Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumBloomberg Markets The $5 Billion Race to Build a Better Battery
Professor Donald Sadoway remembers chuckling at an e-mail in August 2009 from a woman claiming to represent Bill Gates. The worlds richest man had taken Sadoways Introduction to Solid State Chemistry online, the message explained. Gates wondered if he could meet the guy teaching the popular MIT course the next time the billionaire was in the Boston area, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its May issue. I thought it was a student prank, says Sadoway, whos spent more than a decade melting metals in search of a cheap, long-life battery that might wean the world off dirty energy. Hed almost forgotten the note when Gatess assistant wrote again to plead for a response.
A month later, Gates and Sadoway were swapping ideas on curbing climate change in the chemists second-story office on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. They discussed progress on batteries to help solar and wind compete with fossil fuels. Gates said to call when Sadoway was ready to start a company. He agreed to be an angel investor, Sadoway says. It would have been tough without that support.
Sadoway is ready. He and a handful of scientists with young companies and big backers say they have a shot at solving a vexing problem: how to store and deliver power around the clock so sustainable energies can become viable alternatives to fossil fuels. How these storage projects are allowing utility power customers to defect from the grid is one of the topics for debate this week at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York. Todays nickel-cadmium and lithium-ion offerings arent up to the task. They cant run a home for more than a few hours or most cars for more than 100 miles (160 kilometers). At about $400 per kilowatt-hour, theyre double the price analysts say will unleash widespread green power. Developing a storage system beyond lithium-ion is critical to unlocking the value of electric vehicles and renewable energy, says Andrew Chung, a partner at Menlo Park, Californiabased venture capital firm Khosla Ventures.
The timing for inventorsand investorsmay finally be right. Wind turbines accounted for 45 percent of new U.S. power production last year, while solar made up 34 percent of fresh capacity worldwide. Storing this energy when the sun isnt shining or a breeze isnt blowing has remained an expensive hurdle. Battery believers say thats changing. Theyve invested more than $5 billion in the past decade, racing to get technologies to market. Theyre betting new batteries can hold enough clean energy to run a car, home, or campus; store power from wind or solar farms; and make dirty electricity grids greener by replacing generators and reducing the need for more fossil fuel plants. This market for storage capacity will increase almost 10-fold in three years to 2,400 megawatts, equal to six natural gas turbines, Navigant Consulting says.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-14/gates-pritzkers-take-on-musk-in-5-billion-race-for-new-battery
phantom power
(25,966 posts)demonstrates that people still don't understand the difference between producing energy and storing it.
I actually blame this on the fact that the industrial revolution was powered by fossil fuels. Our energy "source" has in fact also been the energy storage medium. So much so that people never even realize there is a difference.
A bit like how light bulb intensity has been historically "measured" by wattage, instead of lumens, which is the correct measurement, since bulbs used the same incandescent technology for a century. The difference only started to matter once non-incandescent bulbs appeared on market.