Energy Policy: Good Batteries and How to Get Them

[kristopher]

Energy Policy: Good Batteries and How to Get Them

Contents:
Introduction: What Good Batteries Can Do
Batteries for Transportation
Batteries for Clean Power
The National Battery Development Consortium
Conclusion

Introduction: What Good Batteries Can Do

Good batteries can change the world. They can dramatically lower the cost of driving in the near term. They can wean us from the Saudi oil tit. They can give us clean, renewable energy. They can bring us good manufacturing jobs and the good pay and pride that comes with them. They can make a huge dent in global warming while reducing air and solid-waste pollution.

In short, good batteries can remake the face of America and eventually the world. And they can do all this in twenty years or less.

That’s a heady prediction. But it’s not dreaming. Almost every bit of industrial technology to make this happen is ready now, off the shelf. We would have to produce it in larger quantities, but scaling up has never been a problem for American industry. The only missing ingredient is reliable light batteries, and they may be on the way. This essay describes why and how.

Batteries for Transportation

Like all technological-economic questions, our inquiry begins with numbers. We need only a single number: five miles per kilowatt-hour, or 5 mi/Kwh. That’s the...

http://jaydiatribe.blogspot.com/2008/06/energy-policy-good-batteries-and-how-to.html

[ElectricGrid]

1. Nice little opinion read.

[Nederland]

2. I'd like to see more analysis

I'm curious if storing electricity from wind and solar is really a practical endeavor. The article doesn't make any effort whatsoever to calculate the size or expense of batteries required to store the massive amounts of power that a typical wind farm produces. Moreover, I'd be very concerned about the pollution such batteries would create. All the lithium batteries I'm aware of contain chlorides or dioxides, both of which are highly toxic.

Interesting idea though.

[bluedawg12]

3. This answered my question from the other thread. n/t

[diane in sf]

4. Batteries are now where microchips were 10 years ago.