First and second laws of thermodynamics back to you.... How the Newton's first law of motion has anything to do with a battery is a mystery to me. Perhaps you mean the first law of thermodynamics? (Energy is not created or destroyed)...I assume that's what you mean, because if not, what you are calling me applies more to you.
Now that we have that straight...
Lithium Ion battery charge discharge efficiency is 80-90%. Put 10 Watt hours in, get 8 or 9 out. This is straight from the Wikipedia article I found with a Goggle search. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Stop and learn something about this by thinking. There is a reversible chemical process going on in a battery, always is. This means when you charge the thing, there is entropy gain, as you convert energy from one form to another, in this case electrical power to potential energy stored in chemical bonds. Entropy gain is unavoidable and represents that part of the energy that doesn't get converted into the desired potential energy, but is lost to some other form like heat. The same is true for the process of changing chemical potential energy back into electrical power. Again entropy is increased, energy is lost to things other than electrical power. My point, and what you should learn, is that entropy increases represent losses in the system, energy that is not returned back to you when you discharge the battery, but is lost to other kinds of energy (heat and such).
So.... Do you have anything to cite here that says my numbers are wrong?
BY THE WAY... Just incase you are confused with "coulomb efficiency" numbers being bandied about which are 99%, this is NOT ENERGY efficiency, but a measure of current efficiency.. You put X amp hours in, you get X amp hours out (less 1%), however the VOLTAGE is not the same. To charge a Lithium Ion cell you have to apply a higher voltage than when it's discharging, amazingly there is about a 10% difference in those voltages...;) Imagine that...
My Li Ion numbers came from Wikipedia, which isn't the paragon of factual information but in this case looks correct. The AC-DC/DC-AC conversion numbers come from my knowledge as an electrical engineer. NOTHING is 100% efficient in converting energy from one form to another... And 97% just isn't possible in this case, given my understandings of Thermodynamics.. So where are you getting your information because I think they are wrong?
Where exactly will "the cheap country" be in 10 years?
Who knows? Who cares? Once I'm done with this working stiff routine, will it matter where I move to?
My guess is that in 10 years I'll have grandkids and my wife will want to live within driving distance of as many of them as she can. If we want to live around here, all we need to do is drive an hour or two away from town, buy a lot and build a small house. Then if the kids and the grand kids are too far away, we can buy one of those huge pusher RV's with the remainder of the money from the house and take a house with us when we go visit.
The point is, by then, my house will be worth a small fortune, all of it equity, most of that I can spend doing the important things and living near pretty much anyplace I can imagine I'd want too...
Inventing news for the sake of ratings is more of the issue here than outright lies. Sometimes it's more about what they choose to report on than that the reporting is false. I learned about this a long time ago...
I was watching the local news reporting covering a Senate campaign in North Carolina (Jessie Helms was running for re-election for who knows how many times..). I remember a day when both candidates had rallies in Raleigh on the same day and the local TV news on WRAL covered both events on the evening news. For the challenger's rally, they covered the candidates speech, which was highly critical of the incumbent. Nothing wrong with that right? Yea, but for the incumbent's rally they covered only the protestors that shoed up, who where (you guessed it) highly critical of Senator Helms, but didn't choose to report on anything Helms said. Yes, they covered both rallies, but ALL the reporting was critical of Senator Helms. THEN they reported on a poll they had taken, that showed the incumbent loosing the upcoming election by nearly 10%... Helms won by nearly 20% in the election 2 weeks later.
This is how "fake news" is made. Nothing they reported on was actually a out right lie, it all was true. However, the perception is that Helms was loosing the election because everybody was critical of him and the polling showed it. The perception was fake...
I'll leave it to you to apply this to today's political reporting... But "Fake news" is not always untrue, sometimes it's just really biased in it's selection of the reported facts that makes it fake.
Certain areas of California are basically a different country with a different currency. if people want to live there and be slaves to their homes, have fun with that. For those lucky enough to have lived there when prices were affordable and are now selling, congrats.
Like happened in California, The real estate price run up is happening in Dallas right now. My house has nearly doubled in price since I purchased it 15 years ago, with 75% of that run up being in the past 5 years. Houses are selling so quickly that many buyers are resorting to making offers sight unseen and bidding wars are breaking out. Builders cannot turn out new homes fast enough.
