New (Flow) Battery Design Could Help Solar and Wind Energy Power the Grid

[BlueStreak]

1. Very interesting. A major fallacy in the energy world is that the same technology can

or should serve cell phones, cars, and power plants. That proposition is nonsensical, as the requirements are entirely different. Cell phones need compact storage, but not much power.

Cars need lots of power, fast recharge time, and not too much weight and much lower cost than today's technologies.

The power grid needs batteries that can scale tens of thousands of times greater than car batteries. Cost is not all that important as long as the cost can be amortized over many customers and many charge cycles. And weight/space isn't a concern at all.

Some nitwits have talked about truly hair-brained schemes where we would connect our cars to the grid so that our cars would be the batteries that would handle the ups and downs of the power grid. Not hardly. When you plug your car in, you want it ti recharge -- not go up and down in charge depending on how the grid happens to be doing.

These flow batteries appear to be highly scalable at a reasonable cost.

There are other companies looking at flywheels to store the excess power. It is nice to see several promising technologies evolving simultaneously.

This stuff is moving much quicker than many people realize. In many parts of the country, coal-fired generators are being shut down entirely. Do a Google search on "coal plants shut down". I got 4.5 million hits. And many of them show the EPA working actively to close these things down. This demonstrates the value of holding the White House. Some of that shutdown activity would happen on its own as natural gas and renewables win the economic argument. But the EPA is able to speed this change along by driving shuttering decisions based on the pollution factors.

The UK may close its last coal-fired power plant in under 10 years.

A huge scalable battery system changes the economics of wind power. Right now you must have lots of combustion-based power plants to handle the ups and downs. As giant batteries become viable, that will allow us to drop the combustion and nuke plants to 10-20% of our generation capacity.