There’s folk wisdom in just about every culture that teaches about renewable energy — things like “make hay while the sun shines”. But as an industrial culture, we want to make hay 24/7 and not be at the whims of some capricious weather god! Alas, renewable energy puts a crimp in that. Once again, energy supplies are slowly becoming tied to the sun and the wind.
Since “Make compute while the wind blows” doesn’t have a great ring to it, clearly our civilization needs to come up with some grid-scale storage. Over in Sardinia they’re testing an idea that sounds like hot air, but isn’t — because the working gas is CO2.
The principle is simple: when power is available, carbon dioxide is compressed, cooled, and liquefied into pressure vessels as happens at millions of industrial facilities worldwide every day. When power is required, the compressed CO2 can be run through a turbine to generate sweet, sweet electricity. Since venting tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is kind of the thing we’re trying to avoid with this whole rigmarole, the greenhouse gas slash working fluid is stored in a giant bag. It sits, waiting for the next charge cycle, like the world’s heaviest and saddest dirigible. In the test project in Sardinia — backed by Google, amongst others — the gas bag holds 2000 tonnes and can produce 20 megawatts of power for up-to 10 hours.
That’s not exactly astounding. It gets you through the night, but leaves you hanging if the next day is cloudy. But it’s scalable. The turbine is 20 megawatts, sure, but all you need is land to add extra energy capacity. The 200 MWh pilot plant is a five hectare facility, which is only about 12.3 acres, or roughly 1/10th the size of the Mall of America. It seems like increasing capacity would be fairly trivial; unlike, say, pumped hydro storage, no special topography is required. Ten hours of storage is also notably longer than the six to eight hours grid-scale battery farms usually aim for.
As of this writing, there’s only one of these plants in operation, but expect that to change rapidly. In 2026 the company behind the Sardinia project, Energy Dome, plans on putting in grid-scale storage based on its technology in India and Wisconsin, and that’s before Google gets into it. They’re hoping to roll this technology out at a number of data centers worldwide, though the exact details of the deal aren’t public.
We’ve talked about grid-scale energy storage before, using everything from liquid tin to electric car batteries and big piles of gravel. This methodology has a lot to recommend it over those others in comparison, and should worst come to worst, at least it won’t burn for days like certain batteries we could name. Releasing 2000 tonnes of CO2 might not be as benign as a failure from a liquid air battery, but storing liquid CO2 under pressure is a lot easier holding onto cryogenic air.
All images credited to Luigi Avantaggiato.
The advantage of using liquid CO2 is that it liquifies at room temperatures above 6 bar/atm. No cryogenics needed for massive volume reduction.
The disadvantage (aside from the greenhouse gas problematics) is that parts of it solidify when boiling off, potentially blocking pipes and vents.
Nitrogen does neither.
I worked for a company here in SanDiego CA. We used CO2 in liquid form by the tanker truck every other week. Sure it sits at 6 Bar at room temp…
As soon as you start using that CO2 for anything it will turn to snow and block your plumbing… You need a tank (or in this case a bag) heater to bring the pressure up a couple more bar in order to stop it from going right to solid phase.
Someone is being paid eo prop up a bad idea.
What if you didn’t expand the liquid in the tank itself, but pumped the liquid out to a heat exchanger, where it can expand by the ambient heat from the environment.
Like, a pipe running through a large pool of water.
So you want a large pool of solid ice?
Would come handy in the summer.
I recently saw a documentary from the 70’s where a fellow who had been a farmer before and after both world wars recounted the difference. Before the wars they were making hay by hand and the limit of how much field they could cultivate was by how fast they could cut it down and transport out before the winter ruined it. He said they would hope for enough sunny days to get it all done, and leave the rest to rot.
After the war, when the horses were all used up and eaten for meat during the rationing, the surplus tractors built for the war effort went to working the farms instead, and all the work could be done in a week.
What place both ate their horses and had ‘surplus tractors built for the war effort’?
Tanks make lousy tractors.
Even the engines are far too big.
Perhaps not for a 2025 model tractor, but a 1950 model?
UK apparently, and they were American tractors sent overseas through the lend-lease program.
The USA had a million tractors in 1935.
Was England that backward before the war?
The interwar years were a period of farm consolidation in the USA.
Many people leaving country, average farm size greatly increasing.
But still just the beginning.
Commies called it ‘end of capitalism’, wrote books.
Just like now.
