Google CEO: How to Fix U.S. Energy Problems

Ockie said:
I can actually do it for much less with technology we already have and infrastructure we already have in place... how you say?

Nuclear Power. Clean, Abundant, Renewable.
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Sadly you have hippies adding in "Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Nagasaki, Hiroshima"

If only they'd wake up and smell the coffee. We have what? 130 nuclear plants in the United States? And how many meltdowns or accidents or mutations since the nuclear age began 50 years ago? Almost none! Even Three Mile Island accident caused no fatality when it partially melted down. The only reason everyone was up in arms about this is because the government and plant officials wouldn't release information. You know what they say about keeping the people guessing. Ideas get made up, people start weaving conspiracy theories, panic ensues, anti-nuke rallies form.

It sucks about Chernobyl though.

Look at coal power. How many mining accidents and deaths have there been? How many forests and mountains have been destroyed? How much of our air has become polluted?

I say MORE NUCLEAR PLANTS!
 
elfletcho said:
By their vary nature wind and sun are not reliable energy sources.
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The sun has come out every day for the last 4.5+ billion years. If it's cloudy, the solar PV doesn't stop working, it just collects less energy. Around my neighbourhood, you can get an average of 3.5 hrs/day of solar power. In spite of this, there are fully functional solar heat and electric based houses.

Wind blows every day somewhere. The total energy in the wind in one day is greater than all the energy in all the nukes in the world since the first nuke was built.

The problem is not that wind and/or solar are not "on" all the time. After all, why should supply be constant when demand is not constant?

There are a number of technologies that can store energy collected by solar/wind during peak supply to deliver the energy during peak demand. NaS batteries are used in Japan for large scale storage, for example.

If you stop whinging about the problems and start talking about the solutions, you'll see this can work quite well. However, the part most people don't want to hear is that part of the solution is to stop wasting energy. For some stupid reason, they seem to think wasting energy has something to do with freedom.
 
I read a book written by the CEO of a large think tank company that sells information to governments and large corporations about what things will be like in the future. From her research, she said that if everyone in the world were to work together and do everything they can to generate energy... drill for all known oil (and account for new oil fields found), build all possible nuclear power plants, build all possible hydro-electric dams, build all possible wind power, mine for all known coal, etc etc, and also account for the increase in the world's consumption of energy, that in 30 years, we will be consuming more than is available.

Now ask yourself, are we doing all that? No, we are not.

I like Google, but I think they are a bit to fairy-tale optimistic, like Obama, about topics like this. I understand why they see this as an issue... they require large, energy consuming data centers.

But the bottom line is that we will soon need to consume less energy. We can do it now so it's not a shock, or just keep consuming it at increasing rates and then be shocked when it all becomes much less available.
 
First I think Global Warming is a bit of a hoax created by those who want something greater to believe in but find religion unfashionable.

Second we need to forget all of the pie in the sky windfarms etc. The maintenance is astronomical. Just build some more nuclear power plants.
 
heh, all the so-called "experts" just don't understand what base load is and why we need it. Solar and wind are not base load power suppliers. They're fine for offsetting *some* load during peak hours, but that's about it. Base load required over the next 20 years is going to grow by 20% to 40% across the nation, probably even more if we want to factor in plug-in electric vehicles. That means many many gigawatts more.. many... The simple answer is more nuclear and clean coal technology plants for base loads, and solar/wind to ease some of the load during peak hours. If we used breeder reactor technology and fuel reprocessing, we wouldn't have to worry about our electricity needs. As for high level waste that needs to be disposed of, encase it in a cask and either bury it or drop it down into an oceanic trench. 20-feet of water or a few feet of concrete and steel insulate the highest rated radioactive materials any nuclear plant can output, and new casks are being rated for 10k+ years. Anyhow, here's some tests of the old casks from decades ago.. the new ones are far better if you can believe it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o8haMIVcL8
 
Totally... nuclear all the way.

You know, I think that big oil/energy companies are behind environmentalism, not so much hippies. Why, you ask? Well, here's my theory. If big oil can get environmentalists to make it too expensive for any new businesses to get into the market, big oil won't have any competition other than what is already there, and they will continue to make lots of money. You might have heard that Saudi Arabia has offered to pay for the building of new refining facilities in the US that would make our fuel processing much more efficient. However, it costs too much because of our environmental laws. It's a conspiracy I tell you!
 
