Makes sense, that's more than can be said for all the global warming hysteria. Remember when Al Gore said NYC would be under water by 2012?

I think in combination with regular thermal power stations it might be a very interesting idea you have the Carbon Capture technology added with this system and added Solar panels on the area and the good thing is if you use decommissioned powerplants blocks you have the necessary infrastructure like turbines generators and the entire power generation infrastructure

Can you please say " Am I not Turtley enough for the Turtle Club. "

LOL....LOL....So they charge the system with MANUFACTURED Co2....well that will fix everything !!!...(sarcasm)....why are you linking climate change with this?

Great video but put the sponsor at the end to the video wont get interrupted and I would still pay attention

My future electric truck won't need batteries, as the energy will come from CO2 evaporation, with the storage bladder towed behind in a huge trailer.

lol no

You can’t forget your rooftop wind turbines to charge your co2 bladder

What do you mean if profitable????? If it's not no one would ever build It ffs

@@willvanderhorst9072 most young people do not have the ability to think. Some do but most do not.

It's an attractive idea, but EVERYTHING degrades. The membranes, turbines, concrete, etc. in these are likely amortized over about 25 years as with similar construction. Making it last longer faces diminishing returns in the face of present value discounting and further would likely be superseded by much more efficient new technology at that time.

@@dtacto We need solutions NOW, not in 25 years.

@@Vile_Entity_3545 Define young? I constantly hear negative things about Gen Z and young people, yet I know too many people that are 50+ years old that barely know how to Google something or how to research a topic. Why do people need to perpetuate the us vs them, the older vs the younger? I understand what the person is basically saying above, even if it wasn't written accurately. They are basically just saying that long term storage systems are easier to become profitable over short(er) term storage systems. Stop thinking you're better than someone because of your age. We all have short comings and we all have strong suites. Stop putting each other down.

And, lots and lots of nuclear.

@@float32 Nuclear is the best option to get to net zero. There are many new designs out there that are far safer than traditional reactors.

@@fr2ncm9 Problem with it is, that it takes a lot of time to get it up. And you need cooling, which is getting more and more an issue with rising temperatures and low level rivers. New tech is there, but until they are up and running we could invest in renewable and storage in the meantime and it would be far better.

I wonder if there could ever be a situation that too many solar panels are reflecting or absorbing sunlight to the point we damage the environments we hope to preserve through changed local weather or localized average temperatures. Desertification around solar farms? I wonder how much landmass that would require to be covered for such a thing to arise?

@@fr2ncm9 I'm pretty sure this is going to be a big thing in the coming years.

what do you need large scale solar and wind generation for if you can use the primary emissions from burning fossil fuels into a further energy source?

Yea, I wonder how it compares to flywheels

because the Co2 is a gimmick in this case and its not being scrubbed from atmosphere anyway, it performs WAY worse than refrigerant does especially at higher ambient temps such as where the company proposes to build such plants. Still I get the idea, make 'batteries' that do not use Lithium ion because it totally undermines the argument of the saving the local and foreign environments and still allows the renewable dream to persist. Would like to see the efficacy of this plant.

@@6Sparx9 It also seems like the "Stores heat to reuse on expanding the gas" is a bit of hand waving. holding high heat in a large enough container for extended periods seems like it wouldn't be easy as a square on a flow chart. and if it was that easy why not just store heat from the sun and use heat pump to intensify it and boil some water when you need it.

@@6Sparx9 You misunderstand how it works. This energy storage doesn't need a constant supply of co2, it uses the same volume of co2 over and over again. Fossil fuel use releases way to much co2, we produce enough co2 in a day to fill up millions of these batteries which don't need to be refilled barring leaks/malfunctions Excess electricity from the grid compress the mass of co2 which is later released to produce electricity, this is repeated and the cow is never used up, if the effeciency is right this is a really good technology because all the parts are already used in industry at scale

They won’t, because nothing this guy reports on ever actually gets built. This channel produces more hot air than all CO2 and methane in the atmosphere combined.

Seems cool, wish he would have delved in to why C02 was chosen more.. is it really the most efficient gas possible for this application? I assume it is, but I can't help but be cynical that it may have been chosen purely as a hook for investment and brand. Is Nitrogen really worse? Why?

@@sammadison1172 I suppose, you would need extremely high pressure to get liquid nitrogen at room temperature. Wouldn't work with this concept.

