VIEWS on BATTERY NEWS: Installed vanadium flow batteries. More looks at the Note 7. Tritium battery.

Snohomish County in Washington has installed 1 of 2 vanadium flow batteries that are the biggest of their kind in the world. They don't supply the cost numbers, but they seem to think they will pay off quite well.

They've already installed 2 Li-Ion grid batteries in 2014 in their grid, so it seems they are acting as the pioneers to find out which system works best.



We thought the Galaxy Note 7 might be having a problem where the battery didn't have enough protection and the battery was being squished sometimes. And with the thin separaters, that would cause the kind of damage that would allow for an internal short. And this might be just what happened.

Although we still have to wait for the official investigation by Samsung to see what they come up with.













The material tritium emits electrons. One would hope there would be a way to take advantage of this. There have been attempts, but this scientist thinks he has cracked this nut. This would result in a battery that would last for about 12 years, although there aren't any numbers that give us a good idea about the performance o
f this battery.

Diamond battery

I've been sent this link about a diamond battery a few times now. It would be more like a primary battery. But it seems to drive electrons through radioactivity and not chemical reactions, but there's nothing wrong with that.

If one watches the video they can see the cool way this battery works

What they don't tell you is that this cannot be the holy grail of batteries. The "better battery" that changes the world.

Despite being relatively inexpensive, the cost is being compared to other diamond batteries. And they are, as you might expect, very expensive.

The feed material, despite being a hefty 95,000 tons, is nothing compared to what would be needed to change the world with battery power.

The ability to deliver current is actually very low compared to what is needed to drive a new world of batteries.

Is this a breakthrough worthy of note? It sure is. It can be the innovation that makes some formerly impossible projects possible. But if anyone that reads this blog actually sees one, that will be noteworthy in itself. Which brings up the challenge that if someone ever sees this battery, no matter how many years have gone by, please leave a comment letting me know.

Now there might be more to come in line with this technology. We might find a way to harness nuclear power directly to electricity in a practical way. Currently, we use nuclear power to make electricity by creating steam from the heat of a nuclear pile, or from thermocouples that get their heat from a similar nuclear construction.

But this isn't nearly as safe or simple or inexpensive as the diamond battery. So hopefully this diamond battery can be the next step in the right direction to getting electricity generation from a nuclear source that everyone can have at their house.

Question on renewable energy batteries

I was recently asked about a battery bank for renewable energy:

I've been doing some research into renewable energy... You might be able to explain to me what a "deep cycle" battery is. A lot of the schematics I'm finding say that "deep cycle" batteries (commonly found on boats?) are the best for storing wind or solar energy. Do you know what those are and how they work? Why would they be an advantage?

Yes. A deep cycle battery is one that can be discharged most of the way and still be able to charge back up again.

For instance, your car battery is not deep cycle. If you discharge your car battery down to 10 percent or 20 percent regularly, it will stop taking a charge after a few discharges. In fact, if you find you have a dead battery in your car more than once, it might be damaged.

That wouldn't be good for renewable energy so deep cycle batteries are required. Still, avoiding deep discharges will allow them to last longer.

And yes, they are used in marine applications a lot because a marine application will frequently deep discharge the battery. But more popularly, deep cycle batteries are used in golf carts. At least the 6V version is.

They are Lead Acid batteries. And currently, that is the best option for renewable energy.

However, a better chemistry would be LiFePO4 not considering cost. This is a safe battery that can deep discharge more efficiently and deep discharge a great deal more times than Lead Acid.

The problem is cost. LiFePO4 can be had for as little as about $1 per Ah at a nominal 3.2V; Whereas Lead Acid is also about $1 per Ah (at about a 50% discharge level) but at nominal 6V

There are a few different kinds of comparisons that can be made, but this one shows that initially you get almost double the energy per dollar currently with Lead Acid.

There are other factors, however.

If the discharge is at a high Amp rate, then the efficiency of the LiFe PO4 batteries compare better. If the discharge is usually far below 50% then the cycle life of the LiFEPO4 batteries will compare better there as well. If maintenance is considered, the LiFePO4 batteries compare better on that count, too.

If all these things are considered together, there are a lot of renewable installations where LiFePO4 is a better fit.

Oh, just to note since some lithium chemistries have been in the news lately for bursting into flames, LiFePO4 is very safe.