I get so tired of people saying 'the sun isnt always shining, wahhhhh'

No, the sun is not always shining, but when it is, it reduces the load on other 24x7 sources

Ever hear of batteries? If every solar installation had batteries, these batteries could be charged during sunny hours, and contribute to the load when necessary. In cases of surplus, the batteries could contribute to the grid, giving you electric credits on your bill
 
Azhar said:
Sadly you have hippies adding in "Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Nagasaki, Hiroshima"

If only they'd wake up and smell the coffee. We have what? 130 nuclear plants in the United States? And how many meltdowns or accidents or mutations since the nuclear age began 50 years ago? Almost none! Even Three Mile Island accident caused no fatality when it partially melted down. The only reason everyone was up in arms about this is because the government and plant officials wouldn't release information. You know what they say about keeping the people guessing. Ideas get made up, people start weaving conspiracy theories, panic ensues, anti-nuke rallies form.

It sucks about Chernobyl though.

Look at coal power. How many mining accidents and deaths have there been? How many forests and mountains have been destroyed? How much of our air has become polluted?

I say MORE NUCLEAR PLANTS!
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i actually just read a really fantastic article about chernobyl, about how the actual damage it did was not as great as most people think and that the greatest damage it did was psychological, by giving ammo to anti nuclear crowd and by blaming it for health problems that aren't related and then again used as ammo against nuclear.
 
well its good to see someone here with some brains (elfletcho \o/)
he is right as well

google_2030_electricitygeneration.png


From google's little picture its good to see they are at least sticking nuke station's (since you need a constant bulk power generation and nukes are very good at just sitting there and... generating). Google Also point at efficiency as a major player in reducing demands on non-renewable and in some respect they are right
incandecient bulbs => LED arrays (or the energy efficient bulbs - be it they have mercury in them) is a major improvement. Getting rid of old, inefficient equipment is also good
In industry most of the power goes to rotating machines and the vast number of them are induction machines, efficiency can be improved from changing alot of these to variable speed sync machine drives (running a induction machine on slip for speed control is sooo inefficient)

HOWEVER... their aim to remove coal,oil and gas are just a pipedream. They are needed to catch the peak loads! ONLY oil/gas/coal can be stoked fast enough to generate the needed power to fill in the gaps due to commercial brake tea/coffee runs (you will be surprised at the spikes in demand an advert can cause)

Wind is tooo unreliable for that, solar? only during the day...
ONLY real contenders from the natural front are: Geothermal and wave (which I notice google didn't include... although they may lump it with hydro but they are different) BUT even still they are unable to provide a massive jump in demand when it is needed

coal/oil/gas are going to have to be relied on for a VERY long time for that specific reason
 
Regarding solar, there is a company called Sterling Systems whose approach to solar energy doesn't involve panels. Instead, they use a Sterling Engine to convert solar energy to electricity. Apparently this system is more efficient than photovoltaics, so why not just use these instead of panels if you don't need mobile energy?
 
Current PV is just not going to cut it, trust what these guys are saying.
Now, what we can do as people doing our part is we can bite the bullet and use RE a little on our own account. When I get back from Iraq in 2010, Ive already got a design drafted for an RE system for my house that will keep all lighting, heating, fans, and emergency needs (small TV/radio and phone chargers) along with potentially my water (not heated tho) system ALL off the grid for only about 3-3.5 thousand $$, not that much for most of us. Yea, its a hefty chunk, but when we look at all the "pork" we spend on youd be amazed how fast we can blow 3 grand. Hell, look at most of our computers!!
RE is pretty do-able in my area , around 4.5-5 hours of sun and I get a constant wind over my property. Its never going to be enough to eliminate my tie to the grid tho (not reasonably, I mean I could drop 80 grand and be on my own but lets be real here)

Will this make a differance? Not on a small scale but over the picture of the country it may mean a good (but still small) amount. Lets say only 20 million people do this across the country, thats a lot of electricity saved, which could mean less strain on coal plants while we switch over to the nuke plants, which are going to be required. Plus, I never have to worry about being cut off from all civilization. I live in the pretty back woods country, and we lost power for 5 days a few weeks back. then a few more days that weekend. Granted we have a small generator for the fridge and the freezer but I had no lights, no running water, no air moving in the house, everything had to be charged in my truck. And its worse in the winter when you cant go out and buy water (but being military and common sense says Ive got about 3 weeks of water, MREs, duct tape, etc.)

