Storage

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the issue of storage as it relates to clean power. As someone who has always claimed to be a common-sense environmentalist, this is clearly where I see the stakes to be highest. Efficient storage is the make-or-break technology for wind or solar energy, since the sun isn’t always shining, and the wind is sometimes calm. We live, the electric futurists say, for a battery technology that will solve those problems, allowing us to save solar energy for a rainy day, so to speak.

But I think this outlook is wrong-headed for two reasons. For one, battery technology is just not moving that fast. Yes, we’ve seen some impressive breakthroughs in capacity and recharge, though these are still far from solving the problem. But even if the capacity and recharge problems were solved, we’d still be multiple tech generations away from the miniaturization necessary for a workable replacement for current solutions. For another, I think this outlook ignores the real principle at play in storage.

In the end, it’s not electricity we are looking to store. It’s work that we want to store. And electricity is just one way that it can be stored — and right now it is just not competitive with work stored in fossil fuels. Thinking of it in terms of running a car, using battery technology is currently the worst of all possible worlds. Electric cars use heavy battery technology, have restricted range, and are still in the end typically powered by fossil fuel, often enough coal, at the power plant.¹

To make things worse, transmitting electricity from power plant to personal use involves significant power losses in the wires, reducing the efficiency of those electricity-generating fossil fuels even more. In other words, your Tesla riding sensibly in the HOV lane might be polluting more than the big Lincoln Navigator that just blew by you.

If we think about where the potential lies for easy storage of work, hydrogen clearly has a lot more promise than electricity. First, it is the cleanest source available. It can be created by simple electrolysis, which is vastly more efficient than burning things for energy. And when it is used in a fuel cell, to power a car, for example, its work is extracted with nothing more than water as a byproduct. So the hydrogen car has already leapfrogged the plug-in electric in both efficiency and pollution measures.

Moreover, hydrogen can be created through solar or wind power whenever and wherever those are available, then stored for use when needed. This gives hydrogen another edge over batteries, which must be charged on demand. Hydrogen could be sold in minutes over the counter, like gasoline, whereas electricity is still sold painfully slowly. Hydrogen technology is also lighter by orders of magnitude than equivalent battery technology.

Beyond cars, there’s no reason hydrogen couldn’t be plumbed into residences, the way natural gas is, to power fuel cells in situ. That would take us off an antiquated, centralized electricity grid that is vulnerable to storms, sunspots, terror threats, and hackers. We could even minimize the need for a hydrogen network by creating solar hydrogen “stills” as part of each home’s power plant, a classic distributed network that allows the free market to bring innovation into a closed, non-market system of quasi-statist utilities.

So why has hydrogen been tested in only a few areas of California? Why aren't the environmental crowd working to make hydrogen infrastructure a priority? I can think of a few reasons. First, electricity is available in the home already, so the technology to support a transition from fossil to plug-in seems to make sense at first glance, even if it takes us a step back. When people think about technology changes, they often can't see around corners -- even though some thinking might make that corner go away. It's point I’ve made before about paradigm shifts. There’s a reason why laundry technology is not limited to simply mechanizing the legacy process of tubs and mangles and clotheslines.

Second, the psychological importance of that step backward shouldn’t be underestimated. I think a lot of people believe that we should have to sacrifice, that being green should be difficult. If you are doing something better, it’s going to involve some hardship, or at least inconvenience, as though we are doing penance for previous environmental sins.

Finally, electric cars are a virtue signal, a way to say “I care.” Even though they are arguably still worse for the environment, they have a built-in halo already. To sum it up cynically, why drive a truly efficient vehicle if nobody knows how much you care?

There was a reservoir near where I lived for years that was long ago used as a gigantic “battery.” When power demand was low, electricity was used to pump water into a smaller upper reservoir. During a power outage, that water could be drained back into the main body of water through a turbine to generate electricity. Visiting that system, it occurred to me that we’ve been tugging on this knot for a long time. It’s time we cut through it by turning to the most abundant substance in the universe.

1. Again, we have indeed seen some breakthroughs on range, but the limited efficiency of recharge technology means that the “range” of an electric car cannot be almost instantly refreshed the way it can in an internal combustion car. I can double the range of my gas-powered car in 5 minutes at a filling station. Call me when your Tesla can do the same.