Compressed Gas For Electricity Storage Claims Are Mostly Hot Air

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Compressing gases and making useful energy out of them is one of those deeply intuitive solutions that seduces people into dead ends every decade.

ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image of a hot air balloon tethered to the ground by an electricity cable covered in sparks

Of course, then there are pneumatically-powered actuators, where compressed gases make mechanical objects move. The first, in the west at least, were built in Paris in the 1870s, where a clock used pneumatics initially, and then a compressed air system was used to distribute power to industrial sites for their pneumatic actuators. For those in the trades, pneumatic nail guns and jackhammers are still daily tools.

In this game, no one can leave the table . As a result, the total number of chips keeps diminishing as the house takes its rake every hand. Everybody, no matter how much they win, eventually gives it all to the house. You can’t win . You can’t break even ., is all about heat. The second law,introduces work. Every time work gets done, the house takes its rake, and that’s entropy.

One of the things that comes out of all of this is that heat is not equal to work. Both are forms of energy, but while work can turn into heat with high efficiency, heat can’t turn into work with high efficiency. That’s the fundamental gotcha of fossil fuels and indeed anything we burn. What we are doing when we are burning something is turning it into heat, and if we need work, we lose a lot in translation.

The ratio of the created mechanical potential energy to the heat is a fundamental drawback of compressed gas electricity storage solutions. If you want a lot of mechanical potential energy, you end up creating an awful lot of heat. If you want to avoid losing all of that energy to heat, you end up without much mechanical potential energy.

The phase of water, whether it’s solid , liquid, or gas, depends on the combination of temperature and pressure. We just happen to live in the range of pressures and temperatures where we commonly see it turn from one to another. Every substance is like this. There’s a lot of stuff happening at the molecular level in terms of hydrogen bonds forming between water molecules that occurs around phase changes and that’s where all the energy is coming from or going to. Solids are highly ordered structures with only vibrational energy within molecules — think of an absurdly fast oscillating spring between two balls where the balls are atoms and the string is the chemical bond — and no rotational or movement energy.

 

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