Tobberone

As with all heating relying on water for energy transport, absolutely when building new buildings, but will cost an arm if you add it in a remodeling.

As for solar capture in Sweden, there are a few places that try to store heat in sandpits, among others a high school in Stockholm. And on that subject the Finns must be mentioned😊 Will be interesting to follow!

The question is: is it efficient enough during the cold season? Cyprus, situated in the middle of the Mediterranean heat reservoir and with plenty of daylight during the off season seems to be well situated.

As for the need: I'm from up north, our houses are built to keep heat inside as that is most positive for our energy consumption. In the south, houses try to limit the need for cooling. The effect of which became very clear to me when I went to the Mediterranean in November. Heating? Yea please.

Well, even 84% sunshine transmitted is still rather shiny and is more than what is available at night.

Oh, it's funny because it's true.

Now I need to go cry in a corner, because it's true

I wish we could. That capacity is already booked. The batteries we are deploying needs to be used as local storage. And this is before the EU mandate on solarpanels on all roof tops has taken effect. The grid can't expand at that rate, unfortunately.

Oh, you are aussie:) i should have guessed by your username.

Ok, for starters, where I live that big yellow thing stops shining. Practically (for electricity production anyways) for almost 6 months of the year and almost totally for 3. And even with heat pumps we still use several MWh of electricity every year to heat our homes. A battery park can keep a city running for 1h. Even those planned in NSW (BESS is it?) would struggle to keep things running for mire than a day. To be clear:

We need more energy storage than can be provided by electric batteries, than can be bought at battery prices and in scales larger than can be produced with any technology current or in the overseeable future. And we needed it yesterday. Any form of low cost, stable, easy to store solution we can use is a huge step forward. Solar is great! But we need the electricity when the sun doesn't shine. Heat pumps are awesome! But their awesomness is needed when the sun doesn't shine so much. That is why we need more energy storage solutions.

Summertime there are almost limitless electricity available, but that energy needs to be stored somehow. And with limitless (in practice) efficiency isn't an issue. Even storing 1% is better than 0%. Regardless of efficiency.

You said it yourself. Still undiscovered. The technology we have today can't be used to save more than a day or so of electricity. We need to handle months. Finding more energy dense ways of doing it is crucial.

And even if we burn it and put it back in the air, it is still positive, because we won't have added more from oil. And if we get enough of the stuff we can let the trees grow, which would be a carbon sink.

Step 1: stop using oil. If we use the methane as is, we've accomplished this step.

Step 2: scrub carbon from atmosphere. Upping the game and replacing wood for heating would let the trees scrub the atmosphere, creating carbon sinks

Step 3: accelerate. Can processed methsne be stored in energy dense compounds? Like oil was?

Batteries may be more efficient, but we can't use them to store all the energy we need. And heat pumps still need electricity when there is less renewable electricity available.

Looking at nature, long carbon chains are the way to store lots of energy and being able to use just electricity to get carbon out of the air is a great first step. Capturing the methane will allow us to process it further.

This is the best news regarding energy storage I've seen in a long time.

Well, there is a big discussion about nutrition among lupies, so maybe heuristics was on to something this time. On the other hand, in what group isn't nutrition a topic?

I agree. To many are happy to think its somebody else's fault and that "our children will pay for me".

Another hurdle, and nobody likes to admit it, is that a whole lot of the emissions stem from the wants and needs of the people. Not the wealth in itself. So the responsibility falls differently than the wealth distribution.

Make no mistake, We need to be better at taxing wealth, with all it's unwanted social and economic effects and disregard for the ecological ones, but it might prove trickier than expected.

But why are they all touching themselves?

Childhood? Still fit most of those!

What would have been the biggest difference had you known back then?