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Neat.
Remind me to check back in 5 years to see if this ever actually materializes.
Narrator: It didn't.
No spoiler warnings?
Sorry, I thought we'd all already seen this dozens of times before.
Well, I’m still waiting for the graphene solar panels, cold fusion, flying cars, drone deliveries, metal nanoparticle engines, healing nano bots and what not.
I wonder if we’re going to build a Dyson sphere before some of those other things become a reality.
Drone deliveries seemed promising with Amazon, but the core company is so toxic that any tangible product that didn't come from Lab126 is doomed. Zipline actually has a shot and is actively operating at a massive scale in Rwanda.
@ooli tl/Dr "Photoncycle
Brandtzaeg holds up a chalk-looking substance: “With this, you can store electricity 20 times as densely as in a lithium battery.”
“We're locking up the hydrogen molecules in a solid to basically fix them. We're using a reversible, high-temperature fuel cell, so we're assisting a fuel cell which both can produce hydrogen and electricity in the same cell,” he says.
That means no need to cool the hydrogen down, making it non-flammable and giving it a higher density than an ion-lithium battery"
I wonder what's the volumetric energy density, historically that has been a bigger issue than gravimetric energy density.
Good question, this article is pretty fluffy, not a lot of hard data. Reads kind of like a fluffed up press release honestly.
According to their site:
A storage system of 3 m3 can store up to 10,000 kWh of energy
So about 3.33 MWh per cubic meter, 3.33 kWh per liter, or 3.33 Wh per cubic centimeter.
Hmm, if that's correct, that's even higher than liquid hydrogen, which would be really impressive.
Edit: Looks like their gravimetric energy density is 3.5kWh/kg
Edit 2: here's a comparison for batteries
Since it's solid hydrogen I think it's to be expected, however I didn't see any information regarding energy losses which I imagine would be quite high when you have those kinds of cooling requirements.
This is why I hate marketing pushes. If they're a good-faith business, the efficiency needs to be within shooting distance of reasonable against costs. But as we learned from the artificial meat industry (that ultimately admitted we've already probably reached lifetime price/quality/scale limits from the methodologies they're using) brutal honesty doesn't get you investors.
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The article is light on details, but it claims they're storing the hydrogen as a solid - not as a gas. Solids are generally about a thousand times more compact than a gas.
That's hardly a revolutionary thing - there are hydrogen powered cars on the road and those don't use hydrogen as a gas either. Those cars don't make much sense compared to lithium, but mostly only because there's almost nowhere in the world you buy hydrogen for your car. That's not an issue if you're producing your own hydrogen at home.
They don't? When the Toyota hydrogen cars were introduced here around 2015, one of the issues were that a full tank of gas would dilute through the tank walls within a week. From the marketing material of the latest Toyota Mirai, it seems that they still use Hydrogen stored in gas form, boasting improvements in a 3-layer tank that is tested for 235% of the pressure that the gas is stored at, compared to 150% for regular gas containers.
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We already have efficient enough solar panels to make our homes self sufficient, we just can't afford to buy them.
Even if we could, the power supply industry would see it happening, bribe and persuade the government to make it illegal to go off grid (I'm sure their solicitors would come up with "good" reasons that we should be stopped), to save their poor little shareholders.
No way will they go down without a fight. Would I love to go off grid? Sure. If I had a few grand of spending money I could easily do it. But that's just one person, no way they'd let the entire country do it.
This is just storage. The article describes that the battery will use nearby solar panel for electricity.
There's a very good reason you don't want the entire country to go off-grid, and that net-metering is a plague that only serves as a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
A large chunk of electric costs are fixed costs. Wiring, power station upkeep, more wiring, transformers, storm damage, etc. Whether you personally use twice or half as much power as the median household does not matter for this. So every net-metered kWh you send on the grid, everybody ELSE ends up ponying up the infrastructure costs for (nevermind the enormous production-side costs of fighting against the duck curve).
