Scientists Turn Air Into Petrol

Yes, but liquid is a really convenient way to transfer energy around the country and world.

It's much more than that, hydrocarbons, especially liquid hydrocarbons are really great ways to store energy. You just pour it into a tank and it stays there. Even a hydrocarbon gas like methane will stay put if you just seal it in. Until now we have heat (leaks away) hydrogen (leaks away even through metal) batteries (leak away gradually, very expensive, pretty rapid performance decay) kinetic energy in fast spinning things (gradually lost to friction, quite dangerous) pump storage (gradually evaporates; takes lots of space). The cost and difficulty of storing petrol is much lower than all of those and the technology is already widespread.

The best wind sources tend to be in areas with few people.

The other important factor is that transmission from those areas tends to be very expensive. If you build one of these plants at the end of the transmission line near the wind power you can then overbuild the Wind turbines so that they are almost always able fill the transmission lines. Spare capacity from the wind turbines goes into producing hydrocarbon fuel. On the other end of the transmission line, you can also build such a plant so you guarantee to run the transmission line at full capacity even during times when not much electricity is needed. If you can produce petrol, producing methane should be trivial, so you can also, at any point you want, pair hydrocarbon creation and storage with a rapid start up gas powered station which will then allow you to cope with peak demand.

Wind is already beating most other generation methods except for coal on cost. The main problem with it is that it's difficult to use for reliable base load supply. This is a perfect example of the kind of integrated interesting power solution which solves that and only becomes possible once there have been serious investment in building lots of alternative energy sources.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/TWavdwH_o8M/scientists-turn-air-into-petrol

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