The climate change debate continues.

[octave]

Here's the problem: there is no cheap battery. My Jabiru uses an 8.4 amp-hour battery at 13.2 volts and cost just over $100. Now 8.4 amps for 1 hour at 13.2 volts is 110 Watt-hours.

 

So I paid about $1 per watt-hour and it was real cheap, most pay 4 times as much. ( they get better control-stuff built into the box though )

 

SO at $1 per watt-hour, or $1000 per kWh, or $60,000 for 60 kWh, the  idea is real expensive.

 

The world is crying out for a battery which will store electricity for a few cents per kWh, I wish I could invent one.

 

Battery prices are falling rapidly.

 

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I am just having a solar system  installed at my place and did consider a tesla powerwall but decided against it as it is not quite there yet on a purely economic basis. (about $8000 for a 14kw powerwall plus installation)   The prices are falling and efficiency is increasing.  For some people they are already economic.     Note I did say I could foresee a time in the near future.    I did live for 20 years on a bush property with no mains electricity, in this case battery plus solar was economically superior. 

 

It is easy to think that the rapid technological progress if the 20th and early 21st century some how has reached an end but people are not great at predicting the future.    IBM   thought there would be an extremely limited market for the computer now we all have one in our pocket.  

 

Vehicle to grid is already beginning used.

 

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/vehicle-grid-technology-revving

 

[pmccarthy]

Today my wife and I are in our solar powered van. We can watch tv or do most things we want. Gas for cooking. The two things we can’t run are the microwave and the aircon, neither matters today. A step change is needed to make us fully solar.

 

 

[octave]

Today my wife and I are in our solar powered van. We can watch tv or do most things we want. Gas for cooking. The two things we can’t run are the microwave and the aircon, neither matters today. A step change is needed to make us fully solar.

 

In 1990 we built a house in the bush off the grid.  We paid $590 for each of our 60 watt panels. A 60 watt panel (if you could be bothered buying one this small)  is  $156.  Bear in mind given inflation $590 is an enormous amount.  The enormous advances in technology will mean that in the near future it will not matter whether you understand climate science or not, it will just be cheaper and more efficient.  

 

 

[Bruce]

I wish your graph was right Octave. It indicates to me that my 0.1kWhr battery in 2018 should have cost $17.60.

 

Instead I paid over $100.

 

I bet you can't actually buy a 1kWhr for $176 .

 

 

[pmccarthy]

Imagine a giant flywheel spun up by solar power and slowed by consumption. If no rpm limit, it could store a months worth of sunshine for two days of use. Can we do it with chemicals? Yes, one day. If we could kick uranium or thorium atoms up to a higher activity then use heat from decay when we need it. I am confident it will happen, but not in my lifetime. 

 

 

[octave]

I wish your graph was right Octave. It indicates to me that my 0.1kWhr battery in 2018 should have cost $17.60.

 

Instead I paid over $100.

 

I bet you can't actually buy a 1kWhr for $176 .

 

 

 

Bruce you cant necessarily equate small batteries with

 

I wish your graph was right Octave. It indicates to me that my 0.1kWhr battery in 2018 should have cost $17.60.

 

Instead I paid over $100.

 

I bet you can't actually buy a 1kWhr for $176 .

 

The price of a small battery may not directly relate to large batteries.

 

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/07/envision-energy-says-ev-battery-cell-costs-will-fall-below-50-kwh-by-2025/#:~:targetText=In general terms%2C the current,be around %24190 per kWh.

 

"At the Stanford Global Energy Forum last month, Lei Zhang, founder and CEO of Envision Energy, made an extraordinary pronouncement. He said the cost of manufacturing EV battery cells would fall below $100 per kWh by 2020 and would be less than $50 per kWh by 2025 according to Driving, a Canadian automotive news site.

