Energy storage tech is only barely in its infancy since fossil fuel corps have stood on its neck for so long.
It’s a really weird take to insist that batteries can’t work when we’ve barely even tried. It’s like the 2 year old saying it’s impossible because he’s been trying to stick the star through the circle hole, and that we should just be happy with stars not being in the box.
Ecologically damaging like lithium is still a case of star in circle hole: we’re only just scratching the surface of grid scale energy storage.
I feel that you have put it best. We are still developing our technology with energy storage. The current technology is not ideal, but as we develop the need we may find ourselves likewise developing energy storage that is more efficient.
I want to see more stuff like grid scale flywheel energy storage. Dead simple tech and if it can live power by even 6 hourait's immediately useful, 24 and that's 90% of that you need
Many battery tech are dead simple. It is a rolled layer of specific materials at precise thickness but really not rocket science, especially when you are not concerned about per kg efficiency. Flywheels are much more complicated, requiring well maintained mechanics, a motor and a dynamo.
It takes a 260kg flywheel with all its mass at the edge spinning at mach 0.5 to store 1kWh.
If you want simple supply chains, build a carnot battery. It’ll be half as efficient, but far more compact (if graphite is the storage, more compact than LFP) and long lasting.
If you want a simple machine, buy a battery. The only hard part is high purity.
I can't help but feel like this is thinking way too far ahead. It feels to me that society has to get people into riding bicycles as an option before even thinking about refining the processes around building bicycles. A big factor of lifecycle (heh) assessment is the amount of usage you get out of a given produced object before it becomes necessary to replace. Making the option to ride the bike easier, more accessible, more inviting is how you make bicycles more sustainable.
re: carbon fiber cargo bike emissions
Clearly there needs to be more studies because this feels like very narrow view of cargo bikes especially when the market for consumer cargo bikes is largely occupied by Urban Arrow (aluminum), Riese & Muller (aluminum), Larry vs Harry (Aluminum), and many more that construct cargo bikes out of aluminum or steel. Just looking at some commercial models of cargo bike it seems like for the most part those are made from aluminum as well. I believe that Urban Arrow offers models for businesses.
It feels to me that society has to get people into riding bicycles as an option before even thinking about refining the processes around building bicycles.
This is where my head is at. Although it's good to see that these things are being assessed anyway.
The key problem is that, as the article highlights, iron is widely available and its energetic cost per ton is relatively small. This means that we actually need to reduce steel production, not just replace it with something else and call it a day. Doing the later would cause more harm than good.
For that, I think that consistent application of the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle - in this order, and stop forgetting the first two R’s dammit) would be a good start. And perhaps legislative measures against businesses trying to prevent you from applying the three R’s.
In the meantime, perhaps look for alternative steel productiion processes? You need some carbon as it’s part of the alloy, but I wonder if the bulk of the reduction could be done by electricity instead. And even the carbon could be sourced from renewable sources; more expensive, but doable.
The folks who came up with the 3 R’s (plastics industry) knew that only the first one made any difference whatsoever.
Even today, plastics recycling only makes a trivial difference. Edit: And a lot of things saying “uses X% recycled plastic” are often referring to the plastic recycled in-house through the manufacturing process, which they’ve always done (such as flash from injection molding). Unless it says “post-consumer” it’s just moral grandstanding.
However, steel is the most recycled material today, and glass is also good at being recycled. But glass has a weight (and therefore energy) penalty, which likely outweighs recycling benefits.
Electric arc furnaces are becoming more common across the steel industry, coke alternatives not so much. Being a commodity, any steel plant that chooses more expensive ingredients is going to quickly go out of business
any steel plant that choses more expensive ingredients is going to quickly go out of business
That’s true, and perhaps governments could/should kick in. The shift would be overall advantageous for society, so I think that it could be viable to tax coke production and use those taxes to subsidise plants using greener energy, offsetting the costs.
In the meantime, perhaps some global measures. Such as a treaty specifically addressing steel-based carbon emissions. Big thing here would be to convince the big three (China, India, and Japan); if the shift is desirable and viable for those three, others are easier to convince.
Coal is required for steel, electricty-based heat would only work to lower carbon emissions (especially when recycling steel since you don’t need coal there), but you couldn’t prevent them.
There’s usually an interface material when using resisitive heat. And there’s heat loss from heating the interface material before the heat getting to the actual material that needs to be heated.
