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To Hit Climate Goals, Bill Gates and His Billionaire Friends Are Betting on Energy Storage (qz.com)
Akshat Rathi, writing for Quartz: The world needs radical new energy technologies to fight climate change. In 2016, Quartz reported that a group of billionaires -- including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson -- launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) to invest at least $1 billion in creating those technologies. Now, 18 months later, Quartz can reveal the first two startups that BEV will be investing in: Form Energy and Quidnet Energy. Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
Storage can achieve 70-80 percent efficiency with compressed air, which is fairly tech driven, but modern tech patents can achieve 60-80 percent themselves.
Even pumped water up an incline, which works both with dams (and has the lowest impact for mini-hydro) and solar water distillation, is fairly efficient. If coupled with renewables, which tend to overproduce at certain periods, this allows you to achieve 120 percent renewables, allowing for variation, and export of the stored energy.
Large trains and trucks are optimized for large-scale fuel cells, but if you want to reduce GHG emissions, you shouldn't be using methane, other than as a capture technology to remove it from escaped gasses, such as with landfills, algae, and, yes, diapers on cows (it's more of a building capture method, really).
The major missing part, as it was with renewables before, is the lack of capitol. So Gates is spot on by leveraging capital here.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. ...
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
This is not in dispute.
Obviously there is nothing to dispute about the fact that you are simply wrong.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I think you and headwind are talking about different things.
You are talking about eutectic salt thermal energg storage: https://energydesignresources....
He is talking about molten-salt electrolyte batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Completely different things.
You are correct, I didn't point that out. Here's a few links to put the waste problems of solar and wind power into perspective.
https://instituteforenergyrese...
https://www.nationalreview.com...
http://dailycaller.com/2017/07...
https://thoughtscapism.com/201...
Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear. Can we reduce the waste from wind and solar? Sure, just as we can learn to reduce the waste produced from nuclear energy. Can we improve the methods of recycling and disposing of waste produced from wind and solar? I imagine we can, just as we can with waste from nuclear power.
Solar power is not only an environmental disaster it is an economical disaster. Perhaps in the future solar power can improve beyond what nuclear offers now but that's assuming nuclear does not also improve. Solar is trying to hit a moving target and falling behind every year. I'm generally okay with wind, it's not all that reliable but it also is not that expensive, does not produce terrible amounts of toxic waste, and allows for use of the land below for farming and ranching. Wind does kill birds but birds are jerks, I say let them die.
Nuclear power is safer than wind and solar. Nuclear power is less expensive than wind and solar, with some exceptions in a few locations. Nuclear power produces less CO2 per energy produced, with perhaps hydro being better in a few locations. Nuclear power produces less waste than wind and solar. Nuclear power is the best source of energy we have right now and we'd be fools to not expand our fleet of nuclear power plants.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I think your post managed to get every single point wrong. That's an impressive achievement.
Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Natural gas, solar and wind cost about the same per kWh. Natural gas is slightly cheaper, wind and solar obviously only work part of the time.
Then comes coal, more expensive than all three.
Then comes nuclear, more expensive than coal.
We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now.
Grid-scale wind and solar are still relatively new. Most have been built in the last 10 years. That's not a "very long time now".
Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down
Sorry, we stopped again. Turns out pretending nuclear is cheap is not an optimal strategy. And now Westinghouse is going bankrupt.
We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Um...no. There is part of a grid in Southern Australia grid that was rather unreliable, mostly due to the limited power generation on it. The battery is designed to 1) level out the brownouts and 2) allow wind-generated power to be used more often.
A plant in this area of Australia's grid failed, and the battery supplied power until other generators came on-line. It did not "save the nation", because the grid we're talking about serves a relatively small part of the nation. Without the battery, there would have been a brownout or blackout in that small population, but the rest of the nation wouldn't have cared - their grids would have disconnected from the shitty one as had happened many times before.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear.
You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above. There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.
Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear.
Nuclear literally has no method for dealing with the waste stream right now. Reprocessing spent fuel is not an option because of nuclear treaty obligations....and even if we ignore that, "build a second nuclear plant" isn't exactly an inexpensive solution. Millennia-long storage is a political nightmare that is not going to happen, because politicians like not getting voted out of office.
So, your concerns about waste stream seem a tad myopic.
Wind does kill birds but birds are jerks
I love when people trot this out. Household cats kill 1000 to 10,000 times more birds than wind power generation. Yet I don't see the same people so worried about it in wind generation propose banning cats.
Also, your sources on solar are 1) funded by the coal and natural gas industries, or 2) citing reports funded by the coal and natural gas industries. There might be a wee bit of bias in their studies.