We're not doing enough to find alternative fuels.

Whenever the aerogel research yields fruits, we will see a massive increase in battery life because of increased capacity. Of course, the problem is that it will happen in the future.
But why does it take more time to charge a battery than to use it?

A guy called dvorak is tired. Tired of humanity not wanting to change to improve itself. Quite the sad tale.

Net loss during transfer. A battery is constantly bleeding energy even when being charged.

Could you please elaborate?

A guy called dvorak is tired. Tired of humanity not wanting to change to improve itself. Quite the sad tale.

Batteries constantly discharge. Much of the time this is only noticeable via instruments like a voltmeter. Over time any and all stored electrical charge will fully deplete from a battery or capacitor.

Charging attempts to keep the level of charge up. It's easier to discharge a battery than to charge one.

Say we have a battery system with a 20,000 volt charge and a 2 amp current (which means if you touch the circuit you get fried). The battery is constantly draining voltage so you will never get anywhere near the original 20,000 volt 2 amp capacity out of what's stored in it. Conversely owing to the way batteries work and the net loss due to natural discharge, you will never get the maximum 20,000 volt 2 amp capacity back via recharging.

Assuming you are trying to run battery circuits on an efficient proper 1 to 1 ratio. It's possible to flood a battery system into a state of overcharged having more electrical charge and capacity than it was built and designed for. Overcharging is not efficient and at times might not be safe.

What you are presenting is irrelevant to "real usage", if it takes 2 hours to charge the battery, and the "normal usage" is a lot lower than what the battery is charged with, you can run the device longer than what is needed to charge.
For example take a GBA SP, it takes roughly 1 hour to charge, but it can be used for almost an entire day.
Which means the point you presented back in a page is more or less subjective nitpicking.
You say that batteries is not a good source due the constant discharge, but that is true for ALL OTHER SOURCES for energy as well, except directly generated source(say solar or wind).
To quote your own words:

The answer is: NO ITS NOT.
If your point was that solar and wind is shit for capacity and stability, then indeed, that is true.

A guy called dvorak is tired. Tired of humanity not wanting to change to improve itself. Quite the sad tale.

Don't be ridiculous, the charge-discharge cycle would be over a 12 hour period for solar, and probably something like a month or two tops for the vast bulk of wind. Charge decay (including more metaphorical decay like liquid hydrogen boiloff or pumped water evaporation) are insignificant, the only real factor is operational efficiency, which is already around 70-90% round trip.

Eric,

@Major Tom: Your comments on batteries are so completely off-base as to be Did Not Do The Research.

For a start, if batteries were as completely impractical as you claim, I would not be able to commute to work and back for three days between charging as I frequently do. (I only charge up more frequently if I make extra trips - shopping, getting dinner - during that period). It only takes 4-5 hours to completely recharge my bike's batteries, by the way - I have it all finished before I go to bed at night.

Secondly, there are an increasing number of batteries coming available that can be burst charged (with sufficient current) in 5-10 minutes and give an hour or so of travel time in an EV. Google "Nanosafe".

Battery discharge rate compared with charge rate, by the way, is heavily dependent on how much drain the battery gets in use - the average mobile phone battery is charged in a few hours while you're sleeping and you can get three or so days of moderate use out of it (unless you're a teen wherein you text so much that you drain the battery in a day )

Sure, an EV uses power at a faster rate but that's irrelevant if it has sufficient charge to get you to and from work (or just to work if you have an understanding boss who lets you charge up for the ~8 hours you're at work) as you'll be charging it up prior to the trip.

Which brings us to the "constant discharge" issue - not as fast as you seem to think, based on your comments, and completely bloody irrelevant if you're charging up at night and using it the next day (E Vs) or the other way around (storing solar-generated electricity).

Batteries are used in a large number of applications all over the world every day; if the concerns you raised were relevant or significant at all, we wouldn't be using them.

As "impractical" and "inefficient" as you seem to think batteries are in theory, they are practical in Real World applications - and that's basically all that matters.

He was talking about industrial-grade grid power storage (to smooth out the peaks of sustainable generation,) not mobile storage for vehicles and things.

Eric,

Oh, and "over time" stored petrol (gasoline) becomes unusable as well. As with batteries, if you've left it for so long that it's no longer usable, that's a problem with you failing to use it within its natural constraints, not with the substance.

