Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

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Each 35MWh system requires about 1.62 acres of land. That seems perfectly reasonable to me, especially since there are still optimizations to explore.

Here's some totally useless back-of-the-envelope calculations on land requirements for this sytem.

The United States, in total, used 1,819,393,805 MWh of energy in 2016. If one plant provides 35MWh of storage, that means 51,982,680 plants are required.

That comes to 84,211,942 acres of land. There are 2.3 billion acres of land in the United States, so it would require 3.66% of the US. That's obviously a huge overestimate.

The beauty of this is the simplicity. This is something we could have built 40 years ago. And unlike LIBs, there's much less worry about degradation and we can put these out in the desert near a solar power source without worry.

Imagine it combined with solar thermal, which has dropped immensely in price per KWh.

Also, concrete reabsorbs around 43% of the co2 used to create it over a period of time.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2840.epdf

You don't need to store everything that's consumed, that's where the absurd number of plants and needed people comes from

10% of that makes more sense, even if it goes, let's say, 50% solar

Yeah, storing (<1%) 3 days total annual supply of electricity would be a huge over estimate... and storing 10% (35 days)would still be crazy large... I'd think the grand parent posts's numbers are high by 2-3 orders of magnitude.

As others have said,they likely would be placed near the solar plant where land is cheap and dry, rather than in neighborhoods.

Right

10% would be overkill. I don’t think we should be aiming to sacrifice our livelihoods to be concrete block stacking addicted energy horarders, but I’m not entirely against that either. It’s hard to look at a solution so tangible and transparent as concrete block stacking before ducking my head into this mangled half-commented test suite.

In this hypothetical, you also need something like ten percent of Americans to be crane maintenance workers, wouldn't you? Based on the crane numbers above it might even be more.

If anything, that's a plus.

But they'd probably be mechanized before long.

>> ten percent of Americans to be crane maintenance workers

> If anything, that's a plus.

That's the world you want to live in, where there are more construction crane maintenance workers than teachers, police officer, food service workers, lawyers and doctors combined and then tripled? Is there no possible better use for human potential that fixing machines that lift bricks?

Honest question: what's wrong with being a crane maintenance worker or a crane operator? Cranes are cool, cranes help build stuff, cranes are complex. And if anything, out of the list of "desirable" jobs you mentioned at least two (police officers and lawyers) are the result of "bugs" in our societal system, they aren't productive.

Nothing is wrong with being a crane maintenance worker, and there is nothing wrong with being an accountant. But if a fifth of the workforce was accountants I would enter a panic.

That's why I asked if that was the pinnacle of human achievement. If nothing was better. Because it crowds our other things at that level.

Gov't (fed, state, muni) employ about 23 million workers. Total workforce is about 130 million. So gov't work is roughly 1/5 of the workforce... hehehe.

Better than 10% of the US being truck drivers. Maintenance on heavy equipment like that can be remarkably complex, and the necessary skills are transferable to all sorts of industrial and fabrication jobs - not too hard to switch from fixing the hydraulics and armatures on a tower crane to fixing the same on any other sort of crane, vehicle, or chunk of factory equipment.

I wouldn't expect teachers or doctors to be transitioning into careers as power storage operators.

"Truck Driver", however, is a common job title[0] which may go away thanks to automation. Finding a replacement role would be nice.

I'm not sure you mean to insult people whose job it is to fix machines that lift bricks, by the way?

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-...

If all they did was make a battery, that's messed up. That many people? That's so much less useful to society than teachers, food service workers, doctors, lawyers and etc. combined. The insult to those people would be to have them spend their lives doing something so meaningless. Operating a crane in a construction crew has maybe a thousand times more dignity because they are making something people want. I have truck driver friends and that job isn't the best but they're doing something people want, they don't get out of bed unless something is out of place in the world, and they fix it.

> The insult to those people would be to have them spend their lives doing something so meaningless

Why is working on power storage and generation meaningless? Cheap energy is literally the basis of our civilization, tech, and standard of living. Would you consider power plant work or oil drilling work meaningless?

The system described in the article is mainly automated. They probably wouldn't need a large team to manage the system or it would be completely unfeasible. Certainly no worse than a giant battery center used to store electricity.

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