...does anyone here have any good experiences with them?

The environmental costs of battery recycling are not negligible. The very best lead acid batteries last 10-20 years, but only with meticulous care. To prevent environmental contamination they must also be recycled with meticulous care. Often they are not.

I'm beginning to think the hallmark of a truly sustainable society would be tools, machines, and infrastructure that lasts a hundred years or more with minimal maintenance, and that all other products would be made in such ways they could be tossed on a compost heap or broken up as non-toxic gravel when they wore out or failed.

Wind energy systems, and especially these "Texan-sized" lead acid batteries, are not sustainable from this perspective. Very few things in this modern world are.

Last edited Fri Feb 1, 2013, 03:58 PM - Edit history (1)

I like to imagine a utopia with a 35mph universal speed limit and year long vacations every decade or so. Watching the world go by through a big window that opens or from the deck of a ship would be considered an essential part of any long vacation.

My wife and I have managed to avoid automobile commutes since the late 'eighties. When we met we were Los Angeles freeway commuters. There's nothing quite so awful as an hour of stop-and-go traffic to and from work every day.

It would be a great world if most people lived and worked in places they didn't need cars.

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The compressed air schemes I've seen still use natural gas to reheat the expanding air. I vaguely recall a couple of schemes where the heat from the compressors was stored and used later to reheat the air in the generating turbines, but I don't think the numbers were favorable. If we've got to have the gas turbines anyways to pick up the load when there's no compressed air left in storage, then we might as well use gas to reheat the air when there is. We still come out ahead compared to a gas peaking plant alone.

Their system-level function is to convert low-quality energy coming from diffuse, variable sources into high quality energy capable of doing maximum useful work for society. The ability to do maximum work is what lets complex adaptive systems like countries and global civilization keep growing as fast and as long as possible.

We need that high quality energy to do useful work like building homes and roads, running factories to make stuff to replace other obsolescent stuff, and operating the conveyor lines at CAFO slaughterhouses...

If they're talking about the delivery of 36 MW of power over a period of time, 15 minutes in this case, it's watt hours.