Why? Because a load of companies have decided that North Texas is where they want to be. Toyota, State Farm, and Liberty Mutual (to name a few) have been moving large portions of their employees to the area.
I hope this trend continues until I'm ready to retire in about 10 years. By then, I'll be dumping the house and heading to the cheap country and living on the proceeds....
Says who exactly? Can you quote something that proves that statement?
Autopilots are there to increase efficiency and comfort of the passengers. They sometimes are there to reduce work load so they can reduce the cockpit crew size, but they are not required safety equipment for commercial flying, unless the automation was the basis for reducing crew requirements during type certification.
The advent of autopilots has actually had a negative impact on pilot's flying skills, which impacts safety. Stick and Rudder skills are allowed to laps because they are not used in favor of the automation's efficiency. This is actually one of the biggest areas of concern in the industry right now, having thousands of hours of seat time, pushing buttons on the automation and little actual experience FLYING the aircraft. It's called Human Factors engineering and it's all about how you keep the human in the decision making loop enough that they can actually be ready to deal with situations where the automation cannot go.
This is BAD for Tesla. The NTSB basically found fault in the "auto pilot" system's user interface AND it's technical capability. I am NOT surprised by this.
Automatic driving of cars and trunks needs to be thoroughly thought through. Not just the technology required to keep the car on the road, sensing what's going on around it and dealing appropriately with this dynamic environment, but also the complex human factors considerations. Tesla may have the first part working fairly well within the given limits of their sensors, but the second part of this problem hasn't been designed very well.
Human Factors engineering has only recently been a consideration for *real* auto pilots (those in aircraft) and flight automation systems. And it has become clear that all the automation in aircraft has given us great efficiency and smooth operation a the cost of inexperienced pilots with poor flying skills who don't recognize when something is gravely wrong until it is too late. They trust the automation, because it just works, at least until it doesn't, and something really bad happens that was easily preventable. The folks over at the NTSB are very familiar with this issue because there have been a number of notable commercial aircraft crashes where this was a contributing factor, where the automation failed to do what the pilot expected and a crash happened in a perfectly flyable aircraft.
Tesla has a serious level of risk with this feature. It may be wiz bang cool and Musk may love calling it an "autopilot" but the legal liability is huge unless they can keep people from crashing while it's on. The NTSB's statements here are NOT going to bode well for Tesla's legal liability and all the EULA's in the world won't stop the lawsuits when crashes happen.
Battery storage is about 95% efficient.
Significantly above pumped storage.
Go back into your cave, troll!
just don't think it is a viable solution to peak shifting/load balancing for things like solar or wind supply issues.
Actually it is, as Germany and other countries demonstrade since decades, stuoid troll.
LOL... Unless they have changed the laws of physics and chemistry in the last decade, 95% is but a figment of your imagination. Chemical based batteries really suck efficiency wise. Lithium Ion batteries (Which are nearly the best rechargeable batteries out there for efficiency) max out at about 90% (dc in dc out), but that's just the battery. If you add in the AC-DC and DC-AC conversion losses and a few percent for I*R unavoidable losses you are well under 80% and likely under 70% for any kind of realistic system (Say the size of what could power a single home.) Industrial sized systems would likely be much worse than this, just because it wouldn't be economical to build systems as efficient as a moderately sized home unit could be.
Heck, the power supply for your PC is 90% efficient at best (AC-DC) and that's pretty much the best efficiency you can find for AC-DC conversion (and is pretty darned expensive being 1KW for about $250. So assume 90% AC-DC conversion, 90% storage efficiency and another 90% going back to AC when you need it and you are looking at (100W - 10W (AC-DC) = 90 W to battery - 9 W (loss in battery) = 81 W (out of battery) - 8.1W (DC-AC) = 73.9 W) making a really GOOD system running about 74% efficient (And that's making some HUGE assumptions like unity power factor loads).... You are claiming 95%?
So have you broken the laws of physics lately? Maybe a thermodynamic law or two? Because there is no way you are getting 95% efficiency (Input power to output power) from a buildable and practical battery storage system that I know of.
100MW is not a measure of storage... I'll assume you mean 100MW/hour...
