41–50 of 135 posts
What 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.
How much air would you need to supply all the power required by all the homes in California? Here's my attempt to answer that question: The first stop is to get a sense of what the realistic energy density of these approaches might be. A quick search lands you here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage#E... My take-away: 1 m3 of air = about 300,000 J How much energy does a typical house in the U…
One small correction. This is akin to a battery, so there is a 'charge' and a 'discharge' cycle, you'd be using the charge cycle when there is an excess and the discharge when you need more than is available or when the price of your stored energy is lower than what you'd be buying from the grid. So likely while you're charging (I'm assuming that's the better part of a day) you're not consuming from the device. So yo…
> Conservation is the best possible starting point
Couldn't agree more. I happen to think that this is where we've failed miserably over the years. Homes are just not built to be efficient, despite what the propaganda might indicate.
This technology is one missing piece.
What 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.
The Thiel quote made it sound like he invested in it because DoE rejected it. I'm not sure if having such an ideologue as an investor is a good idea, especially in the heavily regulated energy sector.
If that includes Peter Thiel then I'm all for it.
Him being a skeptic of clean tech is a validation of sorts, you can bet that this kind of money isn't thrown around likely and that they had the basic physics checked before the investment. If someone would have been able to raise serious practical doubt about the feasibility then likely there would have been no announcement today. Yes, there is still risk, and there are likely lots of unknown factors. But this is technology development. I'm pretty sure the world will be at their feet if they manage to get the device into production at scale, no matter who the investors were.
And names like Thiel, Gates and Khosla certainly don't hurt.
What 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.
The Thiel quote made it sound like he invested in it because DoE rejected it. I'm not sure if having such an ideologue as an investor is a good idea, especially in the heavily regulated energy sector.
An old bad idea -> Many years ago i thought up an idea of creating a FEC - A self contained unit that would convert heat from a forest fires, etc... into energy. The units would be taken by helicopter and dropped into forest fires. Once the fire was over move the units into a grid that could supply energy to millions of homes. This technology is one missing piece.
Forest fires at scale tend to be pretty much unmanageable, people are more than happy just to put them out without having to think about extracting energy from them.
10 points for out of the box thinking, minus several for a lack of feasibility. But keep at it, maybe one day you'll hit the jackpot!
What 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.
The Thiel quote made it sound like he invested in it because DoE rejected it. I'm not sure if having such an ideologue as an investor is a good idea, especially in the heavily regulated energy sector.
I'm confused why this technique is better than just compressing air?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Thiel quote made it sound like he invested in it because DoE rejected it. I'm not sure if having such an ideologue as an investor is a good idea, especially in the heavily regulated energy sector.
You trust a short quote in a news article to be an accurate indication of anything? Have you ever read an article reporting on something that you know first-hand?
And for the record, silly rhetoric about boots on the backs of the taxpayer is completely out of place in an article where he should be pimping his investment. It does make it look like he invested for negative sentiment towards the gov't rather than positive sentiment towards the company.