I'm confused why this technique is better than just compressing air?
Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#22Why did DoE reject them?
A knee-jerk reaction by poorly informed and motivated reviewers, which included a fear of: - Hydrolock (solved by default) - Corrosion (solved) - Inability to separate water and air (easy to solve and quickly solved) - a lack of understanding that water could provide heat to air on expansion (proven...) We actually disproved all of their claims within 2 weeks of their decision. The problem, however, is that you don't…
Yay, so DOE funding not only has false positives (Solyndra, at the point where they were clearly doomed by cheap Chinese imports) but also false negatives.
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#23Congrats, DaniFong!
You're one of those people where 10 years from now it is going to blow my mind that I got to share an Internet message board with you.
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#24Series D and they don't have a product? :eyeroll:
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#25Why did DoE reject them?
A knee-jerk reaction by poorly informed and motivated reviewers, which included a fear of: - Hydrolock (solved by default) - Corrosion (solved) - Inability to separate water and air (easy to solve and quickly solved) - a lack of understanding that water could provide heat to air on expansion (proven...) We actually disproved all of their claims within 2 weeks of their decision. The problem, however, is that you don't…
I am curious how you solve corrosion in a high pressure thermal cycling environment for what are presumably very tiny water fog nozzles. But maybe that is trade secret or whatever.
Naively I'd just switch out the air for N2, since it's mechanically the same and cheap. But then, once you're using special gas, I'd look at using low and high molecular weight (say, He and maybe some long chain which isn't going to detonate under the working pressure?), and maybe other stuff, to see if it would improve the product.
But maybe corrosion isn't a big problem -- there are some awesome alloys out there. I want to get into firearm sound suppressor design and manufacture (custom, tuned for a given weapon and load) just to justify an HPC/CFD capability and a bunch of awesome Inconel and other alloy samples.
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#26What I find really intriguing about this is Thiel's participation - it's one thing to get funding from Khosla, who is a cleantech cheerleader, it's really amazing to get funding from Thiel, who is a cleanteach skeptic.
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#27Congrats! The ideas behind this are amazing, and I'm happy to see some folks really trying to make a difference in this market even in the wake of some nasty history (albeit not your own).
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#28Series D and they don't have a product? :eyeroll:
Yes because only in magic software wonderland can you have millions of users before you have any money.
Once you exit the software bubble, almost everything, especially new technology, becomes a lot "harder" and takes a lot longer.
Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#29Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
#30I'm confused why this technique is better than just compressing air?
I took a tour of LightSail's operations when I was on a trip to the valley a couple months ago. They had just moved to a building that used to be a firehouse so it had beefed up power systems which they needed to test their products, a lot of neat equipment, and really nice people.
From my understanding, they are using compressed air to store the energy but are also using water to cool the system and reclaim the heat energy created during the process.