I ain't got time for this. Give me a paper, some numbers, and a plant flow diagram.

Thunderf00t!! Get in here!

We desperately need mass energy storage. Everyone gets excited about renewable generation, but it is counterproductive without investing 5x-10x what we spend on generation in improved transmission and storage. It would be better to build 1/10th the amount of solar we do and pair it with appropriate energy storage than it is to just build solar panels. This is a crisis that almost nobody seems to talk about but is blindingly obvious when you look at socal energy price maps. The physics simply doesn't work without storage!!

"First, a compressor pressurizes the gas from 1 bar (100,000 pascals) to about 55 bar (5,500,000 pa). Next, a thermal-energy-storage system cools the CO2 to an ambient temperature. Then a condenser reduces it into a liquid that is stored in a few dozen pressure vessels, each about the size of a school bus. The whole process takes about 10 hours, and at the end of it, the battery is considered charged.

To discharge the battery, the process reverses. The liquid CO2 is evaporated and heated. It then enters a gas-expander turbine, which is like a medium-pressure steam turbine. This drives a synchronous generator, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy for the grid. After that, the gas is exhausted at ambient pressure back into the dome, filling it up to await the next charging phase."

> The problem is that even the best new grid-scale storage systems on the market—mainly lithium-ion batteries—provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage.

This isn't the first time I've seen this sort of claim this week about batteries.

If you're a journalist writing these words, stop doing that, and consider your life choices. Ask your boss for tuition assistance to put you through a 7th grade summer-school science class on matter and energy.

If you're a journalist writing these words in an ostensibly technical engineering journal? Christ. I don't even know where to begin.

More blowing up than taking off

no mentioning of storage overhead? how much energy being wasted for each charging and discharging cycle?

I've been waiting for large-scale molten salt/rock batteries to take off. They've existed at utility scale for years but are still niche. They're not especially responsive and I imagine a facility to handle a mass amount of molten salt is not the easiest/cheapest thing to build.

This sounds better in every way.

> And in 2026, replicas of this plant will start popping up across the globe.

> We mean that literally. It takes just half a day to inflate the bubble. The rest of the facility takes less than two years to build and can be done just about anywhere there’s 5 hectares of flat land.

Gotta love the authors comitment to the bit. Wow, only half a day you say? And then just between 1 to 2 years more? Crazy.

Does pure-ish CO2 have advantages over regular air or the freon-like substance used in air conditioning?

How much energy us used to purify and maintain the CO2?