Yes. Before WW1 the UK had almost no mechanized agriculture to speak of, and after WW1 they started importing food instead.
Then come WW2 and the German U-boat problem on shipping, they suddenly ran out of food and had to start rationing everything – while desperately scrambling to re-start agriculture.
Germany was also hugely reliant on horses. Up to 80% of German transport in the war was horse-drawn. They didn’t have anywhere as many trucks as they needed.
On the other hand they didn’t have the fuel for the trucks either.
“should worst come to worst, at least it won’t burn for days”
Is anyone here mathy enough to calculate, in the event of a catastrophic pressure bag failure of the sizes being described here, how far the (now decompressed) CO2 would travel at ground level at hazardous levels before dissipating? Ignoring factors like wind, and assuming level ground. Let’s assume below 1000ppm is the ‘safe’ concentration, given a proximate community that includes kids, old people, pets, etc.
How far away from the nearest habitated area would this need to be built?
I’m sure nothing bad will happen when scaling up the storage by another factor of 100 and putting it near population centers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster#Eruption_and_gas_release
Yeah that’s exactly what was on my mind…the earlier threads about whether grid storage is valuable even if it’s lossy really had me scratching my head….and the people pretending the temperature question is unsolvable, likewise. But a giant bag of CO2 seems dangerous to me. CO2 is at a very low concentration in our atmosphere, it seems like it wouldn’t take a very big release to make a massive localized effect.
What heat source are they using to re-vaporize the liquid CO2?
Now that is a really Good Question.
PT Barnum would be proud if he were still alive…
He is laughing in his grave at us.
Probably natural gas.
The idea is that you would use the ambient heat to boil the liquid, but that’s not fast enough to generate megawatts at the turbine, so these kind of systems typically use some additional heat source like geothermal heat or burning gas to get the peak power output.
4290 tons of water, 20 Kelvin temperature drop (if my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct). That’s a reasonably compact heat storage tank, considering we’re now building systems with 45000 tons and more for city-scale heat storage. No need to over-complicate it.
It’ll also act as cooling waters for the compressors and condensers.
“What heat source are they using to re-vaporize the liquid CO2?”
The energy required for heating could be supplied by Solar Roadways, surely.
It is an interesting idea, seems like it would be reasonably safe and cost effective enough. Though I have to wonder if it really does scale sensibly at all, and if you wouldn’t be better off just putting solar and perhaps a few comparatively tiny battery on that land area instead – the hectare is only about 1MW for solar, so the output for the same land area is on paper about 1/4 of the turbine’s potential, and exactly where on the output curve of solar a day will be is a little less predictable. But they always produce something during the day, so even if you are making the assumption its 1/8th or even only 1/16th the turbines potential reliably on the same land area at this scale when you scale up that 1/16th ‘reliable’ daytime output will turn into 1/2 the turbines potential pretty quick land area wise, and end up exceeding it in the end, even though we are assuming much worse than sticker performance from the panels – yes the gasbags now last more than a day, but the solar and small battery/flywheel is actively generating rather than just storing similar amounts reliably every day (and thanks to the assumption the generation wasn’t near the actual peak potential output of the panels with gluts of excess power available if you can find users for it fairly often). And as solar is much easier to co-habituate with other structures, perhaps including a version of this concept for the medium term energy storage underneath…
So sizing your arrays expected minimum to the local daily demand with a few small batteries placed on top of whatever other building/warehouse/farm etc land use is underneath them to have power daily and get you through the night may be a far more efficient use of land and resources than scaling this project up.
Obviously if you have lots of low value land (which isn’t true around here, but globally isn’t so uncommon) and need that rainy day storage this idea isn’t unworkable, could even be ideal in a few places, but much as I hate to sound like the frequent commenter “Dude” I think for that rainy day energy store in most cases synthetic fuel actually makes more sense – stable, portable, energy dense and flexible in use energy source that you can build deep bunkers of rather cheaply and then easily take on the road/rails/air for energy supplied directly where you need it. Unless the round trip efficiency of this (and so far I can’t find any information on its round trip efficiency, which suggests its probably not that good – if it was surely that really positive advertising data would be made really easy to find) is getting up to the 60-90% sort of ballpark batteries have depending on chemistry I can’t see it making a strong enough economic argument to look better than the more flexible and directly compatible with existing infrastructure synthetic fuels.
It’s a misconception that the grid needs energy storage “for the rainy day” – i.e. rare events when no power is available otherwise.
