> We also have underground compressed air using existing deep cavities, and undersea compressed air. And underwater buoyancy, drawing floats down toward seafloor-mounted pulleys, using a winch and motor-generator on shore. Demand will not exceed our capacity to make cables and floats.
These are more technologies that compete with batteries, not fuels. And poorly at that. CAES in ideal sites might compete with batteries for a while yet, but the others do not. Even a single truck full of ammmonia can store the equivalent to tens of thousands of cubic metres worth of displacement storage. A cubic metre float in a 500m deep body of water can store 5MJ, or about the same as a battery you can lift with one hand and buy for a few hundred dollars.
> But the real answer is that there is nowhere even close to as great a need for long-term storage as you imagine, just as there is not much petroleum stored today. Petroleum is extracted and delivered continuously and reliably. Myriad tropical solar farms will synthesize ammonia year-round, shipping anywhere needed on demand, so storage is needed only until the next shipment arrives.
Moving energy 2000-4000km as not-electricity is strictly a harder problem than storing it for 6 months and is solved with a subset of the same solutions. The main upside is energy input is cheaper and there is less idle time. This is definitely part of the solution but comes under the same heading.
HVDC systems are a solution for most of the issues, but distant solar isn't completely uncorrelated. Also no country is going to stake their survival on a system with cascading failure modes that can be triggered by anything from war, to a heat wave, to a blizzard, to a cyclone, to a forest fire, to political games. Thus capacity for months of backup is still required.
All of this is moot anyway because your other comment led me to find sources stating green ammonia is already within 50% of cost parity with fossil fuels for the cheapest solar energy sources and ammonia fuel cells are now viable as well with the same technology. Between that and thermochemical storage, fission is obsolete immediately and fossil fuels only need one more price shock for the transition to start.
Also none of this supports your original assertion that pumped hydro meaningfully exists in a non-ecosystem-altering way.
No they don't. Proposing international transmission from the equator over a hanful of many thousand km long lines in competition with your neighbors in all directions as a sole source of winter energy is far more fragile than a mixture of local fossil fuel reserves, nuclear, local production, and imports from any direction from immediate neighbors.
PVs solve net energy needs. Perovskites might even make them do so without needing strategic mineral reserves. But they don't really provide energy security, and keeping fossil fuel infrastructure working for 1 month in 30 is extremely costly.
> You are always free to invent falsehoods about pumped hydro, as about anything else.
Then show the real numbers. I did. Demonstrate it being viable as a significant portion of primary energy in a typical country as a new project.
These are more technologies that compete with batteries, not fuels. And poorly at that. CAES in ideal sites might compete with batteries for a while yet, but the others do not. Even a single truck full of ammmonia can store the equivalent to tens of thousands of cubic metres worth of displacement storage. A cubic metre float in a 500m deep body of water can store 5MJ, or about the same as a battery you can lift with one hand and buy for a few hundred dollars.
> But the real answer is that there is nowhere even close to as great a need for long-term storage as you imagine, just as there is not much petroleum stored today. Petroleum is extracted and delivered continuously and reliably. Myriad tropical solar farms will synthesize ammonia year-round, shipping anywhere needed on demand, so storage is needed only until the next shipment arrives.
Moving energy 2000-4000km as not-electricity is strictly a harder problem than storing it for 6 months and is solved with a subset of the same solutions. The main upside is energy input is cheaper and there is less idle time. This is definitely part of the solution but comes under the same heading.
HVDC systems are a solution for most of the issues, but distant solar isn't completely uncorrelated. Also no country is going to stake their survival on a system with cascading failure modes that can be triggered by anything from war, to a heat wave, to a blizzard, to a cyclone, to a forest fire, to political games. Thus capacity for months of backup is still required.
All of this is moot anyway because your other comment led me to find sources stating green ammonia is already within 50% of cost parity with fossil fuels for the cheapest solar energy sources and ammonia fuel cells are now viable as well with the same technology. Between that and thermochemical storage, fission is obsolete immediately and fossil fuels only need one more price shock for the transition to start.
Also none of this supports your original assertion that pumped hydro meaningfully exists in a non-ecosystem-altering way.