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Old Electric-Car Batteries Put Into Service For Home Energy Storage
Hugh Pickens writes "Josie Garthwaite writes that old electric car batteries degraded below acceptable performance levels for autos still have enough life to serve the grid for at least ten years with a prototype announced by GM and ABB lashing five Chevy Volt battery packs together in an array with a capacity of 10 kilowatt-hours — enough to provide electricity for three to five average houses for two hours. 'In a car, you want immediate power, and you want a lot of it,' says Alexandra Goodson. 'We're discharging for two hours instead of immediately accelerating. It's not nearly as demanding on the system.'" (Read on, below.)
Pickens continues: "Deployed on the grid, community energy storage devices could help utilities integrate highly variable renewables like solar and wind into the power supply, while absorbing spikes in demand from electric-car charging. 'Wind, it's a nightmare for grid operators to manage,' says Britta Gross, director of global energy systems and infrastructure commercialization for GM. 'It's up, down, it doesn't blow for three days. It's very labor-intensive to manage.' The batteries would allow for storage of power during inexpensive periods for use during expensive peak demand, or help make up for gaps in solar, wind or other renewable power generation. One final advantage of re-using electric car batteries is that the battery — the most expensive part of an electric car — remains an asset beyond its useful life in the vehicle. 'If there is a market in stationary power for spent batteries, consumers could recognize this as an increased resale value at end of life, however small,' says Kevin See."
But certain people can just look at those heavy batteries and make them fly around the room.
2 hours?! For us, east coasters, 2 hours don't make any difference... for others will be too... soon enough...
And you can't use it in an off-grid solar setup - there aren't many charge/discharge cycles left...
Chevy Volt batteries are failing already? It seems like the Volt has only been on the market for a year.
How does he know that they will last for another ten? It's early days yet and the fact that they have failed for the Volt seems like premature failure to me.
If you can reuse parts of your electric car for your household for economic benefit (and maybe as backup for blackouts) it makes these high priced cars more valuable and therefore expand the potential market.
This will also potenially create a battery market for house backup for blackouts or accomodation to possible day to night price difference. :)
Which also will expand the battery market. All this will lower the production unit costs for batteries.
And here the cycle begin again...
Mundus Vult Decipi
Lets see, my 10kW generator doesn't even power my whole house, and a 10kWH battery set is supposed to provide electricity to 5 houses for 2 hours, that would be 1kW a house. Somehow this seems to be a new use of the word "provide" I was not previously aware of.
-jon
My little 1500 watt heater wrecks their calculations. And that's just in one room of one house.
And 5 battery packs is a good chunk of space and weight.
Plus you need charge controllers, transfer switches, and some way to recharge the batterys. And if you've got enough solar/wind to recharge 10kw in a reasonable time.. You don't really need that giant ass battery pack now. Otherwise you're using the grid to recharge and just delaying your energy usage.. and losing X% to efficiency losses thru every cycle.
Nope. Sounds like bullshit put out by an industry worried they're gonna have to pickup the tab to recycle these giant toxic batteries.
While I agree that this doesn't make much sense for most people--the cost of the electricity to keep them charged isn't worth having a few hours coverage in blackouts for most people, this is quite useful for people with off-grid homes in remote locations. I had friends building in a remote location, and running the power lines to the house would cost as much as a solar array with batteries to last through the night. With used electric car batteries, the cost of such a system would drop significantly.
The idea isn't to have electric car owners make use of their worn-out batteries, but to create a market for them to sell them.
In USA they do not have much use. For emergencies like Sandy, FEMA should simply develop a plan to send the fuel trucks from the army and drive around the affected neighborhoods and dispense fuel for cars in the drive way of homes. The municipalities can collect the cost of the fuel from the homeowners through utility bills later. And the collected money can be considered emergency grants from the federal govt to the municipalities. Once you have an assured supply of fuel in an emergency, we can use the hundreds of thousands of power plants that are already present in these locations.
The hundreds of thousands of powerplants are typically four cylinder gasoline engines, and a good portion of them are six and eight cylinders, the automobile engines. Presently the alternator is sized to provide just enough electric power for the car. If we design a generator that runs at the right RPM, and connection kits that will allow it to be coupled to an car engine it would be very helpful. I am thinking of some kind of frame, a new serpentine belt, or some way to work off the belt driving the alternator. If FEMA funds the R&D to create these kits, builds them and stocks them, they can be deployed in an emergency.
In an emergency so many people would happily stay at home and avoid driving around, if they can. But they are all forced to run around looking for food, gas and water. Municipalities should develop emergency plans where their residents simply text to some known number information like, "running short of water/food/gas", "Medical attention needed", "Number of young children = XX". They should consolidate and send around FEMA trucks to bring food/water/gas to them. If people have the peace of mind, they will stay home and let the roads free for people with real emergencies.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This development will help a lot of folks who don't have reliable access to power. Just because it doesn't matter where you live doesn't mean this feat of technology does not matter to other people somewhere else.
http://www.haitianproject.org/updates/2012/9/living-son
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Your house uses more than 10kw? I really have to ask, what the heck are you doing??
