8 ms·

An overhaul of the battery will jump-start a shift to renewable energy

52 points by dctoedt 13y ago

Qworg 13y ago
Batteries are really hard. The combination of electrochemical systems, with mechanical requirements make the tradeoffs subtle and the gains sometimes elusive. Ex: We tested some new SLA(Sealed Lead Acid) batteries that claimed 20% improvement. They provided very close to that number. But they were totally unacceptable for us - the plates were too fragile and were breaking/shorting in transit.
- omegant 13y ago
  It's not possible to physically encapsulate the plates with some plastic grid to make them more resistant? What kind of application are you doing?
  - Qworg 13y ago
    Riding Lawnmowers. And no, that would obviate the benefits of their new technology.
ballard 13y ago
This is a good driver for tech. It makes sense for everyone to have their own battery at home to be like a google server ups... Distributed is far more reliable than centralized. Heck the power grid wouldn't even have to be 24/7 anymore if it could handle both the peak current and deliver enough average power.
- Sanddancer 13y ago
  Electricity is an area where centralized is much more efficient and reliable, due to the economies of scale when dealing with larger load infrastructures. However, batteries close to the end point could definitely a useful thing, because the grid does work better when there is a constant load. It's easier to plan for both day-to-day activities, and if a plant does need to go down for emergency maintenance.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    It's not just economies of scale, but laws of large numbers. Existing grids have benefited from the fact that though any given individual demand rate might vary widely, averaged over a large number of consumers, trends are far more predictable. On the generating side this hasn't typically been as much of an issue, with highly reliable and dispatchable generating plants. With intermittent renewable/sustainable sources, the fact that local variations in solar or wind capacity can be mitigate by transmitting surpluses, or importing necessary capacity, also helps. In an advanced grid with attached storage, again, large-number averaging should, with effective management, help balance supply and demand. Trying to do this at the scale of individual households means far more variability which must be dealt with on he immediate premises. This is among the reasons I strongly doubt that visions of a "gridless future" will emerge, at least so long as there's not widespread collapse of all social and technical infrastructure.
    - ballard 13y ago
      Large battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. It would be an adjunct at most, definitely not a replacement because it would be temporary storage. Further, any new tech never replaces the previous completely (just look at DC-power grid for elevators in SF. Records, 8-tracks still exist in a post CD world.)
    - ballard 13y ago
      Large battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. That might reduce costs and wear/tear on infrastructure.
    - ballard 13y ago
      Distributed battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. That might reduce costs and wear/tear on infrastructure.
    - ballard 13y ago
      Distributed battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. That might reduce costs and wear/tear on infrastructure.
spikels 13y ago
It is generally hard to take James Fallows' opinions seriously. He is a great writer but always seems to be of the wrong side of history. For example back in the late 1980s he led the "The Japanese are Taking Over the World" scare just before Japan went into a multi-decade decline[1]. The fact that he is now worried about China puts my mind at ease. He is much more credible when he simply quotes Stephen Chu. That much better batteries would change the world is not controversial. Actually making it happen is the tricky bit. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/89may/fallows.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/89may/fallows.h...
- dctoedt 13y ago
  > It is generally hard to take James Fallows' opinions seriously. To me it's exactly the opposite. Fallows isn't infallible, but his opinions are always measured and carefully-considered. For probably 30 years now I've been interested in what he's had to say about any variety of issues (except his interest in beer, which strikes me as perhaps an affectation calculated to present an Everyman image). For example, Fallows moved to Japan in the 1980s, living and working there for several years if memory serves. His view on Japan's economic future was extremely widely held back then; many, many smart people have scratched their heads since then, wondering why things didn't go as predicted. (Who'd have thought it: History not unfolding as predicted; now there's something new, eh?) As to Fallows's views on China, he has been a voice of moderation --- again in part because he moved there to live and work for a few years.
  - brc 13y ago
    Mutant Keynesian policy idiocy coupled with demographic decline is why things didn't go as predicted.
    - dctoedt 13y ago
      Hindsight is always so much easier to get right than foresight.
- matthewmcg 13y ago
stoev 13y ago
This article is disappointing - the first two thirds explain why we need better batteries, as if it was not already painstakingly obvious, and then the last bit mentions three technologies without actually saying much about any of them.
dredmorbius 13y ago
