On Wed, 2014-11-26 at 08:49 +1100, Tom Worthington wrote: > says, it is difficult to use solar or wind power for on-demand power as > the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow, on demand
I'd like to see more study of small and large scale energy *storage*, since the obvious way to smooth demand vs supply mismatches is to store energy when you have a surplus and release it when you have a deficit. I'm not suggesting that all of these are actually useful for storing (say) solar overproduction, but things like: - lifting a weight - tensing a spring - pumping water up hill - dumping energy into heating or cooling - battery storage (small local and large centralised) - spinning a flywheel - dumping energy into ongoing but not time critical tasks (compute tasks like rendering or physical tasks like filling a tank) ...and of course the synergy between electrical cars and their potential use (sorry) for energy storage when they are not being driven. Some of these lose lots of the energy, but it's "free" so that's not as critical as it is when you are burning irreplaceable coal or generating indestructible nuclear waste. And lots of these point up how useful it would be to move away from massively centralised power generation (with huge losses in the network) to small-scale localised power generation with less transport cost, more resilience, and so on. On the flip side, massively distributed battery storage, for example, has major issues of production, delivery and disposal - are these offset by the benefits or not? Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (ka...@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: EC67 61E2 C2F6 EB55 884B E129 072B 0AF0 72AA 9882 Old fingerprint: B862 FB15 FE96 4961 BC62 1A40 6239 1208 9865 5F9A _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link