I'll point out one thing... I think your numbers are wrong, or the amount of storage nearly pointless... The state of Texas, today, had a base load of 30,000 MW and a projected peak of nearly 55,000 MWh. That's JUST Texas on a 90 degree day. 100 MWh is spitting into the wind, 10X that would be required to have any meaningful amount of storage for one state and 20x that would still be spitting in the wind. Scale that up to nation wide and this is meaningless...
1. Fossil fuels will be used until they are too expensive, on this we agree. However, if history is any indicator, fossil fuels are going to be available for a long time to come. All it takes is a small increase in the market price for fossil fuel and you end up getting large increases in "proven reserves" (those resources which are economically recoverable). The available proven reserves of fossil fuels has generally been rising up though this very day. This tells me we are far from being anywhere near running out. Sure, the price has been slowly rising, but so far, this has only increased available supplies. I don't see this changing in my life time.
2. Nuclear power has been given a really bad rap, again we agree. However, the problem with nuclear power today is actually cost. It's too expensive compared to a Natural Gas powered generation plant, because the cost of CNG is so low and doesn't seem to be going up anytime soon. I think Nuclear power could be cheaper, but it's stuck with 1960's technology for various regulatory, public policy and public relations reasons, which has stopped development. However, CNG is a sure thing, low risk solution.
And... Just in case you are interested.... I AM an Electrical Engineer (College Degreed) by training so I do have better than average knowledge of power distribution systems. It's been 20 years, but the basics of how electric motors, transformers, transmission lines work has not changed since Westinghouse took on Edison. The controlling technology HAS evolved and I don't consider myself "up to date" on that part, but I understand how power gets from source to destination and what factors effect the efficiency of the systems involved. I also have nuclear engineering training (as a minor) and have personally toured multiple reactor sites, including trips inside containment structures as part of my learning experiences. So... Where I don't claim to be an expert in any of this stuff, I'm not just blindly speculating or claiming that "I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express" level of expertise.
Do you have *any* idea how inefficient battery storage is? The BEST way to store electricity on an industrial scale is about 87% (pumped storage), batteries are barely over half that.... Chemical battery storage has *really* bad efficency...
Don't miss my point here. Sure, you can have local systems, you can have a battery in your house, use the one in your EV to shift peak loads, but they literally suck power out of the system and waste it, a lot of it. Consuming MORE power is not the best answer here... In fact, I'd wager that we could concentrate on consuming LESS power and make a bigger impact on things though conservation, and not local storage. Changing to LED bulbs, more efficient HVAC and other devices that consume large amounts of power will do more. (Drying clothes, Heating Water, Cooking..)
Look at small scale storage as a local "backup power" solution if you like, just don't think it is a viable solution to peak shifting/load balancing for things like solar or wind supply issues. It's really horribly inefficient for that kind of thing.
Pumped storage is indeed the most usable solution, however, there are two things you simply must have to set up a system.
1. Hills or mountains. You have to pump the water up hill and the higher up you can go the better. This means you need some natural topography that has significant elevation changes where you can build some kind of storage pool up the hill. Usually they take a hill, flatten the top to build a pool. You won't be doing this in the plains, which are nearly table top flat and cover a significant percentage of the country.
2. Water source to pump from. Not only do you need hilly land, you need a ready source of surface water to pump up that hill. Again, this is not a given in the areas of mountainous terrain in the USA. Certainly the southwest doesn't work, it's hilly but there is no water.
So you cannot just build these things anyplace as you indicated. In fact, there are really limited areas that have both things you need for this. Most of the Atlantic seaboard states from Georgia to Maine with the Smokey Mountains could work along with the states just to their west. There is a bit of Missouri (the Ozarks) that could work (actually already do this) and possibly the North West states of OR and Washington but after that, forget it.
Then there is the HUGE environmental impact these things have and the dangers they create for the local area. You don't just take the top off a mountain and pump water up there w/o making lasting changes to the local environment. Plus you need a lower pool to keep the water when it's at the bottom of the hill, which has another huge impact. There is also a risk of failure and accidental uncontrolled release of all that water and the damage that could cause. And yes, that has happened with these things in the past. So, for safety, you cannot build these things upstream from where people are living, or risk killing people should an accident happen. This last requirement puts a HUGE limit on where you can put these things.
