Love LowTechMag for their no fucks given approach to technology.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Generally refrigerators or hot water tanks aren't considered batteries, but its true that electricity is not the only form of energy we use. It's just the most easily distributed.
I'm surprised since they use so many machine tools, they don't have a compressed air system. That can also be a form of energy storage. There's already a bunch of machine tools that run exclusively on compressed air.
There are a few articles that had been devoted to discussing compressed air systems for energy storage. It is what got me to learn about the system.
Industrial compressed air isn't usually compressed enough to make a good storage medium - usually people talking about compressed air storage are dealing with 200+bar, whereas industrial compressed air is only ~8 bar. That means you need really big tanks.
Compressed air motors and compressors are also pretty inefficient and large systems leak like a seive. They're used for convenience, safety, size, and light weight, not efficiency. Battery cordless is much more efficient.
Pretty sure that laptop has a battery.
A laptop, phone, and rechargeable flashlight have an inconsequential amount of lithium compared to a battery bank that is typically packaged with a home solar system.
You can take them out. Mine almost exploded so I got rid of that thing.
Trouble is "don't use electricity after dark" is still unimaginable for most Americans.
That's one of the "benefits" of the steady crumbling of the world's infrastructure. Most of the world is used to routine scheduled power outages due to lack of resources and the US is soon to join that club. When people are used to not having electricity on demand and batteries get more expensive as we run out of lithium and rare earths, direct solar will be less of a hard sell.