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iso1631yesterday at 2:37 PM2 repliesview on HN

Not all batteries need to be mobile.

A 1 GWh grid scale battery takes up about 4 hectares at the moment. The UKs total energy use is about 2,000GWh a day.

It would need to use 240,000 hectares to store all energy requirements (eletric, transport, heating etc) for a whole month. Even in extreme cold conditions it would last a couple of weeks.

That would be about 1% of land use.


Replies

epistasisyesterday at 3:24 PM

Storing a month of energy use doesn't make any sense when it comes to renewable grids. Since you don't have to mine/extract and transport an inventory, far far less storage is required.

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thelastgallonyesterday at 4:26 PM

Instead of batteries, why not green hydrogen or green ammonia? Ammonia is needed for fertilizer, storage/logistics are a solved problem. Emergency plants around that can use ammonia as fuel can solve the dunkelflaute problem?

Another option is natural gas peaker plant on a ship/barge. Have a fleet of these around that can dock at any port and supply electrictity. A peaker powership is essentially a mobile, marine-class version of an onshore peaking power plant.

What would be best long term if we have a few hundred - few thousand nuclear ships/subs that can go anywhere and supply power.

It can be the sharing economy for clean power at scale.

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