Tuesday, July 03, 2012

A promising building battery?

Explainer: storing renewable energy

This article talks about storing energy from renewable power, but as it is written by a Professor involved in a particular project, and so it ends up being mostly about them - being flow batteries.  Can't say I've heard about them before.

There's also a link to RedFlow, an company which is developing and deploying these batteries.  When I can hook one up to a bunch of solar cells on the roof so I can off grid most of the time remains unclear.  (Well, maybe not.  They do seem to have products that appear designed for use at home, but I don't really understand how much power you can get out of them, say, overnight.)

Speaking of solar power, if you really could develop systems that can get people more or less off the grid, at some psychologically important figure like, say, under $10,000, would the psychology of carbon pricing be such that people would happily pay for this, regardless of its true economic sense?   I mean, the psychological value of being able to say to people at work whinging about the latest increase in their power bill "I don't pay for my electricity at all now" must count for something.

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