are batteries (or some sort of storage) in the infrastructure plan for the future?
Hemp bast fiber is normally waste. Hemp anodes for supercapacitors are made from the bast fiber that is normally waste.
Graphene is very useful; but industrial production of graphene is dangerous because lungs and blood-brain barrier.
Hemp is an alternative to graphene for modern supercapacitors (which now have much greater power density in wH/kg)
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp...
> “Our device’s electrochemical performance is on par with or better than graphene-based devices,” Mitlin says. “The key advantage is that our electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.”
> Graphene is, however, expensive to manufacture, costing as much as $2,000 per gram. [...] developed a process for converting fibrous hemp waste into a unique graphene-like nanomaterial that outperforms graphene. What’s more, it can be manufactured for less than $500 per ton.
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=hemp+supercapacit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
I feel like a broken record mentioning this again and again.
It may be that most people dismiss supercapacitors based on the stats for legacy (pre-graphene/pre-hemp) supercapacitors: large but quick and long-lasting.
It may be that hemp is taxed at up to 90% because it's a controlled substance in the US (but not in Europe, Canada, or China; where we must import shelled hemp seeds from). A historical accident?
I'd update the units; good call. You may have that confused? Traditional supercapacitors have had lower power density and faster charging/discharging. Graphene and hemp somewhat change the game, AFAIU.
It makes sense to put supercapacitors in front of the battery banks because they last so many cycles and because they charge and discharge so quickly (a very helpful capability for handling spiky wind and solar loads).
You're right that it makes sense to put supercapacitors in front of the battery banks for the reasons you said.
[1] http://berc.berkeley.edu/storage-wars-batteries-vs-supercapa...
My understanding is that there's usually a curve over time t that represents the charging rate from empty through full.
[edit]
"C rate"
Battery_(electricity)#C_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(electricity)#C_rate
Battery_charger#C-rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rates
> Charge and discharge rates are often denoted as C or C-rate, which is a measure of the rate at which a battery is charged or discharged relative to its capacity. As such the C-rate is defined as the charge or discharge current divided by the battery's capacity to store an electrical charge. While rarely stated explicitly, the unit of the C-rate is [h^−1], equivalent to stating the battery's capacity to store an electrical charge in unit hour times current in the same unit as the charge or discharge current.
Given the over provisioning required to be able to ensure a battery will be able to provide a guaranteed amount of energy, such as last say overnight in 5 years, and that batteries are good for a fixed number of cycles after which they have to be replaced, batteries were not competitive with pumped storage and all the civil works that entails on a project currently under construction.
Dams have many problems. They can only be built on certain topographies, they have an ecological impact (destroy an ecosystem, albeit creating a different one), and have a social impact. However, in the context of energy production, they are amazing. They can start and stop as fast as loaded thermal plants (without the readiness fuel consumption cost), they are 100% renewable, provide aquifers for collecting urban water and provide the best energy storage/temporal load balancing technology today.