I have a modest 4x2 house, with a stay-at-home wife and 2 kids. Big screen TV, and all the other creature comforts and I wouldn't even come close to use 10Kw.
In this instance I have to say 'you're doing it wrong'.
Put your house at around sea level below the 30th parallel in a sunny area and watch what happens to your electric bill.
Also 4x2 house doesn't mean much. I see Europeans referring to their 4x2(?) less than 93 sq meter(1000 sq feet) inner core apartments as houses. That's a far cry from places like Texas where a 4x2 standalone house could be anywhere from 2200 to 4000 sq feet(372 sq meters) and two stories tall.
A guarantee that the latter home will have peak loads of around 18kWh or more.
Electric cars have proved to be a technology that the market place doesn't want. You can argue whether this is because they have technical problems, are too expensive, can't be charged easily, or whatever. But it is obvious that they are not selling. The UK has 28.5 million cars of which currently 1,107 are electric. That's after a 5000 GBP grant was offered for anyone who would buy one. I think they did a little better in the US last year, selling around 17,000, but that's still a drop in the ocean.
This piece does not consider any of the myriad practical problems associated with second-use of car batteries. It's just a puff piece trying to make green noises. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along....
The problems with these kinds of distributed system aren't so much technological anymore... but economic and operational. Who pays for them? Who maintains them? Who operates them? Who manages operations?
These are the hard questions to answer. (Though no doubt, I'll get plenty of replies with a variety of shallow and ill thought out answers...) These are the questions that need to have at least trial solutions before the system can be rolled out.
Why five houses for two hours? Does it not power one house for ten hours? I would prefer the latter...
I looked up the capacity of Prius batteries in case anyone is interested: Normal = 1.31kWh (MH), Plug-in = 4.4hWh (LI).
Now if your yard is full of old cars, it's no longer a junk yard.
Just think of all the beer you can keep cold in the refrigerators too.
In Long Island, N.Y., my buddy's area lost power for almost a week from Sandy, but by using backup battery power he and his family had the only lights in his neighborhood. (He works for a company that provides backup power for office buildings, cellphone towers, phone/computer systems,...) The neighbors all wondered why he had power when they didn't. It's simply because he is prepared for outages when they occur.
This research is extremely promising to aid a small family compound during a short outage, and when used in combination with some wind, solar, and perhaps scavenged propane, a small group of people might live quite comfortably. There is a J-Lo class but though.....there will neither be enough batteries nor enough forethought to keep everyone sustainable where they live. The earth's biggest environmental concern is that a particular species has overrun the planet.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is not the power capability (except at a minimum draw) for 2-3 houses. If you've got ANY high-demand devices such as an on-demand water heater, oven/range, or a washer/dryer- you're going to burn through the pack MUCH faster- it'll almost power a SINGLE house fully.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
deep cycle marine batteries, why have two hours when you can have twelve or more
I wouldn't have figured that the foremost thoughts on the minds of people fighting to survive a disaster (either natural or manmade) is how Honey fucking Boo Boo is doing. I would have thought that the foremost thing on peoples' minds would be the following, in order of necessity: water, food, shelter.
Water is easy: seal and stock. Stock a couple filters as well.
Food is easy: cook, seal and stock. Most of this is already done for you; it comes in cans. Bonus! Get a hand turned can opener or a survival kit multitool and learn how to use it, forget the electric can opener - it's no good without power.
Shelter: you have a house or other manmade structure around you, right now, do you not? You have the ability or knowledge to make fire? It's something Homo sapiens has enjoyed for several tens of thousands of years, now. Surely we have not forgotten how to strike two rocks together and use hair for kindling?
Have we as a species become so dependant on Edison technology that we're destined to extinction when the last bulb flickers and dies? I hope not.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
This plan has been built into the Nissan LEAF program since the beginning. The recycling plan for their batteries is to build power storage substations, not just for a few houses. This is a better plan because it keeps the batteries out of people's houses and off their block, for the most part, while not moving them so far away that they won't do any good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Instead of generating electricity directly in wind turbines, generate compressed air. Transport that energy in pipes and store it on land. On land you have an compressed air driven electricity generator for generating your electricity.
Now you go from peak energy to base load energy. With this, wind will not be an nightmare for grid operators to mange anymore.
The different to use compressed air as a storage for energy instead of batteries, is that you can discharge a compressed tank more times than you can discharge a battery.
The FA talks about Li-ion batteries but I've read about people buying dead car batteries real cheap and bringing them back to life by desulfating them with a simple circuit based on a 555 timer. The idea is to pulse the battery at its resonant frequency of about 4 MHz with high voltage pulses to break up the lead sulfate crystals that often cause a battery to fail. Car batteries might be a cheaper alternative to Li-ion batteries for a home system. Here's a link to the circuit:
http://www.reuk.co.uk/Battery-Desulfation.htm
It's more feasible to recycle old car battery chemicals. Home energy storage should use new batteries to maximize the charge(Voltage,Wattage,Current). Old car batteries might leak and not hold electrical charge. Using old car batteries is a mess.
