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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37130 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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This one is extremely impractical, which you’d see if you even did a back of a napkin estimate.

Source. They've tested successfully, physically, to 1/10 scale. I haven't gone and found the paper, I'll admit; I'll give it a shot ASAP so we can argue productively.

In the meantime, if the napkin math is so easy, share it with the class?

I haven't gone and found the paper, I'll admit; I'll give it a shot ASAP so we can argue productively.

I've casually found:

This is not a “water tower at sea”. This is something different, actually quite smarter. I read their paper, and it doesn’t seem as immediately impractical as “water tower at sea” would, though it is still very much impractical.

According to their own analysis, the construction cost is something like 2-3x the cost of LiIon batteries per kWh. It’s something like $8M for storage equivalent to 2 minutes of operation of a single coal power plant. To build enough storage to replace one coal power plant for base load for half a day, you would need to build 400 of these, at a cost of $3.2B dollars. Coincidentally, this is about as much as it costs to build a nuclear power plant reactor of a similar size, which will keep generating the energy after the deep sea storage solution runs out of juice in 12 hours.

I'm not seeing estimates on the price to build and maintain that per kWh. Without that, yes, you've failed to do the basic napkin math on practicality.

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