The problem with all this RE and clean energy stuff is how do we actually use it> So the chevy volt gets 40miles on 0 gas, how do we get 300+ million Americans to switch from their vehicles to underpowered electric cars? Or the shipping industry? Or the private sector. I drive a truck because I need to. Can you make an electric powered truck that will pull my 2.5 ton Kubota TLB? Can you make an electric Kubota TLB that will run for a whole work day and lift more than a few milk jugs? Then can you make me buy them? We have to get drivers, farmers, truckers, EVERYONE to a new standard, and that will take a really long time. Theres no way around it, oil and the such will be a huge part of us for a while to come, not to mention the extra 20-30 maybe 40 years it will take to start switching the rest of the world over. Short of an armegedon situation, I bet most of us wont see an end to oil use in our life. maybe the US will throtle back heavily, but it will still be there, electricity cant put out the same type of power. And the rest of the world will just start down our path when we are almost done.

Not to go off topic, but some RE on the consumers side is not a bad choice from a tactical POV either. Face it, Avg. American Joe is not ready for another terrorist attack (and we will get attacked again, its only a matter of when). Lets say the next attack hits a power station or a Nuke station god forbid. Lets say no power in a 2-3 state area. How will you react? Where will you get water? fuel? food? shelter, protection, if its winter, heat? If you leave state and think that good enough, what happens to your house? Its free game. What if you dont have enough gas to make it to a place with power. No power = no pumps. We seen it happen after Katrina, and that was relativly a small area. Can you even defend the skin on your back from nature? People will panic, can you make it for a few weeks to a month on your own? Not trying to scare people here but RE in its most simple and cheap forms make for great investments for the avg consumer, even if its just to power your well or to give you a little light. But enough with that, Im going WAY off topic here.
 
choppedliver said:
I get so tired of people saying 'the sun isnt always shining, wahhhhh'

No, the sun is not always shining, but when it is, it reduces the load on other 24x7 sources

Ever hear of batteries? If every solar installation had batteries, these batteries could be charged during sunny hours, and contribute to the load when necessary. In cases of surplus, the batteries could contribute to the grid, giving you electric credits on your bill
Click to expand...
If you think batteries hooked up to the power grid are going to store power for powering the grid that the country demands, you're delusional. Power is consumed so heavily in the US, batteries on a grid wouldn't even have time to charge versus how much dissipation they'd see. It would be pointless to even have them. They wouldn't even be able to handle the heat they'd see because of the current being drawn through them. Not only that, but that wouldn't make sense to store the energy because the peak energy usage is during the day when the sun is out due to everyone across America running their A/C and businesses are open. Working at a power plant, I can see the demand in real time day to day, and believe me, it more than doubles during daytime hours.

Now if you're talking about someone having a solar array with batteries on their home, that could help ease things on their personal demand if they don't use much energy to begin with. Most of us would need a pretty large solar array covering our roof to offset a good amount of our usage, and even then, the cost versus ROI time just isn't good enough for people to justify purchasing, especially with the efficiency ratings vs cost.
 
no one can deny the existence of global warming. it is a fact. however its causes in not completely understood........
 
Michael Daly said:
The sun has come out every day for the last 4.5+ billion years. If it's cloudy, the solar PV doesn't stop working, it just collects less energy. Around my neighbourhood, you can get an average of 3.5 hrs/day of solar power. In spite of this, there are fully functional solar heat and electric based houses.

Wind blows every day somewhere. The total energy in the wind in one day is greater than all the energy in all the nukes in the world since the first nuke was built.

The problem is not that wind and/or solar are not "on" all the time. After all, why should supply be constant when demand is not constant?

There are a number of technologies that can store energy collected by solar/wind during peak supply to deliver the energy during peak demand. NaS batteries are used in Japan for large scale storage, for example.

If you stop whinging about the problems and start talking about the solutions, you'll see this can work quite well. However, the part most people don't want to hear is that part of the solution is to stop wasting energy. For some stupid reason, they seem to think wasting energy has something to do with freedom.
Click to expand...

The fundamental technology in batteries has not changed in centuries. They convert electricity to chemical energy and back again. There are inefficiencies you cannot get rid of. A new method of storing energy is required. This is the great challenge of our day.

It is hard to grasp the instantaneous nature of the delivery of power. Natural Gas is stored underground locally, or is in pipelines. Water is stored in tanks then piped into the home. Fuel oil is delivered by truck and stored locally. Every one of these has a built in demand buffer that power does not have. Are there methods for storing energy? Yes, but they are overall inefficient and greatly add to the delivered cost. Are you going to pay 50, 70, 100 cents per kw-hr? Not when joe coal can deliver that power for 10 cents per kwhr. It is basic economics. The economy of scale does not work on solar, it barely works on wind. It does work on large thermal steam turbine generation facilities.