That’s not the problem. What it needs is the capacity to absorb very large amounts of energy over the sunny day and the windy day and then release it slowly over the average day. Also, the average week, and the average month, as the availability of renewable energy chances on multiple time scales from weeks to seasons to years (i.e. dry/wet years for hydro).
The need to steady the output over months and even years is what demands large storage capacities that vastly exceed the potential of batteries or pumped hydro etc., which can only realistically be attained by turning the energy into synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.
The argument is not about stockpiling a couple barrels of synthetic oil or gas for an emergency. It’s about effectively plugging the renewable power inputs to the gas and oil grids of the nations by running the whole thing through synthesis plants. Sure it’s inefficient, but that’s the only viable way it can be done to expand the use of renewable power beyond the 20-30% share that can be directly integrated into the power grids using the pitiful amount of storage capacity we can build with batteries and the like.
Though to be precise, wind and solar cannot exceed 20-30% by much. Total renewables including hydro, can.
The EU is currently at the limits of how much wind and solar can contribute to the grid at 29% load share, but at the same time the high electricity prices and the surcharges used to pay the subsidies are keeping people from using electric appliances and heating, including electric heat pumps.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/three-four-homes-germany-still-heated-fossil-fuels
Oh, and the German solution to the problem? Introduce a gradually rising penalty on gas and oil heating, and use taxpayer money to pay 50% off on electric heat pumps.
So basically, take money out of people’s pockets to force them to buy more expensive clean energy. Sounds like nothing could go wrong.
https://deutschlandinenglish.com/p/millions-in-germany-face-energy-poverty-amid-rising-heating-costs
You forgot that Germans pass that to French Tax payers that have to subsidizedTHEIR nuclear energy so that Germans can use large amount of it for basically free. That and misusing interconnexion.
You are missing the point – you can be 100% solar powered really really easily if you scale up the generation enough – if your the baseline minimum output of that bad weather day are at or around demand you will never really need more than overnight energy storage levels (and of course the sliding scale of anything in-between that extreme and the other of wanting ‘infinite’ energy storage so no potential generation can ever be wasted.).
And both practically and economically that very oversized solar generation on the same location and land area might well be cheaper and more efficient than this huge CO2 bladder land hog as you scale up – even if the peak potential generation of the solar is largely wasted much of the time as you don’t have those rapidly scalable demands/energy storage solutions its a cheap to build system that reliably meets the actually requirements. The only challenge there is keeping your baseline energy demands inline with the actual baseline generation rather than people being the short sighted fools they usually are filling the generation capacity of something to near the peak potential all the time…
Scale up generation? Panels lose conversion over time. The need replacement. On an industrial scale the amount of pollution you’re creating versus the amount of energy produced needs to be understood. They don’t last forever, how do you safely dispose of them? How much greenhouse gas is generated to mine for the materials to replace the now useless cell? How much energy is consumed in the manufacture of the originals and replacements?
I’m not saying solar doesn’t have a place in the energy future, it does. In places underserved by a grid and remote so the grid isn’t even available, please feel free to install it. But as a long term energy solution that can provide for a growing energy consumer like the human race? The landfills will tell the folly of that kind of thinking.
Why new nuclear plants aren’t being pursued and built with the goal of co-generation using heat for any number of processes that need a heat source (from residential to chemical synthesis) is a mystery to me.
Too many people are making a buck trying to sell the idea of solar and wind as good ideas when they are inefficient. Solar at least has some use as I stated above, but wind and wave power generation? The maintenance alone make them ill-suited for large scale use. The amount of land needed for a wind farm is prohibitive.
Given the existing huge demand for extraction of dirty raw unprocessed materials to make the stuff that goes into solar their lifespan really won’t be a big burden – its like mining the slag heaps as often done now to get the minerals left in them – as it is a rather more concentrated source than the natural world provides! So in theory at least as cells age out in quantity (which hasn’t really really started to happen yet as solar is still in that early growth phase with most of them having lots of life left in them) they will become the cheapest and best source of raw materials to make new silicon wafer etc.
