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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.
...and yet all the gains we get from battery improvements will continue to be squandered on yet more and more layers of JavaScript.
Boo.
... 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...
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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.
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 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.
It's about as hot as it's been since humans arrived right now, and it's going to get much hotter. Not in evolutionary timescales, but within a couple of generations.
Evolution would probably work in the long run, but don't forget that sometimes evolution works by wiping out almost every member of a given species leaving only a tiny handful of "fit" survivors. That hardly seems like a better choice than just switching our primary energy sources ASAP.
Actually, quite a few civilizations have simply collapsed when faced with changing climate. What makes you think one that already has trouble keeping infrastructure running isn't going to join them?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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."