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THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby evilgenius » Sat 13 Feb 2021, 11:31:47

Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby AdamB » Sat 13 Feb 2021, 15:25:20

One more dance for oil, before EVs bloom.

Oil demand could grow at its fastest rate since the 1970s for the next three years, BofA Global Research has said in a note.

The commodity’s future is limited, though, the analysts said, expecting global oil demand to peak around 2030. The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) drives this change.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby eclipse » Sat 13 Feb 2021, 21:30:57

evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

There are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen.

That's 1 100 000 BILLION tons. Bill McKibben in Do the Math said there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves left. That's 2795 BILLION tons. 1100 000 / 2795 = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. So even if we allowed a direct 1:1 locking away of hydrogen per ton fossil fuel (and it doesn't work like that at all!), we would lose only 1/393th of our oxygen! And that's if we burned away every last bit of coal and oil and gas we have on the reserves right now.

But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.
Dr James Hansen recommends breeder reactors that convert nuclear 'waste' into 1000 years of clean energy for America, and can charge all our light vehicles and generate "Blue Crude" for heavy vehicles.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Sat 13 Feb 2021, 21:41:44

eclipse wrote:
evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

Why don't you look up how many tons of oxygen are in the atmosphere and how many tons of oxygen per year it would take to replace ALL oil with the WRONG hydrogen before sounding this rather ridiculous alarm? Go on, tell us what tiny, infinitesimal percent of our atmospheric oxygen we'd be locking away as water? Do the math and tell us how much TOTAL oxygen would be locked away as water if we actually burned all the remaining fossil fuels to get all the hydrogen we needed? What percentage of Earth's free oxygen would be locked away in that scenario? Hint: there are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen. Bill McKibben in do the math suggested there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves. It takes lots of energy to create hydrogen from fossil fuels, so we would need to deduct that. But let's not. Let's pretend - for the sake of argument - that one ton of fossil fuels = 1 ton of oxygen locked away if we convert said fossil fuels to hydrogen and burned it! 1100 000 BILLION tons of oxygen / 2795 BILLION tons of fossil fuels = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. Converting it all - every last bit of conventional coal and oil and gas reserves into hydrogen and burning it would lock away about 1/393th of our breathable oxygen! Call the newspapers it's the end of the world! :-D

But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.

Hey, his ilk likes to throw out random nonsense with an alarmist tone, and hope some of it sticks.

Math, science, logic, etc. need not apply.

And don't plants use water? And exhale oxygen? So it's not like there aren't natural cycles, etc.

Even if this did end up an issue (NOT that I'm buying it), AGW is in our face and this one is millennia down the road.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby StarvingLion » Sat 13 Feb 2021, 22:11:50

final plan decades from now


...buried in the earth with those who created it.

Its all moot. The stock market will crash 3 months from now. You will get a "vaccine" and then its sleepy bye.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby eclipse » Sat 13 Feb 2021, 22:44:21

A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.
Dr James Hansen recommends breeder reactors that convert nuclear 'waste' into 1000 years of clean energy for America, and can charge all our light vehicles and generate "Blue Crude" for heavy vehicles.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby StarvingLion » Sat 13 Feb 2021, 23:11:39

eclipse wrote:A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.


We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby eclipse » Sun 14 Feb 2021, 00:50:11

StarvingLion wrote:
eclipse wrote:A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.


We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.

D'uh! Just thought you'd bait and switch hey? Changing the topic much? Not so fast my little ray of sunshine! :P

Is this a fact or not? :badgrin:

It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

Debating doomers can be like debating climate deniers. I've found climate deniers don't debate, they rotate. It's like they know they are firing blanks, but just keep firing new blanks at a forum in the hope that someone will get distracted by all the noise and start to think there's real ammo in there. EG:-
Denier: "It's the sun!"
Peer-reviewed response: "No it's not as the sun was in a cooling phase during the second half of the 20th Century and yet the planet kept warming. We know from basic physics in a lab how much energy CO2 traps!"
Denier: "There's warming on Mars!"
Peer-reviewed response: "No, there are seasons on Mars and sometimes those seasons look like climate change on Mars. But if we look back here on earth, we can see that CO2 was at 280ppm then jumped to 400ppm today - and we know from the simple maths of the Radiative Forcing Equation that this ads about 4 Hiroshima bombs of heat to our planet per second! We also know it's our fossil fuel use by the isotopes of carbon!"
Denier: "Well, what about.... xyz...."