Finally, there is the efficiency of pumped storage. By most standards it is abysmal. You get at best 87% efficiency and often no more than 75%. This means that you loose 13-25% of your energy input. Remember this is the BEST we can do and there is HUGE environmental impacts with this. Where I am a great proponent of pumped storage coupled with nuclear base load generation as a cost effective solution, I still do not think fossil fuels are going away anytime soon. However, as a peak shifting tool, buying power at night from base generation capacity then selling it at double to triple the price during peak, they might work out financially. But the start up costs are really high, and the energy storage capacity pretty low for the costs, so the break even point would be 10+ years away. So far, it doesn't seem they are very profitable.
Energy storage for an electric grid on an industrial scale is a HARD and environmentally messy thing to do. Doing it efficiently, depending on what efficiency you think is good enough, is not financially viable for much more than just peak load offsetting where the spot prices of power triple or more from base load costs..
We will be keeping those fossil fueled power generators around for a long time yet, or learning to live in the dark.
OK, that's how IP works in the USA.... But patents are almost like currency here, which makes some folks a pile of money at times. What's wrong with making money as long as it's legal? What's wrong with filing patents to make money? But having a patent is only part of this, you have to defend it.
Consider what happened to the Wright brothers. Curtis openly violated their patents and dragged out the court cases for decades... The stress of it all likely killed one of the brothers. In the end, they made some money on their invention, but Curtis's company purchased theirs. Eli Whitney is another story about the perils of protecting patents. As I recall, he lost control of his invention (the cotton gin) and never cleared a profit because of the legal costs of trying to defend it..
If you are trying to put something into the public domain... Patent it, then don't defend your patent....
Publishing in public really doesn't fix this problem. Google can still apply for and get a patent for it, rightly or wrongly.
You can go back later and invalidate the patent, but that requires you take the issue to court, which requires you to hire a lawyer, pay filing fees and spend your time. It might have been cheaper to just get the patent up front when this is all said and done. Surely Google can afford to defend their patent if they decide it's worth it, but can you afford it if your idea is to just give it away?
Right or wrong, that's how this IP thing works.....
As bright and capable as you are, you do realize that *some* of this is because of your propensity to throw little fits of temper towards your developers, and your "I am Linux, What I say goes" control of the project. Right? I understand that it is sometimes better to just make a choice and go with it, but any time you act like a dictator, expect folks to get a bit miffed with you. Now when you vent on your volunteers, you are just asking to be seen as a capricious despot who is too full of himself.
I'll be the fist to admit that not all of the naysaying is justified, but you have to admit that at least part of this is a reflection of how you deal with people around you... In short, (and I will paraphrase) "You need to treat others better than you expect them to treat you."
Even if you want to just give it away, you better apply for that patent or this kind of thing is going to happen Skippy... Now, if you really want to defend this, it's going to cost you a pile of $$, just to give it away.
Little Kim? Is that you Phat boy? What's wrong? Did Dennis Rodman go home? Run out of cheese? Fresh out of nukes and missiles to set off? No rebels to shoot today? So you are reduced to trolling on Slashdot?
LOL... I guess you little trolls have to eat now and then...
My guess is you came back to the discussion days later because you couldn't handle people with mod points downvoting you for being an idiot.
You guessed wrong, which isn't surprising... I don't do Slashdot from home and I wasn't at work this weekend. Also, I don't slum for mod points, I just post. So do you slum for mod points then? So you've been wrong twice in one post, making confident assertions about stuff you obviously don't know.
So are you this wrong about North Korea? I'm beginning to think so...
Why? Because you now have a history of being wrong and are acting more like a troll than someone with something useful to say...;)
Seriously? So you think it's a good idea to downplay the Allied victory over the Axis? Let me guess, you don't think the attempted genocide of the Jews happed either right? It's all just a story used to justify the near total destruction of Germany... Shesh...
Coveting your neighbor's stuff is not a road to making things fair. It's a road to socialism or communism which are both bad forms of government in regards to being fair, unless you want everybody to suffer the same...
Slashdot Mirror
First and second laws of thermodynamics back to you.... How the Newton's first law of motion has anything to do with a battery is a mystery to me. Perhaps you mean the first law of thermodynamics? (Energy is not created or destroyed)...I assume that's what you mean, because if not, what you are calling me applies more to you.
Now that we have that straight...
