Can gravity, pressure, and other elemental forces save us from becoming a battery-powered civilization? On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods to life. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless. These renewable energy sources stop renewing until the weather, or the planet, turns. The obvious solution is batteries. But typical models exhaust their stored energy after only three or four hours of maximum output. It is expensive to collect enough batteries to cover longer discharges. And batteries can catch fire"
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