Meanjin not so much - 35 tomorrow. Getting a little sick of it to be honest with you.
Climate denial all the way it is, then?
Of course I understand energy - two degrees in physics will do that - I just also understand that in practical terms there is a difference between a device that can simply and reusably store energy in the form we want it and single use chemicals stored millions of years ago.
So no answer then? Just a pedant who tries to stomp on discussions while offering nothing useful then?
If you agree that easily and consistently being able to time shift energy that has already been generated as electrical voltage and current to serve its ultimate purpose at a later time is useful then what would you call it?
Yes, but in the past we had to imagine that once we had a link in the chain that was electrical it had to be converted to the final link in the chain instantly. That is no longer the case. Do you see how important that is?
You know what I mean. Electrical energy is going in and electrical energy is coming out.
Words have precise scientific meanings and common meanings in certain circumstances. It’s deliberately obtuse not to see that in this context people are referring specifically to the storing of electrical energy from one time to be used at a later time.
Insisting on the mathematical equivalence of generation and load is exactly the same as insisting you can’t reach 100% efficiency, which is true in terms of physics but completely misses the point. Heat pumps are way more than 100% efficient in a way that’s meaningful in a practical sense.
Batteries fundamentally break the temporal link between the external energy availability and the need for the end product. If you don’t get that you will never understand how much it changes things.
And generation does *not* always have to equal load in the normal way people mean these terms, where generation is the harnessing and conversion of an external energy source into useable electrical energy, and load is the conversion of that into an end product such as heating, locomotion etc.
This is completely misunderstanding what’s happening. They’re not simulating rotating loads - that is not the requirement. They’re supplying active stability, whereas the old technology of spinning machines supplied some degree of passive stability through inertia.
That makes absolutely no sense. Refilling a fuel storage requires an entirely different bespoke process. Refilling a battery or a pumped hydro needs a bunch of electrical power.
The OP was clearly talking about the end of the assumption that generation and load had to exactly match at all times. You can define a charging battery as a load if you really don’t want to drop that assumption but it’s useful to think about the disconnection of primary energy and final load.
It isn’t at all energy storage in the way that most people mean it in that it doesn’t store energy we deliberately generated. It stores solar/chemical energy from millions of years ago and is single use. It really is not in the same category.
Obviously I know how a battery works. I mean that is one of the benefits of batteries and pumped hydro that fossil fuels singularly lack.
They are completely and utterly different because there is no way of using cheap or surplus electrical energy to create petrol or gas or coal (at the moment) for use later.
Imagine trudging down to the petrol station with your Jerry can rather than just plugging the batteries in.
12 enables you to split the year into quarters if that helps.
Surely nobody still has a petrol lawn mower in 2026?
What can we possibly add? We don’t have sophisticated missile defences other than the Hobart Class, and I sure hope they’re not thinking about sending the RAN into The Gulf.
Any troops would essentially be tripwires, designed to force us into the conflict as soon as one was injured or killed.
I reckon Zelenskyy might have a crack.
Being reasonable and measured while others are tearing the world apart is what got us into this mess. Maybe a bit of hyperbolic language is what we need.
I haven’t seen that. Claiming the individual sailors are committing war crimes I think is probably untrue, but we have possibly made them complicit in war crimes. Overstated, maybe hyperbolic. I don’t think people using florid language in their complaints are the real problem here.
People wanting Australians to have nothing to do with this war is not hysterical, it’s a statement of principle.
I think we disagree there - it seems to me the circumstances don’t permit at the moment at all. If we went with our tail between our legs to the French and asked for some exactly like theirs off the shelf maybe we could get them in 10-15 years. Otherwise I’m betting it’s 20-25.
The word “hysteria” sounds pretty blaming.
But in less than twenty years?
There’s lots of hysteria and division, but blaming the left wing right now when the right is doing the clearly illegal and disastrous thing at the moment is unhelpful.
