First off, don’t be rude. Second off, bold claim saying I don’t know shit about shit when you don’t know that a gravity battery is measured in mass (or volume, sure) and height, you know, that thing that gravity needs to make stuff move.
Edit: Also, batteries don’t directly power cities, they just smooth out power generation, but I’ll show how a large enough battery could provide more than enough power if all other generation went offline and it could charge to full when that power was online.
Anyways, I’m too lazy to calculate this myself, but the Hoover Dam website has better data than I do and probably smarter people doing the formulas anyways. It produces 4 billion kWh of power per year on average. The power usage of a city of 1,000,000 people varies based on average headcount of each household and especially by industrial (and commercial) consumption compared to residential consumption, but to take NYC as an example, it uses about 11 million kWh per day, and has a population of about 8 million, so it uses about 1.375 kWh per person per day. Over the course of a year, this means that a city of 1 million people would take 1.375*365*1,000,000 = 500 million kWh for a year. Conclusion: the Hoover Dam, which is a gravity battery, could fully power 8 cities of 1 million people, or almost exactly 1 New York City.
I’ll accept your math. So now in-order to solve america’s storage problem to convert to a 100% renewable grid, we just need to build (Population of the US) / (Population of NYC) = 340million / 8million = ~43 Hoover dams. Do you think that is maybe a non-trivial problem to solve?
Don’t forget that we also need the ~250sq miles of reservoir space for each dam. (technically it’s the volume that is important, but for reservoirs you are often limited by surface area because of the topology required)
First off, don’t be rude. Second off, bold claim saying I don’t know shit about shit when you don’t know that a gravity battery is measured in mass (or volume, sure) and height, you know, that thing that gravity needs to make stuff move.
Edit: Also, batteries don’t directly power cities, they just smooth out power generation, but I’ll show how a large enough battery could provide more than enough power if all other generation went offline and it could charge to full when that power was online.
Anyways, I’m too lazy to calculate this myself, but the Hoover Dam website has better data than I do and probably smarter people doing the formulas anyways. It produces 4 billion kWh of power per year on average. The power usage of a city of 1,000,000 people varies based on average headcount of each household and especially by industrial (and commercial) consumption compared to residential consumption, but to take NYC as an example, it uses about 11 million kWh per day, and has a population of about 8 million, so it uses about 1.375 kWh per person per day. Over the course of a year, this means that a city of 1 million people would take 1.375*365*1,000,000 = 500 million kWh for a year. Conclusion: the Hoover Dam, which is a gravity battery, could fully power 8 cities of 1 million people, or almost exactly 1 New York City.
I’ll accept your math. So now in-order to solve america’s storage problem to convert to a 100% renewable grid, we just need to build (Population of the US) / (Population of NYC) = 340million / 8million = ~43 Hoover dams. Do you think that is maybe a non-trivial problem to solve?
Don’t forget that we also need the ~250sq miles of reservoir space for each dam. (technically it’s the volume that is important, but for reservoirs you are often limited by surface area because of the topology required)