The previous post closed at an open door. That aperture is wider than you think. When dealing with the predominant narrative regarding energy, you’re always drawn back to a scare-city paradigm. It is because fear is such a great tool to use on weak minds.
When we look at energy storage, there are answers all around us, but we are given frames of reference which idolize big bang technological solutions. In many cases regarding energy, the solution can be low tech, local, easy to understand. You’re sold a “grid” but what you have is a system. Nature is an excellent teacher in cyclical self-reliance. The two are dynamically different futures.
Gravity Batteries
Consider the concrete example of gravity batteries. Gravity shows up everywhere once you stop fetishising dams. We underuse or under-think solutions which are unsexy, but practical; quarry blocks, scrap steel, rail based uphill systems, … the options are endless. And the kicker is that most of these ideas don’t care about cycles, catch fire, or degrade. For rural use, municipalities and longlife systems gravity is worth a look.
Thermal Storage
The same happens with thermal storage and thermal regulation. The common modern building envelope is “suspect” (Ben Affleck: Good will hunting) in regard to materials. Sand, stone and ceramics hold properties which either retain or reflect very well. A modern steel and glass rectangle is predicated on enclosing space and speed of erection. That speed often has a long term cost. Most energy demand is not electrical, it’s thermal. So why convert solar → electricity → battery → electricity → heat?
Structural Storage
Structural storage is almost a taboo subject. Concrete with embedded thermal mass, buildings designed as heat sinks, roads that absorb and re-radiate, ground source heat pumps, water pipes as thermal buffers; these systems don’t look like storage, and aren’t owned by energy departments. Elegant energy systems get bulldozed by bureaucracy. They don’t fit procurement silos, so they remain the domain of the tinkerer and the crank.
Pressure Storage
Pressure based storage is another viable concept which has been sidelined in favor of buttons, fire and wire. Yet pressure storage excels at long duration flexibility and it is materially simple. Pressure systems like being overbuilt and hate being rushed. That is a feature, not a bug.
Time shifted demand
Another one that fits outside the dominant narrative is time shifted demand, re-introducing time as a design material. This is the practice of moving scheduled tasks out of peak hours. Think in terms of irrigation timing, refrigeration cycles, industrial batch processing, charging, heating/cooling pre-loads. This is behavioural storage. The market charges for it, but institutions slide past because it messes up the spreadsheet.
Multivariate storage
The mono-pole approach is where thinking fails. “Already (Future) ready” storage is a combination of some fast, some slow, some dumb, some social, some physical
and some chemical energy storage systems. The foundation, as we already noted, is delayed gratification, layered states and resilience modelling. “Modern” energy systems do not need to build single-purpose answers to multi-variable problems. That logic runs counter to circular economies, recycling, sustainable design, local supply chains and empowerment.
