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"Home Batteries" Power Houses For a Week
tjansen writes "Panasonic has announced plans to create 'home batteries.' They are lithium-ion batteries large enough to power a house for a week, making energy sources such as solar and wind power more feasible. Also, you can buy energy when it is cheapest, and don't need to worry about power outages anymore."
Dude, most hybrids out there use NiMH batteries. Sorry to give you cognitive dissonance.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Who wrote this?
Some Guy In A Blog, apparently. It's attributed to Fumio Ohtsubo, President of Panasonic (under a different, less common spelling) but links to no press releases or speeches.
Ohtsubo did an interview about Panasonic working on a kind of fuel cell/LiIon hybrid battery and making a $1B investment (in 2012!) in home power systems, including solar. Here is a link to an actual reputable news source rather than a blogger with poor reading comprehension skills:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=ajhto3eO4fpM
Sorry, but if they have only just "announced plans", then, for the foreseeable future, I still can not power a house for a week, and I still need to worry about power outages.
Wake me up, when I can pick these up at Lowe's... Or, at least, order them online somewhere...
Indeed, TFA itself uses the proper tenses and gives the ETA for what currently can only be called "vaporware":
CmdrTaco, WTF?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually, next-gen hybrids are and will be using various types of lithium-ion batteries and several companies, including Panasonic, Sanyo, Hitachi, and Toyota are manufacturing them. Tesla Motors already uses lithium-ion batteries in their cars.
My blog
Some of these technologies are of no use to those of us that live in areas where the cost of energy is consistent all day and night and year round.
Part of that maybe the problem (no intelligence in the infrastructure). But in the meantime if I were to have solar or any other resource put up that would benefit from stored energy for later use, it'll throw the payback vs normal utility curve way off to where I'd have to live here for decades to get my money back in anything but smugness.
As far as LI battery technology, it seems that the Prius used NMhd batteries because the number of charge discharge cycles was greater, since the batteries in the story were expected to have a cycle per day, the owner would have to replace them realistically every 3-4 years.
As far as the greater energy content of LI batteries, that is a risk that is always present with batteries. As long as the controller / charger is smart and has a layer or two of fault checking, the risk of runaway thermal events is pretty low. (The problem people had with Lithium Ion AA cell batteries where they are available was when people put them into standard NiCad or NiMh chargers, which apply too much current too quickly and make them pop to start fires. Since this is an integrated system by Panasonic with no capacity to mix and match technology evident, I'd say the risks is low.)
It would be possible with standard deep cycle lead acid batteries, but than you have to have climate control for your batteries above and beyond that proposed, and than your dedicating a good chunk of floorspace to batteries (You can't stack them because of heat buildup when discharging). I know the Central Offices I've been in have had a good chunk of their floorspace dedicated to just power, and even than only for the few minutes it takes for the diesel to kick over .. and you don't want to know what happens to expensive telephone equipment when it starts getting fed progressive amounts lower than 48VDC.)
It's not the average times that get you. It's the outlier numbers that collapse into the averages. We've seen eight hours without power in -20 degreee F weather here in Montana. It's why I own a generator and can switch power to the (gas) furnace any time I want to. When you're talking about protection from power outages, what you want to know is does the power EVER go out for long enough intervals to do you damage: And everywhere I've lived - Pennsylvania, NYC, Florida, California, Montana - the answer is an unqualified yes. Right now, there's no sense going without UPSs for computer systems and backups for heating and critical power systems like fishtanks, refrigerators, etc.
The power grid is subject to people running into telephone poles, ice on the lines, old transformers bursting into flames, lightning and geomagnetic storms, human error, and a bunch more things. That's the nature of it - it's out there in the real world. You can protect a power system within your own walls such that it is much more reliable, and that's no slam on the power company - you simply don't have as much to contend with.
Now, if you have no pipes to freeze, no data to lose, no fish to watch float to the top, no freezers full of food to see turn into biohazard... sure, I can see depending on the average. After all... what could go wrong?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Been there, done sorta that with the sump pump backup battery. You may want to consider something even more different. I have a city-water siphon pump backup. No battery needed. As long as my water supply is working, I have sump pump backup. Sure, it's not terrifically efficient, and wastes city water if it gets used - but that's cheap compared to the cleanup effort and property loss potential if my basement flooded again.
I would, since the status quo is no battery at all.
The cool kids on the block already have natural gas generators hooked up to their houses in the case of power outage, and I would guess that a natural gas generator would last significantly longer at a significantly lower TCO than any currently available battery technology (when at the scale of powering a house).
both wrong. the periodic table has nothing to do with commonness.
From: http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/periodic/faq/what-element-is-most-abundant.shtml :
"On earth, oxygen is the most common element, making up about 47% of the earth's mass. Silicon is second, making up 28%, followed by aluminum (8%), iron (5%), magnesium (2%), calcium (4%), sodium (3%), and potassium (3%). All of the remaining elements together make up less than 1% of the earth's mass."
Sig out of date
http://safetravel.dot.gov/definitions.html
The lithium equivalent calculator on this site suggests
That your calculations are a few orders of magnitude
Off.
So, 80 kg for a battery that holds 1000kWh.
Also, we have practically limitless lithium reserves in seawater.
[citation needed] /morbid curiosityZ
Stories like this always have the flavor of a urban legend.
The automated roll bar deployment is a feature of some BMW covertibles only.
It uses springs. Not explosives.
Emergency services guidelines September 2009.
For a full description with handsome cutaway illustrations in color click to pages 22 and 23 of the PDF.
The mass of lithium in a Li ion battery is no where near 1/2. For example, a LiMn2O4 Cathode is only 1/20 lithium by mass. Also, the 'recoverable' reserves of Lithium are at least three time higher than that 11 Megatonnes estimate. See http://lithiumabundance.blogspot.com/.
The earth's crust is nearly 20 ppm lithium by mass, so lithium is faily abundant. However, there are very few economically recoverable sources of lithium. If prices rise, more sources become available. We simple cannot 'run out' of lithium.
World production of lithium is another matter, it is only about 40,000 tonnes a year.
I was doing contract programming at one of the auto companies, in a plant that made "bumper shocks" along with other parts, when a defective weld caused one to fire its piston through an assembly line worker in another plant and killed him. The whole plant was in mourning. (And thank goodness I was in a different product line...)
Gently stopping a 5mph car in a matter of inches, without incurring driving-safety-imparing damage, requires very large and very-well-controlled forces. Bumper shock absorbers (at least that model) are (extremely) pressurized with nitrogen, to keep the fluids in the correct place and act as an initial "spring" during the first part of the travel in a crash, before the fluid friction is ramped up. If the weld holding the piston in fails you have a good approximation to a high-powered pistol firing a large slug.
Of course the manufacturers try REALLY HARD to make sure the welds and the cylinders are solid, given the possible damages if one fails. So getting one to fail in the field is tough. But any manufacturing process (short of single-atom-placement-and-check nanotech and maybe even that) can be expected to have a few defective parts slip through inspection.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way