Cold weather is a consideration when deciding what are the best batteries for a renewable energy installation

Lead Acid batteries don't work as well in cold or freezing temperatures, but they do work without damaging themselves much - one risk is having to deeply discharge them just to get the energy you need because they won't deliver as much in cold temps and then having them sit in the freezing cold waiting to be charged. If they are deeply discharged and it is very cold (zero degrees F or more) then the batteries could freeze and the cases might crack leaking acid or internal damage can occur. A charged Sealed Lead battery has no problems with the cold

LiFePO4 also won't give out it's rated energy in the cold, but it doesn't degrade as bad as Lead Acid. And there is no danger of damage if it is left in a very cold environment in a discharged state. The problem with LiFePO4 in the cold is that when the temps get below freezing it cannot charge without damage. The charger first has to warm the batteries to above freezing before it can start charging them or they will get permanent capacity loss. Obviously, this would require some smarts on the part of the charger.

As far as you application goes: how much energy do you need? Or, asked another way, what do you want to run when running off battery power only and for how long? Once we know the answer to this question we can size the battery and give prices for both options.

Batteries and autopilot

Driverless cars. Computer driven cars. Cars with Autopilot. Whatever you want to call them; Autopiloted cars have been around for a little while - before battery powered cars were considered mainstream. So the first autopilot cars with a lot of press were ICE powered. But generally autopilot only become street-worthy roughly the same time as BEV's have become more popular. But they aren't intrinsically connected.

Still, autopilot is a natural fit for BEV because Tesla jumped into the autopilot game with both feet. And they are a media favorite so whatever happens, good or bad, we will hear about it connected with the Model S.

And as far as autopilot cars go, the Tesla version is considered quite good. There have been a few crashes but people seem to want autopilot so they give as much charity to the problems as possible. It's similar to the batteries themselves - we risk li-ion fires just to get the best energy density and power density when safer chemistries are only a handful of percentage points lower in performance.

As soon as magnetic drive gets the battery it really needs to be a better economic choice over ICE vehicles, it will be the future. And autopilot will probably be the future, too. Why is that? Because they are already considered to be "nice drivers." And in our PC world, that translates to a mandate. There will come a time when people behind the wheel will be considered less safe than autopiloted cars and so autopilot will be required to drive.

All our current software and processing power isn't enough to handle all driving conditions. So total autopilot won't happen for a long time. That's why controlled inner-city areas will be the first to transform into areas that have few or no human-driven cars. And probably the few human drive cars will only be allowed with a permit. This will expand farther out of cities until controlled areas that only allow autopilot are connected.

Will there still be crashes? Certainly. But there will be less than before. And in many inner city areas traffic will speed up because all the cars will coordinate with each other. It sounds like a lot of upside for little downside. But there are a few downsides. One is that central control, a requirement for any network, will limit freedom to travel. And costs may be somewhat high for a rather long time until controlled spaces are connected and less expensive options are allowed.

Don't get left in the cold!

As cold weather approaches (for people in cold weather areas), it's good to do a little maintenance and make sure your battery makes it through the winter.

Colder temps make it harder for car batteries to work. Their usable capacity goes down quite a bit as temperatures fall. So if there is something else going on, like a battery that is starting to wear out, or a parasitic load, take note to do something about it so you don't find yourself stranded.

What is a parasitic load? A parasitic load is something taking energy from the battery when the car and everything in it is turned off. Pretty much every car has a little bit of drain on the battery because the computers need to keep time and memory when it's turned off. Sometimes it is more drain than when the car was new, and sometimes the battery is worn enough that it can't keep the designed drain from wearing it down.

Sometimes a daily use car starts fine, but if that same car is left for a time, perhaps a couple weeks, it always starts hard afterward. There could be something that has changed that is drawing more power from the battery, or the battery might not be up to snuff.

If a car has a parasitic load sometimes it is a very difficult electrical puzzle to solve. A battery maintainer might be the most inexpensive and simplest way to solve the problem.  If one knows the car will be left for a while, just hooking up a maintainer will ensure the car always starts. Or if one knows the temperature will get extremely low, hooking up the battery maintainer then might be a good idea, too.

Cleaning the battery will be a good idea, too. When temperatures swing from relatively warm and cool or cold, condensation will always be occurring. And dirt on the battery can hold water and connect the 2 poles of the battery leading to a parasitic load.

