this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
273 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

77925 readers
2164 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
273
Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere (spectrum.ieee.org)
submitted 2 days ago by kalkulat@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

"This giant bubble on the island of Sardinia holds 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the gas wasn’t captured from factory emissions, nor was it pulled from the air. It came from a gas supplier.... "The facility compresses and expands CO2 daily in its closed system, turning a turbine that generates 200 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 20 MW over 10 hours."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Compressing gas generates heat, and a significant part of that heat will be lost. Heat dissipation is irreversible, and this lowers efficiency a lot.

BTW the same reason why in industry, pneumatic drives are universally replaced by electric motors: Their efficiency is too low.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

There is a thermal energy storage included as s major part. This works because compressing CO2 to 55atm adiabatically heats it up to some 450-ish C, so that heat is pretty high grade, and only the final stage cools it down with heat exchanger open to air. In discharging direction, some heat is taken from outside air to evaporate part of CO2 and heat stored is used up