BrandonD » 03 Feb 2015 18:05 wrote:I recently had a talk with someone who is apparently high up in the oil & gas industry (in Houston, every other person works in oil & gas).
He was explaining to my boss and I that there is no incentive to make renewable energy because it is still more expensive than coal. There is no infrastructure for it, for example it would require building massive new factories to convert the solar/wind/etc to electrical power.
I asked him, what if the devices that collected the solar or wind power were themselves able to convert what they received directly into electrical energy? Then there would be no reason they couldn't just use the existing infrastructure.
He responded that there exists no way to store renewable energy. This statement seemed a bit absurd to me, as I have cheap little solar lights in my front yard that glow in the nighttime from the solar energy that they collected earlier that day. Also, if the device is converting the energy directly into electrical energy, then it could conceivably be stored by your standard battery, right?
I was wondering if anyone who is more knowledgeable on the subject would like to comment on this, maybe shine some light on a point I might be missing. Or perhaps this guy just believes whatever he needs to in order to justify his involvement in the oil industry.
There are certainly ways to store it.
The batteries we mostly have are not a great way.
Here's one that is in place and being used IIRC, the basic idea is to dig a deep hole, it's air tight, and you use excess power during the day to build up air pressure in there, during the night, the pressure is let out through a generator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
There are other methods too, such as building up heat in a heatsink of some sort, or pumping water up a hill, flywheels, etc...
funny how easy it is to not know about such things when one's livelihood is based on doing things the other way.