Discussion for article #235923
Energy storage seems to be a limiting factor for solar and other renewables, and advanced battery technology could overcome that bottleneck.
A few days ago, another site reporting on this development noted that some other promising technologies, such as titanium-air and solid-state electrolytes, are also on the horizon.
A few years ago, someone told me he developed a prototype for a battery system for home solar use that utilized existing technology. However, it needed about a hundred car batteries to provide storage and required installation in a basement or outdoor shed – picture a cube about three foot a side - and so increased density of stored energy seems promising.
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Yes, storage is an issue for my off grid system. I placed 10 deep discharge batteries in the carport on a special wall created to shelf, connect and protect the batteries. Would be nice to have same with a couple of these wall mounted units, however, the cost for just one far outstrips the total cost for the batteries, cabling, etc, etc. I’ll wait and see what the prices are when the Giga Factory comes on line and priced drop. Then again my batteries each have a 5-7 year life expectancy. Cost is from $150-500 per battery, so using $250 per my 10 batteries cost $2500 and provide the backup power for a standalone refrig, standalone freezer, TV, computer, washer/dryer, backup hot water, backup heat, etc, etc…
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I’m a dilettante in this, as in most things, but I’ve been poking around for years because it’s clear to me that the real problem in kicking the carbon addiction has always been storage, not generation. Hydrocarbon liquids rule transportation because there just isn’t any other way to store that much energy cheaply and easily and carry it around with us, nor is there any other way to load that much energy into a transport mode so quickly and, relatively safely (you know, for stuff that’s somewhere between dynamite and C4 for dangerousness).
And, discouragingly, the big constraint seems to be one of physics, not one one of technology. It looks like if we finally managed to make the best battery physics allows cheaply, it still wouldn’t be good enough. It would still be too big, have too small a mass to power storage ratio and take too long to charge to compete with a tank of gasoline/kerosene/diesel. Room temperature superconducting capacitor rings would come closer, but so far, it’s looking like those are always going to require some level of cryonic cooling. And there’s still a limit on how fast capacitors can be charged, and a greater risk they’ll catastrophically release that energy all at once than with a tank of gas. Certainly, it will always be safer to pump a tank of gas than to move an equivalent amount of electricity in the same timeframe.
There are other properties of matter besides chemical bonds and electron shells that store energy, but so far we haven’t found a way to mess with those that isn’t far more dangerous than a high tension line or a dewar of liquid nitrogen or a tank of gas. As I said, it’s all a bit discouraging. No phaser power packs or shipstones in the foreseeable future.
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Interesting, and I look forward to seeing what further technological advances and increased demand – both from consumer end users and utility-scale industry – bring about.