“Over the next 3-5 years this is likely to result in development of batteries which have greater storage density and are cheaper than the initial offering from Elon Musk which is priced at the margin of affordability.” This is the kind of prophesy that Musk’s promotional efforts have generated. The whole of this article reflects the resulting flood of optimism that has swept energy-watchers all over the world. They might all be right, and we won’t have to wait long to find out. In the meantime it’s worth remembering that batteries were invented over 200 years ago, the goals of higher energy density and faster recharging have been targets of research ever since, electric vehicles were on the roads over a century ago, billions of lithium batteries have already been manufactured – I could go on but my point is that there is plenty of history to temper the optimism that has exploded out of the Tesla promotional machine. By the way, the ‘Musk’ batteries are actually from Panasonic, which started making lithium batteries in 1994 and is a joint venture partner in the Tesla gigafactory. Also I thought that the ‘free solar fuel’ slogan had been dropped years ago. It’s one of those seductive half-truths. It’s only free until you want to put it to use. In that sense it’s exactly like coal or gas sitting under the earth’s surface. The only costs worth comparing are the costs of delivered products, like electricity. Solar electricity does represent wonderful technology but please don’t devalue it by perpetuating the ‘free fuel’ slogan.

The energy regulator AEMO has looked into home batteries, EVs and switching gas appliances for electric. It doesn't share the author's optimism
http://www.aemo.com.au/News-and-Events/News/News/2015-Emerging-Technologies-Information-Paper
Basically the cost or payback period is too great. The report suggests we will have 8 Gwh in battery storage by the year 2035. In 2015 we are using 248 Twh/365 = 680 Gwh per day so I make 8 Gwh about 17 minutes worth of national electricity use. An OLO article some weeks back by Di Natale's off-grid neighbour suggested we need 5 days of battery storage to minimise use of a back up generator. In that context batteries are insignificant.

When oil is gone EVs are likely to rule the roads but they need to get a lot cheaper for casual workers to commute in. Some say we will never increase upon 93 million barrels a day of liquid fuels but when that will decline is not yet clear. Bizarrely EVs will increase the need for baseload power as most will be charged at home overnight. The author's faith in batteries is like the way dry rock geothermal was lauded just a few years ago. It didn't pan out.

In some cases solar is far, far cheaper.
On a communal property, near Ebor(NSW) in which I once had a share, the cost of having the electricity brought to the property (poles, wires, labour) from a few kilometres away was $34,000. there was extra cost to bring it to the individual holdings.
For that money the three residences were set up with solal power and inverters to convert to 240 volts where required.

This was over 20 years ago and they are still all solar and happy with it.

After just 5 years of solar power I have about 20 broken down and dead and finished solar batteries, how do I safely dispose them and who pays cost of new ones, every five 5 years? And who pays for the disposal and refitting in non wealthy households?

If ever any industrialised society becomes dependent on any single source of energy we can be absolutely certain that it won't be solar with battery backup. Maybe coal or nuclear could do it, but there will almost certainly be a combination of energy sources, some of which haven't yet been invented or brought to commercial viability.

Be that as it may, I'm fascinated by the following scenario: In about twenty five years time, existing solar panels will need to be replaced. Will the government subsidise this massive cost, as it has subsidised existing installations? If Mike Pope's dreams are achieved, and the contribution of rooftop solar panels significantly exceeds its current 2% of energy generated, what will happen? Imagine if all those households aren't connected to the grid!

Maybe it's time to get real,to consider that it's horses for courses, and promote appropriate technologies, including nuclear and the possibility of clean coal.

These type of batteries have got nothing to do with national power usage. It’s individual domestic power usage. If you take a few million households off the grid, you can shut down a few of the worst polluting generation methods.

Industrial grade storage will come when industry gets it’s act into gear. At the moment they have no incentive to do anything as they get cheap power of the grid.

Households are subsidizing industrial power.

AEMO are subject to saying anything, in their own interests. They had our former PM doing what he was told. You can only imagine there was reasons for doing so.

I am not a Cornicopian but I think everyone needs to get off the cool-aid.

Technology is always going to be limited to the laws of diminishing returns, substitution and as such we have greater threats which will require a great deal of thought as time marches on.

For all you optimists, I recommend this as essential reading:

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-09-18/you-call-this-progress

Good luck with that battery power!

“I think there is a worldwide market for maybe five computers,” Ken Olsen. Great call a bit like some of the posters.

"We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy--sun, wind and tide. I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931)

Tombee your phone is smaller does more and lasts longer then your phone from the 1990.

Bestiality beats battery driven any day http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17709 what?

Not sure I agree with your claim that nothing new has been invented over the last 45 years. The “origins” of new inventions often go back decades but the technology enabling their expression in completely new applications is often very recent. Light emitting diodes were first described over 100 year ago but it is only recently that LED lighting has been developed and the technology for using LED light to transmit data is still being developed.

The principles of Magnetic Levitation were first described in Germany a century ago, but Maglev trains only came into existence in 1979.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Generation 4 Nuclear Reactors, the Internet, 3D Printing, Digital Cameras, USB Flash technology, LED light bulbs and Flat Televisions are but a few of the inventions made over the last 45 years. Most can trace their origins back to prior discoveries. However, those prior discoveries bear no resemblance to these innovations – just as future technology will enable use of graphene in ways now unimagined – but can anyone claim that the technology producing these things was not developed over the last 45 years?

Likewise, a high density, durable, rapidly rechaging storage device able to store sufficient energy to back-up a commercial power station or a power drill has its origins in the 18th century but is now a vastly different thing and will continue to be developed, until replaced by something far better.

