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Battery Advance Could Lead To a Cleaner Way To Store Energy
sciencehabit writes: With the continuing rise of solar and wind power, the hunt is on for cheap batteries that are able to store large amounts of energy and deliver it when it's dark and the wind is still. Last year researchers reported an advance on one potentially cheap, energy-packing battery. But it required toxic and caustic materials. Now, the same team has revised its chemistry, doing away with the noxious constituents—an advance that could make future such batteries far cheaper and simpler to build.
Which will come first: the widespread commercial availability of this battery technology, or the Year of Linux on the Desktop?
Flow battery stores the energy in electrolytes in external tanks. Thus at some point we could have gas stations dispensing "charged" electrolytes making way for very rapid recharging.
As usual for any battery technology it works in the lab and the product is X+10 years away, where X is the current year.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Flow batteries aren't news, yet the words "flow battery" appear nowhere in the summary. This is an article about a flow battery. If you were expecting something new, this article isn't about that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Some toxic chemicals make better electrolytes than some non-toxic chemicals. If one chemical is 5 times as efficient as another then the tank can be 1/5th the size and get the same storage. Then there is stability to be taken into consideration. You don't want to have to replace fluid or plates in the stack often.
The problem with using dams is that most dams also have rivers coming in and rivers going out. In certain times of the year the reservoir is full and there is no ability to store more water. Other times of the year there might be enough excess electricity to pump most of the outflow water back up. That can lead to wide variations in flow downstream. Very low flow at time when electricity is stored and much higher flow when electricity is being generated. This can cause major fish kills, municipal water issues and irrigation water shortages downstream. A hydo dam already has enough trouble balancing storage, production and outflow without dealing with pumped storage.
Pumped storage works best between two reservoirs but the the number of places where the geography allows enough drop and water availability allows enough water to replace evaporation/seepage are limited.
We have blackouts because cheapskates running the power industry don't want to spend for proper backup and capacity planning with our nuclear/coal/oil/gas infrastructure.
At least in my locality, we don't have blackouts or brownouts, but we are dangerously close to overcapapacity and the electric company would love to build more capacity, but NIMBYs and other energy companies on the Utility Board keep turning down their proposals.
It doesn't matter matter whether you build coal, gas, nuclear, wind or solar, somebody will be there to ensure that you can't build it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Does anyone know do flow batteries hold their charge well?
Depends on what the materials are. But unless the materials are inherently unstrable their separation into different storage tanks results in extremely low self-discharge. Very handy if you want to store utility-peaking levels of energy for months.
A more telling point is whether any leakage through the membrane to the other side degrades or poisons the reaction.
The latter is one reason Vanadium Redox flow batteries are so great. The simple compounds on each side of the membrane are the same (except for the oxidation state of the vanadium, and thus the number of its partners, such as oxygen atoms, it's associated with). As a result, any electrolyte that leaks into the wrong half-cell is quickly converted to that half-cell's electrolyte type. A little energy is lost "charging" it to the right oxidation state, but the battery is not poisoned. Unlike the one in the article.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm not sure about the US, but in the UK it's dark and windless for approximately 10% of the year.
Also, peak generating times don't always coincide with peak usage, so energy storage is necessary to even out the supply. And yes, while nuke plants can't spin up quickly enough to cover unexpected loads, they can be adjusted to fit expected loads (eg, at night to cover solar).
It's pretty much dark across the continental US for at least 8-10 hours per day, isn't it?
The wind may blow, but is it continuous at night everywhere it's dark? Is the wind speed high enough/predictable enough to totally offset the loss of 100% of solar capacity in aggregate?
In these places you have MORE wind at night, can you reliably transmit power to places that might have less wind at night, or at least that night?
Whatever happened to the sun never sets over Great Britain ? XKCD says it still doesn't...
Yes, yes I know that Great Britain and the UK are not exactly the same thing (but only somebody from England can possibly keep up with what all the various things are or how they do and do not relate and I live in a commonwealth former British colony !) but it does underline what I've said all along, there are absolutely no problems with renewables that we can't solve with international trade.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
In the UK no nuke plants load-follow, AFAIK, even though Sizewell B at least theoretically can.
Even in France I think that there is only a mean of ~25% load-following available (more for plants with more-recently-loaded fuel).
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
You underestimate the value of boring solutions. There's always this hope that high tech is going to save us but if you want to reduce the carbon footprint, the best place to start would probably be to isolate the house as much as possible and get a high yield gas furnace. And get a small low power car instead of a big one. These are boring low tech solutions but they make a large difference. It's hard to find hightech solutions with the same impact.
Electric cars right now are in an odd place - the initial capital outlay is way beyond my budget but the monthly cost over their lifetime so enormously cheaper (both in fuel and maintenance costs) that if I could get one today I would be significantly wealthier in my monthly budget. Of course if I get it on credit the payments would probably dwarf the difference.
The thing is though - that initial high capital outlay is primarily a factor of production scales rather than cost of materials - the potential cost at which they could be made is at least an order of magnitude cheaper.
Right now - a Tessla Model S would cost me around R1.2 million - but a huge chunk of that is the cost of custom shipping an import, so as soon as they are actually for sale here by a large scale importer, you cut that at least in half. That puts it on par with a new upper-end BMW. Give it a couple of years to ramp up production I strongly suspect I'll be able to get a Tessla-like car for the same amount I paid for my 6-year old A3, which I've added 5 good years to since then.
At the point, there is no sane reason to buy a fossil-fuel car, it simply cannot compete.
Now granted, I despise long-distance driving and avoid it like the plague, anything over 100km and I prefer to fly - which for anything under 4 people is cheaper anyway, so I'm not factoring that in - my daily commute is 99% of my driving needs, and electrical would be so much more ideal for that purpose. For the other 0.1% - I can hire a car fit for that purpose.
The problem with your assessment is, I'm also 99% of the world's drivers.
And don't come with America has long roads and cities far appart... I live in Africa dude, you aint seen nothing yet.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The saying is that the sun never sets over the British Empire, which was a lot bigger than the UK.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well see, that's the problem with the future, it never gets here.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I never see flywheels discussed in this context. I don't understand why not, though.
No need for exotic compounds, sky-high efficiency. They don't have to be replaced every three years.
There must be a reason people keep dismissing them out of hand...does here anyone know what the reason is?
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?