Lithium Ion battery charge discharge efficiency is 80-90%. Put 10 Watt hours in, get 8 or 9 out. This is straight from the Wikipedia article I found with a Goggle search. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Stop and learn something about this by thinking. There is a reversible chemical process going on in a battery, always is. This means when you charge the thing, there is entropy gain, as you convert energy from one form to another, in this case electrical power to potential energy stored in chemical bonds. Entropy gain is unavoidable and represents that part of the energy that doesn't get converted into the desired potential energy, but is lost to some other form like heat. The same is true for the process of changing chemical potential energy back into electrical power. Again entropy is increased, energy is lost to things other than electrical power. My point, and what you should learn, is that entropy increases represent losses in the system, energy that is not returned back to you when you discharge the battery, but is lost to other kinds of energy (heat and such).
So.... Do you have anything to cite here that says my numbers are wrong?
BY THE WAY... Just incase you are confused with "coulomb efficiency" numbers being bandied about which are 99%, this is NOT ENERGY efficiency, but a measure of current efficiency.. You put X amp hours in, you get X amp hours out (less 1%), however the VOLTAGE is not the same. To charge a Lithium Ion cell you have to apply a higher voltage than when it's discharging, amazingly there is about a 10% difference in those voltages... ;) Imagine that...
Citation please....
My Li Ion numbers came from Wikipedia, which isn't the paragon of factual information but in this case looks correct. The AC-DC/DC-AC conversion numbers come from my knowledge as an electrical engineer. NOTHING is 100% efficient in converting energy from one form to another... And 97% just isn't possible in this case, given my understandings of Thermodynamics.. So where are you getting your information because I think they are wrong?
Where exactly will "the cheap country" be in 10 years?
Who knows? Who cares? Once I'm done with this working stiff routine, will it matter where I move to?
My guess is that in 10 years I'll have grandkids and my wife will want to live within driving distance of as many of them as she can. If we want to live around here, all we need to do is drive an hour or two away from town, buy a lot and build a small house. Then if the kids and the grand kids are too far away, we can buy one of those huge pusher RV's with the remainder of the money from the house and take a house with us when we go visit.
The point is, by then, my house will be worth a small fortune, all of it equity, most of that I can spend doing the important things and living near pretty much anyplace I can imagine I'd want too...
Sorry.... "shoed" should have been "showed", but you knew that.
One man's lies are another's news these days.
Inventing news for the sake of ratings is more of the issue here than outright lies. Sometimes it's more about what they choose to report on than that the reporting is false. I learned about this a long time ago...
I was watching the local news reporting covering a Senate campaign in North Carolina (Jessie Helms was running for re-election for who knows how many times..). I remember a day when both candidates had rallies in Raleigh on the same day and the local TV news on WRAL covered both events on the evening news. For the challenger's rally, they covered the candidates speech, which was highly critical of the incumbent. Nothing wrong with that right? Yea, but for the incumbent's rally they covered only the protestors that shoed up, who where (you guessed it) highly critical of Senator Helms, but didn't choose to report on anything Helms said. Yes, they covered both rallies, but ALL the reporting was critical of Senator Helms. THEN they reported on a poll they had taken, that showed the incumbent loosing the upcoming election by nearly 10%... Helms won by nearly 20% in the election 2 weeks later.
This is how "fake news" is made. Nothing they reported on was actually a out right lie, it all was true. However, the perception is that Helms was loosing the election because everybody was critical of him and the polling showed it. The perception was fake...
I'll leave it to you to apply this to today's political reporting... But "Fake news" is not always untrue, sometimes it's just really biased in it's selection of the reported facts that makes it fake.
Certain areas of California are basically a different country with a different currency. if people want to live there and be slaves to their homes, have fun with that. For those lucky enough to have lived there when prices were affordable and are now selling, congrats.
Like happened in California, The real estate price run up is happening in Dallas right now. My house has nearly doubled in price since I purchased it 15 years ago, with 75% of that run up being in the past 5 years. Houses are selling so quickly that many buyers are resorting to making offers sight unseen and bidding wars are breaking out. Builders cannot turn out new homes fast enough.
Why? Because a load of companies have decided that North Texas is where they want to be. Toyota, State Farm, and Liberty Mutual (to name a few) have been moving large portions of their employees to the area.
I hope this trend continues until I'm ready to retire in about 10 years. By then, I'll be dumping the house and heading to the cheap country and living on the proceeds....
And the autopilot in planes saves lives.
Says who exactly? Can you quote something that proves that statement?
