Why is it so hard to store electricity?
In: Technology
Electricity is motion on a scale you can’t see. Just like spinning a top slows and loses energy, moving electrons lose energy to heat.
Mostly because of entropy. Everything in the universe tries to homogenize over time. Storing electricity is intentionally working in the opposite direction of how things go. you have to have elements with too many electrons sitting somewhere and another section with not enough electrons and you have to separate them so they don’t share electrons until you need them to. They don’t naturally stay in that state.
This is why most of the time its easier for us not to store in batteries but to store things that can be used to produce energy when needed. Pumped storage is one of the ways we do that for example. We have to have a certain amount of power plants online to maintain voltage in the system but at night were often not utilizing that power because the lights off, the tvs off and its usually cooler so were not using air conditioning. When that happens, some places will pump water uphill into a reservoir with the excess electricity and when demand rises in the morning they let the water flow out and generate electricity again.
Electricity is electrons in motion, as electrons move through an object they generally heat it up and lose some of their energy, so to store electricity it is normally transformed into some other form of energy and can then be transformed back again when needed, but the process of transformation also loses energy.
Storing electrical charge or electricity is easy enough. Storing enough electrical charge to do the same amount of work you can get out of 60l or 15 gal of petro takes up a lot of space and is not a feather weight. That is the hurtle.
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