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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.
"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.
Research into battery storage has been intense for 20 years. We've had promises of drastic improvements, and we have seen some significant improvements. Yes, R&D has picked up even more but improvements are more likely to be incremental than breakthrough.
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.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
...and yet all the gains we get from battery improvements will continue to be squandered on yet more and more layers of JavaScript.
Boo.
No.
Umm, no, that's not a magical figure by itself. I want to see below a penny per (kilowatt hour * full discharge cycles).
Transmission seems to solve almost all the problem with getting renewable energy to match demand. https://news.slashdot.org/stor... Batteries for transportation seem like an automatic big market, but the stationary storage market may not larger than retired car batteries can cover.
If I had a penny for every slashdot article about batteries since the late 90s, I'd...
Many of the advanced battery technologies will have toxic chemicals. With huge production volumes, there's going to be a lot of poisonous waste materials. I suspect the environmental damage of new batteries is going to make the claimed damage of carbon seem like happy-fun-day.
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Slashdot's Unicode support is to crappy that even the percent sign can't appear in articles. Sad.
a few of those projects seem to be canceled already. also the solutions proposed sound lame. i mean who's really going to use molten glass to store power. once you can increase the efficiency of the battery in my phone i'll be impressed otherwise keep working on fusion.
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.
-SR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Solaren said they'd have it working by 2016. Well, they have four months left, I suppose.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's kind of interesting the games we play with our own heads and, at a national level, with propagandizing ourselves to flee from the monster in the room without actually looking at it.
If we can find a way to store solar energy it is going to help, doubtless -- but not NEAR enough. The real problem is not "climate change" but oil, water, and mineral DEPLETION. We're rapidly nearing the point where the energy to extract more fossil fuel will exceed that from the additional fossil fuel. That is the monster nobody wants to talk about -- and God knows our "leaders" don't want to face. I'm not saying global warming isn't an issue, but it's way, way, way, down the list versus actually running out of oil...to purify and pump the water, to fuel the furnaces to smelt the metal, to run the mining equipment, to extract the critical minerals, to fuel the Habler process, to create the fertilizer, to make the plastics, to make the herbicides and pesticides, to grow the fuel. It takes TEN calories of oil to bring one calorie of food to the table. You are not going to run anything remotely resembling today's consumer driven, leaving-on-a-jet-plane, cheap and fast food economy with solar energy. Think about it and do some basic math. And consider that we're being sold a dream...that is propaganda. And oh how we want to believe rather than look at the elephant in the room.
We've been reading about such storage breakthroughs, along with "dramatic" improvements in solar technology, for something like 50 years now. We've been reading about energy from nuclear FUSION for sixty years -- and the two story lines seem to both be filled with an awful lot of Hopey, urging us to join hands and sing Kumbaya a little louder while the darkness gets a little closer.
When do we actually turn to reducing energy consumption, reducing importing from China, fighting fewer wars, importing fewer foreign workers, and actually get down to the business of "think global act local"? Just wondering. Hope is not a strategy.
vai dar teu cuzinho pro teu pai que passa tua vontade de gritar comigo sua retardade mental.
The US Drumpf Department is funding 75 projects developing drumpficity storage, mobilizing teams of drumpfs at Hardrumpf, DIT, Drumpford, and the elite Lawrence Livedrumpf and Oak Drumpf labs in a bid for what it calls the "Holy Drumpf" of drumpf policy. You can track what they are doing at the Advanced Drumpf Projects Agency-Energy (ADPA-E). There are plans for hydrogen brodrumpf, or drumpf-air batteries, or storage in molten drumpf, or next-generation drumpfwheels, many claiming "drastic improvements" that can slash storage costs by 80pc to 90pc and reach the magical figure of $100 per kilodrumpf hour in relatively short order.
"Storage is a huge deal," says Ernest Mondrumpf, the U,S. Drumpf Secretary and himself a nuclear drumpfysicist. He is now confident that the U.S. grid and power system will be completely "dedrumpfonized" by the middle of the century.
