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esseph 3 days ago

You're not accounting for location at all.

Nor is that generating electricity at night.

Plus battery storage.

And it's closer to 4-6x football fields if you did it in say, San Francisco. 4-5x football fields in Kansas City. 6-8x football fields in Chicago. Again, plus battery storage.

hinkley 3 days ago | parent [-]

How many power problems would be covered by making a battery the size of this device

actinium226 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Depends entirely on how you charge the battery.

quickthrowman 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not many, it’d be roughly 1MWH of storage, based on looking at battery storage in half size conexes that are currently available for sale. A 1MW reactor or diesel genset can put out 1MWH every single hour for as long as they have fuel.

hinkley 2 days ago | parent [-]

I was able to find some that were a bit over 3.1 MWH.

It is unlikely that those 1) cost as much as a nuclear reactor or 2) are exactly the amount of available space you have. So 2 or 3 aren’t going to solve your water desalination problems but might solve your intermittent power ones.

quickthrowman 2 days ago | parent [-]

It depends on the size of the load.

Just FYI, every building that is required by law to have emergency backup power has an engine-generator set. There are zero exceptions to this rule. If batteries were able to serve critical loads like hospitals and emergency dispatch centers, they would be allowed to be installed for that purpose, but they aren’t. This should end the argument about battery backup, at least until battery storage density reaches a point where it can serve those loads.

FWIW I sell and run electrical work

quickthrowman 2 days ago | parent [-]

To add, grid-scale batteries do make sense if you have a ton of cheap land. Most facilities that need backup power aren’t in areas with lots of cheap available land for battery installations.

The kind of backup power needs that hospitals, data centers, and other critical facilities have (multiple MWH per hour at minimum for large facilities) and the durations they need to operate for, combined with the land prices in the areas where they are situated, make battery backup for critical power needs uneconomical due to the space needed with current battery energy density.

esseph 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

zero

hinkley 3 days ago | parent [-]

That’s the sort of bullshit answer you take to Reddit, not HN.

esseph 3 days ago | parent [-]

Name the problems a battery half the size of a flatbed trailer "solves"?

hinkley 2 days ago | parent [-]

That’s not half the size of a flatbed trailer and nobody with space for one trailer has real problems to solve that can be solved with a single delivery.

It’s cargo container size and that’s apparently a few MWH of battery these days.

esseph 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't really understand this line of thought and where you're going with this or the point you're trying to make.