Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryans | Hacker News Reader

I never purported that fossil fuels are a good thing. In fact, I never mentioned them at all and was only discussing the concept of "ideas being cheap." Honestly, it's rather troll-ish and shameful that you've concocted this arrogant rant against an imaginary argument that nobody was making.

You also just bolstered my point about the OC's ideas being bad, because you admitted that the utility providers aren't motivated to do such a thing, which was the entire foundation of his argument -- that some imaginarily ethical regulatory organization is going to force utilities to be equally ethical, efficient and technologically progressive.

And just to be perfectly clear, using a pile of heated rocks as primary energy storage is beyond ridiculous and entirely ignorant of thermodynamics and physics in general.

So, yes, the ideas were both bad and ignorant.

View on HN

You're being unnecessarily confrontational. You're also incorrect: there are already utility providers that have started pricing based on load (my provider bases rates on season, day of the week, and time of day, updated annually, so a sort of aggregate estimate that I suspect will become finer grained in the coming years), and thermal energy storage via mass is a very common technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

edit to add more specific link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater

How exactly am I being unnecessarily confrontational? The OC constructed an entire argument based around something I never said. That is called gaslighting and is the very definition of confrontational, and I have every right to defend myself from it. For you to suggest that I should just accept being gaslit, is both absurd and its own form of gaslighting.

Also, you just made the exact opposite point of the OC in regards to rates, and then provided a link about thermal energy storage that proves the only point I made, which is its inefficiency[1] at small scale -- and at large scale it is not a pile of rocks inside every home.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Heat_st...

> using a pile of heated rocks as primary energy storage is beyond ridiculous and entirely ignorant of thermodynamics and physics in general.

Except there are many examples of such in common use. For example, passive solar houses use this technique.

> some imaginarily ethical regulatory organization is going to force utilities to be equally ethical, efficient and technologically progressive.

Current(1) regulatory organizations fix electricity rates. Electric utilities are already heavily regulated.

Again, just because people use the technique, doesn't make it the best or even most appropriate method. It is incredibly inefficient and no technology can make it more efficient, because it is limited by the laws of physics -- which you keep insisting don't matter for some reason.

And again, you're making a sweeping generalization about regulatory organizations that isn't even remotely true, and you have nothing to base it on. In the US alone, the majority of states have systems that combine both regulated and unregulated rates, and even in the states where the regulators decide on the rate, a utility can request rate increases at any time.

Your entire premise is based around some mystical altruism that doesn't actually exist in government or business.

https://content.next.westlaw.com/Document/Ieb49d7b91cb511e38...

> It is incredibly inefficient

Please elaborate how heating a rock, putting it in an insulated box, and taking it out of that box later to release it's heat to the air is "incredibly inefficient" compared to heating the air directly.

Because it takes 3-5x as much energy to heat rock than water, and at least twice as much as many other common materials. Sorry to say, even air is more efficient depending on the scale of time you're trying to solve for, though its ability to retain that heat is directly limited by the properties of the insulated box -- like a house, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity

https://theengineeringmindset.com/specific-heat-capacity-of-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Heat_st...

You're going to be tempted to reference the last link as evidence in your favor, but it's very much the opposite. It's saying the advantage concrete has is its ability to be heated to higher temperatures than water. Except it doesn't get to break the laws of physics and still requires 3-5x as much energy input, which is why it's really only practical for large scale operations that can safely heat the concrete to extreme temperatures, using massive amounts of electricity that would otherwise be wasted due to low grid demand. They are still losing at least 75% efficiency in that process, but it's slightly better than losing 100%, as long as you pretend there aren't any environmental impacts of producing all that extra concrete.

You'll notice the first installation referenced in this section actually uses 1,000 cubic feet of additional reinforced concrete and an entire home's worth of additional electricity to supply a single home with 50% of its heating and hot water. That's a second foundation's worth of concrete, for perspective.

And moreover, as we've already established, this concept isn't new at all. If it were legitimately more efficient and more practical than alternatives, every home would already be using its foundation as heat storage. But they don't, because it's not.

To quote, your comment's ideas are bad and ignorant. Not because they are incorrect, but because you blindly insist on them. The reasoning is valid merely for a rock/concrete oven or a vacation house.

I suggest you read up on laws of conservation. If you want to be less than 100% efficient, you have to lose energy somehow, somewhere.

I don't know where you're getting efficiency numbers from, but quoting from your reference, storage in Sorø will double as electricity storage while beating your numbers on electricity alone.

"A similar system is scheduled for Sorø, Denmark, with 41–58% of the stored 18 MWh heat returned for the town's district heating, and 30–41% returned as electricity."

BTW, when you switch rocks for concrete, of course it's expensive and makes no sense - people don't add tons of concrete for thermal storage. Though they do use it, if it's there, and add rocks, brick walls, water tanks, phase change materials etc, if they want more.

You are conflating physically and politically hard problems. It's hard to beat physics, but we absolutely should be talking about, considering and demanding practical yet politically hard solutions. All we have to do is ask, and the alternative is to quietly sink into an abyss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com