I've often wondered about the storage to generation issue
it's always seemed rather odd to me -- we can harness the energy of the sun easily now - but, to store large quantites of the captured power - we're really having gods own trouble
I actually find that kinda weird - because in nature - it's not a problem for so many things -
water - apparently came from space - and is easily captured by the planet - by gravity. It lands on the earth - runs downhill and collects at the lowest point where it can't run downhill anymore - storage - done and dusted.
atmosphere - same deal. Heaps of things are captured by the planet.
Fossil fuels - didn't have to work out how to store them - the planet did it quite successfully and easily.
So, here we are - mankind, easily harnessing the energy of the sun - turning it into electricity - then, what the hell can we do with it? - we can store little bits of it - but, mass storage evades us
are we missing something? are we overlooking something obvious, staring us in the face? -- to me - it just seems odd.
We understand that we can store quite a bit of it with - sun and wind to pumped hydro etc - but, it's a very unwieldy process with lots of loss and very expensive.
There's no doubt that sunpower and probably windpower will be around for as long as humans or their new incarnations in the near future will be - so, there's going to be this massive resource as long as we need it - storage shouldn't be an issue --
maybe we should not be thinking about storage at all?? maybe it's as basic as that.
It's like being given the keys to the big bank vault and told - you can take what you want - well, would we really have such a problem working out how to cart very large quantities of cash or goodies away?
give me 15 minutes and I'd have a truck to backup - and, a bloody big one at that
storage of power though - for some odd reason - seems to be a very big issue