A partial solution to make this fairer is therefore to either tax solar installations, use non-net-metering (with digital meters), or make grid connectivity a fixed cost in the electric bill.
For people who are completely off-grid (meaning not only do they not pull any electricity from the grid ever, they are not connected AT ALL and therefore do not incur infrastructure cost on everyone else), it's not as bad but sill not great because the grid operates on economies of scale. So in (semi-)urban areas it's still a net loss for society when someone goes off-grid.
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I don't want my house to be self-sufficient. I want my street and neighborhood to be self-sufficient. I already use my neighbors excess solar for reasonable prices.
My city wants to be off natural gas in 2030 and my neighborhood is in the pilot to transition first. I don't necessarily want a huge heat pump attached to my house, and I don't want a huge energy storage solution in my small garden.
There is city land around our housing block with plenty of room for a solution that can serve the whole street. I hope the city is going to propose something like that for us.
Agreed. Not that i dislike people doing stuff by themself on a small scale, but i really wish the focus would be more on larger scale projects and giving people easy access to invest in those.
Dont make everyone get a small solar panel and a tiny battery in their house. Let them invest in something like a large wind turbine in their area and maybe directly reap some of those benefits.
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They don't actually say what the efficiency of it is, only that the inneficiency is mainly heat and "70% of home energy needs are for heat" which makes sense in Scandinavia but makes less and less sense the further South you are, plus it massivelly depends on being able to capture and use that heat (can you use it for cooking or only for environmental heating?).
Ultimatelly efficiency and price are what makes almost all the difference.
That said, I hope this turns out to be a proper solution: we definitelly need home energy storage solutions which have much higher energy density and lower cost per mWh that the ones we have now.
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You know what else is a solid form of hydrogen?
Ice.
I wish they went into more deatil about what kind of solid fuel cell system they're working with - they say they're trapping hydrogen molecules in some kind of molecular lattice, i.e. a crystal of some sort perhaps?
Anyway, I hate patents but understand why you need them... They just seems to slow down progress.
Patents trade public disclosure of technology for a limited time exclusive use of the technology. Without them companies are less likely to publicly disclose any technologies they develop.
Never thought about it that way but it is an excellent policy. Thank You.
Now if only we could get the goddamn Mickey Mouse in public domanin.
The idea/spirit of patents is a good one.
It enables generic medicine - as patented medicine needs to publicly disclose methods. It also allows the public to know what is in the patented product because it is public info.
It also makes iteration easier, as everyone can build off and on top of the patent info.
However, patent abuse is a real issue. Using patents to stifle others innovation and create monopolies. Also patents that come about from publicly funded research often give private companies exclusive rights to profit from work funded by the public.
Mickey mouse is copyright, which is a different beast. It's also good because it protects people producing easily copied work such as writing, music and images. However, the mouse has lobbied his way into making the copyright protection excessively long. It should be much shorter, 30 years since publication would be reasonable - it would be a tremendous victory if we got it down to 50.
Next year (1st january 2024), it'll be in the US (but just the first version from Steamboat Willie and The Gallopin' Gaucho)
We Reddit now.
Always has been. In many ways, Lemmy resembles the Reddit of 10 years ago.
I dont see any electrical units in this article
Watt?? That's a heck of an ohmission.
Take my upvote and leave. >:(
Why such resistance to comedy?
If you get all amped up about it, it just induces more jokes.
Time to conduct these jokesters out of here...
Maybe could transform your behavior into something mho productive?
I'll go isolate myself in a field.
It helps others to resist the current flow if you illuminate others instead of shunting yourself.
The company's website quotes a storage density of 3.5 kWh/kg and a storage system taking up 3 cubic meters beving able to store 100,000 kWh: https://www.photoncycle.com/technology
I tried to find the patent but it sounds like the application process isn't complete yet.
These are the kind of claims you hear from a startup seeking its next round of funding. I'd take it with a huge grain of salt.
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This is great and a step in the right direction, roll on self-sufficient streets, villages, and towns.
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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