Monday, April 29, 2019

"Battery-Powered" Facts Are Ugly

Ticker is a font of interesting stuff.  Here he leads off with the facts about "C02" on car-batteries (they cause more emissions than diesel), but moves into something even more interesting.

...This assumes the batteries last 10 years.  The problem is that they probably won't except for some very-specific corner cases.

The reason is how batteries work.  They start to degrade chemically on the day they're made, and do so more-or-less linearly.  There's nothing you can do about that -- this happens even under ideal storage conditions.  In addition there's a "per-cycle" penalty too, because batteries operate through ion exchange across the electrolyte -- that is, the physical movement of ions between cathode and anode.....
Oh.

So those "utility-grade" batteries used to store sunshine- and wind- produced electricity.....how much will utility customers PAY for these marvels of short-term usefulness?

Hmmmmmm???



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Every lithium battery powered product I've ever had has been trash: laptops, flashlights, speakers, cell phones. Garbage. Despite endless babying of the product, battery life still goes to hell in 12 months or less.

Grim said...

A buddy of mine bought one of those electric cars, out of a well-meant desire to do right by the environment. He lives in Philadelphia. After one winter of the damn thing being constantly dead from the cold, no matter how hard he tried to keep it working, he traded it for a Chevy pickup.