Are tons of proud americans bragging against each other how much power their home needs.
Without understanding concepts like peak power, or the insight that they are idiots if any of their claims are true.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Fast Breeder Reactors, Molten Salt Reactors. Those technologies burn the "spent" fuel from traditional PWR reactors.
I have a suspicious feeling that General Motors' motivation on this project is to find a place to reuse the batteries they have to replace after warranty replacements, rather than have to pay the costs of recycling or disposing of the hazardous metals.
This shifts the cost of recycling and disposal onto the consumers, when the battery pack fails in their house.
It gives GM additional revenue stream when you buy it at Home Depot. AND they don't have to pay for disposal. I am sure the environmentalists are creaming their pants when they hear how this plan monetizes and incentivizes "green" tech. But I see it as a ruse to displace costs to the consumer, and ultimately, harms the environment---do you really think that individual citizens will actually pay for proper lithium disposal when they can just bury it in their backyard for free???
A battery with a 10 kWh capacity means it can only store 10 kWh of power. At my rates that is about $1.20 worth of electricity. In order for 10 kWh to last 24 hours the average energy consumption of the house must be 416 watts per hour. If a house drew 10 kwh that battery would in theory provide power for only 1 hour. In the real world, battery capacity is reduced at high discharge rates. The capacity of the inverter is another limitation.
The 2005 vintage GM (Chevy, GMC) hybrid pick-up tracks had a 120V/20A duplex receptacle n the and a 120V/20A duplex receptacle in the bed. GM had thought contractors might like it as they could run power tools on a remote job site. I was giving some thought to one of these trucks for camping, but ended up going the Duramax route.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
10 kWh is enough to carry my 2,000 square foot home for almost two days (~36 hours). How is this only enough for 3 or 5 houses for two hours?
Your house uses more than 10kw? I really have to ask, what the heck are you doing??
Grow lamps, dude!
Use CFLs, then?
Then your shit will be as weak as the light from the CFLs.
Is your mission to save energy or is it to produce potent shit?
This is an issue that I have always had with modern day greenwashing.
I don't buy a light bulb to save energy, I buy it to produce light.
I don't buy a washer to save energy, I buy it to make my clothes as clean as possible.
I don't buy a car to save energy, I buy it to get me from A to B as quickly as (legally) possible.
The list goes on and on. Frankly I'm sick of poor lighting, not-so-clean clothes and slow cars. All that saving energy has done fro me is to make the providers raise their rates. Now I spend as much or more for energy despite using 30% to 40% less than before.
How've gonna store the water energy in your residential? With compressed air you can.
What people misunderstand about hydro power is that it is essentially a water pressure power. You make a huge dam, and it outputs certain water flow at a certain pressure, for a certain time.
If you could make a big, high pressure rated expansion vessel under something heavy, like your house or a large mound of dirt, you could add energy to it, as well as extract it from it, without a need for huge canyons and dams.
Aren't ordinary car lead batteries easy to recycle into new batteries by the manufacturers.. or is there some part which can not be recycled? Chemistry not my strong point.
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I lived with poor power for decades and when I was in high school I used to take the old batteries from gas cars and use them for battery backup. I started by running on 12v car lights, since the break lights have 2 filaments they could also be recycled. I once collected so many of them I was able to get 60 volts to light a neon light that usually worked on 110VAC, but discovered that the DC input was just fine for it. I used to design relay and transistor circuits to turn on lights automatically when the power was off and it was dark and the light had been on before the power failed. So I guess I have been using old car batteries for many years already, this makes perfect sense for a house that can get solar panels, you can be up after the hurricane, maybe with less power, and only if your panels survived the winds intact, which is a big if. We did loose power for 3 weeks after David in '79. It was interesting to see how the electric company had to repair lines across town to be able to start the big power plants, the ones that could only be started with lots of power to warm them up. I still keep an old APC UPS for the day that I can setup a solar panel to do this again. Technology has become much cheaper and better, we can go off the grid with solar and wind, if I can get bandwidth, I want to go live further away from the city where the land is cheap and I can grow my own food. But who knows, leaving the big city is probably not that easy. However with rents and housing prices in Silicon Valley being what they are there is a big incentive to telecommute. Gas or diesel generators are very noisy, used to hate them, they also pollute the air, solar and wind make the idea of living out in the woods more appealing to me, I still need the internet.
This is already a connercial product in places like India for the last 10years! Nothing new or innovative. I created a simple version of this after my 10th grade (20+years back) with readily available items in the local electronic market - which could power a fluracent light for hours in my room. Today this has gone commercial have systems that can run house for 2days or more depending on how much you want to spend. With automatic trigger.
But they are intending it more as an office building or apartment building UPS, for the prototypes they are messing with right now. Though considering the power consumption of some american homes, it might be enough...