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I do think that hydro is going to be a better way to go, but the basis of the thread was the assumption of the fact that 100% wind is the goal. A lofty goal that requires a lot of energy storage since the wind is not reliable at all. I also agree that batteries might not be the best way to go here. I thought it was rather humorous that you think batteries are horrible but then want to use electric car batteries (I mean this in a nice way, I mean its just ironic). Someone came up with this idea to use the electric car to reduce peaks and help out the grid, it simply doesn't work. Car batteries are very expensive because they have to be light to be mobile. They have to be small and so they cost a lot. The car itself has a lot more durable stuff in it than an energy storage solution would require. So I say build your energy storage system from heavier cheap batteries rather than the most expensive cutting edge ones on the planet that are super light for no reason. There are not enough electric cars and there will never be. Not to mention the fact that the peak electric usage is just after everyone drives home and the battery is already partially depleted. The only thing electric cars can do is to shave a small amount off the peak but mainly it will help to shift usage to the night time by charging them at night. So would an energy storage unit. Cars can't reduce the peak if they are coming up on empty at this point of the day, and who wants their car depleted just before the morning drive? The idea is one that sounds neat but when you dig in it is about as impractical as ideas come. I can install a unit to run my house for $17,000, but I need to spend twice that to get a car which if just used for storage will do 1/10th the job of my trusty giant pile of batteries for storing energy for use in my house to reduce the peak. They will put a dent in gas usage which is another point alltogether, offset by the fact that we now need to produce that much more energy on the grid to move all the cars. So the actual energy requirements from all these electric cars goes up. Sure they use the grid at night but they are not really shifting usage to night we are just requiring the grid to provide more juice. Having to store up to a day of energy for the worst case scenario is a lot there will still be periods where there is not enough electricity to go around because the worst case I randomly chose is likely not the worst case. As far as batteries and inverters, I was simply choosing a known way to go about it to find the costs to show that "double" is not enough. Everyone will understand how batteries and inverters work and the sheer size of it comes right out in the open when you realize that every home will need 110 of the biggest car batteries. The whole idea of going 100% wind is simply not possible and the storage of the energy is the reason. There needs to be a base load and the smart grid needs to use the electricity at the best time to even energy usage out over the day. The only way to do this and not detrimentally impact the standard of living is to have enough storage to handle the use for when people want to. For example, getting people to do one load of laundry a day and set it up and let is start when the electric grid says so during the night sounds like a great idea, but it is an inconvinience. Distributed storage will help some, for those that are more bothered by these inconviniences they simply need to install more and those that want to live on the cheap with the inconvinience can do so. Another benefit is that distributed storage will reduce transmission losses to zero and the actual peak on the grid will drop because of thise while large area storage the peak will not be decreased. These losses can be as high as 20% so it is not insignificant. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged<<The idea of storing energy at each house is pretty much idiotic (unless talking about solar)>> Either its idiotic or it isn't. Energy is energy. Come on now. You should look into distributed generation and look at the benefits and drawbacks and as in all cases there are going to be times when it is appropriate and times when it isn't. Distributed storage is no different. If your storage containers match you load and are located there then you have minimized transmission losses thats like getting free energy. Who can say no to free energy? Put another way if 23A is sent you your storage 24/7 and you use it in fits and spurts as needed you have as few losses as possible. Its current squared times resistance which is your transmission loss so it goes up parabolically. In addition as the line losses increase the line heats up which increases the resistance, so it is actually slightly higher than current squared but it is highly dependent on outside air temp so having transmission slightly higher at night is going to be the ideal if you want to work out all the math. The problem is consumers never see transmission losses and so it doesn't make sense to think about it, but as far as generating your energy it is a major factor. to illustrate here is a sample. a bunch of houses are fed from a feeder that is 400A at peak and 80A at night. So the first group of houses to install storage to take 1A at night and reduce usage during the peak because it is running on battery power during the day at the peak will make the most impact making the numbers 395A and 81A. The next bunch will have about the same impact. Eventually we reach diminishing returns none-the-less returns they are. The first group though will have transmission losses drop by 96%. Assuming the transmission lines were of the length that 20% was lost during the peak the group of houses that take energy by night will reduce the losses to 1% because of when they had it delivered. Put another way if I need 1kWh during the peak, in this example 1.20 kWh need to be generated to send down the transmission line to get me my 1.0kWh. If I take it at night only 1.01 kWh need to be generated. This, my friend who thinks I am an idiot, is why distributed storage cannot simply be written off as idiotic. You will actually have to make a point about costs of storage in bulk versus distributed rather than trying to debunk the idea because I drool a lot. That is where the main drawback lies, in cost. Yet if a utility's charges are based on time of use this is one method in which we can proceed without a large public outlay of cash, we can actually prepare an estimate of payback time and decide how much of a unti to install in our own home to actually save dollars off the electric bill which can be used to buy the system. If we wait for the large system to be installed by the people as a whole (government or major utility) we might be sitting and waiting quite a bit. (A skeptic, in the true scientific world sense of a skeptic should know better than to use faulty logic to shoot down an idea.)