You might as well say that fruit, veges and meat are impractical means of fuelling people as they also spoil "over time".

Oh dear, how have we managed to survive for the last several million years, surrounded by so many things that become useless over time?

@Eric, considering that the storage of energy for the grid is only supposed to cover a relatively short period (and if it's for night time, a low-use period at that) before recharging, his arguments are still flawed.

The self-discharge rate of batteries is measurable in months, the recharge time is a matter of hours, during which time sufficient energy is stored to do the job required, therefore the literal fact that the batteries are never "fully charged" is irrelevant to the job at hand.

I've not seen any energy proposal that relies on charging something for a few hours and expecting to use it months later for extended periods of time.

^ So then answer this. How are batteries powered by wind and solar better if a heat wave bleeds their storage to death? Always on power sources like nuclear can strain because of that, what's makes you think unreliable power sources can do that better?

I already described several systems that are already in use that can store energy from solar or wind power plants for when the plant is not working. As a result, after the plant has been in use for a day or two, it will never (in circumstances where any other kind of plant would be expected to work) stop producing power long enough for the break to be significant.

The electricity the plant produces can already be stored and retrieved with 80-95% total efficiency. The plants with systems like these are already making big bucks, so though some technologies are still experimental in the sense that they're not yet widely used, they're ready in the sense that they're used in many places and making lots of dough without significant power failures.

With current technology, it is not impossible to produce a country's entire power supply with only renewable sources. It's even economically viable (as in, it's possible to do it and make a decent profit.) The problem is replacing existing infrastructure with new stuff, plus some plants produce less income than plants based on non-renewable sources, but as long as there's even medium profit, why shouldn't we replace the more economic but less sustainable plants with better, renewable sources, even if we make less money with it?

edited 9th Apr '11 3:09:57 PM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Well actually, we kind of should (among many, many other reasons). That's rather one of the points of this thread

edited 9th Apr '11 6:12:06 PM by Pykrete

In other news, the Japanese hope to develop a real live Godzilla by 2025, which will be defeated in 2030 by a Wave-Motion Gun.

This is a very interesting perspective: the idea of removing complexity and redesigning from scratch in order to increase robustness.

Obviously loses backward-compatibility in some respects, but as you note, an electric motor and battery can be retrofitted onto at least some internal-combustion vehicles with relative ease.

Oh, I see what your analysis is.

Basically, you were talking about the currently immediately available (i.e. ready-to-use) supply of nuclear fuel. I was, on the other hand, thinking about what we could recover from the ground (or heck, from the Moon even) and wondering why we'd run out of such a gigantic supply in such a short time.

Oh, right, I forgot about that bit.

Well, there's quite a big difference between having a consumer estimate and compare lifetime costs of cars and having a consumer compare ticket prices that are right in front of 'em.

And Alleged Car, as the article notes, don't really exist anymore; even $15K-or-so-new cars like the Hyundai Accent have at least a minimally decent quality to them. Obviously they don't come with as many features or as smooth or comfy a ride as a more expensive car, but basic functionality is more than likely to be there.

Now if a 2007 Prius with about 60K miles for about that price couldn't convince my parents to buy said Prius...

My overall response to you: That's why I said "build a great battery".

> much longer to store energy than to use it

Depends on how you use it, of course, but charging efficiency is something that obviously should be worked on.

> charge decay

Another thing to work on: battery overall (meta-)lifetime, that is how long it can be useful over many discharges and recharges.

> energy bleeding off all the time while in storage

Yet another thing to be worked on.

> uneconomical

Also another thing to be worked on, both in terms of reducing maintenance needs/increasing robustness and in terms of reducing the cost of materials and labor. Though mass production can help on this front, once it really gets started.

> And lastly, it's just not a practical real solution. It's a touchy-feely feel-good answer that when you think about it will not work for the future.

Does this actually mean anything in real, concrete terms? Or is this just an opinionated conclusion? The "touchy-feely feel-good answer" phrase seems to suggest that this is quite a bit of opinion here.

> Seriously, wind and solar will never amount to anything better than grid supplements. They don't have the capabilities, efficiency and reliability to make it a backbone system.

So basically, you're saying that batteries won't work, and thus wind and solar won't work.

