Hacker News Reader

The world has already used most of the useful locations for hydro. It works well where there are abundant resources, but there are no more areas to put in hydro (even ignoring the local environmental disaster that hydro often is which means we probably wouldn't build it if it could). The locations that have and use it don't have any to spare for the rest of us to live places that are not a good location for hydro.

View on HN

Ok, then we can use hydrogen, or thermal storage, or non-litium chemistry batteries.

The point is that there are many ways to store energy. The fact that there isn't enough lithium or not enough hydro sites doesn't change much.

The problem is scale. Since the other responder didnt want to do napkin math - you could give it a go w.r.t to hydrogen. It gets very very expensive rather quickly. So very expensive you might start to wonder if you shouldn't have built a nuclear plant instead.

Local factories etc. might see a need/use for hydrogen production (Swedish Hybrit comes to mind) but as a national grid stabilizer.. I'm doubtful

They all have something in common: they are very expensive at the scale we need. Hydro is one off the cheapest we have, and if you had a good location you would still be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars (or likely billions!) to build it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com