@@sammadison1172 you don’t make sense at all. If anything it’s an in your face deterrent to use CO2 as most people would think that’s dangerous! Do think about how available it is it’s put in the soda pop you dimwits drink all the time, used in pubs to keep keg bear fresh. Availability dude, cheap!

@@sammadison1172 If I had to guess I'd say it's low toxicity and its very cheap

look up what a 1000PSI exploding in a catastrophic failure of the containment medium will do.

@@6Sparx9 Uh...maybe youre unfamiliar with scuba, but we carry 3000+psi tanks on our backs. All the time. To depths, not just on the surface. Besides, theyre compressing it into liquid. It doesnt require much pressure to keep it in liquid form. Tanker trucks carry liquid gas all the time on the same road you use.

@@maniagokm3186 In all fairness, he's not entirely talking out his ass. Those tanks become missiles when ruptured, and people have been killed by simple 100-150lbs compressor tanks rupturing. Even some vehicle tires can be deadly when punctured. And you just know some jackass in the States will end up shooting one of these things.

@@maniagokm3186 CO2 Does indeed need really high pressure to be kept as a liquid at room temperature (~50 times the atmospheric pressure). Tanker trucks do indeed transport liquid gas but gas as in gasoline or liquefied petroleum gas, not CO2. At the same time I agree that while storing such high pressures might seem difficult, with proper safety precautions it won't cause many problems

This was going to be my question. In the event of a dome rupture or some catastrophe failure of the pressure containers, what would the CO2 do. If it goes straight up in the atmosphere, then probably no big deal. But if it spreads out along ground level, there could be a significant risk of it pushing away breathable air for some distance around the facility. Not poo-pooing this technology, just want to be certain of any risks involved.

there is quite a lot of unused space in any wind farm for instance, and with how unreliable they are, you could use the extra capacity lmao.

I had the same thoughts, especially regarding maintenance, but they could simply build an arc structure on top of the "dome" leaving enough space between the solar panel structure and the dome itself. P.S. Ironically enough, here in Italy it might actually be more difficult to use this in large scale because we don't have that much uninhabited flat-surface spaces, but there are places both in Europe (Germany, France and Poland or any other European country other than Italy and Switzerland) and outside europe, especially in Asia, in the Middle East and North&South America where space isn't really that much of a problem if the intention is to use them in large scale.

@@magnumopus1628 The thing is, this looks like it could be scaled down to household size and be just as useful. Multiply that by each house hold that has a "balloon battery" and link them to the grid and you've got lots of capacity....one house at a time.

@@maniagokm3186 good idea

@@maniagokm3186 that'd require too much maintenance. Probably better to put a central 'battery' on every block or so.

What would be the best use case for this technology? Does it just need a window daily to recharge?

There's another company, ESS in the US that developed the iron redux flow battery. Either is effective, I don't know which would be cheaper or take up more space, and neither uses elements that are under high demand for other use cases, other than iron, but that's the most common element so no big deal. Actually after watching the process and efficiency the ESS system is more effective and I'm sure it takes up less space.

its a lie, everything on this channel is bs

@@alw6589 - “best use case” If it were me, I would use all renewable to compress CO2, send extra renewable to the grid, and increase CO2 power generation when renewable drops. Imagine it as a big capacitor used on a pulsed DC power supply, which fills in the gaps, but on a massive scale.

This system would work well with geothermal generation as it's 24/7. The off peak power could be stored and geothermal plants have a lot of waste heat that could be used in the liquid to gas phase.

Though the structure is round so that's quite akward to place solar panels on I imagine.

@@kedrednael How so?

​@@Seraphus87 Just practically speaking it seems hard to me, to place solar panels on a large round structure. You'd need to use a crane or something? Or build a permanent stairs and walkway specifically for the panels? Regular solar power facilities are easy to build: just place panels on the ground, all in the same way. Or on roofs, where there is room to walk on too. Even then, the work of placing the panels is like 15% of the cost according to google.

@@kedrednael It seems I misunderstood part of the video, the bladder is already inside a solid shell, probably for protection. Simply adding a framework on the outside of the shell, including walkways and hardpoints for mounting the panels, would work. Yes it would cost more than leaving the solid shell as shown here, but if space is an issue, this would provide more utility per square meter of the ground the bladder is built on.

