🔋 Technical Drawbacks: Storage!

Along with safety issues, there are also technical drawbacks to using electricity!

One of the biggest issues is that electricity is hard to store efficiently!

Electricity isn’t a fuel.  Meaning you can’t pour electricity into a tank like gasoline, or stack it like wood—there are very few ways to store electricity in its natural form for later use.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

To store electricity, we usually have to convert it to a different type of energy! While there are many ways to do this, every time we convert one form of energy to another, we lose some of the original energy in the process.  These losses are simply an inevitable part of the physical world.

Not only that, but to store electricity and then use it later, we have to convert it twice—once to change it to some form of energy that we can store easily, and a second time to convert it back into electricity when we’re ready to use it.

That means that there are twice as many losses as you might have expected.  And sometimes the stored form of electricity “leaks” away, so if you don’t use it quickly, you can lose some or even all of it.

Finding more efficient ways to store electricity is such a big problem that whoever solves it will need a much bigger bank, so start thinking about how you would tackle this issue.  Every great breakthrough starts with one person looking at the world in a slightly new, different way.