Autopilots are there to increase efficiency and comfort of the passengers. They sometimes are there to reduce work load so they can reduce the cockpit crew size, but they are not required safety equipment for commercial flying, unless the automation was the basis for reducing crew requirements during type certification.
The advent of autopilots has actually had a negative impact on pilot's flying skills, which impacts safety. Stick and Rudder skills are allowed to laps because they are not used in favor of the automation's efficiency. This is actually one of the biggest areas of concern in the industry right now, having thousands of hours of seat time, pushing buttons on the automation and little actual experience FLYING the aircraft. It's called Human Factors engineering and it's all about how you keep the human in the decision making loop enough that they can actually be ready to deal with situations where the automation cannot go.
So which one of the other automakers are you shilling for here?
All of them perhaps, including tesla.
I don't dislike Tesla, I'm only pointing out that they are on risky ground and the NTSB's view doesn't help them at all.
This is BAD for Tesla. The NTSB basically found fault in the "auto pilot" system's user interface AND it's technical capability. I am NOT surprised by this.
Automatic driving of cars and trunks needs to be thoroughly thought through. Not just the technology required to keep the car on the road, sensing what's going on around it and dealing appropriately with this dynamic environment, but also the complex human factors considerations. Tesla may have the first part working fairly well within the given limits of their sensors, but the second part of this problem hasn't been designed very well.
Human Factors engineering has only recently been a consideration for *real* auto pilots (those in aircraft) and flight automation systems. And it has become clear that all the automation in aircraft has given us great efficiency and smooth operation a the cost of inexperienced pilots with poor flying skills who don't recognize when something is gravely wrong until it is too late. They trust the automation, because it just works, at least until it doesn't, and something really bad happens that was easily preventable. The folks over at the NTSB are very familiar with this issue because there have been a number of notable commercial aircraft crashes where this was a contributing factor, where the automation failed to do what the pilot expected and a crash happened in a perfectly flyable aircraft.
Tesla has a serious level of risk with this feature. It may be wiz bang cool and Musk may love calling it an "autopilot" but the legal liability is huge unless they can keep people from crashing while it's on. The NTSB's statements here are NOT going to bode well for Tesla's legal liability and all the EULA's in the world won't stop the lawsuits when crashes happen.
Battery storage is about 95% efficient. Significantly above pumped storage.
Go back into your cave, troll!
just don't think it is a viable solution to peak shifting/load balancing for things like solar or wind supply issues. Actually it is, as Germany and other countries demonstrade since decades, stuoid troll.
LOL... Unless they have changed the laws of physics and chemistry in the last decade, 95% is but a figment of your imagination. Chemical based batteries really suck efficiency wise. Lithium Ion batteries (Which are nearly the best rechargeable batteries out there for efficiency) max out at about 90% (dc in dc out), but that's just the battery. If you add in the AC-DC and DC-AC conversion losses and a few percent for I*R unavoidable losses you are well under 80% and likely under 70% for any kind of realistic system (Say the size of what could power a single home.) Industrial sized systems would likely be much worse than this, just because it wouldn't be economical to build systems as efficient as a moderately sized home unit could be.
Heck, the power supply for your PC is 90% efficient at best (AC-DC) and that's pretty much the best efficiency you can find for AC-DC conversion (and is pretty darned expensive being 1KW for about $250. So assume 90% AC-DC conversion, 90% storage efficiency and another 90% going back to AC when you need it and you are looking at (100W - 10W (AC-DC) = 90 W to battery - 9 W (loss in battery) = 81 W (out of battery) - 8.1W (DC-AC) = 73.9 W) making a really GOOD system running about 74% efficient (And that's making some HUGE assumptions like unity power factor loads).... You are claiming 95%?
So have you broken the laws of physics lately? Maybe a thermodynamic law or two? Because there is no way you are getting 95% efficiency (Input power to output power) from a buildable and practical battery storage system that I know of.
100MW is not a measure of storage... I'll assume you mean 100MW/hour...
I'll point out one thing... I think your numbers are wrong, or the amount of storage nearly pointless... The state of Texas, today, had a base load of 30,000 MW and a projected peak of nearly 55,000 MWh. That's JUST Texas on a 90 degree day. 100 MWh is spitting into the wind, 10X that would be required to have any meaningful amount of storage for one state and 20x that would still be spitting in the wind. Scale that up to nation wide and this is meaningless...
