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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
The idea really isn't to backup your power during an outage. The idea is to store power collected with on-site measures such as solar/wind and use the battery during times when these local power measure's aren't supplying enough. Another point would be to purchase power from the electric company when demand is low, and store for use when demand is high. Power companies could signal that demand is too high and the load is about cause problems, and people could switch to their reserves, in order to prevent damage to the grid. (Such as happens frequently when everybody runs their air coolers in the summer). I think that this would be a good measure to prevent the problems that cause blackouts, but I don't think it should, in all cases, be the consumer putting forth the effort to fix things. (At least in the US they need fixing). The power companies should put a few of these in the ground, and THEY can activate them when the need is there, rather than asking customers to handle it for them. Else they can damn well charge us a lot less than 60 cents per kilowatt hour. (Newark).
The essence of time is transient. Always be sure to make haste slowly.
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