Science Memes

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Entropy? Never heard of it. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] SpaceCowboy 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear now. The main problem is it's not sunny and/or windy every day. A carbon capture system doesn't need to be running 24/7 though.

If we build way more wind/solar than we use then the excess can dumped into things like this.

Sorry but the economics of nuclear just doesn't work for everything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

One of the interesting energy capture ideas I've seen with Solar and wind is based on kinetic potential energy in high-rise buildings. So you build a sort of heavy weight elevator that is elevated during windy and sunny hours and then it slowly gets released and gravity driven friction generating energy.

This coupled with solar windows and it's a pretty neat idea (not sure how viable though)

Edit: examples: https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-elevators-skyscrapers

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

This might work on the scale of a building to even out its own power usage throughout a day, but to make a difference on a city grid scale, you need an insane amount of height and/or weight.

Check out Pumped Water Energy Storage. It's the same concept but uses water as the weight. Doing the math on the Ludington Pumped Storage Power Plant's active capacity, it stores over 100 billion pounds of water.