This sounds like typical government bullshit, the type that some bureaucrat spouts to get or keep funding for his agency. You can be sure of one thing though, if something ever does come of government financed research it won't be the public that reaps the rewards. Some corporation will swoop in, patent whatever it is that the people paid to invent and then sell it back to us at an eye watering markup. Private profits and public loses, same shit different day.
Right around the corner again? Just like we're told every few years... no thanks. Articles full of progressive unicorn farts exist just to keep bad writers from starving.
Think of the children of coal miners, you insensitive clods!
That's the only thing that worries me. The current system requires lots and lots of public infrastructure. That keeps prices down for the poor (economies of scale and whatnot). That's not gonna last If even the upper middle class doesn't want/need that infrastructure. The folks most able to pay for it aren't going to want to. They won't be using it. But it'll mean going back to the dark ages for the lower class...
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$100 per kilowatt hour is about what the ordinary car lead-acid battery costs.
Good luck with that until you solve Zinc's whiskering problem. Powergenix thought they had it solved with Nickel-Zinc batteries. Nope. 1.6V 2300 mAh is nice but not when you get less than 150 charge cycles due to whiskering.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Same size as a car battery, is about $105.
225Ah x 6v = 1.35kwh.
$105/1.35kwh = $0.78/kwh
As many have posted here, his lack of objectivity is annoying and unhelpful.
Thanks.
Except that mdsolar is not a /. reader, he is a /. propagandist for a specific industry.
I want my nuclear powered car, a nuclear powered house and a nuclear powered business. I want nuclear and/or thermonuclear. I want a tiny nuclear reactor that I can buy and use gormy own purposes regardless of any government or any lobby group and of any popular sentiment and perception.
You can't handle the truth.
and personal
Much cheaper and safer than a tiny nuclear reactor, and about to go into production: http://brilliantlightpower.com...
...and wait for technology to catch up. At some point cost efficient storage has the capability, as TFA notes, to dramatically alter the utility and (especially) the cost-efficiency of intermittent renewable sources. The other critical point is energy transportation -- moving e.g. PV solar energy from Arizona or Texas to Maine without dropping half of it along the way. In the meantime, can we stop panicking and wasting huge amounts of money IMPLEMENTING immature technologies while they are -- immature?
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
.
I remember when nuclear power was touted as being "too cheap to meter." No one ever talked about its by-products.
to push the entire planet away from the conditions that humans evolved to live within
Wow, in fell fell swoop you not only show that you know zero abut the history of the Earth's climate, but also that you actually believe evolution works exactly the opposite of the way it really does!
Humans evolved over time to work within whatever climate they were given which changed dramatically over time - historically it's already been way warmer than it will be from the latest round of climate change, and vastly colder as well (which it will be again someday, not a cycle we can stop). They did not evolve through thousands of years just to mesh with the environment we have today (and which humans evolved "correctly" then, given that some live in very warm climates and some in very cold?), which is itself nothing but a transitory state that was never going to last.
So even if it gets warmer humans will do what they always have done - adapt co conditions as the change.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We're rapidly nearing the point where the energy to extract more fossil fuel will exceed that from the additional fossil fuel.
People have been saying that for something like 50 years... and it's less true than ever before. New technologies like Fracking always come along to keep cost of extraction cheap. The whole reason the price of oil has tanked is exactly because it's so cheap to use fracking to fossil fuels...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's the same place we were 5-10 years ago. Any improvement in battery technology is far more likely to be incremental than revolutionary. Even when lithium based batteries became mainstream about 12-14 years ago it was an incremental improvement and nothing anywhere close to an order of magnitude or more which would place thier energy density more on par with chemical fuel sources.
I live in a medium density urban area, I want to go off grid. Not out of some prepper issue, nor are my present rates particularly abusive. I just hate utilities. I hate the people who run them. I hate the regulators who regulate them. I hate that they look at my house and see a guaranteed revenue stream. I want to cut them off and I will pay extra to do so.
I will even inconvenience myself to do so. I would happily rewire my house so that the LED lighting isn't converting from 110 but from something the batteries were happier providing. I would coat the roof in solar cells, and I would buy a little generator to fill in any gaps. The same with things like my fridge or other power grabbers, they could be 24v or even 12v if needed.