 

The conventional wisdom is that when the price for EV battery cells falls below $100 per kWh, that is when electric cars will become price competitive with conventional cars and the EV revolution will go into hyperdrive. We can’t know for sure, but many industry observers believe Tesla is very near that threshold for the battery cells it manufactures at its Gigafactory 1 in Nevada, if it has not already crossed over it. In general terms, the current industry standard for EV battery cells is believed to be $145 per kWh. 

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

I like the idea of flywheels; after the oil shocks of the 70s flywheel research was often in the news.

 

Simple technology, no complex energy conversion. Just a composite flywheel spinning at high speed in a vacuum chamber under the floor of your car or bus, linked to a generator.

 

We don't hear much about them lately.

 

 

[octave]

Imagine a giant flywheel spun up by solar power and slowed by consumption. If no rpm limit, it could store a months worth of sunshine for two days of use. Can we do it with chemicals? Yes, one day. If we could kick uranium or thorium atoms up to a higher activity then use heat from decay when we need it. I am confident it will happen, but not in my lifetime. 

 

 

 

I guess I am more of a techno optimist than you are. 

 

There is no reason to believe that progress will not continue at the pace it has in the recent past and in all likelihood it will increase.  

 

New York, spot the 1 car among the horses.

 

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13 years later ,spot the 1  horse among the cars

 

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[octave]

I wish your graph was right Octave. It indicates to me that my 0.1kWhr battery in 2018 should have cost $17.60.

 

Instead I paid over $100.

 

I bet you can't actually buy a 1kWhr for $176 .

 

To be fair we may comparing retail price with price to manufacture. But the more important point is that the cost of battery storage is reducing rapidly.

 

 

[octave]

SO at $1 per watt-hour, or $1000 per kWh, or $60,000 for 60 kWh,

 

Actually for around this price you can pretty much buy a 60kw battery pack wrapped up in a Hyundai Kona EV

 

 

[Bruce]

The battery for the SA grid cost us 40 cents per watt-hour, which is just under half of what you get from hobbyking, but that battery was so big it cost millions.

 

I couldn't find a price for a replacement 64kWh battery for the Kona, but guess it would be about $40,000. This guess leaves the cost of the rest of the car at over $20,000 which is reasonable. This is better than my hobbyking figures, but not by so much that the argument changes.

 

 

[octave]

The battery for the SA grid cost us 40 cents per watt-hour, which is just under half of what you get from hobbyking, but that battery was so big it cost millions.

 

I couldn't find a price for a replacement 64kWh battery for the Kona, but guess it would be about $40,000. This guess leaves the cost of the rest of the car at over $20,000 which is reasonable. This is better than my hobbyking figures, but not by so much that the argument changes.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.interestingengineering.com/tesla-puts-price-on-model-3-battery-module-replacement-around-5000-7000

 

 

[Yenn]

The flywheel idea might be good, but I would not expect it to be good for vehicular use.

 

A flywheel is more efficient when it has a large diameter, it can be lighter in total with a big diameter. Once you have a flywheel turning in a car nd then try to turn the car, you will have a big build up of forces, causing bearing wear, friction and even uncontrollability. We have that already on the front of our aircraft.

 

 

[octave]

I like the idea of flywheels; after the oil shocks of the 70s flywheel research was often in the news.

 

Simple technology, no complex energy conversion. Just a composite flywheel spinning at high speed in a vacuum chamber under the floor of your car or bus, linked to a generator.

 

We don't hear much about them lately.

 

 

 

Came across this video, you may find it interesting.

 

 

 

[pmccarthy]

 

Came across this video, you may find it interesting.

 

 

Thanks, very interesting. Flywheel storage systems were used in mines from the early 20th century to smooth power demand in winding engines. They were a DC Ward-Leonard motor generator set. 

 

 

[Bruce]

If you could buy a 60 kWh battery for $6000, you could subdivide it into 300 batteries of 200 Watt hours ( about a car battery ) for $20 each.

 

Car batteries are well over $100 for cheapskates, proper people pay $200.

