Slashdot Mirror
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.
...and yet all the gains we get from battery improvements will continue to be squandered on yet more and more layers of JavaScript.
Boo.
If I had a penny for every slashdot article about batteries since the late 90s, I'd...
... Government subsidizing the development of new technologies has the universal effect of distorting competition and making any such projects fail. ...
Like the railroads, airplanes, nuclear power, computers, the Internet, GPS, biotech, all of which had heavy US government subsidy in the beginning.
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Depends on who you are rooting for; transmission works great for the entrenched utilities, but batteries work better for off-grid and micro-grid. Long term, batteries are likely to prove better for distributed generation as well.
From an engineering, policy, and economic perspective I prefer distributed generation and emphasis on micro-grids; it works very well for everything but city cores, but those cores should be focusing on district heating and cooling, which might make them take longer to leave carbon and nuclear fuels.
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.
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.
No, the current buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere is a slow-motion apocalypse because it leverages the sun's vast energy output to push the entire planet away from the conditions that humans evolved to live within. No amount of run-of-the-mill poisonous chemicals could touch it. (Not that these chemicals would be released into the environment anyway. Utility storage batteries are very easy to track and regulate.)
Germany has plenty of problems with renewable energy, but they have an excellent national grid (much like the rest of Europe). A problem is that conventional plants cannot always ramp up or down quickly enough to cope with highly variable renewable power, and having a good national grid doesn't always solve that problem. You end up buying extra power at inflated prices, or are forced to dump power and sometimes even pay for the privilege. The grid manages but the economics fail. And that is where power storage comes in: it doesn't just balance the load but also prices.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As many have posted here, his lack of objectivity is annoying and unhelpful.
Thanks.
There are enough reasons to be in doubt about Hinkley Point C.
.
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
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.
Randroids always forget about those and pretend that something like nuclear power, which is incredibly expensive and difficult, would have ever existed without the taxpayer bankrolling it.
The original estimation for the price of an EPR at this size was 3 billion pound, now we are talking about 24,5 billion pound for the construction. The whole cost of Hinkley Point during its operation is estimated at 37 billion pound.
Hinkley Point is the "F-35 of power plants". At least with Theresa May, Britain finally has someone with enough sense to pull the plug.
Exactly. Give me a CANDU 6 plant that's actually reprocessing its "waste" any day of the week and twice on Sunday. It's safe, reliable, and oodles of power coming from a small footprint. But no, instead we'll elect to dump all our R&D into new tech that uses tons of rare Earth elements, uses huge amounts of space, isn't dependable (due to weather), can't handle base load, requires lots of toxic chemicals to produce, has to be replaced every other decade, destroys ecosystems housing endangered species, and basically just fucking sucks.
We have a solution to power requirements that doesn't cause any major issues. Replace all coal, oil, solar, and wind power with CANDU 6 power plants and reprocess the "waste" until it's so low energy that it can't hurt anyone. You'll end up with a relatively tiny amount of low-energy waste and a whole lot of fairly cheap, reliable, safe electrical power. If we made it a national priority, we could go 90% nuclear in 10 years in the US, but we'd have to wipe out a whole bunch of local government NIMBY regulations that do absolutely nothing to make anyone or any thing any safer.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It's mdsolar; they won't submit an article that doesn't bash nuclear power. It could be an article about Python, but it better have something about how nuclear power is bad and dangerous or mdsolar won't submit it.
Still waiting to see if mdsolar will ever respond to the fact that - per kwh generated - nuclear power is safer (causes less human deaths) than solar.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
But that breakthrough delivered. Now there is a gigafactory.
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.
... 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
If the Yellowstone supervolcano blows, it's pretty much game over for most of the human population of the planet. The global cooling and ash deposition would result in worldwide famine for a decade or more. Power production is somewhere near the bottom of the world's concerns in that situation unless and until we build a huge underground cave underneath the entire American south with fertile soil and giant light fixtures.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.... :(.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So you are basically dismissing the Manhattan Project here. Even the investment on The Aerodrome was not totally useless. It ended up producing an engine design way better than anything the Wright Brothers had. A water cooled radial engine with 5x the horsepower and less weight. You are also comparing apples with oranges. The $1000 was cost in parts only while the $50000 was parts and labor.
Strange, TFA is about what is happening in labs.