@@kedrednael not really there are curved panels and panels that can be put on a sheet blanket like material. So there are implications to reclaim some energy of that space.

yet even this, for a semi reliable surplus of energy, would be 150$/MW/h due to you needing 3x the storage of actual average capacity so you can deal with slumps and sudden surges in demand. and even then, that just removes a majority of the issue, you would still need instantaneous energy generation, probably in the form of gas, for eternity, unless you remove the stigma of blackouts and energy rationing from a society...

@@aone9050 This would work with a battery solution to ease those surges. Do you think firering those peaker plants take seconds.

Whether renewable have support they are charging ahead anyway... renewable and carbon neutral energy sources make up good chucks of the western grid

@@danielvilliers612 Lithium batteries are to dirty and loose efficiency over time. You need a cheaper battery that easier to produce.

@@aone9050 “remove the stigma” like you’d ever get people on board with energy rationing.

This doesn't do that in the least the CO2 storage even when fully built out is nothing compared to what we put up in the air. This is just a battery although it looks like a much cheaper one for grid storage which is good.

i thought that too and it would be really intersesting to plug in the numbers and see how it would play out. Like How much CO2 is Stored in One Cycle/Storage Plant and how much is that compared to global CO2 Output. It wont be much, but i'd be interested in the numbers

@@miroconzelmann5027 ….he said “ 100 to 200 tons “ at the beginning of the video. Burning one gallon of gasoline, makes 20 pounds of CO2 (climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html) ……. so 20,000 gallons of gas to make 200 tons CO2…… sadly, in 2021, the USA burnt 369 million gallons per day…….still good technology though!

@@josieriley9334 ok so thats less than nothing 😅.... aaanyway

You've hit on something others have missed. These things don't have to all be above ground and made in this shape. Theres no reason they couldn't be made as tall as skyscrapers, with a tiny footprint, perhaps even topped with wind turbines, with solar panels all up their sides.

I think turbines, heat exchangers, heat storage, and lots of precision balanced moving parts don't scale super small easily. I think traditional batteries will be a better fit for small outfits like homes and farms. Of course a farmer could opt to plop a grid scale dome or two on his land, but then we're not really talking about scaling it down.

@@mpoisot You're neglecting the bottleneck in raw lithium production. If ranchers (who are already leasing their land for wind production) are going to get in on energy storage, the demand for batteries will become prohibitive. The battery industry is already in a lithium crunch; making storage with off the shelf components where the only specialty piece you'll need is the custom bladder to fit your old silo is a massive, massive win when we need rapid adoption of storage to halt climate change. Bear in mind, these silos might be smaller than the demonstration dome, but not by an order of magnitude. Maybe 1/2 or 1/3 the size. You only need a few of them and a rancher whose land has desertified and you have a plant almost ready to go. Brilliant idea Ross Reedstrom!

@@mpoisot This is not heat storage; this is energy stored as PV (pressure-volume) which can be theoretically converted into electricity with 100% efficiency.

@@NotOneToFly It's true there are lithium supply crunches today, but if we just go off the price per MWH quoted in the video then it assumes batteries as a family won't always be in a dire supply crunch. Otherwise we should revise the price per MWH of batteries to be much higher and essentially rule them out of the toolbox of storage options. Going back to the original comment, I can't imagine this stuff scaling down super small. Think of the careful maintenance that happens at power plants and refineries. Those turbines are incredibly expensive and any rotational imbalance or other mechanical issues can mean huge expenses, down time, and expert help needed to bring things back online. I think there's a reason we don't all have micro turbine co-generation units at home supplying both electrical and heat energy to businesses and residences. Those complicated machines and heat driven processes doesn't scale small efficiently. On that topic, I think the heat exchange and heat storage component of pressurized gas storage needs a minimum size to be cost effective. If that processes isn't done right it takes a big dent out of the round trip efficiency and probably limits the power output (the max speed you can convert stored gas into electricity). The bigger the heat system gets, the more efficient it can be, especially for longer term storage like days instead of hours. Matt kind of glossed over how the heat storage works in this system, and I bet that's because they're still actively figuring out how to improve that system and whatever they come up with will be their "secret sauce".

Actually a leak would really blow !

