Carantoc said..
And gas, nuclear, geothermal, some forms of solar electricity generation still utilize steam in the process.
Even 'steam' storage instead of battery storage for solar PV has been shown to be less expensive and more efficient.
Sometimes we forget just how inefficient batteries that use chemical potential energy are. Nearly 250 years of experimenting with different anodes, cathodes and electrolytes (and using complex computer logic circuits to control them all) and petrol exploded in a basic ICE is still 100 times more energy dense.
Energy density is often misunderstood. A Lithium battery has an energy density of maybe 0.7MJ/kg. Coal has about 24MJ/kg, petrol about 46MJ/kg and Uranium is 76million MJ/kg.
That is not a mistake. One Kg of uranium outputs the same amount of energy as up to 4,000 tonnes of coal, or 40 rail cars. A typical nuclear plant uses 27 tonnes of uranium per year. or about half a phone booth.
As an easy exercise, if you wanted to replace a 1Gw thermal plant (not particularly big) with batteries for one day. Say as a backup for if sun and wind are not friendly, using the figures for the hornsdale big battery in SA, you would need the equivilent of 186 big batteries just on nameplate. If real world limitations and efficiency were used you would probably have to double it, but lets use just the nameplate.
186 big batteries would cost $32 billion. As mentioned real world probably double. For one day, for one very average power plant. If it was cloudy and still past 24 hours, you are in the dark.
Lithium prices have trippled since hornsdale was built.
