To actually do the volumes that make pumped hydro practical you need not just a hill but a space which can hold a truly huge volume of water.
The main reason is you can site it in a lot of places you can’t put pumped hydro.
It’s more that you can still use the land under the panels, greatly reducing their effective footprint. That’s a big deal, particularly for isolated islands, where 100% renewable will mean a fairly significant chunk of total land area being used for wind and solar.
Depending on tree species, most of the carbon can be above-ground. This is really common in the tropics
Pumped hydro is great but limited by site availability
Sodium-ion is one of several technologies which might end up being how we do storage; there are a bunch of iron-chemistry flow battery technologies which might be cheaper. It’s not at all clear which will be the best choice for stationary storage at this point.
These ones are designed to do utility-scale installation. Probably a bit heavy for your roof
The answer likely varies by model. Check.
Yes, but it’s a system that is designed to sync with the frequency of whatever other electricity is out there, and it shuts of if the main shuts off. Almost all rooftop systems without a battery in the US are set up the same way.
Still, it’s important to check that things you think are disconnected do not have current flowing through them. And this makes it more important.
It has — but a lot of those are related to the fact that fracking is being used to extract hydrocarbons. The situation with enhanced geothermal will likely have only a subset of the issues that fracking has caused in oil deposits.
Historically, the answer on this has involved charging very different amounts in different countries. This both enables some level of access by the poor and maximizes profits.
That Saudi. The plan there seems to be to sell off all the oil, and then have the royal family decamp to a more northern latitude with their harems while the rest of the population cooks to death.
They cut the size, but not the price. Then they increase the price six months later.
Bloomberg (the news outlet) has a bunch of rather competent reporters who regularly cover climate, and Michael Bloomberg (who owns a controlling interest in it) was one of the major funders of the Sierra Club’s campaign to phase out coal use in the US.
The NYT is also very clear that it’s not cloud seeding:
Although some have speculated that recent cloud seeding efforts by the U.A.E. — using chemicals to increase the chances of clouds producing rain — could have contributed to the extreme weather, scientists said this was very unlikely.
“Rainfall enhancement could not cause that kind of increase in rainfall,” said Steven Siems, an expert in cloud seeding at Monash University in Australia, adding that any effects from cloud seeding would have been “marginal” at most.
It’s not impossible; it just requires building a whole lot of expensive infrastructure which is used very infrequently. People usually don’t choose to do that.
The messaging needs to come from somebody they trust.
There was an international treaty to cut the amount of sulfur in the bunker oil that the big ships burn. This is because the particulates it produces when burned kill people. They also reflected a bunch of sunlight, preventing it from warming the water.
Yes, because phase transitions involve absolutely huge amounts of energy.