Again, efficiency is key to helping us out, but changing your incandescent lights to compact fluorescent barely helps. I could post charts detailing the advantages of premium efficiency motors over standard and used motors, but it is late. If want to see a comparison on motors check out a little known program called motor master+. It is a poorly coded database on motor efficiencies the DOE put out years ago. Just google it. Think about this, motors account for about 60-65% of the electric load in the country, lighting is around 15-20% the rest electronic etc. Lets increase the energy efficiency of motors and that will help out a larger portion of the load than anything else.
 
Well I don't know about you all, but considering the way things went with the mortgage industry, being obvious what was going to happen up to 5 years ago to even the not so smart among us, I am not going to rely on the Government or private industry for a solution to the energy issue.

Nope, I'm investing in firearms.

Because when energy becomes scarce, people will be robbing it and other basic things.

My house will be well positioned, armed, and prepared to not only defend direct threats, but will also be positioned to flank such offenders with a rapid, changing, offense that causes much confusion and panic to the criminals.

Not going to rely on the government one bit.
 
mryerse is right, although the whole country wont get there, but next time we have a real crisis parts will be like that. weve seen it time and time again

although he does sound very drastic lol, but you get the idea

and about batteries.. Not to be the devils advocate here, but back in the day railroads used to have entire building full of nothing but DC water cell batteries and would run their machiene shops off them and even the signals and switches. But thats not practical, but it can be done for a building, but there is no way we could have an array big enough for even a small village
 
elfletcho said:
The fundamental technology in batteries has not changed in centuries. They convert electricity to chemical energy and back again. There are inefficiencies you cannot get rid of. A new method of storing energy is required. This is the great challenge of our day.
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That's true of everything - welcome to the laws of thermodynamics.

There isn't just one battery technology. Some of the esoteric, large scale battery systems are capable of up to 95% efficiency. The Japanese project is yielding something on the order of 87%. If you are reclaiming surplus power from wind/solar, that's good enough.

You're being overly negative with no real justification. Since the alternative is to do nothing, I'd rather start working with the technology we have today and get benefit from it. We can upgrade in the future - a process of continuous improvement. Doing nothing is just surrendering to intellectual and technological lazyness.
 
Coming up with new or improved methods of electricity generation is awesome, but what about the transmission of said energy? Ever see that video where a guy puts 100's of fluoro bulbs under some high-power transmission towers and they glow? Seems like there is an opportunity to save some energy right there.
 
riot8ap said:
Coming up with new or improved methods of electricity generation is awesome, but what about the transmission of said energy? Ever see that video where a guy puts 100's of fluoro bulbs under some high-power transmission towers and they glow? Seems like there is an opportunity to save some energy right there.
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You aint gonna stop that, that is corona (and more like static electricity and not really a loss unless you pull from it), and the only way to minimise lighting a tube is insulating the cable which is pointless when they are suspended at 50m in the air and insulating them would weigh the cables down (see next points)


The US is an ideal place for HVDC transmission between states this improves efficiency of bulk power transfer OVER distance AND density
You will still need to invert back to AC todo local grid. There isn't much in efficiency you can do in overhead. You could use Copper (over present aluminium) to drop the resistance BUT
1) the cost involved would be astronomical
2) Copper weighs alot more then Alu and thus the distance between pylons would decrease alot => again cost

The main saving from transmission would come from all the transformers that take transmission voltage downto intermediate voltage and then downto mains. SORT those out and you get improved efficiency

Rotating machines are key here (as a motor drive designer in the 100KVA range I get to see figures for the improvements and DAMB!) So from a home user
change yr fridge,washing machine,Air-con, lights...
Industry are going to be the main players at bringing usage down and efficiency up
 
Adidas4275 said:
no one can deny the existence of global warming. it is a fact. however its causes in not completely understood........
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If you can't completely understand it how can you accept it?

Notice all the green activists winning noble prizes and such for thier green and enviromental work are the biggest hippocrites of all time? Like Al Gore? Who happens to have a 30k+ sqft home, 100+' yacht, 100+' houseboat, private lear-jet, etc?

The problem is that we as Americans are trying to aim for this "green" concept, all while the rest of the world steals our jobs and doesn't give a rats ass about "green" and global warming (not all nations). Take China for instance, they have a hard time following our current laws when it comes to producing products, melamine anyone? lead paint anyone? etc... But yet we tax and kill our businesses so they can be "green".


