We have created a Nightmare of Things that Need Electricity!!!

DayCruiser

Ensign
Joined
Sep 24, 2004
Messages
953
Solar regulations have made it hard for SC citizens and businesses to supplement our electrical needs until now that is. Things have change to make it feasible to get Solar panels etc and get rebates from the power company. All this delay because Utility companies did NOT want the competition. But I walk through my home and see all the little lights that are on. The Central air heat running day and night. The little lights from cell phone chargers, computer charging, clocks, VCRs, Satellite dish boxes, Microwave oven clock, weather radio charging etc. Heaven forbid you cut the lights on so you can see ! About every other year the power companies ask for a rate increase so they can buy up more power companies, build more plants ETC Some poo poo Solar but folks we seem to have no choice. Tesle is building a $5 billion plant to produce battery storage for the night and cloudy days. Countries around the world are adding Solar. India is investing $Billions for Solar and using American companies so that create jobs....Many homes in CA have Solar supplements. I guess when you are rich the power bill is a trivial problem but us middle class suffer from high blood pressure when we get the power bill. Solar is coming down in price. Right now it is 5 years or so before you get your money back from savings. Last years extreme cold caused peoples power bill to double and triple. Some went from $150 (average monthly winter bill) to $400! I know some Senior citizens who have to spend their time in a cold house. That is sad!
 
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redneck joe

Supreme Mariner
Joined
Mar 18, 2009
Messages
10,198
battery storage will change the game



from the economist

Battery technology
A whiff of brimstone

Adding sulphur to electrical cells may quintuple their performance
Jan 3rd 2015 | From the print edition
Timekeeper
BUILD a better battery, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the world will beat a path to your door. For consumer goods, from computers to cars, ?better? means ?better than lithium-ion?. And several groups of engineers think they have one: it is based on lithium and sulphur.

A lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery works by shuttling the eponymous ions, which are positively charged, through an electrolyte that links two electrodes, one made of carbon and the other of a substance containing a heavy metal such as cobalt, manganese or nickel. Such metals have multiple oxidation states, meaning they can lose or gain different numbers of electrons in different circumstances. To balance the movement of lithium ions, electrons (which are negatively charged) move to or from the heavy metal through an external circuit that also links the electrodes, changing the metal?s oxidation state as they do so. When the battery is discharging, both ions and electrons travel spontaneously in one direction, creating a current and releasing energy. When it is being recharged they are forced, by the application of a voltage, to go the other way and thus to store energy.

Lithium-sulphur batteries work in a similar fashion, but dispense with the heavy metal. Instead, they use sulphur, which also has multiple oxidation states?more of them, indeed, than many metals do. This fact, combined with sulphur?s lightness, means lithium-sulphur batteries can, in principle, store four or five times as much energy per gram as lithium-ion ones manage. And, since sulphur is cheap, they can do so at lower cost.

Turning that principle into practice, though, has been a hard slog. Experimental lithium-sulphur cells tend to wear out, because the sulphur in their electrodes gradually dissolves into the electrolyte. There are also questions about their safety. Part of the cycle of a lithium-sulphur battery involves some lithium ions turning into metallic lithium. This metallic form of the element may grow into filaments called dendrites that cause short circuits, and thus overheating and fires.

Various academic groups are working on these problems. Chengdu Liang, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, has developed a solid electrolyte that stops the sulphur dissolving. The dendrite problem, meanwhile, can be ameliorated by adding carbon to the electrode where the lithium is deposited. At Stanford University, Yi Cui employs buckminsterfullerene, a form of the element in which the atoms are organised into spheres, to do this. Cheng Huang at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory use lithiated graphite, which traps lithium atoms within its structure. OXIS Energy, of Oxford, Britain, meanwhile, is experimenting with a lithiated version of graphene, a recently discovered form of carbon that consists of sheets a single atom thick.

Huw Hampson-Jones, OXIS?s boss, hopes the firm?s batteries will go into production in 2015. If they do, they may be the first to reach the market. But they are unlikely to be alone for long. Larger companies, less in need of publicity, are more secretive about their battery programmes. But an unguarded remark by Carlos Ghosn, in a television interview he gave in November, suggests Nissan, the carmaker that he runs, also has a lithium-sulphur battery that is close to production, and will soon be installed in the firm?s LEAF electric cars, doubling the vehicles? ranges.

At the moment, a LEAF?s Li-ion batteries can store about 140 watt-hours per kilogram. OXIS?s store more than 300 Whr/kg and Dr Hampson-Jones hopes to raise this to 500 Whr/kg by 2018. Whether that will be enough to fend off the likes of Nissan remains to be seen. But whoever wins the race, whale or minnow, the days of the Li-ion look numbered.
 