Here is my dream day. The utility goes to the government and demands that regardless of my being hooked up or not that I still have to pay them for the lines that run past my house, and the regulator says, "NOPE".
To me it boils down to the utilities should be a public good like roads, and schools. Not for profit should be the rule. Yet I see board members at these utilities making huge multiples of the average person's salary, let alone the heads of the companies, or the investors.
To have his lame submissions accepted this often, mdsolar must have sucked every dick on Slashdot's staff.
However, I have seen so many enthusiastic announcements concerning all sorts of breakthroughs just around corner, which never were heard of ever since, that I will cautious and skeptical until given solid reason to feel otherwise.
and you've got enough energy to time travel.
posed as question.. so "NOO we want the NEW ORDER"
what about the world?
Yeah, the NEW WORLD ORDER!
FBI SLASHDOT again.
Editors, please stop accepting submissions from mdsolar. The articles are always biased and filled with unscientific drivel. Frankly, they're garbage. But they align with mdsolar's agenda of pushing solar and bashing nuclear, so they keep getting submitted.
Please stop accepting their submissions. It's junk that reduces the credibility and the level of discussion for the site as a whole.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Brain activity decline observed at 600 ppm, 1000 ppm atmospheric CO2.
Satish U.; Mendell M. J.; Shekhar K.; Hotchi T.; Sullivan D.; Streufert S.; Fisk W.J. (2012). "Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance" (PDF). Environmental Health Perspectives. 120 (12).
Joseph G. Allen; Piers MacNaughton; Usha Satish; Suresh Santanam; Jose Vallarino; John D. Spengler1Satish U. (2016). "Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments". Environmental Health Perspectives. 124 (6).
Seriously, the idea that storage will solve the need for base-load energy is just amazing to me. The reason is that MOST of the AE that is being pushed is from the sun and easily blocked. Many will claim no, but any number of the major volcanos on the west coast, can block 5-20% of our sunlight. That will bring solar AND WIND down quickly. This issue does not include the coming ability to control weather and then force clouds to block the sun elsewhere.
As such, we NEED clean base-load power. Geo-thermal is great, but limited. H2O is Limited in America. As such, we need Nuclear power. Everybody wants Fusion, but we also need to clean up our current nuke waste. The best way is to build gen 4 reactors and then burn up the majority of that waste.
And yet, ppl like mdsolar will continue to fight against Nukes, and push an AE ONLY future, even though it can not solve the CO2 problem in time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"not only show that you know zero abut the history of the Earth's climate"
An attack on the history of Earth's climate, i.e. what exactly shows how bad global warning is.
Here is your "adapt".
Just like I've been writing about clean alternatives for the past 20 years -- as AC, I'm not that important -- only to be mocked by those saying coal will always be cheaper... and now this!
The same thing will happen to Linux: lot' and lots of mockery and that "year of Linux" thing until articles come up in succession about countries adopting Linux en masse and everybody saying "of course, Linux is better, everyone knows that".
And I'll just look like an idiot for spending a large slice of my life trying to prove exactly that, not being able to persuade anyone and then have it thrown back at me like it's obvious.
Good thing that those guys who bet there wasn't man-made global warming lost their money. It's only fair they pay for being idiots on purpose. If only we could get the same with solar energy and Linux...
As someone that has worked in the battery industry my whole life -- no - it is just the usual corporate welfare. The improvements are very small 1% and expensive.
Lithium was a big deal - moving from 2 electrons to 3 - the other stuff is not really important - mostly noise - venture vulture stuff to get investors money.
What is always missing is the real cost of battery power. A battery has a cycle life - take that number times the capacity of the battery and you get the total amount of power the batter will deliver. With that you can get a cost per kWh .. assuming the electricity to charge is free (it is not) - it is still very very expensive power.
Now - in a electric hand drill - I am quite willing to pay the high price for that power - but not for running air-conditioners or powering a car.
New technologies like Fracking always come along to keep cost of extraction cheap.
