• mihies@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    9 months ago

    True, but that’s not reliable source of energy though, specially during short and cloudy winter days when it’s most needed. Look what happened in Germany and how they became on if the biggest European polluters. The key ingredient missing is energy storage. Once that’s solved, solar panels would become much more useful.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 months ago

      We could massively subsidize home battery storage and this wouldn’t be an issue at all. Microgrids are the future anyway. The only reason why storage is an issue now is because it needs to be centralized. Once we get away from that tons of new possibilities open up.

      • mihies@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        Home batteries are expensive and take a lot of place. Also they won’t last more than a day. Imagine winter time with short cloudy days. Realistically you need at least a month worth of energy storage and even then you need sun to recharge it. They would distribute energy consumption better though by charging during night.

    • blazera@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      We have all the technology for energy storage we need, it just needs to be built. Theres gravity storage like pumped hydro, pressure storage, thermal storage, flywheels.

      • mihies@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        Well, no. Sadly we don’t. At least not in the range needed. All of these require either specific geographic relief, something really huge, too expensive or combination. Perhaps the most promising is the green hydrogen, but then again, we have yet to see it at such scale. I’d love to be wrong, though.

        • blazera@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          9 months ago

          something really huge

          yeah, we use a lot of energy, absolutely every form of energy production we have involves really huge things. Massive mines, dams, pipelines, oil rigs, nuclear cooling towers, fossil fuel power plants, oil tankers. They just have to be built. we can excavate dams, build solid weight lifting facilities, molten salt storage, make arrays of flywheels. There’s a ton of answers to energy storage already, they dont involve resources with any kind of scarcity, they just have to be built.