DayCruiser

Ensign
Joined
Sep 24, 2004
Messages
953
Good article red neck! Here is one on wind power:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-22/u-s-wind-power-installations-rose-sixfold-in-2014-bnef.html
[h=1]U.S. Wind-Power Installations Rose Sixfold in 2014: BNEF[/h] By Louise Downing 2015-01-22T12:17:47Z


Installations of wind power in the U.S. surged sixfold last year, making it the largest market for the technology worldwide after China.
The U.S. added 4.7 gigawatts of new onshore wind capacity in 2014 compared with 764 megawatts a year earlier, largely due to the extension of the Production Tax Credit in January 2013, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said today in a statement. Total U.S. onshore wind installations are now 64.2 megawatts.
China remains the biggest market for wind with installations rising a record 38 percent, or 20.7 gigawatts, from a year earlier, according to BNEF. China?s grid-connected wind-energy capacity now is 96 gigawatts, more than that of the entire U.K. power fleet. Wind energy is China?s largest power source after coal and hydropower.
?This year has seen a couple of special circumstances come together so it probably isn?t a blueprint for future development,? David Hostert, European wind-energy analyst for BNEF, said in the statement. ?What is remarkable though is that more than 1 gigawatt was repowered with new turbines on existing projects. This means making better use of existing wind sites and opening up new opportunities for developers and asset owners in a mature market.?
Germany installed 3.2 gigawatts in 2014, Brazil 2.7 gigawatts and India 2.3 gigawatts, according to BNEF. Both German and Brazil totals are records for their countries.
To contact the reporter on this story: Louise Downing in London at ldowning4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net Randall Hackley, Ana Monteiro
 

gm280

Supreme Mariner
Joined
Jun 26, 2011
Messages
14,585
I'd love to outfit my entire house with Solar Panels. However, we are certainly not there with the current technology at this point. People THINK that adding Solar Panels is a one time ordeal. But I have some sorrowful news for them. Solar Panels do have a life expectancy with about 15 to 20 years being the norm. Solar Panels are like all electronics being they eventually break down! Their PN junctions stop producing less and less output to the point of not working at all. And usually folks don't understand and going "off the grid" sounds amazing, but they don't know that to be able to accomplish that, they HAVE to have some type storage capability. Presently that means Batteries, and lots of batteries that also wear out over time. It cost a ton of money to replace the batteries AND dispose of the old dead ones too! And those batteries don't live as long as the Solar Panels either! And then you have to have a conversion capability as well to utilize the DC current from the Solar Panels to your present AC house capabilities. And as a matter of pure fact, anytime you make any conversion from one source to any other, you lose efficiency. And as you add up all those issues, "going off the grid" is more a dream then reality too many times. It isn't an install and forget about it type setup. And most folks don't have both the know;ledge or capability to upkeep their own systems without technical folks intervening. It all boils down to MONEY! IF, and that is a big if, a person could construct their NEW houses with a DC capability and install everything to use only pure DC devices, it could help with Solar Panel problems. But DC has its issues especially with motors and compressors and such. So we are not there yet with current technology... Otherwise I would be all over it!
 

TexMonty

Seaman
Joined
Dec 26, 2014
Messages
65
I hate to say this - but until our electricity is a lot more expensive none of the alternate power sources make sense. Here in Texas we are at 8 cents/KW. The power company has started a new nights and weekend free (or really about 1 cent/KW at night) which is attempting to shave peak and reduce power plant load. In a residential application you might charge large batteries at night to run the AC (our biggest load) during the day, but as someone stated the efficiency losses and battery technology just don't work out positive yet. Even commercially payback on alternate power sources to utilize the 1 cent at night is no better than a 10-12 years. If Texas was paying double per/KW as some areas we would get a lot more serious.
 

levittownnick

Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Jul 2, 2003
Messages
789
Have you ever noticed that when the power company helps you to cut down on energy use, prices inch up so that the bill doesn't decrease, in that way they charge more for less and they (not you) are saving fuel and manpower. That saving never seems to get passed down. This is also true for other comodities.
 

MTboatguy

Fleet Admiral
Joined
Jul 8, 2010
Messages
8,988
This company came to my area a couple of years ago and has some very positive things coming out of their research with Zinc Air Fuel Cell technology, I have been watching their progress and it seems good, they just purchased another building to work on Grid Sized applications which are basically about the same size units as a large semi-trailer unit, the military has expressed extreme interest in this as well for powering their command posts and remote camp operations.

https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnl-zinc-air-fuel-cell-technology-licensed-montana-company
 

bonz_d

Vice Admiral
Joined
Apr 22, 2008
Messages
5,274
Have you ever noticed that when the power company helps you to cut down on energy use, prices inch up so that the bill doesn't decrease, in that way they charge more for less and they (not you) are saving fuel and manpower. That saving never seems to get passed down. This is also true for other comodities.

A number of years ago here in Wisconsin during a summer heat wave a previous governor came out and made a Public Service Announcement asking for everyone to turn down the air conditioners and lights to prevent brown-outs. It worked! Only to come that fall when the power companies came out and stated that they lost money and their revenues fell below the ALLOWED amount. They then asked for a rate increase which they also received. Who won? We sweated and they got a rate increase! Makes sense I guess.
 

gm280

Supreme Mariner
Joined
Jun 26, 2011
Messages
14,585
I heard some years back where Bill Gates was experimenting with Nuclear generators for individual home usage. He was gearing up with some Japanizes firm to take used Nuclear fuel rods and using them to produce electricity for each individual household usage in their back yards. He stated that spent Nuclear fuel rods were not harmful in such small amounts and would run a total house for about 20 to 25 years in which the home owner would then contract for them to be changed. So it accomplished two things, first generating electricity off the grid at a much more reasonable investment per household, and second no more need to store spent fuel rods for eons... But I haven't heard anything else about that anymore. Must have worked perfectly and the government decided to put an end to it... We presently are closing so many coal burning power generating plants now and with a never ending increasing demand, what is going to replace them? And too many folks THINK electric cars are the save all ideas. But think if everybody were to plug into the grid at night to "charge" their cars, what huge increased demand will that pose on our electrical system too... It is merely swapping one energy sources to another and from oil to whatever we need to generate electricity... DUH!
 
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