I'm not particularly convinced by this story. It reminds me of a similarly unconvincing piece by Charles Mann a few months back on the prospect of seafloor methane hydrate mining. Battery science is hard, capacities are limited by chemistry, and the easy-to-find electrolytes (also the cheapest and most abundant) are fairly well known. Barring breakthroughs in allotropes (such as graphene, everyone's current favorite carbon molecule), novel inorganic molecules, or biotech-derived approaches, I suspect chemistry doesn't have a whole lot extra to give us. Even reasonably abundant minerals such as lithium portent supply crunches when scaled to, say, a century or more worth of battery EV production (though Elon Musk speaks confidently of addressing this via recycling -- though no recycling process is 100% efficient). The more interesting approaches I've seen for grid-scale battery storage involve possibly less efficient, and certainly less convenient, but cheap and highly abundant materials such as the molten salt or liquid metal (see Donald Sadoway's work) concepts. The chemistry works, the materials abundance is there. I've played with some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggesting that for electrical energy storage, very large scale thermal storage, say enough for two weeks of supply at the scale of the US, is plausible. The heat-substrate facility would be approximately the size of an existing very large petroleum storage tank farm (these exist in Oklahoma at the terminus of several oil pipelines). See: http://redd.it/1viied http://redd.it/1viied But the really useful forms of energy storage humans have turned to are long-chain hydrocarbons, whether created recently in nature as olive oil, beeswax, tallow, or other biogenic oils, or in the form of petroleum, and to a lesser extent gas and coal. The prospect of the US Naval Research Lab's electricity-to-fuel project utilizing seawater as a source of both hydrogen and CO2 to feed a Fischer-Tropsch synthesis process strikes me as among the most promising prospects I've read in a long time. It requires an external energy supply (the Navy proposes existing nuclear reactors aboard aircraft carriers, or renewable energy in the form of ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC). Proposed at a scale of 100,000 gallons of aviation fuel (essentially kerosene or diesel) daily, fed by 240MW of electrical energy (roughly the scale of a carrier's reactors), at a cost of $3-$6 per gallon of fuel produced, it's more expensive than present fossil fuel energy sources, but, when tied to a renewable energy source, offers the prospect of a constant-cost liquid fuel source effectively forever. It also seems to me that scaling this to roughly national levels of production is at least plausible. The NRL's proposal is 1/8400th of present US petroleum consumption, but scaling up costs and plant estimates, $8 trillion in capital, 2 TWe in energy, and a total of 10 m x 4.5 km x 4.5 km processing facility volume, would replace the 20 million barrels of oil presently consumed daily in the US. This compares against some $4 trillion in capital expenditures on new conventional petroleum exploration from 2005 - 2012 with a net reduction in oil supply of 2 million barrels/day.[1] And yes, the supplied electrical energy is an additional cost: this won't be cheap. But it's forever. Round-trip efficiency isn't great: no better than the 60% efficiency of hydrogen electrolysis, with additional energy input requirements for CO2 extraction and a lot of seawater handling (8.8 billion liters/day for the Navy's proposal, 74 trillion at national scale). But once produced, oil doesn't suffer from the relatively rapid storage losses of most alternatives: a few percent per hour or day for many battery, thermal, or kinetic flywheel systems. If used for electrical generation there's another 30% generating loss experienced, for a maximum net efficiency of 42%, but if used to provide liquid fuels to critical uses, this could well prove highly attractive -- there are somethings it's really hard to substitute for. The process should also be carbon neutral, though it does involve a net transfer from present ocean to present atmospheric carbon reservoirs. I discuss this more here: http://redd.it/22k71x http://redd.it/22k71x It's not that I don't expect some improvement in battery technology, but there's a 5x advantage in energy storage densities (MJ/kg) between the best present battery storage technologies (lithium-air) and liquid hydrocarbons. That's closer to 25x for LiON vs. oil[2]. While incremental efficiency improvements (and better energy scavenging through, say pervasive PV surfaces) might be useful for electronics and their Moore's Law dynamics, for devices operating in the physical world and its constraints, batteries will continue to be at a disadvantage in cost, capacity, complexity, and/or abundance. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Steven Kopits presentation, February, 2014. http://energypolicy.columbia.edu/events-calendar/global-oil-market-forecasting-main-approaches-key-drivers http://energypolicy.columbia.edu/events-calendar/global-oil-... Also discussed and analyzed by Gail Tverberg: http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/03/steven-kopits-oil-the-economy-and-policy/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/03/steven-kopits-oil-the-e... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
7952 13y ago
If a large proportion of energy comes from storage wouldn't that eliminate or reduce the need for off peak pricing? In such a system could you actually bid on overcapacity? So that the initially generated energy would be sold to the highest bidder who would store or use the energy.
- zizee 13y ago
  People are doing just that to take advantage of off peak pricing: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-100-000-battery-that-could-help-hotels-save-bundles-of-money/281194/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-10...

