Localized Energy

Energy, specifically electricity, has been a wonderful blessing to many people, yet at the same time, it has been used to enslave populations. I hate to admit it, but I have a green streak also, where I hate to see our energy systems pollute so much as well. Additionally, I think energy systems would be a lot more effective if they were localized and then only tied together to the grid, but able to operate independently when needed.

I have heard many proposals and detractors of those proposals regarding locally generated power. When I say locally generated, I mean something that doesn't require outside resources to continue to run. For some places, that would make natural gas turbines a real viability, but for most places, that leaves as options solar, wind, and water. (I don't accept nuclear as a local option because of the setup cost, and continual problem of nuclear waste.) Yeah, I know, all of these options will generally need outside resources to get going, but once they are set up, they can go for many years without additional outside resources (There is a solution to that problem too, but that will have to be another post).

So, after my walk today, I was thinking about my power bills. I have always like the idea of being able to produce my own power. There are a lot of problems with producing your own power. The initial cost of any solution out there is pretty prohibitive to start with, but even if that wasn't an issue, there are other considerations that need to be addressed. One of the biggest is that we often don't use power when it is best generated, so I would have to have some kind of storage. Now, that starts getting expensive, cause mostly we are talking about batteries now. Batteries are one of the weakest links of any power storage system. They wear out, they are usually toxic, they require big infrastructures to create and support them. They are just a lousy answer, but, that is usually what comes to mind.

What if we had some other way to store energy? Two other solutions came to mind. The first is hydrogen storage. We just take the energy we are creating and not using and generate hydrogen with it, store it, and when we need electricity, or hydrogen to burn for things like cooking, we pull from our storage tanks. Well, hydrogen storage isn't such a simple thing. It is expensive, requires large expensive infrastructures, and is prone to failure. Ok, well what about that other idea.

I would call this one kinetic storage. You hook some kind of generating electric motor (one that is about equally efficient both ways) to a big pulley system that lifts something really heavy upward. It doesn't have to be that high, as the cables that lift it would feed into the pulley system so, when you have extra energy, you send the extra to the generator motor, and lift that big weight, and when you need that energy back, you allow the weight to run it the other way, and generate electricity with it. The weight doesn't have to be that expensive. The structure housing it wouldn't need to be that complex, just strong enough. It could be easily secured in a variety of ways.

So, what would we use for the weight. How about a big iron box with rocks in it, or if it was adequately sealed, put water in it. Hmm, if you put water in it, it could be lighter when you lifted it up, and then lift the water a little at a time. That might be a pretty good approach, when it got to the bottom, it would release the water, and lift the tank back up, and then start filling it again.

Hmm, if you used a gravity piston pump, you could have the thing be your primary generation system, that would store it automatically without converting it to electricity and then back, and you could do it without destroying the streams by damming them up all the time. You would require a decent water flow to make it work, but most of that water (90%) would continue downstream uninterrupted. only 10% would be used to power the system before it continued downstream as well. Hmm, I guess that could also provide a solution for water storage as well, but, that is another issue, even though the solution is right here.

Yes, I know, this won't work for everyone. It requires a decent water flow and elevation drop to make the piston pump work, but, if you had to run from a well, windmills have been used to pump water for longer than they have been used to generate electricity. And, last but not least, you could generate electricity with solar to pump the water from a well. Not as inexpensive and elegant as the gravity pump, but, still it would work.