----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan M" <[email protected]> To: "'Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion'" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 12:56 PM Subject: RE: Scouted: U.S. to collapse in next two years?
> First, I got a "not there" when looking for the paper. Second, batteries > will have to become many orders of magnitude better for storage of power > generation at off peak times for use at peak times....particularly if we > are > thinking of things like wind power which would be close to economically > feasible right now if there was such a storage mechanism. There are a few companies currently promoting business plans wherein downtown office buildings would purchase *used* current technology Li-ion auto batteries to store off-peak power for re-use during peak hours. Storing power on-site would have some advantages. > > Let me run some numbers to give a feel for this. Let's say we have a 200 > MW > wind farm (say 300 MW nameplate, allowing for nominal winds to below > nameplate), and will need to store 100 hours worth of energy to make it > feasible to use it as a stand alone facility. That means we'd need 20 GWh > of storage. That doesn't resemble any plan I've seen. What I've seen has storage only mitigating peak usage for 24 hour cycles. If the wind doesn't blow, you just lose out on savings. > > According to > > http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Battery-Energy.html > > storing this energy with the type of advanced Li-I batteries we've been > seeing in the best cars, we'd have to pay >80 billion for the storage. > The > windfarm itself costs only 300 million in my example, so you see that > battery storage is far away from economical for this purpose. > > That's why folks are looking at lowering the cost of conversion to > hydrogen > and compressed air storage downhole. I think we discussed this about a year or so ago. One of our wind power discussions. > > Now, I'm not saying that finding a cheaper better battery is impossible. > Rather, I'm arguing that it will take a breakthrough. Thus, I'd argue for > the government funding nanotech and nanochemistry as the best means of > approaching this. Already occuring. Industry is also funding considerable reseach on it's own. A lot of good reseach results have already come in as a result of battery nano-research. There is already a Li-ion battery that will recharge to 90% of capacity in 10 minutes and full charge (from dead) in less than an hour. They are working on manufacturing techniques to reduce cost and increase reliability, but that news is around a year old. > If we can get Li-I batteries to increase their capacity > by say 10x, while holding their cost constant, then electric cars become > economically feasible. But, if we don't, then we can subsidize electric > cars with hundreds of billions and we still won't have anything more than > an > expensive subsidy program, like ethanol. > When manufacturing capacity comes online here in the US costs should come down fairly dramatically. The problem currently is that there are only a few manufacturers, almost all overseas, and none can supply enough to cause a price drop. But there is a LOT of money to be made even with lower prices, so there are a good number of companies vying for a piece of the pie. xponent Numbers Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
