Comments by "DynamicWorlds" (@dynamicworlds1) on "Dunkelflaute: No Wind, No Sun, Now What?" video.

  1. Yes, please! Those seem by far the most practical option to me due to longevity, modular deployment, mass manufacturing, low material costs, low maintenance costs, and ease of recycling, but I'd be very interested to see her take on their viability as while I'm far better at identifying pseudoscience than the average person, there are areas of science that I don't have the skills and knowledge to catch more than the most obvious problems with and several of them come up in battery tech.
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  2. I'd be VERY interested to see you look over liquid metal batteries due to their claimed longevity, modular deployment, simple mass manufacturing, low material costs, low maintenance costs, and ease of recycling. I'm far better at identifying pseudoscience than the average person, there are areas of science that I don't have the skills and knowledge to catch more than the most obvious problems with and several of them come up in battery tech. It feels right on the edge between "that sounds like a great idea. Why would we be using the same batteries for grid storage as we use for vehicles? They have entirely different design requirements, not the least of which is weight/kW." and "that sounds too good to be true"
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  3. We've basically failed at producing tidal power so it's been largely abandoned. The dual problems of the corrosiveness of seawater and marine fouling made the maintenance challenges effectively impossible to solve in an economic fashion, unfortunately. That's why almost no-one talks about it anymore. It would be great if that weren't true, as it would put a lot of power generation right where we would want it for desalination, but unfortunately it seems to be a dead end.
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  4. Vertical axis wind turbines are significantly less efficient than horizontal axis ones, so $/Watt they'll never be more economical. There is apparently a pretty simple and cheap solution to reduce bird strikes, though: paint the blades purple. The unusual color sticks out against the blues, whites, greens, yellows, and browns of the natural landscape and enables the birds to notice and judge their speed easier, so they can simply avoid the blades in a way that they find much harder to do when we paint the blades the same color as the clouds. Incorporating gravity storage into the structure seems like a decent idea if it can be done in a cost effective way, though, since you're already building a big tall hollow tower and if you got really clever about the design it might be workable to go right from kinetic energy of the wind to potential energy of the weight without losing efficiency going back and forth between mechanical and electric power. That part is clever.
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  5.  @philosoaper  unfortunately the inefficiencies I was referring to extend to efficiency in extracting energy from a given cross section of wind. Vertical axis turbines have niche advantages that can make them a good choice for off grid systems, but for efficient grid power, the standard design we see of the large 3-bladed horizontal design is extremely well optimized, especially when placed offshore where wind is pretty constant and low-turbulence....and just about every design (including the ones that look and are marketed as new) were already designed decades ago. As much as I like to share in the cautiously optimistic excitement of promising new tech, the aerodynamics here are extremely well-tread ground, so we should expect anything more than small, incremental improvements. :\
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