The Impossible battery... how useful would it be?

[Spacescifi]

Suppose someone gave the USA a battery that could be charged with and store 3000 terawatts.

 

The battery would also be capable of discharging the power at ANY ratio... including 100% (not recommended for staying alive reasons).

 

Like real batteries, too much heat can cause the battery to combust, unlike real batteries, it suffers no extra heat during discharge, but can take on extra heat from it's environment (like whatever it is attached to that is heated from the discharge of energy).

 

So how useful is this impossible battery?

 

Ideally you would have super materuals that could survive high discharge rates (but if we had that we would also have fusion so... ), but since we do not... what can we do and how far can we utilize this impossible tech?

 

 

Edited September 28, 2021 by Spacescifi

[KSK]

My impossible battery produced 1J of energy over 3 femtoseconds.

It wasn't that useful.

Correction:  3J of energy over 1 femtosecond. 

Still not that useful.

My next door neighbour's impossible battery will apparently store 3000 TW hours of energy. It's a real beast - surprised nobody has stolen it yet. Could power 3/4 of the US for a whole year with that puppy.

Edited September 28, 2021 by KSK

[kerbiloid]

My impossible battery was meowing and generating sparkles on touch with noses.

[magnemoe]

Idiotic useful if having high energy density. And it will be heavy restricted as you have an bomb if you short it  
Could even see this used as an feature  in weapons as power source and payload is the same. 
 

[KSK]

Assuming that we’re measuring this battery’s capacity in terawatt hours, I’m honestly not sure how useful it is.

For context, global electricity consumption in 2018 was about 23,400 TW hours. We can expect that to have increased but even so, that battery is capable of storing about 10% of globally consumed electricity for an entire year.  

I haven’t looked up what the global electricity production is but it’ll be higher than the consumption figure not least because of transmission losses and other inefficiencies.

Still - that’s a lot of energy storage - and an expensive battery to fully charge, if you were planning to weaponise it.

My initial thought was that it might be useful for replacing baseline  generators and so allow for 100% renewable energy use but I think it’s too big for that. 

Even assuming a global electricity grid, I don’t know how efficiently that grid could supply power from a single source.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Begs a different question - how many batteries does it take to open the wormhole?

That should provide the answer.

[StrandedonEarth]

3 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Idiotic useful if having high energy density. And it will be heavy restricted as you have an bomb if you short it  
Could even see this used as an feature  in weapons as power source and payload is the same. 

A common improvised explosive device in the Star Wars Expanded Universe is gimmicked  blaster power packs, or other power source 

[wumpus]

Quick note:

Capacitors often have nearly ideal discharge rates (up to nearly 100%) and similar storage efficiency (99+% of stored power can be obtained).  Unfortunately, this is true for the smallest of capacitors (and often needed for analog filtering and similar cases where every bit it is less than "ideal" shows up in the noise) that store almost no power.  As capacitors get larger and larger, they act more like batteries.

So an "impossible battery" is as much an "impossible capacitor" as it is a battery.

Also note: the heat you mention requires inefficiency in charging and discharging (called "equivalent series resistance" in the bigger capacitors), otherwise you don't get the heat.  So don't use the word "superconductor" anywhere in the description.

[magnemoe]

31 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

A common improvised explosive device in the Star Wars Expanded Universe is gimmicked  blaster power packs, or other power source 

Same in the Man-Kizin war by Larry Niven, they used an superconducting storage coil to store power for electrical cars.  
The Kizin banned them on an human colony they conquered as it was very easy to turn this into an car bomb. 
And yes if you have an room temperature superconductor you can pass serious power trough its another way to get this battery. 
 

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, KSK said:

Assuming that we’re measuring this battery’s capacity in terawatt hours, I’m honestly not sure how useful it is.

For context, global electricity consumption in 2018 was about 23,400 TW hours. We can expect that to have increased but even so, that battery is capable of storing about 10% of globally consumed electricity for an entire year.  

I haven’t looked up what the global electricity production is but it’ll be higher than the consumption figure not least because of transmission losses and other inefficiencies.

