| Can gravity, pressure, and other elemental forces save us from becoming a battery-powered civilization? As long as you are burning fossil fuels to generate power, you don’t need to worry much about storing energy. But, to make the transition to solar, wind, and other renewables that is necessary to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change, spare energy must be captured and made easily accessible when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Batteries are one option—but their numerous drawbacks have turned people’s attention to alternatives. The goal, as Matthew Hutson writes in an eye-opening report from this week’s issue, sounds simple enough: “If you use clean energy to do the initial work and find a green way to store and release it, you’ve created an ecologically responsible battery alternative.” But finding a practical, inexpensive, and efficient way to do it is the trick. One company is pumping water underground to form reservoirs that it can release to generate power. Another is liquefying air by cooling it to more than three hundred degrees below zero, and then warming it up to spin turbines. Yet another is trying something with weights and pulleys. Much of it is basic high-school physics on a grand scale—or, as one startup executive puts it, even simpler. “Fred Flintstone would be comfortable with most of this stuff,” he said, describing the act of moving very big things from one place to another. “It could be the way.” —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor | | | |
| P.S. Robert Eggers’s new Viking epic, “The Northman,” opens in theatres today. Speaking recently to Sam Knight, for a Profile, Eggers shared some of the rocky reviews that an earlier version of the film received during test screenings: “Some audience member wrote, ‘You need to have a master’s degree in Viking history to understand, like, anything in this movie.’ ” Presumably, some changes were made. | | | |
Today’s newsletter was written by Ian Crouch. | | | |
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