Inductive heating can be applied directly without heating the interface material.
Though this is probably more applicable to cooking vs industrial kilns and furnaces.
Coal is a significant component in the production of steel to impregnate it with carbon. It’s a fundamental part of how a blast furnace operates. The article literally talks about this…
Even the article about doesn’t mention an alternative. An arc furnace relies on scrap it cannot make new steel.
Though, I wonder if we can move more towards charcoals, but even then I wonder if that’s just much less effective or if it cannot reach the temperatures or concentrations required for industrial processes.
How much of the coal in a blast furnace is actually necessary for the carbon impregnation, as opposed to supplying the heat via combustion? Steel contains only a few percent carbon by weight, so it doesn’t seem like much carbon is needed (not to mention that the carbon in steel is essentially sequestered).
The hybrit process that some Swedish steelmakers (including SSAB - not a typo, it isn't Saab) are using looks promising. They've been testing it with Volvo and are apparently making it part of Volvo's regular process in 2026
Charcoal steel is actually better, as charcoal is generally purer, and steel suffers from phosphor and sulphur impurities. The problem is that it’s costlier.
I think that it would be viable to at least reduce the carbon used in steel production just to impregnate it, and conduct the bulk of the reduction through another process.
That’s fundamentally different from steel. We don’t really have an alternative currently. You could use something like aluminium but that’s not environmentally friendly either (in the initial production, for recycling it’s great).
In Europe, even a single family home is now built using tons of steel. They build with brick, but the foundation, corner pillars, beams on top of walls are all concrete.
A few decades ago, reinforced concrete beams were only used in large buildings and infrastructure.
The maximum energy production is thus roughly 400 Wh per day.
The solar panels are connected in parallel and coupled to a solar charge controller and 550 Wh of lead-acid batteries. Assuming a 33% Depth-Of-Discharge (DoD) and a round-trip battery efficiency of 80%, this gives me a maximum energy storage of roughly 150 Wh
Total electricity use in my office is (on average) 500 Wh per day
But to the authors credit he does talk about what changes can be made around the house to do DC to DC conversation as opposed to DC to AC to DC conversation to minimise conversation loss.
Interesting article that really highlights how the fantasy of millions of wind turbines providing 100% of our energy needs is impossible. We don’t have the raw materials to make such a thing and any time steel is made, it must still use coal, a lot of coal. So when discussing alternative power sources, other inputs must be considered.
a 14 MW offshore wind turbine would require 1,300 tons of steel per MW or 18,200 tonnes in total. Such a wind turbine thus consumes 24 times more steel than a coal or gas power plant of the same power capacity.
I just skimmed, but noticed one small discrepancy in one of the pictures. It shows an inverter connected to the “load” terminals on the solar charge controller. This is not the way to do it, because the inverter draws way too much power.
The inverter should be connected directly to the battery with low gauge wire.
It depends on the hardware you have, as the charger and inverter can interfere with each other in a number of ways.
For an RV with a couple lead-acid batteries, separate devices all connected to the battery usually work fine.
For more sophisticated set-ups (at least around here) all-in-one devices incorporating both charger and inverter are preferred. You also get load managenent this way.
If you have a separate inverter and charger that are designed to talk to each other and have good MPPT, you connect them both to the PV panels so the inverter doesn’t sabotage the charger’s ability to measure the battery’s state of charge or charge it optimally. This is ‘preferable’ for lead batteries and critical for lithium batteries.
As I said, it depends. There are inverters made specifically to be connected to PV panels, and there are inverters made for a fixed input voltage that you connect to a battery (the DIY store kind are usually the latter).
Though if you want to build a self-contained PV system without having to think about it too much, you’re probably best off with an all-in-one device where you can just plug in your panels, your battery and your devices and let it worry about the rest.
There’s another aspect, and I sadly lack the technical vocabulary here, but basically what you want to do for optimum efficiency is to convert the voltage as few times as possible. So: panels–>inverter–>load resp. panels–>charger–>battery, but not panels–>charger–>inverter–>load. The latter decreases your general efficiency and introduces roughly twice the losses.
The charger may also reduce its power output to much less than what the panels could deliver once it thinks the battery is full.
But then again, it all depends on your use case: where you use the system, what the environmental conditions are, and of course what your budget is. There simply is no one-size-fits-all PV system. You may not even need an inverter if all you want to do is charge your phone and laptop.
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