81–90 of 143 posts
BTW, hydrogen-air battery = hydrogen fuel cell, if you didn't realize that.
“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale
“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale
[ESS] already has a factory pumping out flow batteries just south of Portland, Oregon. Its core product is the Energy Warehouse, which fits a rotund tank and several stacks of battery materials into a shipping container, along with the necessary electronics... During a June visit, I saw a test line in which robots prepared cells to be glued together into the battery stack that the proprietary iron liquid flows through.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/ess-is-betting-the-worl...
“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale
> "...what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I'll make a note to check back in 20 years, then. :-) I note they don't mention charge cycle durability - for grid, you'd want 10 000-ish cycles to 80% capacity. A bit of a red flag there. Still, iron is cheap, plentiful, and environmentally benign. Even mining and refining iron ore isn't as bad as mining for many of the other…
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"Just an engineering problem" is a massive oversimplification. It's an engineering problem that requires financing. After that, you still need to figure out how to do it profitably at scale. The vast majority of "the science is done" breakthroughs fail to be commercialized because they're too expensive or time-consuming to figure out how to scale, or the unit economics just don't work out.
There was a time I would have agreed, but when you seed 5-10 companies engineering a solution, if it's possible, one of them is probably going to succeed and take all. Unit economics are an optimization problem, which is literally what engineers solve, and you can hire them at scale. What doesn't work with climbing walls and beanbag chairs in the bay area might work remote, or somewhere outside the US. If there is st…
That's irrelevant to this particular article because the intellectual property for this development is owned by only one company.
> if it's possible, one of them is probably going to succeed and take all
> If there is still science to be done, sure, higher risk
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Your original comment implied by it's just a matter of spending enough on engineering. That's just not true.
So now you're moving the goal post and qualifying "it's just a matter of engineering" with "it's just a matter of engineering... unless it's also a matter of financing and other breakthroughs that may be needed".
> Unit economics are an optimization problem, which is literally what engineers solve, and you can hire them at scale.
Engineering doesn't just scale like that. You don't make a breakthrough in 1/10 of the time just because you hired 10x the engineers. There are lots of limiting factors beyond how many engineers you have.
> even paying a few scientists to develop IP for 2 years is a rounding error on what investors put into novelty software projects
This is just not true. The whole soft part of software is that you can shuffle around some code and have a completely different outcome.
Two years of scientific research on something hard (as in hardware) and also difficult/unprecedented is not comparable to building the next Slack or something, either in costs or the ability to staff it up. You could build a Slack clone today for To advance a new battery tech to a marketing/sales problem can't be done by a few people in a few weeks for $10k. It's orders of magnitude more expensive.
Also, working for 150 hours is no great feat. Just means they undersized the inverter and power electronics. If you did that with lithium ion, you’d also have much lower cost per kWh (for small systems with only an hour or two, the inverter could be half the cost or more), so going to 150 hours would also reduce costs by a lot as you’d be closer to the raw cell price.
I suspect that unless there’s a chemical reason why they have to discharge over many days, any real system is likely to be more like 12-24 hours as you’d be wasting the usefulness of the battery by picking an impractically small inverter.
Here’s hoping it’s actually a huge cell cost reduction while keeping decent round trip efficiency and cycle life.
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Lead acid are not particularly great as far as DOD (depth of discharge) or longevity. Comparing for example a 100ah lifepo4 to 100ah lead acid, the useable capacity of the lithium will be close to 4x more. Using the full capacity of the lead acid will make them wear out quickly.
What about the deep cycle batteries that are designed specifically for full discharge? Or am I believing marketing? I have a couple Optima Blutops that I've built a remote cart off of, but I don't use them nearly as much as the market they are targeted which is fishing boats. Run your pumps, gadgets, and trolling motor all day on the water, then charge them back up over night.
Fine for a trolling motor, but if you're deep cycling them in a power system, that could kill them in a couple years. Usually you'll want to size them so you never go below 50% discharge on a normal basis.
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I’m sorry, that really doesn’t make any sense. There is several missing factors here, and it’s a useless metric. Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well - based on discharge rate. It can also do 10 minutes - based on discharge rate. 100 hours is literally useless on it’s own because it doesn’t tell you anything concrete. 100 hours….. of what? It looks like a classic science writing article where they left all the impo…
> > You could do the same thing with Lithium Ion, it would just be cost prohibitive... 10x as expensive, supposedly. > Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well Did you reply to the wrong person? I already addressed your entire comment several different ways in my original comment, and you didn't address anything I wrote in mine, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm not the best at explaining things? > 100 hours... of what?…
In your first comment you seemed to be talking right by the person, but I guess not.
Thanks for the correction.
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Edison batteries (Nickle-iron), although expensive initialy, are apparently the cheapest batteries once you factor in their lifetime of multiple decades without degradation.
I'd also look into LTO (lithium titanate oxide) if you're interested in long term cost per KWh, not because they are cheap by any means but because they (allegedly) last so long that you'd only be able to replace them maybe twice over your lifetime, it's a pretty new chemistry so unfortunately it's rather early days to verify whether any of the consumer offerings available today will actually perform for as long as t…
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The big, large, heavy, cheap battery you are looking for is the lead-acid battery. The market for them is still larger than the global lithium-ion market, and they're quite suitable for stationary applications. Many off-the-grid houses use banks of lead-acid batteries.
LiFePo are starting to make a splash (pun intended) in the marine sector now that costs have started to fall, but lead acid still rules the roost. I have 4 AGMs and one Lithium in my vessel.
Lead acid are still more forgiving (although with the caveat that they don’t last long even if we’ll cared for), but LFP is pretty wonderful.