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Comment by cupofpython | Hacker News Reader

What a great read. Saving this for additional research later. I also saw something related to harvesting some energy from the tides, which I think would fall under lifting or sinking stuff and virtual batteries. I wasn't convinced on being able to scale it, or get too much of significance out of it, so i didnt read too much into what the exact technical implementation was.

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If you're letting the ocean move it, it's generally known as tidal or wave power. It's appealing because it's very predictable and the variability is not correlated* with wind or solar. Afaik cost and placement of suitable sites is a dealbreaker.

One potential technogy https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-31/wave-power-generator-...

New thing I just learned. The tidal stream industry seem confident they can beat nuclear at shockingly low investment. https://interregtiger.com/understanding-tidal-stream-energy/

If they're not lying, that's your high return investment for the future (if you're a policy maker...if you are a private investor then what happened to the solar industry when panels got cheap could happen again).

* uncorrellated variable sources need less storage when combined There are already regions that can work on wind, solar, and a small percentage of existing hydro with no storage for this reason. Tidal isn't completely uncorrelated -- roughly once a month your peaks will line up with solar peak production, and the trough will line up with peak demand for a few days -- but attaching two systems at distance will help with this and it reduces the load on hydro.

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