[dolanbaker]

For domestic electrical storage, we don't need super high power density of the types that is required for vehicles, what we need are cheap long life deep cycle batteries that are stable for (preferably) decades.
These batteries sound like they may be possible candidates for this task.
I really don't mild if they take up a couple of cubic metres of space in the garage.

[Outcast_Searcher]

For domestic electrical storage, we don't need super high power density of the types that is required for vehicles, what we need are cheap long life deep cycle batteries that are stable for (preferably) decades.
These batteries sound like they may be possible candidates for this task.
I really don't mild if they take up a couple of cubic metres of space in the garage.

Again -- if they are available in the Home Depot for a moderate price with an iron clad warranty lasting even ONE decade -- I will be very interested. Until then, it's just background noise, IMO.

[dolanbaker]

For domestic electrical storage, we don't need super high power density of the types that is required for vehicles, what we need are cheap long life deep cycle batteries that are stable for (preferably) decades.
These batteries sound like they may be possible candidates for this task.
I really don't mild if they take up a couple of cubic metres of space in the garage.

Again -- if they are available in the Home Depot for a moderate price with an iron clad warranty lasting even ONE decade -- I will be very interested. Until then, it's just background noise, IMO.

Sad to say, but you're correct, we'll have to wait until they appear on the open market.
Having said that, battery technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years.

[dolanbaker]

what we need is Unobtainium. What we get are batteries, woefully inadequate energy carriers. The theoretically perfect lithium-ion battery has only 6.7% energy density of gasoline (practically it is closer to 2-3%) . In terms of peak oil, batteries are mostly non-starters for anything other than Iputz's, golf carts, WW2 submarines.

I'm actually referring to batteries for storing the surplus energy from solar & wind, rather than for transportation. But then again electricity generation isn't really a peak oil issue either.

[kublikhan]

the story was posted in phy.org.blah. It is the goto site for algae biofuel stories. Enough said.

If you prefer a more legitimate source you can try Stanford or Nature

Although the phy.org article looks like just a copy of the Stanford press release. And the nature article is just a teaser. The full article is behind a paywall.

Again -- if they are available in the Home Depot for a moderate price with an iron clad warranty lasting even ONE decade -- I will be very interested. Until then, it's just background noise, IMO.

Sad to say, but you're correct, we'll have to wait until they appear on the open market.
Having said that, battery technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years.

I like to look at both: Current products that are already commercialized and available at home depot. And new discoveries that could be coming down the pipe and might be available in coming years. It sounds like a really interesting development. Would be nice to have a new battery technology like this added to our options. However don't hold your breath on this coming to home depot anytime soon. Commercialization still looks 5-10 years away, if it even pans out.

Though the Stanford research team’s technology has the potential to disrupt the industry, University of Toronto electrical engineering professor Olivier Trescases, who works with batteries and energy systems, said the challenge of coming up with a better battery has stumped countless researchers.

Dr. Trescases said the results appear “very encouraging,” but added that it’s simply too early to tell for sure. He thinks the large-scale commercialization of a new battery technology will likely take 10 years or more. Hari Subramaniam, the CEO of Toronto-based energy storage company eCAMION Inc., which uses batteries to build its systems, agreed. Even if the technology works as advertised, it could take five to seven years for the product to reach consumers, he said.

New inexpensive aluminum-ion battery set to outlast competitors

[kublikhan]

Has anyone seen a website keeping track of the progress of all these battery technologies?

If you are looking for a brief overview of progress made on battery technology that has already been comercialized, this might help:

To understand what's going on, consider where battery makers have been, where they are now, and the challenges they face.

Michael Sinkula of Envia Systems, an advanced battery startup in California, crunched the numbers and found the energy stored in a battery in 1995 didn't double until more than a decade later, in 2007. Since then, a battery's energy hasn't even risen by 30 percent. And Envia believes most batteries likely won't have doubled again even by 2021.

Until now, major battery advances came from using new materials. Consumer electronics batteries began lasting longer when they switched from relying on nickel, a type of metal, to lithium. research now is focused mainly on improving lithium batteries. "The periodic table is limited," he says, and advancements are becoming increasingly tough.

Given all the money at stake, many researchers are working to improve batteries. Even so, few breakthroughs have materialized. Plus, almost all major research has shifted to cars and power grids.

It's 2014. Why is my battery stuck in the '90s?

If you were looking for something with a bit more discussion of the various battery technologies, you might want to check this one out:


The rechargeable revolution: A better battery

[dolanbaker]

Dolan, electricity generation is not the major peak-oil-problem but it is important. We can do without Iputz's, electric lights and EV's but we need electricity to manufacture things. But it looks like NG will be around to do that.

That was sort of the point I was making, electricity generation is not directly tied to peak oil which is more of a transportation issue.

Electricity generation can be almost fossil fuel free when the development of cheap and reliable energy storage becomes available, then we can (hopefully) provide enough electrical energy to sustain a near " normal" lifestyle.
It is important to remember that much of modern activity is done using electronics that use a tiny fraction of the energy of previous technologies.

[isgota]

Quite an interesting battery this is. It's made of abundant materials as well, so it could be scaled up to meet global demand for storage.

As a drawback, somebody has estimated it's energy density from the nature paper abstract, it's below state-of-the-art lithium batteries. But it's one of the firsts Al-ion batteries, so we'll see if they can improve that.

If you were looking for something with a bit more discussion of the various battery technologies, you might want to check this one out:


The rechargeable revolution: A better battery

It's funny, I found first time this article some days ago searching some info for Magnesium-ion batteries, it's like some telepathy stuff

The thing about that article is it cast doubts about Lithium-Oxygen (really Li-Air) practical usability. But a group of Japanese researchers are looking for a workaround, using peroxides instead of oxygen from air. They could have already better energy densities than Li-ion, and potentially meet the Li-Oxygen level.

