Why is it so hard to store electricity?
In: Technology
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.
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