You don't need batteries per se, only energy storage systems.
Pumped storage, pressurized air, flywheels, ultracapacitors, and of course chemical batteries. Pumped storage and compressed air systems store orders of magnitude more energy and power than batteries.
That's true, but there are synergies. We will need lots and lots of batteries for electrifying the transportation. There's lots of R&D money in battery research. Much less in other types of storage. There's all the reasons to believe batteries will become cheaper in the long run by a factor of 2, or even more [1]. There are also a few advantages that batteries have over other types of storage: they don't have moving parts, they have quite high round-trip efficiency, their maintenance is cheap, the failure mode is not that bad.
You don't need to imagine it. Such a fire already happened. It was brought under control.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/05/tesla-megapack-fire-highligh...
That is going to be true regardless of storage technology. Concentrating energy into a tiny volume is effectively making a bomb.
Lithium, when it burns produces gaseous lithium oxide, which becomes lye, drain opener, when it gets to your nose.
Pumped storage in particular is also geographically dependent. If you've got lots of spare lakes on mountains, pumped storage is just what you needed, if you're the Dutch not so much.
Furthermore, underground reservoirs have been demonstrated, in both natural and abandoned mining cavities.
A hollow sphere anchored to the sea bed can have the water pumped out with surplus power, and allowed back in to generate power.
Draining water from an elevated reservoir to a deep underground cavern can multiply the energy storage capacity. Height is strictly limited to hill height, but underground cavities may have any depth, to the limits of drilling.
Maybe a mix of storage systems will ultimately be the best solution for whatever reasons, but this idea makes so much sense to me because of how it takes advantage of all of our existing infrastructure. Just stand up renewables at existing plants, use spare capacity to power capturing CO2 from the output and/or the air, formulate the captured CO2 into a usable fuel on site, and then swap out the dirty fuel supply for the synthetic one. Now you have the functional equivalent of renewables + batteries — with the advantages that the plants are already built and wired into the grid, battery supply is no longer a bottleneck to rollout, and a lot of jobs are saved. So as a whole, as I see it, this would be faster, easier to plan, less wasteful, and more politically viable, as compared to replacing existing plants with brand new renewable ones that use battery storage.
The same concept applies to vehicles. Our entire infrastructure around gasoline is already sitting and waiting to be used as a massive energy storage system. If carbon could be captured from the air using renewables and centrally processed into a backwards-compatible fuel, it would no longer be necessary to push so heavily for a transition to BEVs. Instead, consumers could choose solely based on the costs and benefits to themselves; maybe gas cars would be less efficient than BEVs (like the equivalent of running an app in Wine or Rosetta), but that would be reflected in the price of the fuel if so, with consumers eating the full cost rather than passing part of it along to society as a negative externality.
Ditto for existing gas-powered stoves, heating, etc.
Additionally, once it's running at scale, this system would naturally lend itself to the next step: transitioning from net-zero emissions to net-negative emissions. Governments could allocate funds toward buying carbon capture fuel and simply sequestering it away for emergencies, at least until atmospheric CO2 drops to pre-industrial levels. Maybe the same method would prove useful for terraforming other planets with inhospitable atmospheres as well.
I'm very interested in seeing how United's experiments with synthetic fuel go for these reasons. Last time I brought this topic up on HN, someone shared Prometheus Fuels with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels.
Does anyone know how far along this kind of technology is? What factors have prevented the idea from already being implemented in traditional power plants at scale?
Now it’s true that bev have transmission and battery losses, but synthetic gasoline is going to have inefficiencies and cost to transport, too.
The case wher e it makes sense is where the weight of batteries matter, ie: jet packs and airplanes.
"Imagine a lossless conversion" is obviously doing a lot of work here, but even if they're only 1% as efficient end-to-end as BEVs, that would still be fine in a world where we had more renewable power than we needed without the capacity to store it all. BEVs would eventually be pushed to dominance by market forces, while in the meantime we would accelerate our transition to net-zero emissions.