Still - that’s a lot of energy storage - and an expensive battery to fully charge, if you were planning to weaponise it.

My initial thought was that it might be useful for replacing baseline  generators and so allow for 100% renewable energy use but I think it’s too big for that. 

Even assuming a global electricity grid, I don’t know how efficiently that grid could supply power from a single source.

 

I wanted to say we may be able to make a thermal space only rocket with it, but combustion is an isssue so maybe not.

 

On the other hand, I reckon charging a dead 3000 terawatt battery would be... hard?

 

Like, you don't plug it into the wall... would take too long. Would likely drain a city or maybe even entire countries of power charging the thing LOL.

 

"Mom... why is the city out of power?"

With a heavy sigh mom says, "Kirk is charging his phaser... again."

Edited September 28, 2021 by Spacescifi

[EnderKid2]

also the Watt is a unit of power, or energy per time, not a unit of energy, so a storage capacity of "3 petawatts" makes no sense.

Edited September 28, 2021 by EnderKid2

[Hannu2]

18 hours ago, KSK said:

Assuming that we’re measuring this battery’s capacity in terawatt hours, I’m honestly not sure how useful it is.

For context, global electricity consumption in 2018 was about 23,400 TW hours. We can expect that to have increased but even so, that battery is capable of storing about 10% of globally consumed electricity for an entire year.  

It would be very useful for handling seasonal variations of many renewable energy production systems. Capacity would be unnecessarily large but if it would be possible to make 3000 TWh units probably it would be even easier to make 30 TWh units and distribute them on World's electric networks.

Unlimited current is not reasonable idea under known natural laws but if maximum current would be extremely high there would certainly be military applications too.

 

[magnemoe]

15 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

I wanted to say we may be able to make a thermal space only rocket with it, but combustion is an isssue so maybe not.

 

On the other hand, I reckon charging a dead 3000 terawatt battery would be... hard?

 

Like, you don't plug it into the wall... would take too long. Would likely drain a city or maybe even entire countries of power charging the thing LOL.

 

"Mom... why is the city out of power?"

With a heavy sigh mom says, "Kirk is charging his phaser... again."

You could make an electric jet plane even an fast one using power to heat up air. You could do the same with reaction mass like the microwave powered spaceplane idea from some time ago, except here you don't need the microwave towers. 

[Irreversible Extents]

A full, total and instantaneous discharge-

You're talking 3000 Terawatts. That is 3x10¹⁵ Joules/Second coursing through this thing. That produces a Celsius temperature value of 1579695229399.3918 degrees when fully discharged. (0.0005266 Celsius in 1 Joule). You heard that right, that is 1.6 Trillion degrees!

Any chemists out there willing to figure out the insulator/conductor specs on that?

[EnderKid2]

1 hour ago, Irreversible Extents said:

A full, total and instantaneous discharge-

You're talking 3000 Terawatts. That is 3x10¹⁵ Joules/Second coursing through this thing. That produces a Celsius temperature value of 1579695229399.3918 degrees when fully discharged. (0.0005266 Celsius in 1 Joule). You heard that right, that is 1.6 Trillion degrees!

Any chemists out there willing to figure out the insulator/conductor specs on that?

doesn't that depend on the specific heat of your heating element?

[NFUN]

5 hours ago, EnderKid2 said:

doesn't that depend on the specific heat of your heating element?

it depends on a lot of things

[Irreversible Extents]

On 9/29/2021 at 11:24 AM, EnderKid2 said:

doesn't that depend on the specific heat of your heating element?

Yes, this is a very general value, when the specific heat of the materials involved are ignored.

[NFUN]

4 hours ago, Irreversible Extents said:

Yes, this is a very general value, when the specific heat of the materials involved are ignored.

and how much of the material is being heated...

 

(and energy lost to effects like ionization and chemical reactions, which isn't as relevant to your point)

[Irreversible Extents]

At any rate, with normal conductive materials in this scenario, the substances involved would be thoroughly GONE in the event of a discharge this rapid.