Tesla's PowerWall Is Only A Small Part Of The Solution To Electricity Demand Smoothing

The future of power generation is pretty rosy. Solar panels and wind turbines take advantage of the infinite availability of the power source to generate power in huge amounts. When your power source is the sun you really don't have to worry about efficiencies too much.

What you do have to worry about though, is demand peaks and troughs and how they rarely tally with similar periods for generation.

On a cold winter night solar power and turbines aren't going to keep those heating systems, electric blankets and entertainment systems spinning.

Which means it becomes necessary to store the power generated during the day or even during the summer in order to release it back into the system when demand spikes.

Chemical batteries like Tesla's PowerWall offer a reasonable solution on a very local scale - individual houses sporting micro-generation capabilities, but on metropolitan or regional scale the cost and environmental damage of building and shipping all of those chemical batteries is immense.

Fortunately there are better ways: mechanical batteries.

In its simplest form a mechanical battery is anything which stores energy for future use without using chemicals. The most common form your might recognise is the flywheel. Once spinning these are capable of storing huge amounts of energy. Modern flywheels with magnetic bearings and carbon fibre construction can spin at phenomenal speeds and reach impressive efficiencies - upwards of 80%.

Maintaining that efficiency whilst keeping these devices spinning for longer periods is the challenge. To deliver the sort of four to six month energy storage times that a metropolitan power solution demands will require further improvements before large scale deployments are financial viable.

Another mechanical battery solution is hydro-electric. Our normal expectation of hydro-electric power stations is the damming and routing of natural waterflows. However with unlimited and 'free' power generation via solar and turbines creation of hydro solutions with artificial potential drops becomes viable.

To whit, create an artificial water storage facility at height (i.e. on a hill without a large natural flow of water) and use the power available from solar during the summer to pump millions of litres of water up there. Then during high demand winter months release the stored water into a traditional hydro-electric plant.

So whilst Tesla, its competitors and their battery partners seek to develop better, more efficient chemical batteries for EVs; they should also consider how they can work with power generation companies to change the way electricity is generated and stored on much bigger scales.

Because being able to match demand and supply is the next biggest challenge for both EVs and all other power consumers, consumer, retail or commercial.