Nuclear energy has one killer feature not a lot of people mention, 1% of Uranium is useful for energy production, 99% needs to be dumped somewhere and there is not a single (yet) landfill we can store some dangerous stuff for 10k years (or more). It would be a good transition technology 50 years ago but is not a good one today. cost of dealing with the mess of spent fuel or indeed 99% of uranium ore that cannot be used is just too expensive. (Thorium, slow wave reactors and etc probably would make sense 30 years ago with solid founding, but not today with no founding and being 20 years away).

@@drachenfels6782 modern reactors are far more efficient and nuclear waste is tens of thousands of times less volume than coal power. We should have been building more for 50 years we'd be in much better shape

@@Scoots1994 I agree *if* we were building that many nuclear power plants we'd be in a different world. But nuclear has been a disappointment for growth. The first production-ready nuclear power plant was started in 1951 but yet, 72 years later, nuclear only provides 10% of the world's power. Nuclear power was like the promising college grad with all the honors, degrees, extra-curriculars, and praise from all his professors. But, ultimately, he never left his parent's basement nor had a real job and is well past middle age. There's a lot of reasons why this is the way it is.

@@beyondfossil nuclear growth stalled because of Chernobyl disaster.

​@@amitgupta25121993 Sure, the Chernobyl was a huge disaster. We also have more recent major incidents like Fukushima Dai-ichi, Japan (2011) which costed between $1.2B to $2.1B. Then before Chernobyl was Three Mile Island, USA (1979) which costed $2.4B to clean up. But consider every other year, there are minor incidents at nuclear power plants all over the world. Some leaked radioactive material into the local waterways too. They resulted in millions of dollar spent for repairs and clean up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country Another factor is the nuclear is an expensive form of energy. Lazard lists the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of nuclear between $131 to $205 per MWh. Similar LCEO for solar farms is between $30 to $41 per MWh and wind farm is $26 to $50 per MWh. Nuclear construction also has a consistently bad track record of being billions over-budget and years over-schedule. Its laughably bad and has become an inside joke in the energy industry.

Talk is good but where are the reactors. We need solutions now, not promises that seem to perpetually fade into the future.

They were talking about thorium reactors at my university 10 years ago and there still aren't viable solutions

A marriage between the two technologies. Storage can prevent the requirement for over building a reactor to support the peak demand. If the reactor is stable at over production of say 10% for 70% of its production time and only falls short for 30%....the energy could be stored for later use and supplement times of peak demand. Think of it like peak shaving your home with the use of solar amd batteries, but on a much larger scale. We do the same thing with air compressors in manufacturing. Don't install a giant electric gobling air compressor for leak loads on the system. Install two smaller units, the second unit will supplement the system for peak demand but when you are steady state...you have a much smaller, more efficient unit running.

@@jamesashurst I have to agree, we need solutions now or just around the corner and not promises of what might work in a decade or two. Many companies talk a good deal but it takes forever for them to deliver and in a lot of cases, they don't deliver. It's why the tech that interest me the most is near future tech over the next 5 years and not the promise of tech over decades.

What's the timeline for building such a plant? What's that timeline if you include all of the funding, bureaucratic red tape, public awareness campaigns to turnover opinions on nuclear, and sheer construction lead times? Solar, wind, and storage are ready to go NOW. Although, I do have to give it to nuclear that the supply chains and waste streams are more defined for that tech compared to solar, wind, and storage. Those issues will burden the renewables sector in the next decade, if they haven't already. I don't think Thorium is that silver bullet you're looking for, but I definitely think nuclear is part of the silver buckshot of sustainability. All depends on how fast we can get stuff out so that we can transition from fossils to renewables

I agree. We have the knowledge and technology already available to hit our immediate goals. We just have to do it.

@@UndecidedMF nuclear is the main solution to greenhouse neutral on-demand power that provides the grid stability solution that renewables' intermittency requires... The main issue in my mind is stigma around nuclear power and it's safety. People know a whole lot more about nuclear disasters than nuclear power, and it informs public discourse in an unfortunately negative way :(

I would challenge that this "solid backbone" is necessary. Renewables rather need flexibility. Nuclear is especially bad in this regard, as it's a hassle to power down. Geothermal is just not viable in many places. In an environmentally friendly way at least, not causing earthquakes or similar problems. Smart grid and sustainable storage should be the main focus right now, not building new nuclear or risky geothermal projects.

@@Triforian Just build nuclear power plants and run them consistently, not intermittently. People are afraid of nuclear in the same way they are afraid if snakes and spiders, irrationally.