Also this big gas bladder doesn’t last forever either, probably from the article at least a shorter lifespan than the solar would have, but that is rather beside the point, as nothing lasts forever. The big point no matter what you are doing is land area is finite, and by far the limiting factor in many places so anything that consumes so much of it to be a really low energy density and probably really inefficient battery just doesn’t work out well – Cover the same area with Solar and a tiny battery and the batteries will need replacement once maybe twice in the lifespan the bladder expects but they have likely cycled vastly more useful power through them as the efficiency is good, and the solar cells are still 80% of brand new and almost certainly better (seriously modern panels if they don’t get physically damaged are getting towards 20+ years in the 90-95% of new sort of range – age is so often less impactful than how recently they were cleaned and the weather!). And for good measure its not just an energy store its actually generating it.
Not really, as that land can still be fully productive farms etc – Wind and Solar can share the space they occupy quite a lot better than this giant bladder for instance – You are not grazing sheep or growing leafy greens under the giant bladder, but you can do that with low level solar, and big wind installations are no different to the farmer than the telegraph pole or electric pylon that happen to cross so many fields – minor inconvenience, perhaps a small fraction of that single percent yield loss for the field.
The concept is called “embodied energy” (the energy required for mining, transportation, refining, processing, manufacturing the solar panels). it is typically expressed in units of kWh (of embodied energy) per kW of installed capacity (“standard sun”). The highest values (which I trust more than the lower ones) come up to about 4200 kWh / kW; so 4200 hours orthogonal in full sun energetically repays the panel. Depending on how arid or cloudy the sky is, at what angle it is installed, … it will take longer. This is an industry estimate (unknown date). Wikipedia, Australian government, and other sources typically mention lower values. It will depend on who is making it where and when (energy efficiencies of processes improve).
I think you over-estimate how giant the bladder is: 12.3 acres is just 0.0497 square kilometers.
That’s for ~200 MWh of storage capacity. If we scale that up to roughly 1 Terawatt-hours, which is about 1/600th of the yearly electricity consumption of Germany, it would only occupy less than 16×16 kilometers of land.
In other words, if you build kilometer by kilometer farms of gas bladders, and repeated that 250 times, you could get enough grid storage capacity for 14-15 hours of average demand on the German grid. That shouldn’t be too difficult, or costly. That’s just perfect for overnight backup of renewable energy.
The same amount in lithium-ion batteries would cost around $150 billion. That may not sound like too much, until you consider that it needs replacement every 15 years regardless of use, while a gas bladder at atmospheric pressure is basically just a big plastic tarp with a relative cost of nothing.
A good rule of thumb for solar panels is that the effective average output over a year is 1/8th of the peak wattage. To account for different locations, In Dubai it’s double and in Halifax is half. Could be better, could be worse, but the local weather, upkeep and maintenance, play a big role so it’s hard to predict.
Anyways, adjusted by the average, your number would suggest just under 4 years. Sounds plausible. However, it doesn’t “repay the panel” until you consider the losses of going from electricity back to the materials that made the panel – or “closing the loop”. That’s because refining and depositing the silicon for the panel actually uses carbon from natural gas and coke made from coal in a direct chemical reaction that can’t be replaced 1:1 with electricity. To do that, you run a conversion loss that multiplies the amount of years the panel would actually need to operate in order to make the materials needed for its own construction.
That is something that nobody has solved yet. The conversion loss from solar PV back to new solar panels is technically a net negative, with all the glass and refined silicon and mining operations etc. that cannot run directly on solar PV. It other words, it’s not a net energy source, it’s a net energy sink that only exists by the use of slightly more fossil fuels.
Mind: I’m not saying that each solar panel consumes more fossil fuels than it makes in electricity – that’s not the case. I’m saying it would take more energy than the solar panel produces to make the solar panel using the electricity it produces, because electricity is not directly useful for making solar panels.
That is why solar panels are not truly the answer to de-carbonizing the energy system. They help reduce CO2 emission, but do not eliminate the use of fossil fuels yet.
How many times do you need to scale up to operate through December and January, somewhere around northern Germany where you have 8 hours of daylight with the sun hanging low and 60-70% average cloud coverage?
https://aleasoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/20221107-AleaSoft-Monthly-solar-photovoltaic-thermosolar-energy-production-electricity-Europe.png
I.e. basically no solar output for 2-3 months.
Also, what do you do while the sun isn’t up? How many solar panels does it take to power you through the long nights? Answer: infinite, because there’s no sun. That means for 2-3 months a year, for more than 16 hours a day, you have to run other generators – and the fuel for those other generators comes from… any ideas?
Also, to make matters worse, the demand curve for Germany is completely inverse of the solar output curve, so for the 2-3 months where you have minimum solar output, you also have maximum grid demand.
