I took classes in calculus, differential equations, physics, physical chemistry… and I might have known something about these equations. But my career was in synthetic organic chemistry, where I thankfully didn’t need expertise in this sort of mathematics. It’s been 45 years without even a thought of this stuff, so please forgive my inability to recall. (And more than 10 years since retired, so not up on the chemistry anymore, either. My hobby is now learning plant taxonomy, conservation of natural habitats and growing native plant species.)

But if I had to hazard a guess, they look related to thermodynamics. Not a reply worthy of earning a heart, eh?!

...prize in the contest, have a heart on me just for being a kind of soulmate.

"Not really green" sounds like gotta be perfectly green or it is worthless and useless. It is a false dichotomy to say something is "green" or "not green". Batteries charged with non-fossil energy are greener than internal combustion.

Yes, you can go on at length about the environmental costs of mining the metals needed and the limited lifespan of things like wind turbine blades and nuclear power plants. Yes, it is not completely green, but can you say it not greener than oil burning engines and all their infrastructure?

Equations? Maxwell relations and thermodynamics. But I don't understand them and can't discuss them.

I report them regularly, this morning in fact:

January 2025: The Worst January Year to Year Increase Ever in CO2 Concentrations Recorded, 2025 over 2024.

The money squandered on energy storage can be found here:



IEA overview, Energy Investments.

The site includes this graphic to discuss the money squandered - with contempt for the laws of thermodynamics obviated - on energy storage:



If one pokes around in the data on these pages, one can learn that since 2015, the world has squandered 3.556 trillion on energy storage with the result that the accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is accelerating with a positive first, second and even a third derivative.

...and I have to listen to this crap!

I started this thread with the intent to discuss a mathematical point about physical laws relevant to the collapse of the planetary atmosphere. I didn't start it to listen to piddling distractions from reality.

Of course, I cannot control what responses involving excuses and prevarications, but I will say this: While I cannot control responses here, I really don't appreciate the littering of the thread with excuses for the inexcusable, particularly when it expresses contempt for numbers that don't require any sophistication whatsoever to understand and grasp.

The fucking planet is on fire, and one reason is denial represented by tortured excuses and silly attentions to trivialities, nitpicking nonsensical bullshit.

And trust me, as shown, I am equipped to demonstrate what bullshit is.

Have a swell week and try not to breath in too many combustion gases while the planet burns.

Or drive around with a thermal energy isotope decay generator in cars, heavily shielded, and dog help the urban environment if you get into an accident and have a rupture.

I don't think I've ever heard you state what you think should power cars and trucks if it is not batteries. I wrote:

which you ignored to instead inform us of the news that the world is getting warmer while CO2 is rising.

The increased expenditure on "Grids and Storage" there could easily be the result of increasing electrical grids to extend them into areas that don't have it yet, to upgrade grids to handle greater industrialization and increased consumer use. That's before we get into the demand that crypto mining and AI training/service is placing on grids. It is not only batteries but also water reservoirs, heated thermal reservoirs, gas storage, and various other storage systems. All imperfect and all impossible to be perfect due to the laws of thermodynamics.

But still we must have energy storage. For multiple reasons. A gas tank in an ICE vehicle is energy storage. A home hot water tank is energy storage, for convenience. Both of those leak energy but both have their purposes. Do you have a hot water tank at home?

You have a very low opinion of your readers when you think they are not aware of increasing CO2 and increasing global temperatures. But it seems you have an almost universal low opinion, so I don't feel lonely.

So much easier to post graphs than have a discussion. Better yet, explode eloquently with "Bullshit.".

So here's a graph from your intellectual inferior, myself, noticed on the website. In it we see that investment in storage is only a fraction of grids and thus the "Grids and Storage" part of your chart is almost all Grids. In 2022 it was 21 billlion on storage versus 331 billion on grids. 21 billion is a tiny fraction of the appr 1600 billion invested in 2022 on clean energy. So I don't think you can prove "3.556 trillion on energy storage". I think you are counting the greatly predominant investment in Grids as Storage. I think you have made an error, but you will undoubtedly find a way to use it to belittle me and your other readers. Again. So be it. Have at it.

See the top chart on this page: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-clean-energy-investment-2015-2023 It's the same graph you posted above, but with hover access to figures.

Oh, by the way, you might like to know that CO2 levels are increasing and the world is getting warmer.

They are easy to dismiss as irrelevant to any serious interest in sustainability; I have often expressed my contempt for the belief that the maintenance of the car CULTure is more important than the stability of the planetary atmosphere. Bit supposes an ethical purview in which I cannot in any way.

There is a difference between energy storage of thermodynamically degraded electricity in mass intensive batteries that
further degrade it and exergy capture using high temperature flows in heat networks, an engineering concept that is widely discussed in the scientific literature, generally referred to as "process intensification." Much of the chemistry of these processes are well known; some even operate or have operated on industrial scale. As it happens the processes may produce chemical energy with electricity as a side product. This however is not storage so much as recovery, specifically the recovery of exergy.

Whomever the "we" are for whom you claim to speak, I would agree that for them, they are unfamiliar with more sophisticated thinking in energy engineering. It's OK. I know from direct experience how difficult it is no matter how much passion one might exhibit, to find the time and intellectual rigor to approach these points, many of which are arcane.

