[Discuss] OT - no silver bullet energy Re: Eclipses Re: Great talks last night, however...

[Bill Ricker]

Rich is (largely) right about storage.
It Always Costs extra. (And environmental and other indirect costs count.)
Storage only works at all when energy is much cheaper/plentiful one
place or time than another.
OTOH, that's usually true: all things are never equal.
So some form of storage is often attractive. Whether you use LiOn,
NiMH, or Alkaline, all your portable devices are on Stored energy, not
some Tesla/Heinlein gridless power-grid. Various liquid fuels, fossil
or synth, are likewise stored energy.

(OTOOH, Supercapacitors are getting pretty darn close to impossible
perfect efficiency, but what's the carbon/energy cost to build per kWH
?)

> Regardless of how we end up generating electricity,
> converting it for storage and then converting it back for use will
> always be less efficient than using electricity directly.
A truism or theorem of thermodynamics.
Which is why no single energy source ("pure strategy") is optimal.

Thus, we must have a mixed solution.
Base load / Surge load.
Day/Night. Hot/Cold.
Wind/Tide/Sun/Biomass/legacy Fossil/legacy-nuke/mini-nuke.
Demand reduction by BOTH time-shifting with differential pricing and
by increased efficiency/insulation/passive heating&cooling (as
seasonally/diurnally appropriate).

Leaving Wind or Solar or Biomass or Nukes out of a solution because it
won't solve the whole-problem is simply fallacious.
Leaving Nukes out because Nagasaki guilt or Chernobyl / Fukushima fail
or "fear" is likewise foolish; the failed designs aren't on the table.
(OTOH discussing ethical problems of using edible portions of crops
for fuel is on game. Discussing whether Nuclear can be made life-cycle
cost-effective *including* full retirement cost with say Small Modular
reactors is on, as well as how to make them fail-safe and how to
safely decommission, and must either convince the diehards or include
in lifecycle the extra construction costs of litigation-delayed build.
)

//bill