@@Triforian You may be overestimating the amount that I mean when I say “backbone”. I’m still editing the video where I fully describe this, but the high level is this: I’m looking for about 10-15% nuclear energy and 2-5% geothermal energy globally. We really don’t need that much in order to keep critical systems running and those seem to be the numbers that experts have coalesced around.

It's look more like a standard air-sourced-heat-pump. Compressor, vaporizer. You can get those too with CO2 as the 'coldgas', these days.

We're going to run out of room for people to be able to do cool things if we build things too big bro.

My thought exactly, erect one of those old water towers that farms have, get some used pressurized canisters to contain it while liquid, and if everything else is commercially available we have a off grid dream possible. Feels like a totally viable battery storage for anyone that might be a bit handy.

My guess is it's too big (as in takes up too much land) for small scale

There will be no micro version. Storing CO2 in liquid and gas form, storing heat, generating power - all of these work *much* better at larger scale.

If it scales linearly, then eyeballing the bladder, the needed space is ~7cubic feet per kilowatt. If an average house is using 10Kw/day then you need around 70 cuft, or a 5'x5'x5' block of space. Double or triple that footprint for the other component and you have a small out-building less that the size of a guest house. Thats very doable in a lot of locations.

@@EddieGonzalez you still need the pump to generate 70 bars of pressure and the power to do so, etc. Doing this at small scale would bring that entire system out of balance. You'd need the same power for a lot less storage. It won't get small until the pumps and everything get efficient enough to be smaller. But even then, big-scale will yield way more. As I've commented on the other 4930 comments saying this; It'd definitely be better to do this for an entire block or neighbourhood instead of per household.

Take away co2 from the plants….the horror.

Would be interesting to hear what passive safety features they have in place to deal with catastrophic leaks. Any compressed gas stored at an industrial scale always makes me think about the Bhopal disaster back in the '80s. CO2 isn't THAT dangerous, but a sufficiently large quantity could be a risk. Perhaps having it far enough away from populated areas would be enough mitigation (other than for on-site workers). It would warm up and dissipate into the air fairly quickly.

Genuine question but would putting walls up around the tank storage force the co2 up and away from people? Or maybe enclosing it in a larger box that isnt air tight but slows the expansion of the co2 so less is released into the area at once? Yes anyone in there wouls be dead but it might stop a ton of people dieing

@@graham1034 CO2-detectors, an alarm system and respiratory masks with a small air tank (for several minutes of breathing) would reduce the risk for on-site-workers almost completely.

Co2 is unique with its point being so easily accessible, also liquid is accessible at room temperature. Other gasses that behave like this like methane have far worse compression ratios and global warming potentials.

@@varno Not really unique at all. Look at a list of all the hvac refrigerants that exist All of these compounds were specifically designed to have their gas/liquid transitions happen at reasonable pressures/temperatures and to do so with substantial heats of condensation/evaporation. My guess is that they use CO2 because it is cheap.

And also its a great marketing ploy to say you store co2.

@@apostolakisl there is actually a big move to use co2 as a refrigerant, as almost all other refrigerants have massive global warming potential. Further other refrigerants tend to be very expensive comparatively, which is a big negative for a storage system.

And safety, abundance, availability, ease of use.

Now this is an intriguing idea. Reminds me of how Dave with Just Have a Think on YT just this year did a video on distributed underwater hydrostorage bladders encased in concrete spheres that operate on the pressure differentials presented at the seafloor. With these membrane bladders for CO2 storage, you could raise the solar panels in the air like 2-4 meters or so and scatter the bladders sparsely to allow working clearance for maintenance and inspection. The only problem here is that these bladders might impede any convection cooling that might be gained from raising the panels, and so the entire solar fleet may run at a lower efficiency as a result. To an environmentalist, reduced efficiency but with greater storage capacity via distributed domes still sounds like a good deal. The problem arises when you consider economists and investors that want to see their ideal rates of return. There's different patterns you could do with this idea, though. You could stagger rows of bladders / solar arrays so that there would be corridors underneath the panels for improved convection cooling. PV plants could reconfigure like this, as well as CSP plants that use parabolic troughs and are already spaced out (although the spaces are there to allow for maintenance and removal of dust/sand that build up on the trough, but I digress). You'd have to calculate what the space savings for distributing the bladders + all of the additional piping, cabling, and equipment needed to operate the bladders (and the inherent losses therein) compared to lumping it all together. I have an idea the calc would have to depend on how much surface area is available, and that distributing the bladders may work better for larger and larger utility-scale farms. Awesome idea though!

