Slashdot Mirror
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.
Winding down the fossil fuel economy means more than just making bigger batteries.
Storage is a big part of the solution.
A gas turbine can spin when demand is high, and slow down when it is low.
Wind turbines don't work that way. They spin when the wind blows.
There are alternatives to storage:
1. Long distance HVDC transmission, to move supply to demand over a larger area.
2. Flex-pricing, to shift demand instead of shifting supply.
These will help, but you still need storage.
Low specific energy is less important in stationary storage and poor charge retention is less important when talking about, say, weather-related weekly cycles and very low priced intermittent electricity sources. The fact that NiFe batteries don't use any rare or problematic materials could easily render them relevant again in the future if mechanisms for automated maintenance of the electrolyte get improved.
Ezekiel 23:20
Nature on average is very slow giving time for living things to adapt and change. Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years
Temperature drops can be very fast during each wave of glaciation in our current ice age. Temperature rises are what's typically slower, although there are some spikes in the ice core records.
We're already causing such a huge animal extinction event that it's big enough event to match the extinction of dinosaurs
Maybe it will go that far, but it hasn't yet. Mostly we're affecting other species by taking land for our needs.
I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
I'm not sure they should. At any rate I'm sure that people should decide democratically, not have any reduction in standard of living imposed on them by some aristocracy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.