Why would we produce synthetic fuel when we have batteries? We also have other ways to store electricity.
Am I missing sarcasm in your comment or something?
Am I missing sarcasm in your comment or something?
With synthetic fuel let's say it takes m fuel producers / consumers to store electricity produced one day and use it the next. Then it still takes m fuel producers / consumers to store electricity produced during ten days and use it the next ten days. The only thing you need to scale up is your fuel tank, but that is very cheap.
The thousand pounds of batteries in a Tesla contain the same amount of energy as ~3 gallons of gas.
I'm sure EV's is going to take over in most areas given enough time. Until then, it's only logical to run ICE's on green fuels if available. Synthetic fuels made with excess solar/wind certainly sounds like it would fit that description.
Also, we already have infrastructure in place for handling large amounts of petrol and diesel, so storage and handling is a solved problem.
My point is that when talking about storing excess energy from the grid, maybe storage density isn't as important as storage availability.
Let's say you want to store fuel now and keep it for 6 months, might be realistic with gas or fuel. On other hand single cycle from battery is awfully expensive. Even if you get to use it for 100 years.