More expensive tho

They need less exotic materials though, not none. They still use electric engines and certain alloys in their system.

Here in the US, people are still fighting the land uses that renewables would take. :-(

I think it is more his team that understands energy. That or they know how to read and repeat a press release.

Yes. I suspect it'll be driven in part by geography. Solutions that are more space efficient favouring countries with greater land costs.

Ammonia would facilitate much longer storage period. Weeks and months not just a day or two. To me, that type of solution would truly make wind/solar viable

Removing the fluorocarbons would be even better than co2 at reducing greenhouse gasses. They are responsible for like x4-x6 the amount of warming than co2, at just a fraction of the volume.

I was thinking about ammonia, too. It’s a common refrigerant, so there is a lot of industrial-scale equipment for exactly this purpose already. It may not have the buzzword compliance of CO2, and be more of a problem in case of a leak or accident, but it may be more thermally efficient. I’m sure someone else is working on exactly that, though… this really does seem like an obvious approach.

The problem with anhydrous ammonia is material interactions. It degrades many alloys. CO2 is relatively inert and cheap. HFC are designed for very low pressure phase change for refrigeration. In this case the pressurization is what you want to run turbines.

@@davestagner you’re not looking for refrigeration in this case. You’re looking for pressure differential of phase change to drive turbines.

It wouldn't be viable for home use.

That's true it will make it a carbon cycle that would sustain itself. Almost like how Hydrogen is a good idea because of its abundance.

@@madat5843 you've essentially hit the problem on the head. Anything self sustained means perpetual motion. Violates laws of thermodynamics

That wouldn't sort anything, since the CO2 inside the bladder is basically the same for 30 years... So it wouldn't even pinch the CO2 level in the atmosphere.

@@ricardomarcelino8388 somebody with a brain 👍

😂

I wonder if this aspect was already calculated into energy storage efficiency or not? If not then this system combined with heating and cooling plants can reach even higher efficiency levels.

The sun's heat would in theory increase the pressure too right?

A Sterling generator would be ideal.

NOPE NOPE NOPE! You seem to have ignored a major part of the system. When they compress the CO2, it gets hot, so they store that heat in a local Thermal Energy Storage System. They do not provide that heat for other system. They store it for their own future use. When energy is needed, they use that stored heat in order to convert the liquid CO2 into a gas that they can extract energy from. If they were harvesting heat and cooling, they would lose the energy they're storing.

I think there are several problems you have to take in consideration: 1 - A very inefficient process. 2 - If you burn fuel you produce NOx (Catalytic converters only converts NO to NO2). 3 - Produce of ultra fine particles. It is just soot, even if it is invisible to the naked eye. And no, there is no safe limit. The only pro, unregarded the source, is ease of use.

@@janjager2906 There are more pros. Existing infrastructure, highest energy density after hydrogen. And the ease of use advantage is a pretty big pro, because ease of storage and transportation also has an environmental impact.

Gasoline does not store very well for long periods. A year maybe without stabilizers. The co2 gets re-released when used.

Exactly my idea! Why not?

batteries are awful. Phase change storage is the most green and perpetual form of storage without degredation. Energy Dome is amazingly legit. Supply chain, common products, traditional heat pump / refrigeration design. No degredation. If i was an investor id be in this.

That's interesting! Do you have any sources I could look this up please?

Do you have sources for that? I'd like to check them out.

Yes and no, you have sodium ion batteries coming online. They have non of the disadvantages stated in the video and only have lower power desity, which is not important for static storage.

They should ditch the solar farm and use energy from the grid at night when nobody else is using it.

@@mth469 Energy storage can be used in lots of ways, including storing excess, or possibly cheaper power, overnight, and then selling it back to the grid when it's more expensive, or most needed because other power sources have failed. It's just a question of who owns the cheap electricity, and how you, as the owner of the energy storage unit, want to make your money. If you own your own solar panels, then the cheapest power will be at noon. Similarly, if you own a wind farm then the cheapest power will probably be overnight. Otherwise you need to buy the electricity from someone else and you can't control the price as much.

I would put this on shore probably, but the windmills offshore. Salt water is bad enough as it is.