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Comment by biturd | Hacker News Reader

Is interim storage of electricity too costly? I never knew that power worked this way. So power has no storage, we run this fine line of balance where we hope supply and demand are within a few points of each other?

No wonder they like nuclear so much; not that I am against it, but we can generate as much or as little as needed on demand. Seems to me this is an issue of an antiquated grid system that needs an overhaul. We are still running a 10Mb/s network and needs to update to Fiber as an analogy.

I would think hat if there is excess, it would be stored to use when there is a demand for which we can't supply. Apparently that is not the case?

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> Is interim storage of electricity too costly?

For most intents and purposes, interim storage of electricity is science fiction. Batteries are woefully inadequate, and the solutions that we do have, like pumped storage, have so long turn-on times that they might as well not exist for spikes that fast.

This is the biggest narrative about energy production that is left unsaid in the general discourse. There are two distinct markets for energy -- the baseline production, and peaker production. They are different enough to be thought of as entirely different industries. Wind has the misfortune of not belonging in either.

What about pumping water uphill, then using turbines to catch it coming down when it is desirable to do so.

Of course. That's very common approach and there are many such power plants ("storage"). But as you can imagine, this cannot be built anywhere, cheaply enough and in large enough quantities.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Dlouhe_st..., 2 × 325 MW for 6 hours when full, ~250 millions EUR to build)

Smith Mountain Lake around Roanoke, VA.

656MW of power generation/storage, built for $103 million in the early 1960s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Dam

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

A smart grid + demand response could help with storage:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/smart-grid-demand-re...

Basically, if you can control lots of water heaters, fridges, refrigerated wharehouses, A/Cs, etc.. You have a way to store power (f.ex. you make the water a couple degrees hotter, or the wharehouses a couple degrees lower). Not enough to affect what's in it, but enough to use that extra power and "store" it (which buys you time, and means that you can use less power later, ie. shut down a gas plant or whatever while all those things revert to normal temp).

>For most intents and purposes, interim storage of electricity is science fiction. Batteries are woefully inadequate, and the solutions that we do have, like pumped storage, have so long turn-on times that they might as well not exist for spikes that fast.

Maybe the wind farms should install their own buffering systems. If they built reservoirs on hilltops then dumped their excess electricity into their own pumps they could avert this "all or nothing" issue by delivering power to the grid on a more consistent basis with fewer spikes.

At the current rate of wind development, says the BPA's Mainzer, the region's system of dams and power lines will start running into consistent operational problems around 2013, when wind in the agency's territory reaches total capacity of some 6,000 megawatts.

Ok, 6 gigawatts of capacity. Let's say you want to store 12 hours worth of wind capacity. 6GW * 12 hours is 260 terajoules, the equivalent of 61,000 tons of TNT. Not only do you have to build a system that can safely store and dischange that much energy, but it has to be cheaper than current power generation methods.

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