JF Aus, re your replacement problem.
I suggest you look into Nickle Iron cells. There is a company in
South Australia who supplies them. They last at least thirty years and
are very robust and can be mistreated in ways other cells would be written off.
I do not know how they compare for cost but their 30 yrs plus would
offset a lot of that.

The 15 minute 80% recharge would worry me. The heat generated in the
battery would be damaging for their lifetime I would think.
To have recharging stations on highways able to recharge several cars
would require very large electricity supply. Must work that out, hmm.

The Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi have 30kwhr batteries.
One car, 30kwhr battery, would need 88amp three phase supply for a
one hour charge or 352 amp 3 phase supply, for each car for 15 min charge.
If say 10 cars were being charged at once a 3.5 Megawatt supply would be needed.
The cars with 500 km range will have larger batteries so the above
figures will need to be increased by 500/150 to tripple them.
11.666 megawatt charging stations on highways, hmmm.
No, that will require a rethink. Someone rework my figures please.

Bazz, the dead batteries I have are in Solomon Islands and there are many others dead there too. Some lead acid, others gel. Most others were supplied by development aid to replace kerosene lights. Now cost of new batteries is beyond reach of most people. I am often asked to fix solar units but the problem is worn out or faulty (from manufacture) batteries.

Truth about sustainable energy (and) batteries needs to be told.
But I don't know enough to be doing the telling.
Then there is the problem that the flat earth CO2 society does not want to know.

J F Telstra replaces their back up batteries every 5 years. They are excellent solar storage batteries. They replace them by date and not condition, they are good for around 15 years. These batteries are sold off.

If you got on to Telstra and told them what you want them for, you may have a sympathetic ear.

Lead acid batteries are no good for storage batteries, you need proper deep cycle storage batteries.
Or deep cycle marine batteries.

JF Aus
Well for that sort of use I would think Nickle Iron cells would be just the job.
They last for 30 years, you can replace if needed single cells, you
short circuit them without damage, they can be left for years not used
then put on charge and away they go.
You can recondition them yourself if needed, but I think they are
larger for the same capacity, but for the sort of place you are speaking about they could be ideal.

http://www.ironcorepower.com.au/page3.php

Second last sentence of the article: "We are at the start of a market driven revolution which will sweep all before it, over-riding government ideology and policies."

Rich Americans can preach "freedom" because they can buy it from the front of the queue. But such "freedom" doesn't apply to us mere mortals.

If there is mass use of batteries government POLICIES and regulations will need to be stepped up in such areas as:

- safety standards for battery operations including fire (when charging) especially any dangerous emissions or explosions from burning batteries. This also applies to normal house fires spreading to batteries

- imports of cheap n dangerous batteries from non-US sources (eg. China, Bangladesh, India).

- safe and economic disposal of batteries on a mass basis

- prices charged by older style electicity networks for people who cannot afford solar or batteries

- costs and rights for solar users (semi-free riders) to opt back into electicity networks on a mass basis

- pollution from industries that make batteries and dispose of them?

How rare or plentiful are the chemicals that go into batteries?

Lead batteries. Lead poisoning is already a massive problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning

Then on top of all that, we will need to train an army of people to
service the battery backup systems.
Just that overhead may well push the system into complete economic failure.

Then there is the real problem. The battery has to be able to store
an unknown number of days of overcast skies and low to nil wind speed.
Just for discussion sake let us say 4 overcast windless days.
The solar/wind system has to have a capacity 5 times a single days
consumption. The batteries have to have capacity to hold 4 days demand
plus enough to get the system up and running for the next sunny day.

That surely makes the whole system impossible financially.
It amounts to a five times increase generation and perhaps a three
times increase in price, assuming some costs are fixed no matter
what the generation capacity.

Again, solar and wind cannot do the job, we need to put more effort
into some other alternative system. We have wasted billions on solar
and wind. They are useful, but are just not what we need.

Then we get seven overcast windless days in a row !

Hi Bazz

In your post of 28 Sep you raise the question of heat generated by rapid battery charging. If we are talking Lithium-ion batteries, that is as good point.

But in the case of graphene batteries it isn’t a problem at all. My understanding is that graphene battery recharge, faster than 15 mins has been achieved with no heat problem.

Agnostic, Hmmm your suggestion implies an extremely low internal
series resistance. I know nothing about graphical batteries except
the usual carbon non-rechargable battery.
I know if you feed power into them they do get hot.
Probably what you are talking about is quite different.
However does a low series internal resistance imply a high internal
discharge rate ?

Hi Jazz

It seems that graphene mixed with vanadium oxide can be used to make super cathodes. These enable a battery to recharge in less than 60 seconds and retain 90% of its capacity after 1,000 recharges. Moreover, these super-cathodes enable scaling up for industrial use which I am told is happening in the USA, Japan and Germany.

This sounds experimental to me but it does indicate that the problems of rapid recharge and durability are probably closer to being overcome than I thought.

Very nice for Australia since we have the worlds largest deposits of lithium and graphene copyrights!

It still doesn't solve the problem of having to have power cables as
thick as your arm to do the fast charge.

It could be possible in a factory or very large building carpark but
it would be impossible for domestic premises.
Actually to make the connection to the car would be very difficult for those currents.
Would a small woman be able to lift the plug and cable ?

There are stacks of problems for charge rates under an hour or so.
What if 20 cars in one street were plugged in at the same time.
Would they melt the street wires ?