She's Span-ish

• G. Santos

Look like trouble!

Yeah, but those batteries are "oversized" and built to degrade. Basically, they are just putting a 40kwh battery with a "useable" 35kwh.

Sounds like a great way for wealthy first world nations to maintain their positions of power. :/

I was speaking to my BIL who recently got out of the Marines and was in their MARSOC Program. He was telling me that, for the most part, the primary job of special forces isn't so much to fight, but to train locals to fight for us. Actual engagements by our military is really a last resort. We really only do proxy battles now.

So the example he gave me was our "Murder Van" program in Afghanistan and somewhere in Africa. As described, both these places are run by local "Warlords" that are really just well armed gangs. So what we do is find the rival gang, and our Spec Forces dudes train them and arm them. In the example he gave, there was an outpost with about 50 well armed bad guys and an "officer" that needed to get got.

So instead of the typical onesy-twosy guerilla tactics the rival gang used. MARSOC came up with a plan and trained a group of about dozen rival gang members. First, MARSOC folks helped them procure a transport van (cant remember if it was stolen or purchased). They mounted a Machine Gun inside the van and armoured it. Then, they stick a few gang members in the van - all armed to the teeth with US equipment, and position the rest around the outpost. Long story short, the van pulls up to the gate, draws bad guys in, then starts blasting with the MG. Meanwhile, we launch long-range artillery and send in a fleet of drones to hit our targets and provide additional support when opportune. The other dozen go in and clean up, all the while getting fed info from our ground and satelite intel. The rival gang gets to keep the weapons and what is left with the outpost.

So this is the current iteration of our "Proxy War" approach. But you can see how adding more robots to this will make it even more effective.

Also, when talking to him about robots and stuff, he mentioned that the thing he sees as hugely valuable are "sherpa" bots. The whole murder van approach is predicated on surprise. So that means small teams who then have to bring in a crap load of equipment. So instead of having a dozen Marines each carring a 100+ pounds go gear, you could potentially have just 3 or 4 with a robo mule carrying the equipment. It opens up all sorts of logistical options.

Its just a balancing act. The value here is you can scale up this form of energy storage at a low cost - I am talking GWh scale. (I am assuming that this article is backed by good research. IEEE-Spectrum is a sorta the public face of the peer-reviewed technical journals from IEEE.)

Any it would have to be compared to batteries and H2 systems that are both extremely capital intensive and likely dont have the same "scales of efficiency". Batteries certainly dont- there costs are basically linear, and H2 is has its own funny equation (adding storage is cheap, but the balance of system costs are extremely high.) Also, there are pretty significant losses in both batteries and H2 storage.

The current thinking for H2 is pretty interesting. The idea is you setup the H2 system next to a NG plant. Then use renewables to power the inefficient electrolyzer when power is basically free. Store it, and then co-fire it at 10 or 20% with the natural gas. So, it does have its application, and it could become quite common. But it isn’t a stand alone system like what they are discussing here.

It also worth noting that we do have a lot of industrial heat recovery systems that may be able to take advantage of incumbent geo-thermal equipment. So, there may be some real savings here.

At the end of the day, this wont be a silver bullet. But it may have a significant role in cracking the GWH scale energy storage that we really need.

The thing you have to remember is that in many areas, there is so much excess renewable energy that its basically free. So, it doesn't really matter if its less efficient.