Fracking has been done commercially since the 1950s so calling it a new technology is not really accurate. There have been some advancements in fracking but what really has made it viable is the worldwide price of oil going north of about $40/barrel. It's more expensive than drilling into big reservoirs of oil like in Saudi Arabia but the technique is nothing new. It's just become economical in the last 20 years as the price of oil has intersected with the cost of fracking.
The whole reason the price of oil has tanked is exactly because it's so cheap to use fracking to fossil fuels...
The reason the price has gone down is because there is a temporary oversupply. Fracking is a part of that but a bigger part is countries like Saudi Arabia intentionally pumping out more oil than demand dictates. Too much supply + not enough demand = low prices. It's a mostly a short term supply and demand thing rather something inherent to the cost of pumping. We had the price 2-3X what it is today not long ago for similar reasons. I expect we'll see prices like that again at some point, though not for a few years probably. Good time to buy oil/gas stocks if you're comfortable owning evil companies.
... for the time being. It's cost that's currently the main hindrance. And that is being squished big time as we speak, or so a notable amount of credible experts say.
An modern IC engine has north of 200 moving Parts, required gearbox not counted. A modern electric Car engine has 18 moving Parts and needs no gearbox.
Once battery prices have dropped beyond a certain threshhold the entire global Auto industry will Flip so fast it will make our heads spin. This is bound to happen in the next 5 years, probably in the next 3, once battery prices are low enough.
Gasoline in Personal Transport is on the way out, that's pretty much a given. And the advancements in cars will feel like the transition from steam to oil back in the day.
Or even more significant.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The new technology is wonderful. And some changes are painful. But we still completely fail to deal with consequences of the rapid changes we are seeing. For example we know coal will be shut down. That means that big coal will have no money to repair damaged areas that are unsafe due to pollution. So is anyone doing anything to force big coal to have cash reserves for future clean-ups? Then we have the displaced workers in the coal industry who often live in areas where no other employment options exist. We simply can not abandon those workers and destroy the economy of states like W. Va..
technologies are usually "smashed" by newer technologies.
usually mobile homes or manufactured homes but sometimes ones they build or maintain themselves (being blue collar). The houses might be shabby and falling apart, but they own them. In America home ownership is the only way to get ahead if you're not already rich. You lock in a rate (usually a reasonable one) for your housing costs. Rent goes up anywhere from 4-8% a year (they 8% spikes are recent and brought on by a lack of new building because we're running out of land that was developed before we stopped infrastructure spending). My worry is the poor (especially the Working Poor) are either going to be completely shut out of home ownership and trapped in the cycle of increasing rents. Moreso when a $50,000 solar battery system is part of the minimum barrier for entry on a home.
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if you're relying on the savings from home ownership to make up for your stagnant wages and fund your kid's future than adding a $50k mortgage on top of it just so you can have electricity is going to hurt. A lot. If you don't already own a home that $50k is going to put a mortgage out of reach and put you in a exploitative position in relation to landlords who can.... :(.
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Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
What made fracking viable was the advent of directional drilling.
If oil is at around $36/barrel. Over 50% of the oil production in the US comes from fracking these days. If oil prices fall below $30 for a sustained period then fracking producers cannot remain in business. Right now the OPEC countries are pumping a lot of oil intentionally to keep prices low and put a squeeze on fracking producers and can do so because of their cost advantage. But this strategy cannot be sustained indefinitely since their oil reserves are finite and the oil that is more expensive to extract is still in the ground. Furthermore most of the OPEC countries set their federal budgets based on oil prices higher than they currently are so there will be political pressure to ease off on pumping sooner rather than later.
The chemistry is "done" so there will likely NOT be orders of magnitude improvements.
The slack is in the construction/manufacturing techniques at this point.
Do you wonder about how long gas will last and claim it a catastrophe that it goes so quickly? Do you worry that your car's body, made of steel, needs to be "properly disposed" of?
Look at the comments on that article and about that article - it's utter fucking bullshit derived from the moonshine fiction guy. The citation is a fucking newsletter at oak ridge, circulation under a hundred. It's a lazy example of reporting by press release and Scientific American got a lot of flak for that article.