Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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 Posted: Thu Aug 13, 2009 11:18 pm Post subject: Interesting Article on Energy Technology |
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| Article wrote: |
Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery's life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.
Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours -- how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That's a pretty exciting place to live.
And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles -- one per day for a decade -- you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they're kaput in a year or so.
How do you recharge? By tapping your solar panels or windmills. It's just like plugging in your cell phone or iPod, only you plug in your house. |
Entire article can be found here.
$2000 dollars for 10 years of usage seems like quite a bargain. Admittedly, their figure of 3 cents per kilowatt hour doesn't take into account the cost of recharging equipment from what I can see. Having your house set up with solar cells isn't incredibly expensive, but it's not free either, and eventually you will have to replace them. Even so, I've little doubt it still comes out to be substantially cheaper than the purchased-electricity figure, and that's ignoring the fact that the purchased-electricity figure is only as low as it is due to government subsidies.
Exciting. |
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