose. Like, you want to accelerate the Moon, you get a bigger orbit. We pull energy out of it via tidal generators, and in theory, we could speed its orbit up, increase its altitude.

  I mean, it could theoretically smack into something, but it’s not gonna hit the Earth very readily, and the speed of an object that isn’t in Earth orbit is probably more of a factor in a collision than the speed of something that is.

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  • Zink@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The orbital one sounds interesting. That’s a lot of energy, and it could do a lot of damage, but it seems very stable if left untouched.

    My gut suspicion is that with something more safe/stable, you would also be dealing with a low quality/potency source and/or low efficiency.

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• laverabe@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  On a small scale yeah. The sun heats rocks and they’re able to store heat for up to an hour or so. Cats can attest to that.

  Same with large bodies of water; the ocean, lakes, pools, etc.

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  • Zink@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I guess in my head I was implying that it was energy humans store for other humans to use at grid scale. When I said "of any kind” I guess that’s not what I meant, lol.

    So in my line of thinking, you’re right about e.g. using the sun to heat a rock. But if we use the sun to heat something for electricity generation, or we heat some medium for energy storage, I bet that will be pretty potent.

    Besides, past the small scale into the smallEST scale, it’s all just energy anyway, man. 😎

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