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190 points erwinmatijsen | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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napoleoncomplex ◴[] No.45113000[source]
For anyone interested in a breakdown of the basic logic, this recent blogpost that trended on HN is probably the best: https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html

Really interested in seeing how it fares in reality, almost sounds too good to be true.

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jnsaff2 ◴[] No.45113523[source]
Why too good to be true?

There are significant trade-offs with this technology.

It's storing heat, so if you need electricity then you eat a lot of efficiency. I think Vernon said ~45% round trip efficiency. Batteries are 90%+.

The storage is at a high temperature (500-600C) which means that you can't use heat-pumps to produce the heat to be stored. This means that you miss out on ~400% energy gains possible from converting electricity to heat.

So the efficiency is pretty low.

That said, solar PV is really cheap and moving large amounts of earth into a pile is also a very much solved problem so in some cases, notably higher latitudes which have very long days and low heat/electricity demand in the summer and the opposite in the winter, it could still be a very good solution.

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1. HPsquared ◴[] No.45113567[source]
Yeah the efficiency is much less than 40% if you compare to heat pumps. It'll be something like 15% compared to those.