Note: the denier never really engages substantively with a single reply or disproves any of the science. They just keep rotating. I've seen forums where a denier probably went through as many arguments as there are letters in the alphabet - and eventually came back to asserting A again. It happened over several months, but when I realised what was happening I had to call it out.
DENIERS DON'T DEBATE - THEY ROTATE! But we don't need to worry. They're only firing blanks.

Now, doomers? Well, they use the same strategy. Hey - they might get real lucky and someone might push the big red button that says "End of the world - do not push this button!" Ever since we invented The Bomb there's been a Doomsday clock. It's just doomers are arrogant enough to think they know when that clock is going to hit midnight. Sorry pal but according to the many doomers I debated in 2004, we should have hit Mad Max about 20 times by now. 20 huge "I know this with all my mind body and soul!" predictions have turned to smoke and mirrors against the actual forces of history. I'm not saying I KNOW we're going to make it - but I am saying there's every chance that we'll have tens of thousands of people gradually building a new world on Mars and the asteroid belt as much as there is also every chance that we'll be digging our way through the rubble of a nuclear war. Oh, and if that happens? Industrial civilisation would be back within a generation or two! There's just no unlearning the stuff we've learned.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby jedrider » Sun 14 Feb 2021, 12:07:21

StarvingLion wrote:
eclipse wrote:A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.


We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.


Commercial real estate building is (or was) crazy here in silicon valley. Now people are working from home, so it looks to be a boom/bust cycle, with the bust probably starting about now. We'll know when they leave construction projects half-finished, I guess. The presumption of all this building is that the workforce is zipping around in electric cars, of course. That must be the presumption.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby evilgenius » Tue 16 Feb 2021, 07:12:59

eclipse wrote:
evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

There are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen.

That's 1 100 000 BILLION tons. Bill McKibben in Do the Math said there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves left. That's 2795 BILLION tons. 1100 000 / 2795 = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. So even if we allowed a direct 1:1 locking away of hydrogen per ton fossil fuel (and it doesn't work like that at all!), we would lose only 1/393th of our oxygen! And that's if we burned away every last bit of coal and oil and gas we have on the reserves right now.

But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.

Thanks for the information. Do you know if your confidence is justified over an extended period of time? If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Plantagenet » Tue 16 Feb 2021, 16:26:44

evilgenius wrote: If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.


Thats a very good point.

As far as I can learn, the only emissions emitted from a FCV (fuel cell vehicle) are water vapor and some heat.

epa: hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles

Water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas, and so creation of more water vapor might theoretically drive more Greenhouse warming. Indeed some climate models suggest that global warming due to CO2 is putting more water vapor into the air, resulting in a feedback effect that slightly increases global warming.

However, the hydrologic cycle for the entire planet is so huge, that the amount of water coming from FCVs would be really tiny in comparison to the natural hydrologic cycle. This is contrast to CO2, where human generated CO2 has greatly increased the amount of CO2 in the atmophere.

So, yes there might be a very tiny effect. But it would probably be very tiny, and more then offset by reducing lifetime CO2 emissions from ICE and EV vehicles.

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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby eclipse » Tue 16 Feb 2021, 20:26:05

Yes - but it's CO2 that's driving the extra water vapour feedback.
The whole effect works out to be 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of extra heat trapped per second!
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 21 Feb 2021, 10:27:00

Plantagenet wrote:
evilgenius wrote: If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.


Thats a very good point.

As far as I can learn, the only emissions emitted from a FCV (fuel cell vehicle) are water vapor and some heat.

epa: hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles

Water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas, and so creation of more water vapor might theoretically drive more Greenhouse warming. Indeed some climate models suggest that global warming due to CO2 is putting more water vapor into the air, resulting in a feedback effect that slightly increases global warming.

However, the hydrologic cycle for the entire planet is so huge, that the amount of water coming from FCVs would be really tiny in comparison to the natural hydrologic cycle. This is contrast to CO2, where human generated CO2 has greatly increased the amount of CO2 in the atmophere.

So, yes there might be a very tiny effect. But it would probably be very tiny, and more then offset by reducing lifetime CO2 emissions from ICE and EV vehicles.

Cheers!


Water vapor is not a concern because air can only hold a certain humidity at any given temperature and pressure so if humans add water vapor over here it just precipitates out more water vapor over there. The concern is the hydrogen source. If you use electrolysis of purified water to source your hydrogen you have to get the electricity somewhere. If you get the electricity from nuclear or renewable sources than you come out ahead using the hydrogen as an energy storage medium. However today the common practice is to strip hydrogen from methane and vent the resulting CO2 that is created by the cheapest methods of doing this transformation. Hydrogen sourced from Methane where the CO2 is released is worse than just burning the methane because energy is lost in every step of the process resulting in a net increase in CO2 emissions. There is a lot of fast talk about a carbon sequestration version of using methane as a hydrogen source but it is expensive and wasteful of energy. To produce the kind of Hydrogen supply needed for a fleet of fuel cell vehicles the costs would be sky high, and outer space is the limit on that sort of pricing scheme.
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Re: What are electric car's batteries made of?

