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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

>One battery breakthrough will obsolete this

Maybe this is the battery breakthrough.

Further gas storage of energy is cheaper than battery storage (with a fixed cost for actually burning the stuff) Are batteries ever going to get to the point of being viable for storing a week's worth of energy? A month's worth?

In a lot of the world that's what you'll need to do. Solar isn't going to cover that European January where there's no wind.

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Methane storage is cheaper than batteries, but hydrogen molecules are so small that the cost of storing it is actually pretty high.

The cost of capturing the carbon to make the methane ruins your idea.

not my idea, I prefer batteries. But Methane storage would be above hydrogen storage in my hierarchy of things I'd allocate capital to.

I can see why I sounded in favour of methane over batteries but I was just acknowledging the OP's point about dollers/joule stored. Batteries have plenty of other advantages that I think put them ahead despite that figure.

I don't see why you'd prefer methane storage. You're straining mightily (capturing CO2, synthesizing methane) in order to save on storage caverns, which are cheap.

I wasn't aware hydrogen storage in salt caverns was a thing, I had been thinking of a 'metal tanks' solution similar to gas stations which I know leads to major issues with corrosion.

Hydrogen storage is hard to do cheaply

The cost of an underground cavern for hydrogen storage is as little as $1 per kWh of storage capacity. So in an application where the charge/discharge power is small compared to the amount of energy you want to store, hydrogen will be among the cheapest storage options, far better than batteries.

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