Shove a whole lot of clowns into a tiny car so you can later release them... Or so you can finally eliminate the clown menace by sending them all over to Shelbyville.
for lithium ion batteries that may be true, but you can make batteries out of all sorts of elements. Especially when they don't have to be lightweight for mobile applications, the possibilities really open up. See the molten metal batteries someone mentioned in the thread here as an example
I don't know much or actually anything about engineering, but what if the grid just stretched really far from East-West so that night time and daytime had a lot of overlap?
There's considerable losses in energy transmission, actually (see 'lengthy distribution lines'). You could alleviate this by lowering resistance on the line itself - but superconductors are a real pain to build for long distances and costly to maintain in themselves (gotta cool them constantly n shit)
Yes. There's even some nuclear and fossil fuel plants that already use pumped storage for the opposite reason going back decades. They make extra power all night then burn it off during high demand during the day (when people are awake, using AC, etc).
Couldn't you use pumped storage to help alleviate this? This being wasted energy?
That, or make hydrogen. Spin up fly wheels. Batteries, of course. Lots of possibilities.
another fun one is to pull train cars full of rocks up a mountainside
Shove a whole lot of clowns into a tiny car so you can later release them... Or so you can finally eliminate the clown menace by sending them all over to Shelbyville.
I volunteer as a rock
Batteries isn't great as they can only be so big and the components are largely mined by child slaves
for lithium ion batteries that may be true, but you can make batteries out of all sorts of elements. Especially when they don't have to be lightweight for mobile applications, the possibilities really open up. See the molten metal batteries someone mentioned in the thread here as an example
I don't know much or actually anything about engineering, but what if the grid just stretched really far from East-West so that night time and daytime had a lot of overlap?
There's considerable losses in energy transmission, actually (see 'lengthy distribution lines'). You could alleviate this by lowering resistance on the line itself - but superconductors are a real pain to build for long distances and costly to maintain in themselves (gotta cool them constantly n shit)
Yes. There's even some nuclear and fossil fuel plants that already use pumped storage for the opposite reason going back decades. They make extra power all night then burn it off during high demand during the day (when people are awake, using AC, etc).