suppose within a year the Alien Space Bats will teleport all evil-and-polluting power plants in (heavily dependent on such) Ruritania off to the other side of the Moon, leading to power shortages and exorbitant prices. In the meantime, for now electricity is still cheap and plentiful.
In such conditions, what technologies might the Ruritanian companies use to store energy for resale or consumption later on? I am guessing that part of the answer might be stockpiling of energy intensive commodities like aluminium and silicon. Nevertheless, that’s not quite energy storage per se. Let’s say maybe Ruritanian Motors needs actual electricity to run the factories so they want to be able to get some “out of thin air” once production is curtailed.
Well, so what are optimal technologies for storing a lot energy cheaply? Would that be pumped storage? Or emptied out gas wells filled with hydrogen under pressure? The same gas wells filled just with pressurized air that can be then run through a turbine? Some sort of cheap, massive batteries?
AFAIK, at least the pumped storage has been used to some extent in reality by the electrical infrastructure for load balancing purposes. Is this an efficient technology? Is its use heavily limited by absence of appropriate locations or are they in fact widespread and fulfilling all our load balancing needs?