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Comment by teraku | Hacker News Reader

This is not true. There is a bunch of papers and releases by universities, that show that if you manage your power grid properly, which is already done for any grid having more than 15% renewables, you actually gain an advantage with their flexibility and can work around any base-load problem.

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>you actually gain an advantage with their flexibility and can work around any base-load problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'base-load problem', but what I mean is that you need a fossil-fuel base-load.

Do various sorts of batteries (gravity, fly-wheels, LiON) provide reasonable alternatives for some base load and peak generation?

I personally am a fan of gravity batteries but the amount of scammy companies operating in the space is dragging the entire field down. The energy density of weights is really low so manufacturing a weight is absolutely uneconomical. What you want to do is take material from a landscape. Usually this means pumping water up a hill but you can also carve out a hydraulic cylinder out of the landscape and use water to lift it. [0] It has absolutely insane scaling potential. Energy capacity grows like so: r^4. Doubling the radius increases energy capacity 16 fold. Energy storage up to 1.6TWh is definitively possible.

Of course this is so ambitious that it might never get built but I can definitively tell you that a crane system like this would be barely economical [1] because weights are really expensive but it's a good attempt and can be refined further.

And finally here is an example of a scam concept: [2]

Digging shafts is unaffordable unless you reuse old mine shafts which would reduce the number of shafts in the picture to just a single one. If you can only have one weight per generator that means the system doesn't scale. The power density of lifting a 1000 ton rock 100m high is pathetic. It's just 270kWh. The cost of the concrete is negligible in this scenario but you won't find a generator that is cheap enough to compete with a conventional battery.

However, to stay realistic. Gravity batteries are about as likely to happen as everyone suddenly switching to nuclear power. The odds aren't great.

[0] http://www.eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-sy...

[1] https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/784/10784/Ener...

[2] https://offgridquest.com/images/banners/gravitybattery.png

[1] Echoes Tower of Hanoi, slightly interesting

theoretically yes, but we have to scale production way up, there just aren't enough batteries in the world right now

>you need a fossil-fuel base-load.

Basically saying this is wrong.

Technically, base-load refers to the minimum amount of energy demand on a given day. All sources and studies I have are from Germany, but our parliament, their adjacent (technical) offices and the universities here have concluded that "base-load" as a concept is wrong with today's power generation and the way a power grid works. Today they usually talk about residual-load, turning the paradigm around. Regardless of how it works, there are also renewable energies which can fulfil this classical "base-load" idea: Namely organic gas or geothermal power plants.

>Regardless of how it works, there are also renewable energies which can fulfil this classical "base-load" idea: Namely organic gas or geothermal power plants.

Why is Germany investing billions in NEW pipeline projects to ship natural gas from Russia for the next few decades? Germany says a lot of nice sweet-nothings, but their actions don't match their words.

Well, first of all the parliament and the government are distinct entities. Government also is very corrupt and slowly changing. An advantage of gas pipelines is they can potentially be repurposed, for example to ship organic gas.

Your statement says nothing about the feasibility, just politics.

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