grist.org

...and how easy is it to recycle lithium batteries, or any others for that matter?  Would we wind up with mountains of toxic dead batteries?

In the coal.  Converting from coal to electricity then to something else and back to electricity in order to trade the ramping up & down of the coal plant for the ramping up & down of this other thing to improve efficiency and reduce pollution sounds good, but what is the proposal again and could it really work?  I guess the real question is whether a carbon-less energy source could be used in a way that matches consumer demand.  You can't ramp up solar when demand rises, you can't even use it after sunset.  Wind has similar problems.  What about nuclear?  What about hydropower?  Coal & gas plants aren't getting shut down until we have something clean that can ramp up to meet demand peaks at a time that is convenient for consumers, not producers.

Hey, all:

Gee, it doesn't matter whether you speak of big or small.  And sustainable sources are essential.  You folks almost COMPLETELY ignore home systems and sustainability.  And why the fuck are we STILL  discussing COAL?  Have you learned NOTHING about coal?

Are all of you STILL slaves to the mentality of electricity as a commodity?  Are you lobotomized engineers (yeah, that's redundant!) with no ability for critical thinking?  

Engineers + Box --> Nowhere

Greed will practically always drive utilities to confine sources into monopolies and customers into those sources.  It is part of marketing.  To the extent we follow their marketing crap we are doing no better.  

Hey, Jon Rynn:  I can only speak for lead-acid batteries since this what I use at home, and I vetted them years ago.  These are highly recycled (as highly as any consumer product) by customers and suppliers.  Plastic, lead, acid all get reused.  I suspect it is a matter of scale--the larger the battery the easier the handling and the better the incentive to recycle.  It may be that large new-tech batteries should only be leased to customers (whether utility or residential), so the suppliers have better control over recycling.  

Wind and Sun on all scales, with storage on all scales, is the way to sustainability--on all scales.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

For meaningful comparison you need to know kWh capacity.

The USA today article describes them as costing $2,500 per KW. But the question is: per KW for how long? IF that $2,500 for a ten hours capability, that $250 per kWh of capacity. If it $2,500 for one hour then it is $2,500 per kWh of capacity. I suspect the real figure lies somewhere in that range. Maybe someone with some time can do some more research and come up with a cost per kWh cost. As Rynn says, storage helps stabilize grids. It is useful to all energy sources.

...and I also just want to throw in to the mix the idea that, in the future, a sophisticated use of different storage and generation strategies will require a larger workforce dedicated to energy; it will be a different world then the present one of most energy management occurring in centralized locations, with much more work being done locally and on the ground.  That kind of work would definitely beat flipping burgers, me thinks.

I noticed too that the Sodium Sulfide batteries  were invented in this country, but now are imported from Japan. Another example of how the various US administratiions have taken their eye off the renewable ball in favor of cosy-ing up to various Middle Eastern oligarchies.

I don't believe V2G is going to have much impact.

Instead I think G2G will be far more important, since it allows for full control by the utility.

It also doesn't have car consumers wearing down their precious battery life while they can still use it.

And for those car holders, if they sell the battery after it's no use to them.  Not only are the utilities getting cheap batteries, but the car consumers are getting a lower cost of ownership.

We need more of this energy industry insider perspective to hone our arguments.

How to move the debate around to storage/conservation now?  With an internet enabled grid that stores energy in the form of heating/cooling in everything from your home freezer to the thermal mass of malls.

For instance,cool a mall's floor down (using geothermal cooling that uses a fraction of the energy of air conditioning, that's conservation) during hours with lowest power demand and coast on that cooling for the next 24 hours (that's storage), right through the peak demand time.

Since building heating/cooling produces 36% of our GHG emissions,and large scale wind could provide 95% of our grid power already, this indicates there is more than enough buffering capacity in heating/cooling alone to dispense with other storage.

This is without adding the effect of charging plugin vehicle batteries off peak and doing large scale industrial heating/cooling in such a way as to smooth the grid.  Like recycling glass during off peak grid time and using the waste heat to generate power during the peak.

With an internet enabled grid energy use would be timed over the whole grid to make electrical storage of power unecessary.  Even in a 100% wind/solar powered grid.

Now how to make industry  insiders like the authors of this article realize and incorporate this information about an internet switchable grid into energy policy?  Show them it is the bottomline profit path of the future.

Then utilities will race to compete in this area, with customers all connecting their various high energy use heating/cooling  devices through switches that are controlled by the smart grid.  Eventually plugin vehicles will connect through these switching systems too.

These authors are the ones to convince.  But will they interact on revolutionary concepts like this?  Hard to say.    

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