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

Its a continuation

[Mr D from 63]

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.

Re:Its a continuation

[fustakrakich]

*The world's next energy revolution is always more than five or ten years away.*

How far "Beyond 2000" was all that stuff supposed to be?

Tomorrow
Tomorrow
I love you, tomorrow
You're always a day awaaaaaay...

Re:Its a continuation

[dinfinity]

I admit to having little knowledge about them, but I think flow batteries have great potential.

The numbers are probably exaggerated, but these guys claim a range of 1000km in a car with a total of 350 liters of fluid storage. That would mean an energy density of roughly 1/7th of gasoline. That isn't stellar, but it's also far from 'useless crap'-territory. It would be fine for at least industrial energy storage (from renewable sources), it seems.

Let me reiterate this, though: I'm far from an expert on these things.

Re:Its a continuation

[rbrander]

Something can look incremental but actually be pretty dramatic. We're kind of spoiled by Moore's Law having a doubling time of just a few years.

Increases in battery life have been "incremental" but also exponential - the increase has been something like 7% per year on the average, a ten-year doubling. And of course, we ate most of it with higher power consumption in most battery-powered devices: the phones, tablets and laptops. But look at how long something simpler like an iPod lasts now compared to 2001 and it's dramatic.

Electric cars are going get much more serious after one more doubling, and while the car companies would pay billions to have it happen overnight, it's still going to happen in 10 years even with the "incremental" progress.

Re:Its a continuation

[David_Hart]

Something can look incremental but actually be pretty dramatic. We're kind of spoiled by Moore's Law having a doubling time of just a few years.

Increases in battery life have been "incremental" but also exponential - the increase has been something like 7% per year on the average, a ten-year doubling. And of course, we ate most of it with higher power consumption in most battery-powered devices: the phones, tablets and laptops. But look at how long something simpler like an iPod lasts now compared to 2001 and it's dramatic.

Electric cars are going get much more serious after one more doubling, and while the car companies would pay billions to have it happen overnight, it's still going to happen in 10 years even with the "incremental" progress.

The majority of improvement of battery life in electronic devices have been due to energy efficient circuit designs, power management (being able to put components to sleep), and shrinking of electronics (i.e. more room for a bigger battery in the same case).

Still...

[mr_jrt]

...and yet all the gains we get from battery improvements will continue to be squandered on yet more and more layers of JavaScript.

Re:My own prediction

[Arnold Reinhold]

... 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.

Haves / Have nots?

[rsilvergun]

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...

Hello "EditorDavid"; please stop quoting "mdsolar"

[Bearhouse]

As many have posted here, his lack of objectivity is annoying and unhelpful.
Thanks.

If it sticks it to the utiities I am in.

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:Unfair to bash nuclear

[Loki_1929]

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.