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I have a silly question. Could have looked it up elsewhere, but why be ashamed, right?

Why can you not store electricity?
Do the plants always produce 1-to-1 with the demand?

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government -- Edward Abbey

by serik berik (serik[dot]berik on Gmail) on Mon Mar 6th, 2006 at 04:33:33 AM EST
You can, but only in a very limited fashion: things like pumping water into reservoirs to feed hydroelectric turbines. Expensive, dependant on geography, environmentally awful and not always very worthwhile. What form would you store it in?
by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Mon Mar 6th, 2006 at 04:39:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]
There's no such thing as an efficient storage technology. The best batteries are hugely inefficient and also far more expensive than generation. So the only possible storage systems are mechanical, like the water scheme that Colman mentioned.

If someone invented a room-temperature superconductor, it would eliminate distribution losses and could potentially also be used for loss-free storage. But current superconductors need super cooling, so they use more energy than they could possibly save.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Mon Mar 6th, 2006 at 04:58:37 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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