As for the topic, I'm all for nuclear power, I think the sooner we can start getting people to turn around on the topic and accept it like the europeans have the sooner we can make a diffrence.
 
Renewable or not, the key to a solid energy source is diversification. We don't want to get off of fossil fuels just to be reliant on any another single power source.
 
The sun transfers more heat to Earth in one day than man creates in a year.
 
Hmmm; I didn't know we can "fix" global warming since there's absolutely 0 hard proof that humans cause it.

More nuclear please.
 
I think the sun sends us more heat/energy per day than we've used since the beginning of time.
 
Hmmm; I didn't know we can "fix" global warming since there's absolutely 0 hard proof that humans cause it.
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one of the best things in this thread, and this one

Notice all the green activists winning noble prizes and such for thier green and enviromental work are the biggest hippocrites of all time? Like Al Gore? Who happens to have a 30k+ sqft home, 100+' yacht, 100+' houseboat, private lear-jet, etc?

The problem is that we as Americans are trying to aim for this "green" concept, all while the rest of the world steals our jobs and doesn't give a rats ass about "green" and global warming (not all nations). Take China for instance, they have a hard time following our current laws when it comes to producing products, melamine anyone? lead paint anyone? etc... But yet we tax and kill our businesses so they can be "green".
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+1 for nukes, we need to do this. NEED
 
The biggest problem with Coal is the pollutants that get released and why it’s not used in most plants any more. Granted we have the technology to clean the exhaust but at what cost? Don’t get me wrong I agree with you and I think that we need to rethink the whole issue and come to more practical solutions.

But more often then not the decision is made at a level that we will never know or see. And almost always some high ranking corporate individual based solely on the bottom line
 
Deano71390 said:
The biggest problem with Coal is the pollutants that get released and why it’s not used in most plants any more. Granted we have the technology to clean the exhaust but at what cost? Don’t get me wrong I agree with you and I think that we need to rethink the whole issue and come to more practical solutions.

But more often then not the decision is made at a level that we will never know or see. And almost always some high ranking corporate individual based solely on the bottom line
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Coal burning is still one of the most dominant producers of power and can be produced clean. Clean coal energy is still a very cheap energy production method. The US sits on the biggest stockpile of coal in the world, IIRC it was estimated that even if we turned all our cars into coal burning (you can liquify or gasify coal) we would still have 500+ years of supply left.

Coal is the alternative I like to leave on the back-burner, as the holder of the worlds largest reserves, it should be something we should keep as our emergency stash. Nuclear would be the clearer alternative as it's generation is still cheaper and cleaner and it's renewable.
 
Deano71390 said:
The biggest problem with Coal is the pollutants that get released and why it’s not used in most plants any more. Granted we have the technology to clean the exhaust but at what cost? Don’t get me wrong I agree with you and I think that we need to rethink the whole issue and come to more practical solutions.

But more often then not the decision is made at a level that we will never know or see. And almost always some high ranking corporate individual based solely on the bottom line
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Welcome to the [H] noobie. The only major pollutant that we have issues scrubbing is mercury and trace radioactive elements. Over 99.99% of Particulate Matter (PM) is taken out. NOx and SOx scrubbing technologies are cost effective and work very well. Don't hear anything about acid rain anymore do you? CO2 is NOT a pollutant. A higher level of CO2 in the air will lead to higher levels of plant growth and subsequently lower levels of CO2 in the long run (centuries). Where do you think the carbon in hydrocarbons came from? All this carbon was on the surface in the form of CO2 hundreds of millions of years ago. I have stated this in another thread, but what you see coming out of a coal plant stack is water vapor. You don't SEE any pollutants.
 
hehe, I'm surprised someone mentioned coal plants outputting radioactivity. If people in the public knew just how much radioactivity goes out the stacks of a coal plant and into the environment, they'd probably shit bricks. Then you have people shitting bricks about actual nuclear plants, which release nil/nothing into the environment. I find the phenomenon pretty humorous. :p
 
Ockie said:
If you can't completely understand it how can you accept it?
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We don't completely understand gravity. Does that mean it doesn't exist?

We know precisely zero about any factual basis for most major religions, yet the overwhelming majority of people accept them.

Measuring global warming and understanding global warming are two different things.
 