52 points by dctoedt 13y ago

Qworg 13y ago

Batteries are really hard. The combination of electrochemical systems, with mechanical requirements make the tradeoffs subtle and the gains sometimes elusive. Ex: We tested some new SLA(Sealed Lead Acid) batteries that claimed 20% improvement. They provided very close to that number. But they were totally unacceptable for us - the plates were too fragile and were breaking/shorting in transit.

omegant 13y ago
It's not possible to physically encapsulate the plates with some plastic grid to make them more resistant? What kind of application are you doing?
- Qworg 13y ago
  Riding Lawnmowers. And no, that would obviate the benefits of their new technology.

ballard 13y ago

This is a good driver for tech. It makes sense for everyone to have their own battery at home to be like a google server ups... Distributed is far more reliable than centralized. Heck the power grid wouldn't even have to be 24/7 anymore if it could handle both the peak current and deliver enough average power.

Sanddancer 13y ago
Electricity is an area where centralized is much more efficient and reliable, due to the economies of scale when dealing with larger load infrastructures. However, batteries close to the end point could definitely a useful thing, because the grid does work better when there is a constant load. It's easier to plan for both day-to-day activities, and if a plant does need to go down for emergency maintenance.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  It's not just economies of scale, but laws of large numbers. Existing grids have benefited from the fact that though any given individual demand rate might vary widely, averaged over a large number of consumers, trends are far more predictable. On the generating side this hasn't typically been as much of an issue, with highly reliable and dispatchable generating plants. With intermittent renewable/sustainable sources, the fact that local variations in solar or wind capacity can be mitigate by transmitting surpluses, or importing necessary capacity, also helps. In an advanced grid with attached storage, again, large-number averaging should, with effective management, help balance supply and demand. Trying to do this at the scale of individual households means far more variability which must be dealt with on he immediate premises. This is among the reasons I strongly doubt that visions of a "gridless future" will emerge, at least so long as there's not widespread collapse of all social and technical infrastructure.
  - ballard 13y ago
    Large battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. It would be an adjunct at most, definitely not a replacement because it would be temporary storage. Further, any new tech never replaces the previous completely (just look at DC-power grid for elevators in SF. Records, 8-tracks still exist in a post CD world.)
  - ballard 13y ago
    Large battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. That might reduce costs and wear/tear on infrastructure.
  - ballard 13y ago
    Distributed battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. That might reduce costs and wear/tear on infrastructure.
  - ballard 13y ago
    Distributed battery banks would allow demand to "debounced" (smoothed) such that load could be much flatter and more predictable. That might reduce costs and wear/tear on infrastructure.

spikels 13y ago

It is generally hard to take James Fallows' opinions seriously. He is a great writer but always seems to be of the wrong side of history. For example back in the late 1980s he led the "The Japanese are Taking Over the World" scare just before Japan went into a multi-decade decline[1]. The fact that he is now worried about China puts my mind at ease. He is much more credible when he simply quotes Stephen Chu. That much better batteries would change the world is not controversial. Actually making it happen is the tricky bit. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/89may/fallows.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/89may/fallows.h...

dctoedt 13y ago
> It is generally hard to take James Fallows' opinions seriously. To me it's exactly the opposite. Fallows isn't infallible, but his opinions are always measured and carefully-considered. For probably 30 years now I've been interested in what he's had to say about any variety of issues (except his interest in beer, which strikes me as perhaps an affectation calculated to present an Everyman image). For example, Fallows moved to Japan in the 1980s, living and working there for several years if memory serves. His view on Japan's economic future was extremely widely held back then; many, many smart people have scratched their heads since then, wondering why things didn't go as predicted. (Who'd have thought it: History not unfolding as predicted; now there's something new, eh?) As to Fallows's views on China, he has been a voice of moderation --- again in part because he moved there to live and work for a few years.
- brc 13y ago
  Mutant Keynesian policy idiocy coupled with demographic decline is why things didn't go as predicted.
  - dctoedt 13y ago
    Hindsight is always so much easier to get right than foresight.
matthewmcg 13y ago

stoev 13y ago

This article is disappointing - the first two thirds explain why we need better batteries, as if it was not already painstakingly obvious, and then the last bit mentions three technologies without actually saying much about any of them.

