Startup to deploy innovative air-based energy storage system underwater — here's why (msn.com) A Swiss company is already selling cranes that hoist rocks up higher, using gravity to extract energy on demand. This one is too stupid and easy to do. Seriously, for almost no start up costs you can create a giant battery in any pond in the world, including a sewage pond. This a crude startup, but they could take this idea to extremes. No doubt, it will even work in cold climates, if the water freezes over.
It's just a float, like a buoy, and saves power by compressing air inside it. The rocks on top weight it down, and provide habitat for fish. In fact, if you put them in the ocean, you will have to account for everything in the world trying to turn it into a mobile coral wreath. Theoretically, you could create giant batteries, that extend all the way down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. About three miles worth of battery power but, you'd want a totally different design.
In 1953, a low differential evaporator set in the bed of the river Thames, heated the Royal Festival Hall in London at a COP value of around 3. It worked on the basis that the coefficient of cubical expansion or water reverses at around three degrees celcius. When they realised the dangers of half a ton of liquid ammonia passing through the condensers in the auditorium, they decommissioned the whole lot, following less than 2 ounces of escaping NH3 at an ice rink in France killed around 30 people. My late father was one of the design engineer for the festival hall project. Being only 4 years old at the time, I had not yet earned my title of the nutty professor. We could extract endless energy from the oceans at COP-3 using liquid ammonia in a perfectly safe environment, but at around 40 degrees, the heat would have limited use. We could also end up with a problem when icebergs started popping up from deep in the ocean and sinking a few more Titanic's. LOL
That's an excellent point, China could start sinking icebergs for electricity, and raise the ocean several feet. With modern technology, they can already just drop a cable into the water, from a ship, and extract electricity from the temperature differential alone. Fusion reactors are the future, with the laser powered inertial fusion reactors getting as small as two meters in diameter. Three of them on a semi-truck could power NYC. Jenson Huang only wishes he could make them.
The latest drones can swim for up to a year, without recharging, getting their electricity from the water. You can also split the water, and use hydrogen and oxygen for a power cell, but that's getting Goofy. The simple fact is, the newest supercapacitors make these kinds of batteries all but obsolete, with 19x the capacity of current ones. Imagine if batteries came on cloth, that you can cut with scissors, punch holes in, or whatever, and you could even throw a pair of pants made of carbon into the fire, and it would recharge them, and clean them. Cloth, that they reel out on a machine by the thousands of yards, and is the equivalent of throwing leaves on the ground.