[dolanbaker]

Blond batteries, won't be very smart so!

[Keith_McClary]

Blond batteries, won't be very smart so!

It says they have better density.

[ennui2]

In terms of peak oil, batteries are mostly non-starters for anything other than Iputz's, golf carts, WW2 submarines.

Someone tell that to Tesla.

[ennui2]

A good precedent here is the hype that once surrounded nimh and the cobasys patent, only to see lithium ion make that patent seem worthless before it expired. New battery technology therefore can shake things up. It's just a matter of separating the real deals from the duds, like the altairnanos of the world. Announcements like these are pretty commonplace but they seem to fall out of the 24 hour news cycle and are never heard from again. So all you can do is just kind of issue gut-feeling prediction about whether any of these will ever match the hype.

[davep]

what we need is Unobtainium. What we get are batteries, woefully inadequate energy carriers. The theoretically perfect lithium-ion battery has only 6.7% energy density of gasoline (practically it is closer to 2-3%) . In terms of peak oil, batteries are mostly non-starters for anything other than Iputz's, golf carts, WW2 submarines.

I'm actually referring to batteries for storing the surplus energy from solar & wind, rather than for transportation. But then again electricity generation isn't really a peak oil issue either.

You can use it for transportation. I have a slightly crazy (in a good way) French friend who has been using three electric bikes for a few years and is planning a 1200km round trip with his son. He needs a bit of help funding the purchase of some powerful (LiFePo4) batteries for this proof of concept trip, so here's his donations page (it's mainly in French, but there are some good pictures of his bikes and trailers and stuff) http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/la-croisiere-crue-c-est-600-kilometres-a-velo-en-trois-jours-pour-livrer-un-pot-de-miel

I particularly liked this one:


And if you speak French, he discusses long-term budget vs cars in this post http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/la-croisiere-crue-c-est-600-kilometres-a-velo-en-trois-jours-pour-livrer-un-pot-de-miel/news/et-si-on-parlait-budget-le-velo-ca-peut-pas-marcher-pour-tout-le-monde-a-moins-que TL;DR the costs are upfront and it's the equivalent of the gas tank that's expensive, the gas itself is cheap (he also has thermal and PV solar panels etc). Also, don't buy Chinese or it'll break within a year (his are Dutch/German - they're more expensive but last forever).

Anyway, it's nice to see some people actually trying an alternative to the car and measuring costs etc. This friend has been peak oil aware for a long time. If you can spare a few euros/dollars for his project I'd be really happy as it's a worthwhile practical PO venture.

[davep]

Nobody interested in genuine PO mitigation attempts by my friend then?

He also has a composting toilet, with the wee and other water going through a reedbed to a clean pond.

Until recently he also sold eggs to a restaurant about 10km away in exchange for their food garbage that he'd sort and feed to his pig (he'd get a new one each year) and end up with 150kg of piggy goodness. He rotated the pig each year with corn.

He's got lots of other projects too, but money is obviously a limiting factor. So a bit of help from PO-aware people would be handy for this interesting project (a total of 1200km over six travelling days via electrically assisted bicycles).

[Subjectivist]

Nobody interested in genuine PO mitigation attempts by my friend then?

He also has a composting toilet, with the wee and other water going through a reedbed to a clean pond.

Until recently he also sold eggs to a restaurant about 10km away in exchange for their food garbage that he'd sort and feed to his pig (he'd get a new one each year) and end up with 150kg of piggy goodness. He rotated the pig each year with corn.

He's got lots of other projects too, but money is obviously a limiting factor. So a bit of help from PO-aware people would be handy for this interesting project (a total of 1200km over six travelling days via electrically assisted bicycles).

It used to be common practice in America that hog farms got restuuraunt scraps. Between infection concerns and the subsidized low price of maize most restaurants now landfill or compost their bio waste and most farms buy corn. I prefer hogs fed on the variety of things you get from restaurants because the meat is much better IMO than that raised on corn maize.

[kanon]

This is from the battery-technology-thread-pt-3-merged and I couldn't help thinking it is very much like the subject of this thread. Does anyone knowledgeable care to compare and contrast? New device combines the advantages of batteries and supercapacitors

Professor Richard Kaner and Dr. Maher El-Kady have made an important step in this direction by creating a high-performance hybrid supercapacitor. Like other supercapacitors, their device charges and discharges very quickly and lasts more than 10,000 recharge cycles. But, according the scientists, their invention also stores six times more energy than a conventional supercapacitor, holding more than twice as much charge as a typical thin-film lithium battery in one fifth the thickness of a sheet of paper.

[Peak_Yeast]

Well - I do wish the battery technology would take a leap forward and give us the best of batteries and supercapacitors all-in-one.

I have hoped for this for the past 10 years sinc I started looking at solarcells for my house. Now I have the cells, but no viable storage. And nothing - NOTHING - would suit me better than getting off the grid.

After having seen 100+ articles about new fantastic batteries that are ALMOST commercialized my enthusiasm has been dampened somewhat. But, of course, progress probably will happen eventually... Or not.

Another snag is that very often companies take micro-steps forward in order to maximize profits.. So that every year the item is only slightly better than last year (or the competition for that matter). - Or another way to say it: How to waste most possible time and destroy as many resources as possible during the progress.

[ennui2]

Look on google for hopeful battery news and ye shall find, but out of all these overly optimistic "flying car" type articles that seem to come out like clockwork, maybe 1 or 2 viable new battery types will eventually emerge in the next 10 years and there's no way to really know based on the wording of these things which it will be.