Perhaps your numbers are wrong?
A couple of points...
1. Fossil fuels will be used until they are too expensive, on this we agree. However, if history is any indicator, fossil fuels are going to be available for a long time to come. All it takes is a small increase in the market price for fossil fuel and you end up getting large increases in "proven reserves" (those resources which are economically recoverable). The available proven reserves of fossil fuels has generally been rising up though this very day. This tells me we are far from being anywhere near running out. Sure, the price has been slowly rising, but so far, this has only increased available supplies. I don't see this changing in my life time.
2. Nuclear power has been given a really bad rap, again we agree. However, the problem with nuclear power today is actually cost. It's too expensive compared to a Natural Gas powered generation plant, because the cost of CNG is so low and doesn't seem to be going up anytime soon. I think Nuclear power could be cheaper, but it's stuck with 1960's technology for various regulatory, public policy and public relations reasons, which has stopped development. However, CNG is a sure thing, low risk solution.
And... Just in case you are interested.... I AM an Electrical Engineer (College Degreed) by training so I do have better than average knowledge of power distribution systems. It's been 20 years, but the basics of how electric motors, transformers, transmission lines work has not changed since Westinghouse took on Edison. The controlling technology HAS evolved and I don't consider myself "up to date" on that part, but I understand how power gets from source to destination and what factors effect the efficiency of the systems involved. I also have nuclear engineering training (as a minor) and have personally toured multiple reactor sites, including trips inside containment structures as part of my learning experiences. So... Where I don't claim to be an expert in any of this stuff, I'm not just blindly speculating or claiming that "I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express" level of expertise.
Do you have *any* idea how inefficient battery storage is? The BEST way to store electricity on an industrial scale is about 87% (pumped storage), batteries are barely over half that.... Chemical battery storage has *really* bad efficency ...
Don't miss my point here. Sure, you can have local systems, you can have a battery in your house, use the one in your EV to shift peak loads, but they literally suck power out of the system and waste it, a lot of it. Consuming MORE power is not the best answer here... In fact, I'd wager that we could concentrate on consuming LESS power and make a bigger impact on things though conservation, and not local storage. Changing to LED bulbs, more efficient HVAC and other devices that consume large amounts of power will do more. (Drying clothes, Heating Water, Cooking..)
Look at small scale storage as a local "backup power" solution if you like, just don't think it is a viable solution to peak shifting/load balancing for things like solar or wind supply issues. It's really horribly inefficient for that kind of thing.
Pumped storage is indeed the most usable solution, however, there are two things you simply must have to set up a system.
1. Hills or mountains. You have to pump the water up hill and the higher up you can go the better. This means you need some natural topography that has significant elevation changes where you can build some kind of storage pool up the hill. Usually they take a hill, flatten the top to build a pool. You won't be doing this in the plains, which are nearly table top flat and cover a significant percentage of the country.
2. Water source to pump from. Not only do you need hilly land, you need a ready source of surface water to pump up that hill. Again, this is not a given in the areas of mountainous terrain in the USA. Certainly the southwest doesn't work, it's hilly but there is no water.
So you cannot just build these things anyplace as you indicated. In fact, there are really limited areas that have both things you need for this. Most of the Atlantic seaboard states from Georgia to Maine with the Smokey Mountains could work along with the states just to their west. There is a bit of Missouri (the Ozarks) that could work (actually already do this) and possibly the North West states of OR and Washington but after that, forget it.
Then there is the HUGE environmental impact these things have and the dangers they create for the local area. You don't just take the top off a mountain and pump water up there w/o making lasting changes to the local environment. Plus you need a lower pool to keep the water when it's at the bottom of the hill, which has another huge impact. There is also a risk of failure and accidental uncontrolled release of all that water and the damage that could cause. And yes, that has happened with these things in the past. So, for safety, you cannot build these things upstream from where people are living, or risk killing people should an accident happen. This last requirement puts a HUGE limit on where you can put these things.
