These sort of breakthroughs will begin showing up commercially in the next 5-7 years as oil prices continue to remain high. Within 10 years we will be able to get off the grid. Homes, businesses, all forms of transportation, all needs for energy will finally be independently produced.
Within 20 years, relatively cheap energy will become available once again and will be controlled by the user, not the producers.
The two links are just representative of hundreds of possible solutions that will now find financing to commercialize the inventions. The systems generated will be expensive at first, but competition will drive down costs within a decade or two.
Remember when your first PC cost $3000? Now we have laptops that sell for little more than toaster ovens… It’s gonna happen…
I would bet that storage batteries would be grossly inefficient and a terrible environmental burden, if they were to replace communal power sources wholesale. It’s too bad we seem to have no idea how to design buildings to work with climate rather than against it. Techno-fixes are bandaids, as are current enviro-fads like building straw-bale houses in places like the rainy northeast U.S., rather than the southwest U.S. If “off the grid” is your thing, then fine. But it doesn’t mean actual independence in the least, and if you’re building new, at least look up resources for some useful design principles. The best house I ever lived in from an environmental/energy point of view was a shack with no insulation at all. It was designed right, and had some happy accidents working for it. If it had insulation, the energy costs, both monetarily and environmentally, would have been even more minimal.
Whether we like it or not, the world will run on electricity. How and what is the source of extraction, how and what will allow us to store that electricity is certainly up for grabs at the moment. The are multiple approaches for all sorts of systems. But electricity will be the common form of energy used. Your ability to post to this site relies on a very complex power grid. Nothing could be less efficient that the current power grid that loses approximately 20 % of the power produced just transmitting that energy from it’s source to your electrical outlet.
There are many green designs for everything we use that can reduce the overall need for energy. We waste as much as we use, and often simply because of poor design. Storage batteries are a good solution because they store and deliver electrical power directly and require no intermediate processes that contribute to inefficiency. I’m not blind to the fact that materials have to be used to create the batteries as well as re-cycle them as they fail. But compared to thousands of miles of towers and transmission lines, which is more environmentally a burden?
If there is anything positive about the current situation of high energy costs, it is that we will begin exploring and implementing alternative energy systems, designing more efficient habitation, and minimizing our overall footprint on the environment. Will we do this because we want to? No. We will do it because we are forced to do it.
I agree that technology is only part of the solution, that as people slowly climb down off their pink clouds that issues of frugality, minimizing our demands on the environment will also need to be addressed.
I see what many are calling a “crisis” as a grand opportunity. The only crisis part is the unwillingness of people having to adjust their standard of living downward - but that is part of the deal.
That would be a hell of a lot of batteries thrown out periodically by billions of people. I’m not convinced, but I admit I have no information at my fingertips. It’s a hunch, and maybe I’m wrong.
I’m very glad people are interested in this subject, and there’s more than one way to skin a cat. The interest itself is enough to move us in a more sensible direction.
I only ever cook on electric (even though I like the expression ‘cooking on gas’ hehe) and if I had my way: I would install solar panels to run my whole house on, but planning permission and cost prohibits…
Using gas is as prehistoric as the fossils that made it.
Wait for awhile. The efficiency of both solar cells and battery storage will increase significantly over the next 5-10 years. Prices will come down and P&Z will be forced to make the necessary adaptations to allow reasonable installations. We aren’t there yet, but another decade and we will be.
Hydrolysis and hydrogen storage is one of the proposed methods for efficient storage of solar energy, and this is one of the enabling technologies for it.
There is so much ingenious energy research going on right now. I hope we can scale it into a good alternative energy source before the global warming shit really hits the fan.