Will New Battery Technologies Smash The Old Order? (telegraph.co.uk)

"The world's next energy revolution is probably no more than five or ten years away," reports The Telegraph. "Cutting-edge research into cheap and clean forms of electricity storage is moving so fast that we may never again need to build 20th Century power plants in this country..." Slashdot reader mdsolar quotes their article: The US Energy Department is funding 75 projects developing electricity storage, mobilizing teams of scientists at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the elite Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge labs in a bid for what it calls the "Holy Grail" of energy policy. You can track what they are doing at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). There are plans for hydrogen bromide, or zinc-air batteries, or storage in molten glass, or next-generation flywheels, many claiming "drastic improvements" that can slash storage costs by 80pc to 90pc and reach the magical figure of $100 per kilowatt hour in relatively short order.

"Storage is a huge deal," says Ernest Moniz, the U,S. Energy Secretary and himself a nuclear physicist. He is now confident that the U.S. grid and power system will be completely "decarbonized" by the middle of the century.
One energy consultant predicts the energy storage market will be worth $90 billion in 2025 -- 100 times larger than it is today.

Comments

Unfair to bash nuclear

[Elledan]

The author of the article seems to have an issue with Hinkley Point, which is understandable, but to use it as 'proof' that nuclear is not viable, here's a counter-article, also from the Telegraph:

"Until now, the absurd story of Hinkley has been as vivid an example of the self-deluding power of groupthink as could be imagined. All those ministers swept along by it, such as Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davey, should hang their heads in shame. This culminated in that humiliating spectacle last year (as also noted by Mr Timothy in April) when David Cameron and George Osborne invited the President of China to London, to beg him to lend us billions of pounds towards buying a reactor design so flawed that it could almost certainly never be built.

Nothing should have brought this home more forcefully, as I noted last year, than the contrast between the Hinkley project and the way South Korea is building four nuclear reactors for the United Arab Emirates, to an already proven design and at only a fraction of the cost.

Although the UAE only began talks with Korea in 2009, the year we began negotiating with EDF for its two 1600 megawatt (MW) reactors at Hinkley, the four 1400MW reactors for the UAE (hence their name APR1400s) are already under construction, with the first due onstream next year and the rest to follow by 2020. For £15 billion, they will thus supply 5600MW of electricity, much more than Hinkleyâ(TM)s 3200MW, so grotesquely subsidised that even Decc admits its cost could eventually be £37 billion."

Saved in the Nick of time from the worldâ(TM)s most expensive power station

To then bet on power storage to save solar and wind (both white elephants in their own right), seems rather comical.

My own prediction

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

The US Energy Department is funding 75 projects

That pretty much means that soon we'll see 75 projects failing. Government subsidizing the development of new technologies has the universal effect of distorting competition and making any such projects fail. I've witnessed it countless of times in several European countries, and I have no doubt the same applies to the US, too.

Smash the Old Order?

[PPH]

No. Because, rooftop solar installations aside, the nature of large scale power generation, storage, transmission and delivery requires entities like utility companies. Economies of scale, operation and maintenance staff, etc. So the old, Old Order might be replaced by a new, Old Order. But the power utilities will look pretty much like they do today.

Now, if the renewable energy proponents want to stop looking like a bunch of revolutionary Red Brigades, then perhaps people will take them seriously and adopt some of their ideas. People don't get tied up in ideology when they plug their toaster oven in. In fact I'm certain mdsolar didn't give a second thought to how much additional energy all the data center servers and Internet backbone providers his article would consume before he posted it.