[[Tangent inspired by your mention of ship batteries: I had been running the numbers, back when Europe was first looking at undersea power cables from North African solar farms—and it seemed reasonable to manufacture immense floating bulbs… just, big hollow, rigid-shelled floaties, for vacuum capacitors of immense scale, able to deliver power to various locations flexibly, without using rare materials. It’s a vacuum inside, so it’s perfect at sea! Spain was looking at cables on the order of a hundred billion bucks, to power Europe properly—when we could just make giant plastic hamster balls, and roll them across the Med.]]
So it’s a pressure vessel storing energy by the difference between pressure at sea level and inside?
Why not use compressed air batteries, which can have many times atmospheric pressure inside. More storage for volume and your money invested. (Though all these variants of energy storage are inefficient and probably doomed to be never built at scale in favor of sodium or flow batteries)
Erm, no not a pressure vessel. A vacuum capacitor. They hold electrons, and they are able to charge and discharge in a fraction of a second, which is essential so that your floating power-bulb is able to haul-into port, discharge, and leave quickly. Batteries on a ship would take immense amounts of time, or immense amounts of copper; you pick. Vacuum capacitors are also empty, with a surfacing of Teflon for high electrical insulation, resulting in minimal capital; they are cheap, light, easy to mass-produce, and simple enough to automate their routes.
Doesn’t look viable. Capacitors aren’t good enough for energy storage as it is and known dielectrics are thousands of times better than vacuum.
The actual solution is way more boring. It’s possible that even flow batteries will be too expensive and we’ll just spam the sodium version of server rack batteries.
[[Tangent inspired by your mention of ship batteries: I had been running the numbers, back when Europe was first looking at undersea power cables from North African solar farms—and it seemed reasonable to manufacture immense floating bulbs… just, big hollow, rigid-shelled floaties, for vacuum capacitors of immense scale, able to deliver power to various locations flexibly, without using rare materials. It’s a vacuum inside, so it’s perfect at sea! Spain was looking at cables on the order of a hundred billion bucks, to power Europe properly—when we could just make giant plastic hamster balls, and roll them across the Med.]]
So it’s a pressure vessel storing energy by the difference between pressure at sea level and inside?
Why not use compressed air batteries, which can have many times atmospheric pressure inside. More storage for volume and your money invested. (Though all these variants of energy storage are inefficient and probably doomed to be never built at scale in favor of sodium or flow batteries)
Erm, no not a pressure vessel. A vacuum capacitor. They hold electrons, and they are able to charge and discharge in a fraction of a second, which is essential so that your floating power-bulb is able to haul-into port, discharge, and leave quickly. Batteries on a ship would take immense amounts of time, or immense amounts of copper; you pick. Vacuum capacitors are also empty, with a surfacing of Teflon for high electrical insulation, resulting in minimal capital; they are cheap, light, easy to mass-produce, and simple enough to automate their routes.
https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-ll-lithium-battery-24v-200ah/
Vacuum dielectric strength: https://eepower.com/capacitor-guide/fundamentals/dielectric-materials/
Doesn’t look viable. Capacitors aren’t good enough for energy storage as it is and known dielectrics are thousands of times better than vacuum.
The actual solution is way more boring. It’s possible that even flow batteries will be too expensive and we’ll just spam the sodium version of server rack batteries.