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Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

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Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#51

Post by pyoung »

firemanx wrote: post #9
beagle3 wrote: post #4

Congrats to DaniFong and the rest of the LightSail team. Large scale energy storage is an unappreciated problem. Our current grid has to quickly scale up and down with demand, because there is no way store excess capacity when demand is down (and therefore, no way to reuse previous excess capacity when demand is up). When this problem is actually solved (crossing fingers until LightSail actually ships ...), the grid…

I think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively li…

I think the lack of visibility in this industry has more to do with who the target customers are. Storage/Energy tech is primarily sold to governments, utilities, or large industrial customers. If you are a consumer app, getting a lot of press can make or break your company. Not so much with energy companies.

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#52

Post by [deleted] »

firemanx wrote: post #9
beagle3 wrote: post #4

Congrats to DaniFong and the rest of the LightSail team. Large scale energy storage is an unappreciated problem. Our current grid has to quickly scale up and down with demand, because there is no way store excess capacity when demand is down (and therefore, no way to reuse previous excess capacity when demand is up). When this problem is actually solved (crossing fingers until LightSail actually ships ...), the grid…

I think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively li…

[deleted]

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#53

Post by [deleted] »

firemanx wrote: post #9
beagle3 wrote: post #4

Congrats to DaniFong and the rest of the LightSail team. Large scale energy storage is an unappreciated problem. Our current grid has to quickly scale up and down with demand, because there is no way store excess capacity when demand is down (and therefore, no way to reuse previous excess capacity when demand is up). When this problem is actually solved (crossing fingers until LightSail actually ships ...), the grid…

I think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively li…

[deleted]

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#54

Post by [deleted] »

firemanx wrote: post #9
beagle3 wrote: post #4

Congrats to DaniFong and the rest of the LightSail team. Large scale energy storage is an unappreciated problem. Our current grid has to quickly scale up and down with demand, because there is no way store excess capacity when demand is down (and therefore, no way to reuse previous excess capacity when demand is up). When this problem is actually solved (crossing fingers until LightSail actually ships ...), the grid…

I think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively li…

[deleted]

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#56

Post by firemanx »

jbooth wrote: post #50
pjscott wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm willing to trust that he said it to the reporter who then printed it. 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.

To be fair - you end up having to make statements like that a lot in this industry. Like it or not, there have been some very large, high profile failures lately (Solyndra being one of the more prominent, but certainly not the first or last). There is a stigma developing regarding "clean / green tech" that we continually have to fight because of these failures, both in terms of the general industry, but even more so if you have any connection to public money, and often even if you don't.

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#57

Post by firemanx »

DaniFong wrote: post #12
firemanx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively li…

Good luck with your company! Management of the systems is a seriously underappreciated and difficult problem, especially with batteries. To do it well, you have to really know the chemistry. I think the difference in fanfare is probably because, unless you change the levelized cost of stored energy to be less than the cost of producing power from fossil fuels in the first place, you can have a significant effect, but…

Thanks for the reply, Danielle.

We are indeed a battery-based system for now, though we aren't necessarily tied to that technology long term. We've focused on building a strength is in flexibility and ability to distribute storage wherever its needed. It's always exciting to see new methods of storage being developed, as I agree with you about the economics of storage. I'm not quite convinced that batteries are an antiquated option just yet (or aren't feasible financially or environmentally, long term, especially as R&D continues to move there as well), but I'm just a lowly software engineer - I'll leave it for the rest of our team to worry about those problems :)

Congratulations on your successes thus far, and good luck for what the future holds!

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#58

Post by firemanx »

pyoung wrote: post #51
firemanx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively li…

I think the lack of visibility in this industry has more to do with who the target customers are. Storage/Energy tech is primarily sold to governments, utilities, or large industrial customers. If you are a consumer app, getting a lot of press can make or break your company. Not so much with energy companies.

That's an excellent point, though it's always interesting to me just how much many energy companies try to market to consumers, despite the optimal markets :)

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#59

Post by pyoung »

robomartin wrote: post #43
jacquesm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, of course, you wouldn't use compressed air storage for power 24/7. I just went for worst case to see where the numbers would lead. > 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.

I disagree with you on your point on efficiency. California has had a ton of success implementing efficiency programs, and these efforts are starting to be copied by other states.

My guess is that your perception of failure is largely driven by the McMansion trend of the 90's/early 00's. While these large, suburban homes definitely consume more energy than their smaller counterparts, if it wasn't for strict codes and standards and minimum efficiency requirements for appliances, our energy situation would look much worse.

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#60

Post by lutorm »

robomartin wrote: post #37

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…

I didn't read the article super-carefully, but my impression was that they were using the heat of vaporization of water for energy storage, not PdV work of the air. I haven't done a calculation, but my guess is that this is much more efficient.
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