To make solar power viable, we need a solution for overnight energy storage.

Batteries are complicated.

Do you know what isn’t? Water go up.

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you can use saltwater for it though, doesn’t need to be fresh water or treated in any way, just a physical medium to make turbine go brrr

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15 points

Machinery and saltwater generally don’t mix very well. And you’d still need to make a saltwater lake somewhere uphill.

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yeah but in this case it’s just a pipe and a turbine it’s gotta make move

And you’d still need to make a saltwater lake somewhere uphill.

water tanks tho

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14 points

Saltwater damages turbine blades very fast. Using saltwater would require some very different engineering for the turbine blades, which might not be worth the benefit of being able to use saltwater.

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8 points

Turbines are precision machines. And if we’re talking utility scale installations here, we want an upper reservoir measured in thousands of cubic meters, not liters.

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2 points

The pipe and turbine would break so fast it’s basically useless. Also, tanks are waaaay more expensive than digging a hole in the ground.

There’s good reasons why freshwater open reservoirs are used. If tanks and brine were usable, people already would be using them.

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