Shocking! Battery Tech From MIT (an awesome presentation)

[Playinghardball]

If we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out. We can't just drill our way out. We can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old-fashioned, American way. We're going to invent our way out, working together.
Donald Sadoway

One of the engineering opportunities (nee problems) still open to green energy production by solar and wind technologies is the very real issue of generation and demand. As currently configured the electrical grid must be ready to deliver as much energy as is needed at any time. This may not be possible in a system primarily dependent on solar or wind energy generators.

An obvious solution would be to store electrical energy in industrial quantities so that peaks in demand could be met smoothly. Donald Sadoway has an idea about how to do just that.

The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago. Because the way things stand today, electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply. If in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage, some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid, the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately. But coal plants, nuclear plants can't respond fast enough. A giant battery could. With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal, gas and nuclear do today. You see, the battery is the key enabling device here. With it, we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn't shine. And that changes everything. Because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings, here to center stage. Today I want to tell you about such a device. It's called the liquid metal battery. It's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs.

Below is Dr. Sadoway's presentation at TED in March of this year. It is about 15 minutes and worth the time. He is an interesting lecturer.

More: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/04/1080441/-Shocking-Battery-Tech-From-MIT

[PoliticAverse]

1. 1 battery you can actually buy > 1,000,000 Ted talks. n/t

[uponit7771]

2. Storing electrons in batteries is not the real issue it's the cost of doing so, hopefully this guys

..."market price point" is the real deal

[CJCRANE]

3. Or each house can have a battery.

An engineer told me that you can run your household electricity needs from a truck battery.

You can then trickle-charge the battery via solar power/wind power/the grid.

[TheMadMonk]

8. Not even close. A forklift battery pack will give 48 hrs if used frugally.

A truck battery will just suffice for lights. Again if used frugally.

Both are highly toxic.

For static applications, a NiFe battery is a cheap option. It's not the best performer in the world and it has a low energy density, but they're cheap, non-toxic, abuse tollerant and easy to maintain.

[CJCRANE]

11. Fair enough

but the idea is for off-gridders to trickle-charge the battery during the day using solar power. That way you have the power when you need it at night.

I like the sound of the NiFe battery, I'll look it up.

[IDemo]

4. When or if electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids penetrate the market enough,

The V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) concept can help:

http://www.udel.edu/V2G/V2Gconcept.html

[Junkdrawer]

5. We've never lacked ideas. If the Best and the Brightest ran this country....

we would be living in a completely different world.

But they don't; sociopaths whose political power relies on 100 yr. old technology do.

And THAT's why Human Extinction is staring us eyeball-to-eyeball.

[Egalitarian Thug]

10. And that is why huge corporations, and the people that run them are

the biggest problem we face. We have to rid ourselves of the myth that these monstrosities are a source of innovation. That their "success" indicates that they are the best at what they do, and that they create jobs.

Only government, nominally the sole representative of the people, is the only institution with the resources and motivation to achieve progress.

Pick the field, medical, energy, transportation, pure research, education, employment, social/sexual/racial/economic equality, or whatever else you can think of. Big Business has zero incentive to compete or to innovate. Collusion is always more profitable than competition and innovation is expensive and usually results in diminished profits at best and frequently the elimination of their industry.

[Junkdrawer]

12. Friend, you said a mouthful...

If there was one post I wish everyone on this site would read....

[Old and In the Way]

6. The sweet spot should be a system designed for home installation.

Based on the system that is contained in a 40' container handling power needs for 200 homes, a home version ought to be feasible in the space of a small closet. Great presentation.

[longship]

7. Battery tech is very difficult

Advances are, so far, incremental. Revolutions are rare and dependent on breakthroughs which take decades of hard work and, most importantly, advances in the science which may not yet be achieved.

That's the regrettable situation right now.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

9. Back in the early 1970s, that's about 40 years ago

I remember listening to a presentation on Pacifica radio by two top engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech regarding a way to have continuous sources of power on Earth, night or day, from the sun. They said it would be feasible to put gigantic solar collectors in outer space and beam the energy back to Earth as microwave beams and to do it in a way that wouldn't fry an airplane that happened to fly into the path of the beam. Of course it would require a serious funding commitment to a space program, an area in which we seem to have lost our way.