I'm not sure what you are saying about the graphic and I really don't care what it might be. I have worked with iea data in many forms for decades as well as data on the destructive and often reactionary practices in other settings that have led to the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

To me, the issue is not about thermodyamically degraded energy, whether it be mechanical, electrical or in cases such as hydrogen, which is regularly hyped by tiresome fools, chemical.

I am interested in primary energy, in particular that can be expressed as heat, the hottest that can be safely contained being the best. I do not apologize for my firm belief that the only sustainable such form of primary energy is nuclear.

Now maybe you can politely consider whether you are willing to return this thread to its purpose.

I still don't know how you think we should power cars and trucks. You have eliminated ICE, hydrogen, nuclear fission, nuclear isotope decay, and batteries. That leaves fuel cells and solar cells, the former lagging in efficiency compared to batteries and the latter rather impractical for weather and even moderate distances and requires batteries anyway. Oh, and animal power.

Car and truck culture is not going away this year or in 2026 and not for many years after. In any case, what would you replace cars and trucks with?

It is well known that heat flow systems are more efficient at higher temperature differentials to the surroundings than at lower and that conversion is always lossy.

Since your favoured primary energy production is nuclear fission, that still begs the question of how to convert those high energy heat flows into a form of energy useful for cars and trucks. Nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal energy, etc are not usable directly and must all be converted a form that can be transported. To what?

You may be interested in primary energy, but you raised the issue of storage for a rant and mistake the over $300 billion annual Grid and Storage investment for the actual $21 billion annual storage investment. Multiply by ten years as you did and you get over $3.5 trillion which you claim is for Storage investment but it is really almost all for Grid. The actual figure would be less than $210 billion for Storage, much less because the investment has been much smaller until the last few years.

IEA data for storage:
2 billion in 2015
too small in 2016
3 billion in 2017
5 billion in 2018
5 billion in 2019
7 billion in 2020
10 billion in 2021
21 billion in 2022
37 billion in 2023
50 billion in 2024 (extrapolated guess)

That adds up to only $140 billion since 2015.

You wrote:

which is a mistaken statistic, off by more than an order of magnitude.

Nothing prevents readers from responding to your challenge for hearts, as some have.

The reference from which the truncated equations appear is this one: Dong Hyup Jeon, Seung Man Baek,
Thermal modeling of cylindrical lithium ion battery during discharge cycle, Energy Conversion and Management, Volume 52, Issues 8–9, 2011, Pages 2973-2981.

The paper, unlike many papers in which symbols for the variables are defined in the text, has a table of symbols for variables and their meaning.

This is it:



The full equations, as opposed to those posted in the quiz are these:



The definition of "q_entropy" with a dot includes one of three possible secret words that would have won a heart.

These are: "entropy" (of course), "heat" and "resistance." ("Internal resistance" would have justified two hearts.)

These words reflect the reality that storing energy wastes energy, therefore storing energy is not "green." There was a diversion in the thread about whether storing so called "renewable energy" is "green," which I found very annoying, since there is essentially no where on the planet where there is such a surfeit of so called "renewable energy" as to matter. So called "renewable energy" remains a trivial (and very expensive) form of energy that has done nothing, zero, zilch, to arrest the extreme global heating we now experience. In fact, if one looks, it made things worse:

If one looks at a grid where there is a lot of batteries - California is an excellent place to see this and can be accessed at the CAISO website - one will see that batteries are being charged while dangerous fossil fuels are being burned, with the dangerous fossil fuel wastes being dumped directly into the atmosphere. Since storing energy wastes energy, it follows that charging batteries while burning gas means that more dangerous fossil fuel waste is being dumped than would be if batteries did not exist. In other words, batteries make things worse, not better. The lie that there is so much so called "renewable energy" on the planet that it justifies mining the shit out of the same planet to make batteries is just that, a lie. It's not just wasteful; it's obscene. I found the entire exchange annoying, since the multitrillion dollar so called "renewable energy" industry is an economic and environmental nightmare that has been useless in arresting extreme global heating. All it has done is to render precious wilderness into industrial parks.

These remarks apply, in spades, to hydrogen, which is even worse than batteries.

Although the "contest" generated no responses, a heart was awarded for being an organic chemist, albeit apparently one that left physical chemistry behind. I've been an organic chemist, but I'm kind of happy that my career did not leave physical chemistry behind; it inspired me to embrace it, although I became a chemist because I loved organic chemistry, in particular synthesis, although that's not how my career ended up.

The only justification for the toxic chemical nightmare of batteries are cases where they capture exergy that would otherwise be wasted, as in a hybrid car. Even there, the case is weak, although I have personally embraced that practice - while being aware of the moral and environmental cost, which in some sense makes me worse than other people - as much as I own and drive a hybrid car. It isn't "green." It's just slightly less odious, particularly if one is willing to ignore the moral cost of nickel mining in Siberia and His Maggotcy King Eloon's the first (and hopefully the last) practice of holding cobalt slaves in Africa. (In the case of the generation of primary energy, waste energy can be best stored as heat with minimal losses, upgraded or otherwise, which can thus capture lost exergy; this is only really an option in nuclear plants and to my knowledge isn't practiced anywhere except China, and possibly may be practiced in Wyoming if the Terrapower plant is completed.)

Thanks for reading if you have done so. Have a nice weekend.