Unread postby hz9998871 » Mon 06 Sep 2021, 05:55:11

DesuMaiden wrote:Are electric car's batteries made of renewable or nonrenewable resources? I would like to know what an electric car's battery is made of. That way I can evaluate if electric cars are viable alternative to fossil fuel based transport.

That's all I'm asking. I would really appreciate your help.


Well, well! Batteries for electric vehicles may contain renewable resources in some cases. Experimentally speaking, electric batteries use nonrenewable resources. With Tesla Electric battery Motor Cars, quality is more important than quantity. Tesla uses lithium-nickel-cobalt-aluminum chemistry and is developing lithium-iron-phosphate technology as well as nickel-based batteries.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby evilgenius » Wed 08 Sep 2021, 05:40:56

Outcast_Searcher wrote:
eclipse wrote:
evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

Why don't you look up how many tons of oxygen are in the atmosphere and how many tons of oxygen per year it would take to replace ALL oil with the WRONG hydrogen before sounding this rather ridiculous alarm? Go on, tell us what tiny, infinitesimal percent of our atmospheric oxygen we'd be locking away as water? Do the math and tell us how much TOTAL oxygen would be locked away as water if we actually burned all the remaining fossil fuels to get all the hydrogen we needed? What percentage of Earth's free oxygen would be locked away in that scenario? Hint: there are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen. Bill McKibben in do the math suggested there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves. It takes lots of energy to create hydrogen from fossil fuels, so we would need to deduct that. But let's not. Let's pretend - for the sake of argument - that one ton of fossil fuels = 1 ton of oxygen locked away if we convert said fossil fuels to hydrogen and burned it! 1100 000 BILLION tons of oxygen / 2795 BILLION tons of fossil fuels = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. Converting it all - every last bit of conventional coal and oil and gas reserves into hydrogen and burning it would lock away about 1/393th of our breathable oxygen! Call the newspapers it's the end of the world! :-D

But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.

Hey, his ilk likes to throw out random nonsense with an alarmist tone, and hope some of it sticks.

Math, science, logic, etc. need not apply.

And don't plants use water? And exhale oxygen? So it's not like there aren't natural cycles, etc.

Even if this did end up an issue (NOT that I'm buying it), AGW is in our face and this one is millennia down the road.

You know, I've stood by you in the past. I've defended you from those who have accused you of falsity. Mere speculation does not make the thought wrong. How many years ago was it that people were worried about global cooling?

I consider this deflection to say only that man is not capable of destabilizing the oxygen balance, by using this bar. Think about the concept, though, and imagine how man can change all of those numbers by innovating one thing or another. Plus, we have demonstrated the very real capacity to observe something going wrong and do nothing about it. We could very well watch the numbers go the wrong way and just keep watching them.

Look, it's not that we will, but that we could. What I am really saying is that we need to think about these sorts of things before we act. Otherwise, it sounds a lot like how they wanted to clear the mountains out of the way to build I-70 by using atomic bombs in the fifties. As long as it remained a statement of pride it was ok. As soon as the idea began to be taken seriously, though...
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Tue 23 Nov 2021, 14:08:02

evilgenius wrote:I consider this deflection to say only that man is not capable of destabilizing the oxygen balance, by using this bar. Think about the concept, though, and imagine how man can change all of those numbers by innovating one thing or another. Plus, we have demonstrated the very real capacity to observe something going wrong and do nothing about it. We could very well watch the numbers go the wrong way and just keep watching them.

Look, it's not that we will, but that we could. What I am really saying is that we need to think about these sorts of things before we act. Otherwise, it sounds a lot like how they wanted to clear the mountains out of the way to build I-70 by using atomic bombs in the fifties. As long as it remained a statement of pride it was ok. As soon as the idea began to be taken seriously, though...

Look, I didn't say it was impossible. I implied that given the numbers:

1). It's highly unlikely.

2). That AGW is in our face and needs to be dealt with ASAP. Vs. spending lots of time and energy worrying about things that aren't close to being proven yet, and given the numbers, look like small order effects.

If plenty of good science and math shows that destabilizing the oxygen balance looks like a serious problem, THEN I'll get much more concerned about it. Just like I did with AGW as the evidence (and my understanding) grew.

