Comment Re: happy (Score 1) 49
Having an aluminium plant working only in the summer is not going to be profitable.
I don't think it's meant to be profitable. It's meant to store power. That can be part of a system that's overall profitable because you sell the power.
Yes, understood, but still not profitable as an overall system. Your estimates all seem off by a couple orders of magnitude (think if we listened to you, aluminum or electricity price could increase by a factor of 10, 100 or 1000).
Having batteries with only 1 charge cycle per year would be even worse.
If the discharge is over a matter of months and the battery in question is cheap, then not really. It depends on what battery you meant there. If you meant a heat battery, that's generally pretty cheap. Consider for example that a lot of houses have a battery that stores about 15 kWh in their house that cost around $500. They just use a tank of hot water for power storage. An insulated tank on around the same scale as a municipal water tower tank can keep water hot even in winter conditions literally for years, so a season is not a problem and it's not very expensive. It works better for heat storage than electricity storage of course, although you can use such a system to produce electrical power as well. In any case, heating is one of the big applications for power in Winter anyway.
You don't seem to realize a $500 water heater will reach room temperature in only 2-4 days. And I think it's more like 10 kWh for a 60 gallons water heater.
Keeping it hot for years would require very expensive insulation.
Considering that many of those places are the places we vitally need fresh water to grow our crops
That's the thing. We don't "need" to grow that much crops in California. We CHOOSE to empty the Colorado and Rio Grande for agriculture. There could be other ways (producing food in other regions) instead.
Belgium and California are already net food exporters.
and also taking into consideration the transport issues you mentioned, the world actually does have a fresh water shortage.
The world doesn't. Still plenty of unused fresh water in places like Russia and Canada flowing into the ocean.