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this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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Is it even possible to have energy storage of any kind that is truly safe and stable? Some are better than others, of course.
Giant springs are fucking scary. Energy is dangerous when you store a lot in one place.
Large flywheels are well known to be terrifying mechanical monsters, despite just being a spinning disc
A couple decades ago I worked at a place that did power generation turbine controls.
One thing I worked on was a redundant sync check for connecting turbines to the grid. A turbine has to be brought up to speed, about 3600rpm in the US, before being connected to the grid. The sine wave coming out of the generator needs to match the sine wave on the grid.
If they are mismatched when the huge breaker closes, it’s not a shock or fire hazard, it’s an explosion hazard.
Dams are scary too, I just hope people are able to decommission them slowly when the time comes. Otherwise the deluge is going to suck.
considers
Kinetic energy of a body in orbit, I suppose. Like, you want to accelerate the Moon, you get a bigger orbit. We pull energy out of it via tidal generators, and in theory, we could speed its orbit up, increase its altitude.
I mean, it could theoretically smack into something, but it's not gonna hit the Earth very readily, and the speed of an object that isn't in Earth orbit, like an asteroid or something that hasn't been captured by Earth's gravitational field, is probably more of a factor in a collision than the speed of something that is.
At a smaller scale, I expect that thermal energy storage can be pretty safe, as long as you keep it within bounds. Like, if you wanted to insulate a lake and crank its temperature up or down ten degrees, probably not a lot that it could do even if the insulation was penetrated. The rate of energy release is gonna be bounded by convection.
The orbital one sounds interesting. That’s a lot of energy, and it could do a lot of damage, but it seems very stable if left untouched.
My gut suspicion is that with something more safe/stable, you would also be dealing with a low quality/potency source and/or low efficiency.
On a small scale yeah. The sun heats rocks and they're able to store heat for up to an hour or so. Cats can attest to that.
Same with large bodies of water; the ocean, lakes, pools, etc.
I guess in my head I was implying that it was energy humans store for other humans to use at grid scale. When I said "of any kind” I guess that’s not what I meant, lol.
So in my line of thinking, you’re right about e.g. using the sun to heat a rock. But if we use the sun to heat something for electricity generation, or we heat some medium for energy storage, I bet that will be pretty potent.
Besides, past the small scale into the smallEST scale, it’s all just energy anyway, man. 😎