It still sounds like rent-seeking to me. The answer is: Move to the city. Centralize. Hivitize. We need to stop enabling those who think a McMansion [⛧] in the forest/desert or the suburbs is, in any way, a Good Thing. Suburban and rural populations are sucking way more than they're contributing, living off the excess produced by the centralized hubs.
It *seems* reasonable to assert that we should work on the "last mile" problem, applying individualist solutions like personal vehicles and private power lines (of whatever composition) directly to one's rural homestead. But the last mile problem is only a problem because of our delusional identity as individuals and our delusional conception of private property. Correct those causes and that symptom will be mitigated. Sure, there will still be issues like transporting individuals from the hive into the fields to do work (e.g. launching small groups into space). But those would be the edge cases, not the center. If the power law distributed majority of us lived in appropriately dense hives, compressed air storage makes a lot more sense (as does broadband communication, cultural transmission, and a host of other processes perverted by our identities as individuals). [⛧] Sorry, Steve. I know your homestead, littered with cool micro-inventions and geeky tech, doesn't *seem* like a McMansion. But it essentially is ... just tailored to a - our - subculture's tastes. >8^D Even for those who go fully "off grid", when the sh¡t hits the fan, those humans, massively capable harvesters of natural resources that we are, will go back "on grid" to, say, get cancer treatment or buy some canned beans or whatnot. But we can tolerate the few truly innovative survivalists, and *not* pipe energy to their stead. It's the blatant exploiters, rent-seekers, whose living out there is fully supported by their ability to suck resources from the hive ... and our abetting that parasitic relationship. On 2/8/22 09:00, Steve Smith wrote:
As an amateur complexicist, I am a fan of multi-scale systems.... so I look forward to systems like yours not being scaled (only) to mega-industry. I wonder at how far out the existing distribution chain you can push compressed air practically? I doubt there are (m)any mechanics or private homes, for example, who could give up their NG feed (heat mostly) for compressed air, even if the upstream distribution were converting. The new(ish) DC-powered residential scale mini-split heat-pumps would seem to operate well off of any mechanical energy source (not just PWM modulated variable speed DC motors) and the decompressed chilled air from the air-motor would go right into boosting the efficiency rather than being yet another source of waste heat. Not a perpetual motion machine, just a system where some of the intrinsic inefficiencies are exploited/recovered elegantly? The big win seems obviously to be the major NG pipelines and existing electric generation stations. I can't tell from your literature if converting existing NG turbines to compressed air is even reasonable... seems like this is probably why CAES is burning NG to bring the charge up to the performance scale of existing turbine designs? I believe that many of these plants were designed/modified to be "peaking" plants which it seems your tech is ideal for... let the
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