We’re not talking about doubling up on the solar panels, we’re talking about building 20 times as many, and still not having enough. Surely at that cost, it would be more sensible to just make synthetic fuels and burn those instead.
If climate of germany is not valid for life then why not put people on boats during winter and move them to Kenya for good weather? When it gets warm then can return.
Also note that Germany is already hitting negative net loads in the summer, thanks to solar, while solar is actually only contributing around 15% to the total electricity consumption. Scaling up from here will have sharply diminishing returns because the added capacity mainly adds to the peak summer capacity, which is already too much to be used and needs to be sold for export.
https://www.gridx.ai/blog/germanys-duck-curve-integrating-renewables-into-smart-grids
In the winter, you don’t have enough sunlight to charge your “overnight” batteries even if you scale the system up by a ridiculous factor. Yet in the summer you’ve already got more power than you can use.
The only serious solution for going up is to start shifting power from summer to winter over a 6 month window, but building it with electric batteries would be a humongous waste of money, energy, and materials, because the ESOEI of a battery that gets charged and discharged basically once per year is piss poor. Accounting for the energy required to build it, and the energy it would store over its service life, would put the system efficiency well below 10%.
That is why, even if we were to turn the excess electricity into chemical fuels and back into electricity at a low efficiency, it would still easily beat the battery by energy and much more by cost.
Kenya is on the equator, which is very good for solar power all-year-round. I think you’re onto something. The Kenyans could all move to Germany for the wealthy stable society and good social benefits etc., and then the Germans could all move to Kenya for the good cheap energy resources, and both would be happy in their new homes.
I mean, it would be a far better idea than the DESERTEC plan, which was to build superconducting power lines all the way to Africa and the Middle East, so the Germans could have access to solar power all through the year without ever leaving home. It kinda smacks of Neo-colonialism a little bit.
I did say with battery/flywheel for the overnight – but that is the point if you size generation up so you get enough even in winter during a bad day, which is plausible enough even if its not that sensible then you don’t need the deeper energy store at all – its clearly not an optimal option for a nation, especially those furthest from the equator with really big seasonal shifts as on those good days even in winter you are going to have more potential power than you can possible ship or use, and by the summer that potential is even more wasted. But it is very possible. And might actually compare rather well in price over time and land area use compared to this rather land hogging bladder and tiny turbine that still needs there to be a power generator somewhere else…
Except you can scale it up that far and you don’t actually have to do anything with it at all – that cheap solar panel can just be disconnected and ignored when its potential isn’t required. Obviously if you can ship your excess to somewhere else usefully and earn a little in the process you should but having excess solar panel that could be generating power but aren’t in use at the moment is no different to the practically countless backup generators etc that sit there doing nothing much of the time… The investment was made to have energy, if you don’t need it right now you don’t HAVE to actually use that potential generation and find somewhere to use it.
And the point is this gas bladder appears like if anything you need to scale up and cover even more land to have sufficient storage capacity than that ridiculous scale solar – to have enough runtime on that turbine you likely need too many bladders covering enough land that the reliable solar GENERATION on that land might well be getting ahead of the turbine output from this energy STORAGE plant – the sun effectively has infinite capacity and that giant land area taps into it, this storage plant can’t output more than the turbine spec, and needs all that land area to last a very finite length of time, while also needing somewhere else a heap of power generation – that to make this concept worth building at all must be more uncontrollable renewable.
Maybe this is a solution to peoples needs somewhere, it certainly seems like it should be very affordable reasonably on demand storage but it really doesn’t look like the tech in the article actually scales sensibly, it is just too big a land hog, and the larger it gets the greater the safety exclusion zone around it must be, making it an even bigger land hog than its already giant footprint. Where you could if you wished build every not transparent part of your home out of solar panels and some structural frame perfectly safely, though it would be stupid with the only reason to do so being you have an excess of solar panels with nowhere better to put them, but you could.
There is no such cheap solar panel, and never will be.
The cost structure of solar is 2/3rds other than panel cost, so even if the panels cost zero you could not afford to scale the system up enough to get solar in the winter.
To put things into perspective, having our current energy infrastructure costs around 5% of GDP today. A fully renewable system that produces the same amount of energy would cost much more, but let’s say it cost exactly the same for the sake of the argument: now try and over-provision that up by a factor of 20x to get your solar power in the winter.