I don't see why that's unreasonable, given that we can't possibly BEGIN to seriously address every potential problem we face. Hell, we aren't even very seriously addressing most of the proven and obvious and very serious problems we face.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby kublikhan » Mon 26 Sep 2022, 18:50:28

As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap.

The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway. “I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale stationary storage, and ultimately for automotive [uses],” explains Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry.

The three ingredients they ended up with are cheap and readily available — aluminum, no different from the foil at the supermarket; sulfur, which is often a waste product from processes such as petroleum refining; and widely available salts. “The ingredients are cheap, and the thing is safe — it cannot burn,” Sadoway says. In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F).

Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction. “It’s funny,” he says, because the whole focus was on finding a salt with the lowest melting point, but the catenated chloro-aluminates they ended up with turned out to be resistant to the shorting problem.

What’s more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. “As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat,” Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, “you’d store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you’d draw electricity after dark, and you’d do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature.”

The new technology is already the basis for a new spinoff company called Avanti, which has licensed the patents to the system.
A new concept for low-cost batteries
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Mon 26 Sep 2022, 19:10:46

eclipse wrote:Yes - but it's CO2 that's driving the extra water vapour feedback.
The whole effect works out to be 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of extra heat trapped per second!
And how does that compare to 100 million barrels of oil ,plus coal being burned every day for a century? A good third of the energy in those heat sources went directly into the atmosphere and continues to this day.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby evilgenius » Sat 01 Oct 2022, 09:58:55

Outcast_Searcher wrote:
evilgenius wrote:I consider this deflection to say only that man is not capable of destabilizing the oxygen balance, by using this bar. Think about the concept, though, and imagine how man can change all of those numbers by innovating one thing or another. Plus, we have demonstrated the very real capacity to observe something going wrong and do nothing about it. We could very well watch the numbers go the wrong way and just keep watching them.

Look, it's not that we will, but that we could. What I am really saying is that we need to think about these sorts of things before we act. Otherwise, it sounds a lot like how they wanted to clear the mountains out of the way to build I-70 by using atomic bombs in the fifties. As long as it remained a statement of pride it was ok. As soon as the idea began to be taken seriously, though...

Look, I didn't say it was impossible. I implied that given the numbers:

1). It's highly unlikely.

2). That AGW is in our face and needs to be dealt with ASAP. Vs. spending lots of time and energy worrying about things that aren't close to being proven yet, and given the numbers, look like small order effects.

If plenty of good science and math shows that destabilizing the oxygen balance looks like a serious problem, THEN I'll get much more concerned about it. Just like I did with AGW as the evidence (and my understanding) grew.

I don't see why that's unreasonable, given that we can't possibly BEGIN to seriously address every potential problem we face. Hell, we aren't even very seriously addressing most of the proven and obvious and very serious problems we face.

No, but you say my ilk. Obviously, I've come across to you as some sort of conspiracy theorist or alarmist. That's not what I was doing here.

Here, I was pointing out something that ought to be obvious. There are two different sources you can get your hydrogen from. If you are always getting it from something that is not systemically tied to the source, though, you run the risk of destabilizing the oxygen balance. Yes, it sounds crazy, but so did global warming.

No, it's not something that I think is inevitable. I think that's where you misunderstand me. I'm not saying it will happen. Nor that it is necessarily probable.

I'm not predicting it. I should have been more adamant about saying that. The way I can go on, that's misleading. It's just that it's not all that hard to see the economic pressure to continue into what might be a really bad policy.

If people can make money off of it, they will. And that can drive these sorts of things. Such a practice would increase the amount of water in the world, and decrease the amount of oxygen. Every two hydrogen atoms gotten from nat gas would bind to an oxygen atom, taking it out of the system, unless, later, it too was electrolysized. But that balance relies upon human recognition and endeavor. Electrolysis doesn't take place naturally.

We would be talking about entering a new human managed world. A new sort of management that we would have to get mostly right. We can, and most probably would. I am only saying that we need to think about it or we could just go the way we always have and try out what isn't good for us well before we try out what is. Like global warming, that might not be the best path.
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Re: THE Battery Technology Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sat 01 Oct 2022, 13:32:00

evilgenius wrote:
Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

Using hydrogen generated by electrolysis has zero effect on the oxygen balance as it is a perfect recycling loop. Using natural gas as your source of hydrogen is stupid on it's face as it would be better to just use the natural gas as efficiently as possible.
Anyone promoting hydrogen fuel cells has a note or proviso in their literature somewhere that the hydrogen has to be generated by electrolysis using nuclear or renewable electricity before any climate benefit is possible.
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