Finally, there is the efficiency of pumped storage. By most standards it is abysmal. You get at best 87% efficiency and often no more than 75%. This means that you loose 13-25% of your energy input. Remember this is the BEST we can do and there is HUGE environmental impacts with this. Where I am a great proponent of pumped storage coupled with nuclear base load generation as a cost effective solution, I still do not think fossil fuels are going away anytime soon. However, as a peak shifting tool, buying power at night from base generation capacity then selling it at double to triple the price during peak, they might work out financially. But the start up costs are really high, and the energy storage capacity pretty low for the costs, so the break even point would be 10+ years away. So far, it doesn't seem they are very profitable.
Energy storage for an electric grid on an industrial scale is a HARD and environmentally messy thing to do. Doing it efficiently, depending on what efficiency you think is good enough, is not financially viable for much more than just peak load offsetting where the spot prices of power triple or more from base load costs..
We will be keeping those fossil fueled power generators around for a long time yet, or learning to live in the dark.
OK, that's how IP works in the USA.... But patents are almost like currency here, which makes some folks a pile of money at times. What's wrong with making money as long as it's legal? What's wrong with filing patents to make money? But having a patent is only part of this, you have to defend it.
Consider what happened to the Wright brothers. Curtis openly violated their patents and dragged out the court cases for decades... The stress of it all likely killed one of the brothers. In the end, they made some money on their invention, but Curtis's company purchased theirs. Eli Whitney is another story about the perils of protecting patents. As I recall, he lost control of his invention (the cotton gin) and never cleared a profit because of the legal costs of trying to defend it..
If you are trying to put something into the public domain... Patent it, then don't defend your patent....
Publishing in public really doesn't fix this problem. Google can still apply for and get a patent for it, rightly or wrongly.
You can go back later and invalidate the patent, but that requires you take the issue to court, which requires you to hire a lawyer, pay filing fees and spend your time. It might have been cheaper to just get the patent up front when this is all said and done. Surely Google can afford to defend their patent if they decide it's worth it, but can you afford it if your idea is to just give it away?
Right or wrong, that's how this IP thing works.....
That constitutes prior art and make Google's patent invalid.
Which you now have to fight Google in court to prove if they got the patent that you should have applied for.
I get that Google will not win, but it takes $$ and time to go to court and prove you invented this first.
Which... If you read my original post, is what I'm saying. It very likely would have been cheaper to file the patent...
This is Mr. Kettle...
As bright and capable as you are, you do realize that *some* of this is because of your propensity to throw little fits of temper towards your developers, and your "I am Linux, What I say goes" control of the project. Right? I understand that it is sometimes better to just make a choice and go with it, but any time you act like a dictator, expect folks to get a bit miffed with you. Now when you vent on your volunteers, you are just asking to be seen as a capricious despot who is too full of himself.
I'll be the fist to admit that not all of the naysaying is justified, but you have to admit that at least part of this is a reflection of how you deal with people around you... In short, (and I will paraphrase) "You need to treat others better than you expect them to treat you."
Even if you want to just give it away, you better apply for that patent or this kind of thing is going to happen Skippy... Now, if you really want to defend this, it's going to cost you a pile of $$, just to give it away.
Little Kim? Is that you Phat boy? What's wrong? Did Dennis Rodman go home? Run out of cheese? Fresh out of nukes and missiles to set off? No rebels to shoot today? So you are reduced to trolling on Slashdot?
LOL... I guess you little trolls have to eat now and then...
Bye Bye now...
My guess is you came back to the discussion days later because you couldn't handle people with mod points downvoting you for being an idiot.
You guessed wrong, which isn't surprising... I don't do Slashdot from home and I wasn't at work this weekend. Also, I don't slum for mod points, I just post. So do you slum for mod points then? So you've been wrong twice in one post, making confident assertions about stuff you obviously don't know.
So are you this wrong about North Korea? I'm beginning to think so...
Why? Because you now have a history of being wrong and are acting more like a troll than someone with something useful to say... ;)
Seriously? So you think it's a good idea to downplay the Allied victory over the Axis? Let me guess, you don't think the attempted genocide of the Jews happed either right? It's all just a story used to justify the near total destruction of Germany... Shesh...
That's none of your business.
Which part?
And an overly simplistic view of the situation, to boot.
Do enlighten us.... My guess is that you really don't have much more insight than I do about this, but I'm willing to read what you got to say.
Class Envy... That's all you got.
Coveting your neighbor's stuff is not a road to making things fair. It's a road to socialism or communism which are both bad forms of government in regards to being fair, unless you want everybody to suffer the same...