If one is storing a battery, the best advice is to keep it clean and keep it charged. One needs to keep it clean for the reasons just mentioned. But keeping it charged is because a partially run down battery, one that is below 80% charged, will have deterioration on the plates due to sulfation.

Charge a stored battery every 2 or 3 months. Every battery self-discharges even without any load, and lead acid more than most other chemistries. So that is what prompts the top-off charge. And if the battery will be stored inside the car, it's not a bad idea to remove the negative battery cable to be sure no load can be on it.

Will we be recycling Li-Ion like Lead Acid?

Recycling has been a success in the Lead Acid battery industry.

Lead batteries are the environmental success story of our time. More than 99% of all battery lead is recycled. Compared to 55% of aluminum soft drink and beer cans, 45% of newspapers, 26% of glass bottles and 26% of tires, lead-acid batteries top the list of the most highly recycled consumer product.

Wow, more than 99% of lead acid batteries are recycled. And they can, to the tune of 60-80%, be turned back into a new battery.

This can't quite be true for lithium batteries because we can't just melt down the component parts and put them back into a battery very easy. But this is somewhat due to the tiny volume of li-ion in a particular place. To get a high enough volume for recycling li-ion to make sense, the use of li-ion will actually need to be quite a bit higher.

But if current trends continue, we should see that kind of volume in the future. Even then, recycling of li-ion will not be on the same scale as lead acid because the recycling process is more expensive. The effect of recycling li-ion will probably be relegated to evening out the price of some of the component parts.

But I know one might point out the rising price of lead. And it's true the price of lead has gone up lately. Despite that, the 5-year price of lead has been a little over and a little under a $1 per pound.

But looking at lithium carbonate, the material needed for lithium batteries, We see a much wider swing. Note, too, that the graph for lithium is for a longer time period.

And there are also other components like cobalt, copper, and aluminum, but they are also difficult to extract from a spent cell.

It's not all bad. We will probably see a different chemistry in the next few years just based on creating a safer battery. And whether this new chemistry can be recycled well or not will still only affect the price, and not the availability, of what we will come to know as a necessary part of modern civilization.

VIEWS on BATTERY NEWS: The worlds largest battery still running strong, but it won't be the largest for long. World's largest charging and swapping network breaks ground.

There have been a number of new utility sized grid batteries that have come online in the world in the last few years. But the largest grid battery was built 13 years ago.

It's still going strong. Obviously, it doesn't use lithium technology since that technology wasn't around for grid batteries back then. It uses NiCd chemistry.

NiCd batteries may very well be the most robust battery type available, even today. LiFePO4 might take that crown in time, but looking at the performance of this very large battery it might not. NiCd might not have the energy density of Lithium chemistries, but that doesn't matter much for a battery that weighs in at 1500 tons.

What does matter a lot is cost. And lithium chemistries are benefiting from economies of scale. Already we are seeing sub-$200 prices per kWh. NiCd cells are more than $300 per kWh.

So the next 'world's biggest battery' will be made with a lithium chemistry. It's going to be built in Los Angeles.

I'm going to bet that it will be a much shorter time than 13 years before the LA battery is out-done.

There is a large network in the world that runs the gas pumps that power our vehicles. It is a system that goes from an oil pump to the refinery to the distribution centers to the corner station. It's worldwide in size and the capital equipment within this system is almost too big to comprehend.

So when the world switches to magnetic drive, how are we going to replace this network? Do we merely need to switch all the gas pumps hoses with wires?

Kinda, but "merely" is as big an understatement as the size of the petrol system. It'll be like eating an elephant.

How does one eat an elephant?... One bite at a time.

And Beijing is taking a bite. The taxi system is switching to EV's. It is encouraged because of the smog problem in the city. But the number charging stations or battery-swap stations just won't handle the kind of increase in EV taxis the government is hoping for. So they are building stations to fix the problem.

This seems like a good idea on the surface - getting rid of the exhaust from a large number of the cars driving in the city. But the power requirements of the stations will have to come from somewhere. And we already know where it will come from.

The coal plants not far from Beijing. And those coal fired plants are one of the main reasons the city has a smog problem. Sure, the coal plants might be a little more efficient than the cars, but the smog problem will not be reduced as much as they want it to be.

And the reason they really want to get a handle on this now is because in a few short years Beijing will be on display at the Olympics.