1. I never said that wind and solar had to replace baseload power.
   1. That said, people are already reselling extra wind and solar power back onto the grid.
2. Improving battery technology has FAR more implications than merely helping wind and solar become more viable. Just imagine if there could be a giant battery that could be transported to a local community using less energy for transportation than the energy that would be lost in transmission from a power plant—and that's just one example. Other posters on this page have cited much better examples, such as Wolf 1066 talking about his electric motorbike, and del diablo talking about the GBA SP.

So if you actually want to solve problems, rather than just sitting around dissing liberals and their oh-so-green aspirations for wind and solar power, then you should agree that we ought to be working hard on improving battery technology, along with everything else—carbon sequestration, safe nuclear, efficiency, solar PV, solar thermal, wind, and the rest of the gang.

And the regularity of the cycle actually could mean that a storage system could be designed specifically to take advantage of that. This is an interesting idea that I just now noticed. Thank you, Eric!

Well, if heat is a problem for your batteries, then stick them underground, or otherwise insulate them.

And better battery technology can help BOTH with making wind and solar more reliable and ALSO with making distributed generation more viable, thus reducing the need to use a grid in the first place.

Yep, everything that's off-grid is going to require distributed generation in some way (be it gasoline-burning generator, personal solar panels, or anything else), or is going to require lots of infrastructure for transmission lines—which themselves are lossy anyway.

IIRC Brazil mostly runs on hydropower. And Washington (state) gets much of its power from hydropower too.

Not sure if you consider hydropower "renewable", but still.

^ Heat as in heat wave demand. You know the thing that happens regularly in California and much of the South and Southwest?

Oh, I see. I thought you meant that their capacity would be impacted because you said "bleeds their storage to death".

But as I said before, I'm not saying that we should have only wind and solar for our baseload power supply—at least, not with much better reliable and large-capacity storage, which is way, way out of reach at the moment anyway.

In the meantime, and probably for some places even after we get nice storage, nuclear should probably be the baseload.

You do seem to know a lot about nuclear, though—how easy is it to get it to startup or stop producing power? Will it work well (as in efficiently) as a peak load demand reliever?

AFAIK Short term storage such as batteries would be the ideal peak demand reliever. That's practiclly what they're designed for!

Depending on the particular storage tech, you'll probably have zero startup cost and near instantaneous startup time.

edited 9th Apr '11 8:41:15 PM by storyyeller

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Nuclear power? It's easy to make that backbone technology that has capacity to meet surges and sags reliably. That's its key advantage to all other power sources. Capacity and reliability. (And with new reactor designs such as thorium power or pebble beds we have sufficient ore in the US alone to power the US grid for decades if not centuries.)

Nuclear power can be supplemented by wind and solar, might actually be a good idea so that for example a nuclear plant needs to shutdown for maintenance/refueling and there won't be grid disruption for the short duration it's offline.

If we find a way to make nuclear fusion viable, then we can start converting fission reactors to fusion and in that we'll have fuel to last indefinitely. (Indefinitely in human terms, there is a finite amount of fusable isotopes on this planet in physics terms.)

And the greatest thing about nuclear power both fission and fusion? It's clean. No CO 2 emissions, no sulfur emissions, no smog, no ozone pollution, no acid rain. All of this is the reason why nuclear power is the energy provider of the future of Humanity.

To answer one last question: How easy is it to start up and stop a nuclear reaction (either fission or fusion)? Fission is easy to start and depending on reactor design can be easy to stop. Easy being a relative misnomer however. It's not like flick a flame and starting a coal burn easy, but it's not this Rube Goldberg Contraption that takes days to start up. From a cold start it takes traditional nuclear reactors at most a few hours to get up and running. To stop a reactor to a dead stop and heading cold (non-emergency situation) it can take as little as a few minutes to stop the reaction but it can take hours to days to dispense of waste heat.

Nuclear fusion is a different beast. Harder to start, but once started it can last indefinitely so long as nothing disturbs the reaction itself i.e. sudden fuel loss, containment breach, etc. If the fusion reaction is disturbed, it shuts off exactly like a fossil fuel engine when it runs out of gas aka it just quits right then and there. (Only at the cosmic scale does a sudden halt in fusion result in ginormous booms.)

Hmm, thanks a bunch for that insight. Though I have a few comments on the different pieces:

> fission, from cold start: a few hours

This doesn't seem very good for excess demand. Now, I know that coal-fired power plants are already being used to meet excess demand, and as you observe, it's got a faster warm-up time.

> fission, shutdown: waste heat

This is wasteful, but might still partly be usable with some heat engine workaround.