Now you’re paying 40% of your GDP and people are walking around in rags because they literally have to spend all their disposable income just for keeping the lights on. It is not plausible even if it was technically possible to produce so many solar panels for everyone.
Really not true, or at least it doesn’t have to be – a fully renewable system puts nearly all the cost into maintaining a larger and more resilient grid which will be more expensive than the current stuff, but comes with the advantage that a wider web of connections are made so resiliency to a downed power line gets better etc – it would be nice to have that anyway. But as the generators themselves are so so cheap, and getting cheaper to build, maintain and run the cost of actually generating the electric is so so much cheaper…
Really not true or just as true of every power plant if you include all the external infrastructure – oil wells, refinery, shipping the crude and refined products around, you still need a beefy grid connection, and all the Enviromental protection studies and labour building the place…
Plus how you build solar will make a big difference to its costs too – Battery (or alternatives) are the single biggest cost item but you don’t in a system loading up on really excessive panels count actually need many of them, so while they could easily eat 3/4 of the budget on their own if you wanted to it isn’t a requirement when focused on shoving as many panels around as possible to bring that reliable baseline generated up. The MPPT/Inverter brain electronics tends to be the next biggest cost per item and this one you can’t skimp on but you generally only need one of them for even pretty darn giant panel counts, so assuming you are going for maxing out your control electronics rated capacity it won’t actually be that big a share of the cost compared to the huge count of panels and mounts..
“make hay while the sun shines” is about taking an opportunity while you have it,not renewable energy.
When CO2 is compressed, work is done, releasing heat. That heat must be withdrawn from the system, i.e., thrown away, to liquefy the CO2. When vented to the turbine, heat must be added to convert the liquid to gas. At each stage, energy is wasted.
As others have mentioned, WHAT is the efficiency in total, and how does that compare with current technology, such as vanadium flow battery (~75-90%, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery), or Na-ion battery (~90%, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery)?
aside from this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster
There’s the real estate problem to think about.
If you’re going to bother with this, what’s the tradeoff if you went with hydro storage or gravity storage? I can drink or use water, and gravity is only a problem if a safety system fails and I’m next to it when the blocks fall down.
Why in the world would you use the poisonous gas you’re vilifying as a storage medium? We need to find a way to convert it to a useful form, not store it. This goes for the underground storage baloney as well!
Perhaps creating synthetic petroleum? Carbon fiber?
why is it that so called renewable energy solutions tend to have underwhelming output and consume an egregious amount of land.
Yep… And ugly too. While a nice nuclear energy plant could almost be unnoticed on a comparably postage stamp of area.
>nice
>nuclear
Pick one.
Chernobyl and Fukushima should’ve been lesson learned enough that this is not safe nor sustainable way to produce electricity. All the money spent on building the New Safe Confinement over Reactor #4 could’ve provided free electricity to the entire Ipswitch and surroundings for 38 years – which is longer than average lifetime of a nuclear reactor. What’s worse, despite all the fake promises by Novarka Corporation, with current technology it’s impossible to dismantle Chernobyl reactors, and it won’t happen for another 100-200 years until all the radiation dissipates.
the lessons i learned are:
dont let communists design and run nuclear reactors
dont build your powerplant in a tsunami zone.
nuclear sounds a lot better than bulldozing ecosystems to put up solar panels and wind farms. let alone all the co2 we pump into the air because all this renewable technology sucks and we got to make up the slack by burning fossil fuels.
besides these two are old designs that had deficiencies. there are newer safer designs now. safety rules are written in blood.
How about social democrats?
Case in point: the first two nuclear reactors in Finland were built in collaboration between the Soviet Union and General Electric. You know, to remain politically neutral through the cold war. The Finnish politicians hated both in equal amounts by the anti-capitalist sentiments from the left and the fear of Soviet invasion by the right.
So they put both through the wringer and demanded each to justify every design choice and feature, run the construction through validations and double triple checks, explain every detail until they both were in agreement over how it should be done. It is said that this elevated the level of nuclear power design in both countries, because the Finns would accept no less than perfect, and that is what they got. The old reactors are still pulling world records in uptime and reliability, and they’re probably the most closely monitored nuclear power plants in the world.
Fast forward a few decades, and the French AREVA wants to enter the market with a design of a brand new EPR power plant. Which country do they pick for the trial?
