Energy storage coming to a power grid near you

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Friday, 27 June 2008
Energy storage coming to a power grid near you
June 27, 2008 4:00 AM PDT
Posted by Martin LaMonica

Someday, the electricity grid will operate with the equivalent of a giant hard drive. But in the short term, grid storage will look more like a PC's cache or RAM, able to serve up small bursts of power to keep things from crashing. [Frontpage...]

[Gizmo]

This kind of technology is absolutely key to us being able to really being taking advantage of 'variable' power sources like wind and solar. I look forward to seeing how this develops.

[Daniel ~]

Yeah it seemed like just the thing to encourage diversity of power sourses without loss of overall reliabilty...

[danrok]

We only think that mainstream power plants are reliable because they mostly have been in the last 20 years or so, for most of us.

That's a situation which can change, and may well do depending on where you live and what type of power plants are used, etc.

Any serious failure could mean that electricity gets rationed out, with one part of the grid being supplied at different times to others, for example.

[Gizmo]

Heh. Speak for yourself. I routinely lose power here for at least a couple of hours at least twice a year, usually during storm season, and have minor 1/2 second or so glitches at least once/month.