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Energy storage solution – a big boost for renewable energy

Energy storage systems signal arrival of ‘baseload’ renewables REneweconomy, By Giles Parkinson  21 November 2012 It has been widely thought that the arrival of cost-competitive rooftop solar PV systems would be the biggest game changer in the electricity market. But it may be that the emergence of affordable energy storage systems will have an even more profound impact.

There are predictions that the energy storage market is going to boom. One survey suggested that $30 billion will be spent on energy storage in the next decade in Australia alone. In the US, where $1 trillion is expected to be spent on electricity network infrastructure in the next 10 years, at least one fifth of that – or $200 billion – will be spent on energy storage.

The big question is who is going to benefit most from that investment – the customer, or the utility that delivers or sells the electricity. Or maybe even both. Most people are still trying to figure that out. Read more »

December 28, 2012 Posted by Christina MacPherson | energy storage | Leave a Comment

Very fast charging batteries for electric cars

New Korean Lithium Ion Battery for EVs Charges in Under 1 Minute http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2012/08/21/korean-lithium-ion-carbonized-battery/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheGreenOptimistic+%28The+Green+Optimistic%29#.UDbvH8FlT4Y By Ovidiu Sandru   August 21, 2012    A new lithium ion battery developed in Korea could make those long waiting times for an electric car to charge become history. A team of researchers at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) claim they can build a battery that can charge in less than a minute, 30 to 120 times faster than a classic Li-Ion battery.

The bigger the battery (in volume), the longer it takes to charge it –
that’s the sad rule of thumb of batteries these days. One solution
would be to split the big battery into smaller piles – which has been
done so far, but it’s still not enough.
What the Korean researchers have done was to dip the cathode material
(lithium manganese oxide – LMO) in a solution containing graphite.
After carbonizing the graphite-soaked LMO, the graphite turned into a
dense network of conductive traces that ran throughout the cathode,
acting like blood vessels and allowing the entire battery to charge at
the same time, thus greatly speeding  up the recharge process, without
the energy density or life cycle being affected.
The new battery needs to be packaged no differently than a normal
lithium ion battery, which makes the new technology easily adaptable
to already existing production lines. That, in turn, shouldn’t make
the new Korean LMO batteries much more expensive, but a hell lot
faster to charge.
It remains to be seen when and if this technology will actually become
mainstream, or at least having some big car manufacturer like Ford or
GM test it on the roads.

September 2, 2012 Posted by Christina MacPherson | energy storage | Leave a Comment