Oh… Finland. Well, it took them 18 years to get it done to satisfaction. The other unit built in Taishan, China? That took only 10 years and went online before the Finnish unit did, but then suffered from cracks in welds and fuel rods, and radioactive gas release in 2021…
So I guess the moral of the story is, safety rules aren’t written in blood. They’re written in regular ink. It’s up to you to maintain the standards. And also, don’t buy nuclear power plants from the French.
They still cant get it right…………
Diablo Canyon was bu-ilt next t a fault line, so was the decommissioned reactor at San Onofre.
The problem with nuclear power is two fold…
The environmentalists have driven the cost of building said reactors to the point of making them not profitable….
The second issue binds to the first; the operators of these plants literally run they until they fall apart like they did with San Onofre. They ran this one well past it service life.
There is one more problem with Nuke Electricity Boxes….
Nobody wants to dispose of the waste from these plants.
Not to mention the reactors take a decade or six….
Not only that the vessels this radioactive trash is stored in break down over time and have to be replaced…
So in the end. Nuclear power is not a bad idea; it’s a fatally stupid idea, poisoning the environment for tens of millions of years.
Burning dead dynos until we establish ourselves in space is a wise idea.
Nuclear power is not clean compared to coal or natural gas.
The effects of coal and natural gas only last a short time compared to the byproducts of playing with element 92.
Nuclear is the way. Everything else is window dressing.
“Chernobyl and Fukushima should’ve been lesson learned enough that this is not safe nor sustainable way to produce electricity. ”
Neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl killed nearly as many people as coal and oil have done, and will continue to do.
Agrivoltaics, nothing says you are committed to one use with solar.
” consume an egregious amount of land.”
Solar can coexist with farming. The panels provide shade that some crops love. I’m sure there’s some modifications to how high the panels are mounted, or spacing of the panels, but you still get multiple uses of the land.
Also, solar is something that can be placed on otherwise unusable land. Former trash dumps; sites that were contaminated then cleaned up but still not seen as desirable locations for building; sites near noisy facilities like, say, data centers with gas turbine power generators.
Just like the Space Elevator.
:D
is the volume of that big bag really ~ 1 million cubic meters? quick estimate of 2000 tons of CO2 at STP gives about a million cubic meters. I can’t see how long the thing is.
Of all possible gases, why did it have to be specifically CO2 though?
What happens when the ambient temperature exceeds the critical point of carbon dioxide?
Why not turn atmospheric CO2 to dry ice when you have power (there is already a lot of tech around this), and then you don’t have to worry about pressure, and just insulting it well. When you need power you “melt” it to get the CO2 gas again, and you have a high temperature difference which could also generate energy.
I guess maybe it’s more complicated or inefficient than liquefying CO2, but that giant bag just seems so impractical.
“The turbine is 20 megawatts, sure, but all you need is land to add extra energy capacity.”
Land just happens to be one of the most expensive commodities in places/countries with a high density of people. While those are exactly those places where something like this is necessary.
That “all you need” is about the hardest and most expensive thing in population-dense areas.
And guess what…..
It may take as much as 50MW to get all that warm air back in those little steel bottles.
Ridiculous. Neither cost effective, economically nor ecologically sustainable. The Sun shines 24 hours a day. Bits are portable. Electrons are not. Make compute where the Sun is shining. Duh
Right, all it needs is 3x the number of data centers, each run for 8h/d.
I know it’s you, Jensen. Quit hiding behind such nicknames to sell more GPUs.
Right now Jensen couldn’t sell more if they wanted to….
And @The Mad Programmer does have a point a large amount of our cloud/internet/compute demands could be met by moving the loads to where the sun is shining across the day – plenty of data centres out there not at 100% utilisation much of the time. But actually making that all work seamless and securely…
That’s actually what bitcoin mining DOES, shifting around the world based on electricity prices. I know it’s “wasted” compute but it’s also a BTC/renewable power arbitrage. Power needed? stop BTC mining and sell power. Power revenue drops below BTC returns? Back to mining….worldwide balance in milliseconds.
Hackaday editors – for the love of God, please add a voting up / down system to your response system so that we don’t have to keep wading through so many garbage responses from science denying idiots
Your dogma ate your credibility when you wrote “Since venting tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is kind of the thing we’re trying to avoid with this whole rigmarole, the greenhouse gas slash working fluid is stored in a giant bag.” because the physics based truth is simply that the gas is collected and stored purely as a matter of energy efficiency due to what it would take to seperate it from all of the other gasses in air. 🙄