Michael Daly said:
The Japanese have a 34MWh battery in such a capacity. Not all batteries are the little things you stick in your toys.
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Batteries are pointless for power distribution. Batteries are for storing energy for later use. The US is in *constant* demand for power, peak hours being during the daytime. Storing up energy and releasing it into the system later on is not even worth it because we need constant energy right now.. not a trickle of energy or momentary burst of energy later on in time. The rate at which the battery being charged versus discharged would not make sense. The only sense it makes is for a personal home installation where you can control when you need/want to use the power. But in that case, most people just use the solar/wind in real time to power/heat things, or they backfeed their meter to offset their energy cost.
 
Michael Daly said:
We don't completely understand gravity. Does that mean it doesn't exist?

We know precisely zero about any factual basis for most major religions, yet the overwhelming majority of people accept them.

Measuring global warming and understanding global warming are two different things.
Click to expand...

This has nothing to do with religion.... however as for your comment, yes, we understand gravity... global warming people don't fully understand as we only have limited data from a small scientific scope, yet we are fed this whole notion that our temperature increase (read:global warming) is purely human generated and is BAD.

Gravity exists and it's proven to exist, there is no third assumption based factor. We know what gravity does and why it does it, we also know the consequences of gravity and the benefits of it. If we jumped out of a building, we'd know the result.

If we pumped 5mw of heat into the atmosphere for an entire year, we don't know the result, we can only assume with some calculations. Thats what I find so ironic, people want concrete proof (usually the people such as you posting about religion and making comments about it) but are easily gullible when it comes to some assumption thats been drummed up by a bunch of hypocrites (who lives in homes that pollutes more than 7 times the average american home and flys private jets which burn thousands of gallons of fuel on a single trip) with no proof. The only proof that can be presented is that temperature increased in the past century (assuming that we had geo thermal global satellites in the early 19th century not to mention before) and somehow it must be us humans.

I've heard theorists say everything from termites are causing global warming (since methane holds 20 more heat than carbon dioxide does and termites have the highest flatulence than any other creature in the world) to people saying it's volcano's. Others are saying that it's animals (meat) thats resulting in global warming (Dr. Joseph W. Fox)

Michael Daly said:
The Japanese have a 34MWh battery in such a capacity. Not all batteries are the little things you stick in your toys.
Click to expand...

While you have a large battery array, it doesn't mean its efficient or the right solution. Yes you can store a lot of energy, yes, you can use it later. But you have to look at the entire value when you are trying to combat global warming and efficiencies.... think about the battery production and think about the entire process of creating these batteries, think of the plastics, think of the processes.... THEN stand back and think about how great your batteries are... they are not so true green as the makers want you to believe. Direct solar systems are more ideal because you cut out the entire battery process and it's a suppliment for power grids.
 
Batteries are a sol'n in some instances

There is a technology called "flow battery" which are fscking sweet!!!
you have two tanks that hold the battery electrolyte. Need more capacity you just add more tanks \o/

This is being used on some remote sections of the USA where they are off the grid and rely on diesel and wind-power
 
not saying flow batteries (or any batteries) would be suitable to take a national load (dams are good tho \o/)

There are some interesting tech for storing solar during the day for night use.
one is a superconductive coil/inductor
 
Ockie said:
Tyes, we understand gravity.
Gravity exists and it's proven to exist, there is no third assumption based factor. We know what gravity does and why it does it, we also know the consequences of gravity and the benefits of it. If we jumped out of a building, we'd know the result.
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Yet there is no satisfactory theoretical means of explaining gravitational force as there is with electromagnetic force. Hence, we do not understand it. We know what it does, but we don't know why.

My statement stands. And if you can't see the religion statement as an analogy - too bad.

While you have a large battery array, it doesn't mean its efficient or the right solution. Yes you can store a lot of energy, yes, you can use it later. But you have to look at the entire value when you are trying to combat global warming and efficiencies.... think about the battery production and think about the entire process of creating these batteries, think of the plastics, think of the processes....
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The battery in question is about 87% efficient. It is a steel container containing ceramic, sodium and sulfur. I'm not talking about a bunch of little AA batteries in a row. These are massive batteries that have tremendous capacity and are currently being used to supply real power in substantial amounts on a real grid. They last for years and can be recycled.
 
As I recall, one of the goals of the LHC is to try to better understand Gravity. So with that said, I don't think saying we fully understand gravity is accurate. Not to me anyway.

Google has a business reason for their energy plan. Who knows exactly what it is, but I'm willing to bet it has something to do with increasing their profit, not pushing their personal agenda.

Data Centers are expensive. It probably has something to do with that.
 
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