I am sure that such an undertaking would be considered impractical. The energy grid storage is something you simply doubled the price of but did not account for in any practical manner other than to double the cost. There is no commercially viable method that simply doubles the price. I have no idea what a typical houses uses in the netherlands, in fact I dont know what a typical house uses in the US. But I do know that a house in my neighborhood would use an average of about 1500 kWh per month. This works out to about 50 kWh per day or about 2 kW average with a max demand of about 4-5 kW. Since any system needs to handle the peak, a storage system must be sized with the peak in mind. Assume the house will use 5kW max with as much as 100kWh in a particularly busy day. Now I know that you are wondering where this is going. We are calculating the cost of available technology. That is lead acid batteries (best to use AGM type for this) and inverters. We will skip the point of how to store the wind power in the batteries for now as what that would require is a complex system to connect to the grid to charge the batteries when wind is available and at the same time power up the house full time with the inverter. This will be a costly change to every user of electricity. A group 31 battery (about 80 pounds nearly as big as they come for vehicles) will have about 120 Ah of capacity, which means it will run at say 12 Amps for 10 hours. You won't get much more efficient than about 90% when you store it and another 90% when you use it. So you need to store about 10% more or 110 kWh so the output is 100kWh. You will need to use 10% more to get that much stored but that is a measure of how many extra wind turbines you need and not relevant for this calculation. So the battery can output 12A at 12V for 10 hours this is 144 W for 10 hours or 1.44 kWh per battery. So you will need to buy 110 bateries to run this house. An AGM battery is going to give you many cycles but it will be unlikely to last more than 1000 which means you need to replace them every 3 years. So every house will need to buy 3 batteries a month that cost about $100 each. This adds $300 to the electric bill in the maintenance column and that is assuming that you can have them installed for the difference that you get the volume discount for. (I can buy 1 now for $100 but if you buy a million they will be a tad cheaper, but they need to be installed). I don't know what a 5kW inverter will cost but I imagine it would be along the lines of $1000. So now the question is, is there enough lead acid batteries and inverters avaiable? I can't imagine the electrical conversion to make each house feed from the system to charge a giant rack of batteries would be any less than $5000. This is just a huge undertaking. So you convert a house for $6000 plus $11000 for batteries or $17,000. Or better yet you install a 0.6 MW (30% of 2MW) wind turbine and convert 400 houses (600000/1500=400). The 400 homes cost $6.8 Million dollars which is much more than double the 2 million euros for the turbine. Plus the maintenance of the batteries. And the vastly inferior performance of the grid when each house has its own inverter and huge cost of battery replacement. As an alternative it would be much better to simply assume something like 10% wind power. Then you can store it in huge batteries and run it back into the grid as but a small percent of the total so the batteries simply don't need to store ALL the energy but only some of it and the other generation that currently exists will have to manage the varying need with far greater swings. You only store what you need to get other generators fired up or load dropped when the wind dies down. You can then store energy in all manner of crazy methods such as flywheels since it will only be stored for a short time. This will reduce the costs. Although if you want to get to 100% then you need to rethink how the electric grid works, cause generation has to meet load at all times. It will be very costly to add in devices to store any more than necessary. It will either be very costly or we get a drastic drop in reliability. We are simply not accustomed to having to think about electricity as a resource that may not be available at all times, yet if we go all green it becomes just that.

if the sun is lower in the sky or a light layer of clouds or con-trails is present the current output from the solar panels will drop. If you get a particularly nice sunny day during the best time of year and time of day you will see your highest output. So it goes without saying that more light will give you more output. There will be a maximum output though, based on the size of the wires where you get diminishing returns and there is the heat factor as well. So you will need to determine how hot the cells can run and the maximum current output they can handle. Then make sure that you don't send more light along than this. You will likely need to do some experimenting or reading a lot of datasheets and asking the manufacturer a lot of questions. I don't know if solar cells have a shorter life if they get hotter or if they run at a different efficiency if their temperature is higher. These would be good questions to find out What you may find is that just buying another panel is cheaper than building and keeping a mirror or lense clean. That will be another variable in the equation at any rate.

What would be a good cheap and or easy way to safely turn a small bin of lead oxide powder mixed with tin-lead into something that was safe? and/or what do they do with all the recycled lead from batteries and would this provide a clue to the above question? and/or can it be disposed of just like batteries or alongside a battery? it is coming from a flow-solder re-work station that has been collecting up for a while now so there is a tin-lead alloy mixed in as I am not very careful to keep all the solder out when I skim this crap off the top. I noticed some dude in here was trying to make fireworks with the stuff... maybe I can mail it to him... :-O

I think the point is not electrolysis, rather the point is to get oxygen disolved into the water while also increasing the ORP reading. Then said drinking water will "attack and disable" free radicals in the body. I am not claiming this will work, but it will alter the chemistry of the water and therefore one is drinking something different than the original water that was started with. I would imagine that just about everyone would agree the only way to know is to run some scientific tests and measure the results. So back to the point, electrolysis is usually done to collect hydrogen and/or oxygen. But since the point here is to disolve oxygen in the water to make it "healthier" as well as to increase the ORP readings the AC current might actually help to not collect the oxygen on one side and if the plates are large enough it might all dissolve into the water.