Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine a power technology emerging that makes the cost of electricity virtually zero and the supply virtually endless.

Since the emergence of life, the task of survival is the quest for energy in one form or another. Most of the critical advancements by humanity have been driven by the need to acquire, distribute and store energy. When you're sitting at your computer being productive for a paycheck, you are serving the same goal as prehistoric hunter-gatherers, you're just doing it via a much more complex system of acquisition and distribution.

The more efficiently we acquire energy, the less effort it takes to satisfy our individual energy needs and the more time we have for other pursuits such as culture and exploration.

What happens when the effort necessary to acquire a life's worth of energy approaches zero?

Oh yeah, *promote the interesting video.

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, September 21st, 2017 3:57am PDT - promote requested by TheFreak.

Ok....they start with a few mistaken premises.
Most importantly, the premise that energy is best stored in a chemical battery. It sounds good, but it's simply wrong. The best way to store large amounts of energy is in a hydro/gravity storage system. This is a two basin system, with two basins at different heights with a pump/generator linking them. When you have excess power, you pump water uphill. When you need more power, you let it flow back down. It's ecologically friendly, cheap, and effectively never wears out like batteries all do, it can work on any scale, and unlike most hydro doesn't impact a living river system. It's proven technology that's head and shoulders above battery banks.

*animation

Adding video to channels (Animation) - requested by ant.

Nice try. Everyone knows coal is the energy of the future.

/s

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Awesome.

Go to bed Donald.

Hadn't heard of that, but I get the concept. Cool idea.

Off the top of my head, I'm concerned about pump and generator efficiency. You're going to use some amount more energy to pump a volume of water up to the high basin than you will get back by gravity feeding it through generators. To be fair, efficiency is a problem with using and recharging chemical batteries as well, but the limited amount that I remember from college engineering courses tells me that efficiency in the electrical / solid state world tends to be more easily obtained than in the mechanical world.

And as another "to be fair", efficiency is a bigger concern for things like fossil fuels, where burning one unit of fuel produces a set amount of energy and you have to improve efficiency to get the most value out of that energy. With things like solar and wind being "free" energy when active but requiring storage for when the source is inactive (night / calm winds), efficiency still certainly matters, but not as much as with a scarce / non-renewable source of energy.

Anyway, I'd like to see concrete numbers comparing the utility and efficiency (in various metrics) of your hydro storage vs battery storage.

There was a show, islands of the future, on Netflix now, that had a large scale demonstration and explanation of it, used to store wind energy and power an island.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a comparison with batteries with concrete numbers.
I think you hit the nail on the head with what you said about efficiency, but for large scale storage, it has to be better when you factor in the energy costs of making, replacing, and disposing batteries, even including the cost of replacing the turbines.
...and all that ignores the ecological issues, where ponds beat battery factories hands down.

No Netflix for me, and no luck on a quick search of torrents, but I'll keep my eye out for that show/series.

Many metrics to compare. Ecologically, that system sounds great for static locations with enough of an elevation gradient and reservoir areas to make it work. On the other hand it seems like the ecological damage done by constructing batteries, factories, and disposing of them is likely quite small compared to many other alternatives, particularly fossil fuels (which also have long-term scarcity concerns on top of plenty of other issues).

A major advantage of battery tech over hydro storage would be mobility. If the thing consuming energy doesn't sit in one place, hydro storage won't work. Another somewhat less significant advantage is the ability to install anywhere -- a battery farm recharged by mains and/or a solar/wind farm could be installed in places where hydro storage couldn't. And for one more item in favor of batteries, I'd wager that the land area footprint required for batteries is much smaller per kWH stored, although that might be wrong for extremely large reservoirs (ie. a hydroelectric dam, pretty much). But by the time you're getting to that large scale, the location requirements and ecological disruption are also much more extreme.

Anyway, I don't mean to pooh-pooh the idea of hydro storage -- it really does seem like a very good and ingenious idea where it would be applicable. But there's certainly room for improved battery tech, too. I don't think that we're going to get fully or even significantly weaned off of fossil fuels quite as fast as the video would have us hope for, either. Fossil fuels were the primary tool in our toolbox for a LONG time. And as the saying goes, since all we've had is that "hammer", we've started to think of everything as a nail.