dredmorbius 13y ago

I'm not particularly convinced by this story. It reminds me of a similarly unconvincing piece by Charles Mann a few months back on the prospect of seafloor methane hydrate mining. Battery science is hard, capacities are limited by chemistry, and the easy-to-find electrolytes (also the cheapest and most abundant) are fairly well known. Barring breakthroughs in allotropes (such as graphene, everyone's current favorite carbon molecule), novel inorganic molecules, or biotech-derived approaches, I suspect chemistry doesn't have a whole lot extra to give us. Even reasonably abundant minerals such as lithium portent supply crunches when scaled to, say, a century or more worth of battery EV production (though Elon Musk speaks confidently of addressing this via recycling -- though no recycling process is 100% efficient). The more interesting approaches I've seen for grid-scale battery storage involve possibly less efficient, and certainly less convenient, but cheap and highly abundant materials such as the molten salt or liquid metal (see Donald Sadoway's work) concepts. The chemistry works, the materials abundance is there. I've played with some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggesting that for electrical energy storage, very large scale thermal storage, say enough for two weeks of supply at the scale of the US, is plausible. The heat-substrate facility would be approximately the size of an existing very large petroleum storage tank farm (these exist in Oklahoma at the terminus of several oil pipelines). See: http://redd.it/1viied http://redd.it/1viied But the really useful forms of energy storage humans have turned to are long-chain hydrocarbons, whether created recently in nature as olive oil, beeswax, tallow, or other biogenic oils, or in the form of petroleum, and to a lesser extent gas and coal. The prospect of the US Naval Research Lab's electricity-to-fuel project utilizing seawater as a source of both hydrogen and CO2 to feed a Fischer-Tropsch synthesis process strikes me as among the most promising prospects I've read in a long time. It requires an external energy supply (the Navy proposes existing nuclear reactors aboard aircraft carriers, or renewable energy in the form of ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC). Proposed at a scale of 100,000 gallons of aviation fuel (essentially kerosene or diesel) daily, fed by 240MW of electrical energy (roughly the scale of a carrier's reactors), at a cost of $3-$6 per gallon of fuel produced, it's more expensive than present fossil fuel energy sources, but, when tied to a renewable energy source, offers the prospect of a constant-cost liquid fuel source effectively forever. It also seems to me that scaling this to roughly national levels of production is at least plausible. The NRL's proposal is 1/8400th of present US petroleum consumption, but scaling up costs and plant estimates, $8 trillion in capital, 2 TWe in energy, and a total of 10 m x 4.5 km x 4.5 km processing facility volume, would replace the 20 million barrels of oil presently consumed daily in the US. This compares against some $4 trillion in capital expenditures on new conventional petroleum exploration from 2005 - 2012 with a net reduction in oil supply of 2 million barrels/day.[1] And yes, the supplied electrical energy is an additional cost: this won't be cheap. But it's forever. Round-trip efficiency isn't great: no better than the 60% efficiency of hydrogen electrolysis, with additional energy input requirements for CO2 extraction and a lot of seawater handling (8.8 billion liters/day for the Navy's proposal, 74 trillion at national scale). But once produced, oil doesn't suffer from the relatively rapid storage losses of most alternatives: a few percent per hour or day for many battery, thermal, or kinetic flywheel systems. If used for electrical generation there's another 30% generating loss experienced, for a maximum net efficiency of 42%, but if used to provide liquid fuels to critical uses, this could well prove highly attractive -- there are somethings it's really hard to substitute for. The process should also be carbon neutral, though it does involve a net transfer from present ocean to present atmospheric carbon reservoirs. I discuss this more here: http://redd.it/22k71x http://redd.it/22k71x It's not that I don't expect some improvement in battery technology, but there's a 5x advantage in energy storage densities (MJ/kg) between the best present battery storage technologies (lithium-air) and liquid hydrocarbons. That's closer to 25x for LiON vs. oil[2]. While incremental efficiency improvements (and better energy scavenging through, say pervasive PV surfaces) might be useful for electronics and their Moore's Law dynamics, for devices operating in the physical world and its constraints, batteries will continue to be at a disadvantage in cost, capacity, complexity, and/or abundance. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Steven Kopits presentation, February, 2014. http://energypolicy.columbia.edu/events-calendar/global-oil-market-forecasting-main-approaches-key-drivers http://energypolicy.columbia.edu/events-calendar/global-oil-... Also discussed and analyzed by Gail Tverberg: http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/03/steven-kopits-oil-the-economy-and-policy/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/03/steven-kopits-oil-the-e... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

7952 13y ago

If a large proportion of energy comes from storage wouldn't that eliminate or reduce the need for off peak pricing? In such a system could you actually bid on overcapacity? So that the initially generated energy would be sold to the highest bidder who would store or use the energy.

zizee 13y ago
People are doing just that to take advantage of off peak pricing: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-100-000-battery-that-could-help-hotels-save-bundles-of-money/281194/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-10...