 

If these batteries sold for $50, you would make some nice money.

 

 

[Yenn]

I hear today that a paper published in Nature says that Nitrous Oxide NO2 is between two and three hundred times worse for global warming than Carbon Dioxide. It comes mainly from Nitrogenous fertilisers.

 

The reliance on fertilisers for farming has only been with us for about 70 years and coming from a farming background I am horrified by it. No doubt we can produce more food that way, but it has had a terrible effect on the actual soil, which is no basicly just something to keep the plants standing upright.

 

No laughing matter!

 

 

[Bruce]

It was Fritz Haber, a German Jew, who invented the process of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere to make  ammonia. This enabled the production of ammonium nitrate, a high explosive.

 

Germany had entered ww1 with only 6 weeks of ammunition, ( they thought it would be over before  6 weeks ) but the Haber process enabled them to make much more, plus feed their population. " Brot aus luft! "  was the headlines. ( Bread from air ). They could have said "explosives from air".

 

Before Haber, they used Chilean nitrate for their explosives, but of course the British navy would have stopped this.

 

I never thought of nitrates as being a greenhouse gas. It washes out of the sky readily. A fair bit of nitrate is fixed in thunderstorms, and the nice effect this has on plants is easy to see.

 

I wonder if the atmospheric nitrate concentration has been growing.  Hitler killed off a lot of the Habers  in ww2.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

It was Fritz Haber, a German Jew, who invented the process of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere ...

 

Before Haber, they used Chilean nitrate for their explosives, but of course the British navy would have stopped this...

 

A fascinating story. That fertiliser trade (I thought it was phosphates from bird quano) from Valparaiso round Cape Horn to Europe used large sailing ship well into the 20th century, some of them with up to seven masts.

 

 

[Bruce]

You could be right old K. I had read that  Germany simply could not import stuff by sea while at war with Britain.

 

I reckon I assumed about Chilean stuff...  gosh, since high-school I have thought they were the only big supplier.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

You could be right old K. I had read that  Germany simply could not import stuff by sea while at war with Britain.

 

I reckon I assumed about Chilean stuff...  gosh, since high-school I have thought they were the only big supplier.

 

Just did some homework and discovered that fertiliser was rich in both nitrates and phosphates. Guano is a fascinating story in itself, pivotal in the history of colonisation by many nations- USA, Australia- and the cause of wars.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano

 

 

[Yenn]

The Chilean stuff is mainly phosphates, Nitrous oxide is nitrogen, which is mainly a promoter of green growth. Good for grass or leafy vegetables. Wheat is of course a grass but excess nitrogenfertiliser will not increase the yield of wheat.

 

One of the early nitrogen fertilisers was interesting. We used to put fertiliser in alongside the seed with a combine drill. that had a hopper for seed and another for fertiliser. the fertiliser was very corrosive, so we used to clean out the hopper after use and then put sump oil on the moving parts. What happened was that when you next started the machine moving, the oil had combined with some of the fertiliser and you had what the miners use to blow coal apart. That was how they found anfo.

 

 

[Bruce]

Thread drift I know,  the Bali bomb was anfo, but it was so poorly mixed it only went off about 20%. If they had mixed it properly, there would have been a crater where the building was.

 

Luckily those terrorists were so ignorant about chemistry huh.

 

 

[octave]

https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/billionaires-invest-in-massive-solar-farm-to-supply-power-to-singapore-20191120-p53cf7.html?fbclid=IwAR2z_TP9K_pKGSmKwHBRQut4y-HwvsB6GlUG9x6d8w-WRMdG07FCYtpAAGQ

 

 

[pmccarthy]

ANFO is 6% fuel oil and 94% ammonium nitrate. It was “ invented” following an investigation into an accidental explosion in the USA just after the war. The AN works best in prill form. I used to buy that for the garden because it was cheaper than fertilisers marketed as such. I have mixed and used a lot of ANFO.