> No, what I'm doing is telling you that there is a benefit there. Our current grid design is frankly terrible, speaking as an electrical engineer.

Then please, pretty please, with sugar on top: You have the scientific and mathematical training to actually understand that what you are being told is complete bullshit. However, you have to be willing to apply some of that critical thinking, engage in some simple research, do a little math and try to understand. However, you have to be willing to leave this single variable view of the world behind during the process.

Grid storage = good?

Current grid design = terrible?

Well, grid storage today means batteries. It does not mean Star Trek dilithium crystals, hydroelectric plants, compressed underground air, spinning masses or the myriad interesting-but-unrealizable ideas people have floated. In the US, in particular, it would take a hundred years to build just one new hydroelectric plant, much less a couple of hundred of them.

Everything sounds great until you start considering scale. A town of 30K people, in an optimal solar region, full solar with batteries at every home? Sure.

I have a 13 kW system at my home that I built myself. I might add batteries at some point in the future, when and if it makes sense. Would I recommend everyone in my neighborhood do the same? No. It's crazy. This was likely the single worse investment I have ever made.

Scale IS a problem. Most definitely.

Scale means that for everyone to have what I have (or will have, if I ever install batteries) you have to be willing to do things like destroy thousands of miles of marine ecosystem to mine the very materials we need to make something like this happen at scale.

Scale is the problem. You have the background to be able to explore and understand this.

Electric vehicles. Calculate the energy we deliver into gas tanks every day through gasoline. Now calculate what that means in terms of total energy delivery EVERY DAY across the US. Make an accounting of our current energy generation capacity. Which, BTW, does not happen to have been built to support a 100% or 200% demand increase. Now translate the total energy delta demanded by a fleet of, say, 300 million electric vehicles, into, say, 1 GW nuclear power plants. The conclusion, if I remember correctly, is that we need somewhere in the order of 100 new 1 GW class nuclear power plants spread across the nation in order to support a full shift into electric vehicles.

The other problem is POWER rather than energy. In other words, you have to be able to deliver a certain amount of energy per unit time simultaneously across geographic areas. If you have 100K or a million cars charging simultaneously you are going to have to build additional POWER delivery capacity in order to service that demand, something that today (in terms of energy) we deliver using a liquid fuel.

When you start considering scale and get beyond single variable reduction of reality, things look very different. Coincidentally, the Los Angeles Times published an article about the mess we are walking into due to our drive to move into electric cars:

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-07-21/california...

From the article:

"A mining permit pushed through in the last week of the Trump administration allows the Canadian company Lithium Americas Corp. to produce enough lithium carbonate annually to supply nearly a million electric car batteries. The mine pit alone would disrupt more than 1,100 acres, and the whole operation — on land leased from the federal government — would cover roughly six times that. Up to 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid would be used daily to leach lithium from the earth dug out of a 300-foot deep mine pit."

Seriously?

And this is for JUST a million batteries per year. I assume they mean cells rather than the full car battery. Whatever the case may be, at scale, this is horrific. Yes, I said "at scale" because a million per year is not scale. We need many times that, thousands of times that amount if we are going to electrify the global transportation fleet. If we also want to use the same materials for grid energy storage the problem, again, at scale, quickly reaches apocalyptic proportions.

All I am asking you to do is to invest the time to really get into the details of the issue and use the math and science you understand to develop a true sense of proportion.

My guess is that the current path to electric energy storage is, at scale, a seriously flawed idea. I am not a chemist, so I can't propose an alternative that would be more benign at scale other than to say two things:

First, we need to be very careful and not allow politicians and various interests to lead us by the nose into causing a global disaster of unimaginable proportions.

Second, I have a sense --and the hope-- that a bright young scientist might just discover a path to store and deliver energy in liquid form in a way that will not have us resort to such things as strip mining the oceans and dumping millions of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to leach lithium out of them.

I don't have the answers. I just know we are probably being led down a path that could be far uglier than pumping petroleum out of the ground. We are making dumb decisions, like cancelling the XL pipeline...which means oil will have to be trucked...which will burn millions of gallons of refined diesel fuel to move petroleum at a horrific loss in efficiency. In the meantime, we have no problem dumping thousands of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to get lithium for "clean" electric cars and storage.

Does this really make sense to you? At scale?

I hope not.