> fission: hard to start

Well, I guess that even more than fission this is going to be baseload or bust.

> fission: easy to stop

This is...kinda cool, I must say. Can't think of a good application for this off the top of my head—a baseload power supply that's very easy to stop. Can anyone here think of one?

I think you're forgetting the elephant in the room here—dangers of radioactivity leakage. If we're going to account for national security risk AND natural disaster risk, we're going to be looking at rather strict limits on where these things can be built, and where they can supply power to.

And then, of course, there's nuclear waste.

And there's also the hot wastewater problem that is an environmental issue, if we're going to talk about nuclear's issues.

Nuclear has an insanely high energy density, and there's a damn lot of it in the ground, and it won't be climate-f***ing, which is what makes it quite nice in my opinion. Though before we can use it properly, we gotta fix its issues, the biggest one (but not the only one) of which is the risk of nasty stuff coming out of our using it.

I say we put the trash on subsiding plates and just let it run back on the conveyor belt into the mantle. But we still have to figure out where to site our reactors.

edited 9th Apr '11 9:01:30 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

Quite irrelevant given the strict standards applied and recommended for nuclear reactors.

Fukushima (caused by a quake that normally happens in such a region once in centuries) and Chernobyl (extremely shoddy reactor design) are the exception, not the rule. Modern reactor designs are even safer, some of which are nigh-impossible to induce a meltdown in.

For the record GMH, pretty much all large generators have a several hour "cold start". Most of them are kept running regardless of whether or not they're generating unless they're down for maintenance.

Fight smart, not fair.

Not only that, if run at any power level other than their ideal, they can be so inefficient that it's more profitable to use them to charge current grid storage systems off-peak. This even goes for thermal solar turbines, which (especially if augmented with additional thermal mass) have a sort of inertia which gives them steady output throughout the day, with a slow dropoff into moderate output through the night as well.

It isn't the currently available stuff, it's the economically viable stuff. Anything beyond the second figure is so inefficient to mine and process (completely stupid stuff like trying to extract trace uranium from granite) that it would require more energy to turn into reactor-grade fuel than it could produce in a reactor, except maybe using a breeder. Such resources are said to have a “negative ERoEI” (energy returned on energy invested.)

Nuclear is a dangerous, pointless, dead-end distraction from the real solutions.

Not really. EVs already benefit from large subsidies, rebates and tax incentives which lower their purchase price to the consumer. For instance, by what its page on the other wiki says, the Nissan Leaf with home charger drops from a retail price of $34,980 (already $10k less than in Japan) to $21,480 in California through a combination of federal and state subsidies.

I'm merely noting that those subsidies probably have room for substantial increases, since each EV replacing an ICE saves taxpayers a great deal of money down the road.

Keep in mind that batteries aren't the only form of grid energy storage, there are numerous other technologies, each suited to particular uses.

Eric,

edited 10th Apr '11 6:55:46 AM by EricDVH

You don't know much about nuclear do you? Modern reactor technologies like pebble beds and breeders can use just about any kind of radioactive fuel and run. Meaning old spent rods from traditional reactors, nuclear waste slag from processing, old nuclear warheads that have been decommissioned for 50 years, hell we could use radioactive slag from things like the SL-1 disaster.

And that's just existing sources including current mining operations of uranium.

Then you have other fuels which can be run in the same designs. Thorium for instance. It's 4 times as abundant as uranium in all isotopes put together, the US has abundant supplies of the stuff (the only other large supplier that can beat us in thorium reserves is India), and it offers the same benefits energy-wise.

Thorium alone could power the US grid for 200 years.

And safety? As mentioned earlier, Fukushima, SL-1 and Chernobyl are the exception not the rule and that's with traditional nuclear reactors. Modern designs are even safer inherently. Some designs (pebble beds and molten salt reactors) are nigh-impossible to create meltdown conditions in. It gets even better if we make fusion viable. Fusion cannot meltdown (at least anything resembling a meltdown/runaway reaction below cosmic scale like that of a star) and it has no real waste (radioactive byproducts of fusion itself have half-lives measured in at most minutes).

Well Fusion could induce radioactivity in the reactor walls if the material isn't chosen extremely carefully. So there is some risk of waste.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

And low level byproducts are reason enough to warrant discarding an entire science of energy production? All existing technologies produce greater dangers than that!