Fancy New Battery

[wdyasq]

Is this more pie in the sky?

http://www.gizmag.com/solar-battery-cheap-power/12676/

Calculating a '$100 Golf cart battery' at 200AH and 50% draw-down I come up with equivalent to 33 batteries or $3300. This new battery has to be held at 90C so some power will be needed to maintain that heat.

Ron

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

Looks like that's the operating temperature - but the ion channel operates at "room temperature" as well so this is probably the temperature it runs at due to self-heating or where it's most efficient so its cooling system tries to keep it there.  Hard to tell from a press release, though.

Sodium-Sulfur has been around for a while.  Press release seems to be about a major improvement in it.  But enough to take over the RE storage niche?

2.5 cents just to store each kWh sounds a bit pricey to me.  IMHO one of the new lithium technologies will probably beat their pants off.

[dnix71]

That energy density would make electric vehicles doable. I live in south Florida. Without a/c an electric car isn't going to make it here. I would rather bike than pay $40k for a car without a/c. Back when GM had the EV1, they gave the local paper editor Gary Stein one to test drive. He ran it dead and had it towed without ever making it to work. It was raining and he needed the a/c to defog the windows.

Providing peaking power on the grid would be a great use. Stop burning natural gas and oil for peaking and build a few more nukes and run steady state.

[joestue]

How does 38 cents per KWh sound for lead acid?

(data from the Ford TH!NK City A306, twenty-two 110 Ah 12V lead-acid battery of model UB121100 at 650 cycles and 7 grand cost)

If I can get 1000 cycles out of a lithium laptop battery (normal ones, not liFe) its only 20-30 cents/kwh

Commanda and others have demonstrated the cost effectiveness of lithium iron phosphate over lead acid already, but 2.5 cents is an order of magnitude lower than everything besides the high temp sodium sulfur designs, (almost cost effective).

90C is nothing, were talking less than 1KWh a day to keep a fridge sized battery at 90C, after all, it only takes .1KWH to keep a deep freezer the size of a fridge at -10C, and that's without a vacuum insulated chamber.

Whatever happened to the V2O5 redox cells?

[stop4stuff]

Is this more pie in the sky?

possibly...

Grover Coors, the principle scientist for battery development and one of the owners of Ceramatec, told Gizmag;

"...Ceramatec does not yet have working prototype, but the battery is currently in early stage R&D and the first prototype will be tested over the next couple of years..."

[bob golding]

what ever happened to V2O5 batteries?

http://www.pdenergy.com/

this company has most of the patents. i did ask them if they are going to do anything small, in our terms, but they said not yet. reckon they are going for the utility side of the market first. i gave up on my experiments de to the cost of the membrane and went for surrette lead acid instead.

 bob

[DamonHD]

Sufficiently annoyed by "kW/h" all over the piece to write to the editor.

Rendered useless the near-final para about the important metric that the mfr thought others were neglecting...  His secret is safe with gizmag!  %-P

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

To the mag's credit, the editor has already written back to me promising to fix the typos.

I still don't understand in my old age the quote:

"The battery we are constructing will be able to dispatch 40,000kW/h per kilowatt, which means the cost of storage over the life of the battery will be 2.5c per kW/h. Most battery developers for the EES market either don't understand this metric or have chosen to disregard it because their batteries are either too expensive to purchase or too expensive to operate."

end if I read that "40,000kW/h per kilowatt" as say 40MWh/kW.  Is that a proxy for the number of cycles the battery can endure in effect?

Rgds

Damon

[TomW]

HD;

My take on this is you can put in and take out that amount of power over its life [per kw of battery].

It sure reads like a beancounter wrote it up from some figures they tossed out??

Kind of double speak to imply long life of many cycles. Perhaps insiders in the EV market get it?

I call it "Marketing Droid" speak myself.

Age old tactic that boils down to:

If you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull ship."

Just an opinion.

Tom

[DamonHD]

OK, you are probably right, but in any case surely it would be more sensible to do the metric in kWh, which is how right-thinking (RE) people think of batteries, rather than peak power such as "cold-cranking amps".

The editor fixed the typos too BTW, but I already bugged him to recheck the quote if possible to see if there was a transcription error, eg maybe it should be 40MWh/kWh which would make more sense in this context IMHO.

Rgds

Damon

[zeusmorg]

 It seems new technologies pop up all the time, and initially some "salesman" or "copywriter" deems the final price, which USUALLY does not pan out.

 I've seen literally 100's of new RE ideas over the years, but few make it into fruition.

 I tend to start getting excited when something can actually be purchased, then I compare it to what is already available on the market. (case in point Lithium batteries)  

[willib]

how far did ya get?

i was wondering where i could get the vanadium solution/solutions ,i have been real anxious to try that .

i havn't thought about them in a while but what i do remember is they can be charged and discharged simultaneously.

and if the solutions mix a little the ions just change to its opposite ionic charge.which is the beauty of the whole battery ,it cant be contaminated because both solutions are the same plus or minus a couple of electrons per ion.

[bob golding]

hi sorry missed this first time around, just found it while looking for something else. i got as far as working out how to make the electrodes using carbon felt. i needed to make the first cell in order to process the vanadium oxide. for that i got the membrane and worked out the size i would need. if you are still interested i can let you have the membrane and the felt. i paid around 200 dollars for them both, but make me an offer. they are sitting around doing nothing at the moment cept gathering dust till i get bored and try again. i have the figures somewhere for the costs per watt. think it was around 10 dollars, but will have to check my notes. the process has to be done under a blanket of nitrogen to exclude any oxygen. email me off list if you are interested. photoman290@yahoo.com

cheers

bob