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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m not an egoist anarchist, but the other answer to your question is wrong and I don’t want it to be standing there without correction. Egoism in an anarchist context goes back to “The Ego and His own” by Max Stirner, a German philosopher. He was not an anarchist, but has been and is still very influential on the movement.

    Here’s his works on the anarchist library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/max-stirner

    I haven’t read it myself yet, but read some short summaries. Afaik he wants everyone to acknowledge that we’re basically working in our own self-interest all of the time BUT that this requires cooperation and that helping others without immediate material benefit can be part of our self-interest, e.g. because it makes us feel good or because it builds relationships that might be beneficial later.


  • There’s so much years old anti storage propaganda in your text, it’s painful.

    Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet

    What makes a tech mature to you? We have all the components of a hydrogen storage path up and running everywhere around the world. They’re not profitable, at least not without government incentives, but solarpunk is anti-capitalist, so profitability shouldn’t be among our primary concerns.

    something like 35% round-trip efficiency

    That’s a worst case figure for purely electrical round trip efficiency. We could use waste heat of the fuel cell process (to a lesser extent also the electrolysis process) in order to bump that number up considerably.

    not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size

    That has not been an issue for quite some time thanks to advances in materials science. Also, we could use methanation, of course sacrificing some more efficiency, but then we could even use old natural gas infrastructure without an issue.

    Shouldn’t even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.

    Lithium-ion batteries are environmentally bad for sure, but talking about thermal runaway? Really? You need very high temperatures for that to happen. Most stationary storage applications will never see such high powers that they come even close to thermal runaway by themselves. If in a high power application, you’ll have better battery management systems supervising the temperature and reducing the allowed power. It’s really a non-issue if you have engineers who know what they’re doing working on it.

    Coming bad to environmentally bad: see sodium-ion batteries.



  • Really gives me extra hope that this isn’t another vaporware battery technology.

    I’ll take it with a grain of salt:

    • From the summary I didn’t see if the energy density is a cell level value or a system level value. We have to compare system level energy densities.
    • Also energy density isn’t the only thing lithium ion batteries are good at. Firstly, if the cell at its core is a reversible fuel cell with nafion membrane, the dynamics of the cell will be comparable to PEM fuel cells. Lithium-ion batteries can deliver full power instantly without an issue. With PEM fuel cells you have to be more careful: it’s possible to flood the membrane with water or dry it up if you change power too quickly, which is why their response time (time from set point change to actual delivery of full power) is usually limited to about one minute. Secondly, how good or bad is the calendric and cyclic aging and recyclability of the new battery? Lithium-ion has come a long way concerning lifetime - recyclability not yet, sadly.
    • With Sodium-ion batteries there’s another, more mature and similarly environmentally-friendly technology already on the market. And while I wouldn’t have thought that it made sense, chinese manufacturer CATL already has built Sodium-ion batteries for cars, and (sadly) that’s the far more important market for batteries compared to stationary ones.