Michael Giberson
Earth2tech offers “3 Questions for 3 Energy Storage Experts.” The three questions:
- Why is energy storage so essential to the new energy economy?
- What is the most important use or implementation of energy storage?
- Which energy storage innovation do you most believe in?
Not exactly hard-hitting, investigative journalist-type questions, but useful in inspiring some informative chatter about what is going on in energy storage.
For my tastes, the answers to the first question over-emphasized the importance of energy storage to the respondent’s vision of the future energy economy. I’d be better sold by an answer that emphasized the potential to reduce costs and improve services to energy consumers.
Of course, the question primes for a wishful-thinking answer. The difference between me and the three energy storage experts – other than my obvious lack of energy storage expertise – is that I wish for different kinds of things.
To me the answer to “Why is energy storage so essential to the new energy economy?” is that better energy storage eventually allows the withering away of the state’s specialized regulatory apparatus for the electric power business.
Yeah, I know, I’m a dreamer. 😉
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I think the most important question is: For each of the important applications you list in your answers to questions 1-3, what will it take to produce storage technology that is economic for that application?
They admit, that the idea of “renewables” cannot work without storage. What they are in denial about is that there is no real technological headroom for storage. They also have, and in keeping with the rules of the “renewables”, completely ignored the question of how much storage you need to be able to rely solely on “renewables” without using any fossil fuels or nuclear power.
In late December the sun is not much in evidence in the northeastern US, winds, are of course variable and vagrant. Even in the southeastern desert, there are only 10 hours a day of sunshine, and the maximum altitude of the sun is 33 degrees. There will be little solar power. How much energy storage would it take to get through the last week of December, in a “renewables” powered world? What is your advice to us poor benighted northerners? Chopping wood warms you twice?