Hydroelectric dams have also claimed more human lives than any other type of power plant.

A little bit of authoritarianism is what we need now to mitigate climate change and avoid the much worse kind of authoritarianism we will be in for as climate change gets worse. There’s no hippy la-la conscious capitalism way out of this situation.

Sometimes you have to intentionally burn some stuff to create a firebreak and save a lot more other stuff.

I do not understand how climate change is analogous to a leaky faucet with respect to anything.

Back to energy storage: if you’ve got some brilliant solution - get to it. We’re waiting.

No to storing joules in environmentally questionable batteries. Use the energy immediately to produce useful, necessary stuff like fresh water and hydrogen.

I’m not sure what you mean. Natural fresh water supplies are stressed in many regions. We need hydrogen to fuel vehicles and for the production GHG-free steel and fertilizer. Oxygen of course is necessary for medical and industrial applications. Safely handling hydrogen and oxygen is a solved problem and these gases are not polluting if you have to vent to atmosphere. It only makes sense from a wasteful, financially extractive perspective to store extra electricity by environmentally questionable means instead of actually using that energy right away.

I don’t think they should be operating at all.

If we build out our GHG-free power capacity beyond our electricity demand, efficiency isn’t an issue. We need fresh water. We need hydrogen and oxygen. I’m sure there are other convenient things to produce whenever electricity demand falls off. These energy storage and reselling schemes are just destroying value.

Well, I don’t know how we’re supposed to fix the climate while playing nice with bourgeois interests.

There’s also avoiding (or minimizing) the need for storage at all, with “demand shaping”. Basically, we radically overbuild solar, wind, wave, tidal, etc. Normally, that would tank energy prices and be unprofitable, but we also build out some massive, flexible demand to buy this excess power. Because they are extremely overbuilt, the minimal output from these sources during suboptimal conditions is more than enough to meet normal demands; we just shut off the flexible additional demand we added.

Bingo.

None. Use demand shaping instead. I like electrolysis of water, but desalination might make more sense in some regions. I suppose you could even redirect excess electricity to certain computational work.

I don’t think we should be storing and reselling electricity at all.

We need an authoritarian figure to nationalize the energy supply, shut down these wasteful expressions of late stage capitalism, mandate rooftop solar, and build out our nuclear fleet.

Abandon the model of buying and storing electricity when demand is low and reselling power back to the grid when demand is high. Instead, electricity should almost always be generated in excess of demand with the difference going to hydrogen and oxygen production for various medical, industrial, agricultural, and transport applications. If we ever run out of storage, they can be safely vented to atmosphere.