Randall Parker notes that we don’t so much face an energy shortage as fossil fuels run out as an Energy Storage Shortage. Fossil fuels store an enormous amount of energy in an easy-to-transport form that you can burn when and where you want.
Sodium-sulphur batteries may “enable solar and wind power to provide electricity when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow”:
An NaS battery, by contrast, uses a far more durable porcelain-like material to bridge the electrodes, giving it a life span of about 15 years, Mears says. It also takes up about a fifth of the space. Ford Motor pioneered the battery in the 1960s to power early-model electric cars; NGK and Tokyo Electric refined it for the power grid.Since the 1990s, Japanese businesses have installed enough NaS batteries to light the equivalent of about 155,000 homes, says Brad Roberts, head of the Electricity Storage Association. In the USA, AEP is using the 30-foot-wide by 15-foot-high battery to supply 10% of the electricity needs of 2,600 customers in north Charleston, says Ali Nourai, AEP manager of distributed energy. The battery, which cost about $2.5 million, is charged by generators from the grid at night, when demand and prices are low, and discharged during the day when power usage peaks.
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The biggest drawback is price. The battery costs about $2,500 per kilowatt, about 10% more than a new coal-fired plant.
Commenter Jerry Martinson makes an important point though:
Much of the diurnal “peak” of energy consumption can be handled much more cost-effectively on the consumption end rather than the generation and storage end. Most of the peak of consumption is from air conditioning. It is possible to not only shift the peak in time but it is also possible to drastically reduce the peak altogether in certain markets. Better insulation is a major component and a revamped performance-based energy building code would make a big start.
Frankly, as long as the end consumer pays no premium for peak-time energy, we won’t see much done on the consumption end.
There are any number of ways to reduce or shift energy use, many of them via passive solar building design.
For instance, a home with many large windows to the south — assuming it’s in the northern hemisphere, of course — will naturally bring in more sunlight and, like a greenhouse, stay warm.
That’s great during the winter, but what do you do during the summer?
Well, you design your windows with overhangs that block the high summer sun without blocking the low winter sun.
(I must admit, that wasn’t obvious to me before I read about it.)
Also, you can make sure that heat gets put to use when it’s needed by making sure the sun is shining on a signicant thermal mass — thick bricks, or concrete, or barrels of water — which will take a long time to warm up and a long time to cool down.
In fact, many of these techniques were widely used throughout history:
During the fifth century BC., the Greeks faced severe fuel shortages. Fortunately, an alternative source of energy was available — the sun. Archaeological evidence shows that a standard house plan evolved during the fifth century so that every house, whether rural or urban, could make maximum use of the sun’s warm rays during winter. Those living in ancient Greece confirm what archaeologists have found. Aristotle noted, builders made sure to shelter the north side of the house to keep out the cold winter winds. And Socrates, who lived in a solar-heated house, observed, “In houses that look toward the south, the sun penetrates the portico in winter” which keeps the house heated in winter. The great playwright Aeschylus went so far as to assert that only primitives and barbarians “lacked knowledge of houses turned to face the winter sun, dwelling beneath the ground like swarming ants in sunless caves.”