Put some kilowatts in your closet

Altair Nanotechnologies, which specializes in lithium ion batteries, said Monday that it will work with investor AES to develop home energy storage systems that can hold more than 500 kilowatts of energy.

AES, a power company, invested $3 million in Altair earlier this year.

A lithium ion battery from Altair.

(Credit: Altair)

Home storage is one of the holy grails of the clean technology field. With a big battery in the closet, the energy harvested from solar panels on the roof could be used by a homeowner at night. Home storage also gives utility owners breathing room. Get enough batteries out there and the risk of a brownout goes down.

It can even help utilities put off erecting additional power plants. PG&E says that plug-in hybrids could serve as home energy storage units.

Start-up GridPoint has emerged as an early leader in the field, but it's still relatively small. More companies will jump in.

Altair is trying to play in lots of markets. It also makes lithium ion batteries for plug-in hybrids and claims its batteries can recharge rapidly, a big sticking point for electric cars. Altair also says the batteries are safer than traditional lithium ion batteries.

So far, however, Altair is not producing massive numbers of batteries. At clean tech conferences, the name comes up a lot. But the question everyone asks is, if the technology is so good, how come the company isn't bigger?

[billmosby]

Any drawbacks?

Are there any environmental drawbacks to having massive
tonnages of lithium batteries produced, used, and recycled? If you
had a closet full of them, would there be any particularly enhanced
risk of burning your house down? Just askin'. So far, the batteries in
my laptops and hybrid have not caused me any trouble, so I'm
hoping these batteries would be as benign. Don't know anything
about recycling them, though. Also, how many recharge cycles will
you get?

[deecee]

Kilowatts? Lithium Sulfur

Two points worth noting...
First is nickpick, Kilowatt is a power dissipation unit, not an energy storage unit, so the title mekes no technical sense
Second lithium sulfur is a battery technology with greater promise than lithium ion, it's environmentally benign and has higher energy and power density than the lithium ion technology.

[Sparky672]

Where's the technical editor?

[b]Quoting:[/b] [i]"... can hold more than 500 kilowatts of
energy."[/i]

This statement is factually incorrect.

[b]Kilowatts[/b] is NOT a unit of energy. It's a unit of [b]POWER[/
b].

[b]Kilowatt-hours[/b] is a unit of [b]ENERGY[/b].

It always takes 100 watts of POWER to light up a 100-watt light
bulb. If you burn it for two hours, you use twice the energy than
burning it for one hour.

Since one should care greatly about how long before total
drainage, this is an important distinction when discussing
batteries.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Some of us try...

Alas, my good friend Michael Kanellos has proven highly resistant to reeducation on this subject. :-)

Michael, the world really needs to understand the difference between power and energy. Both words are in common use, but energy measurements are rarely presented correctly. You could do the world a favor by making it a CNET policy to get this right!

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[ArtInvent]

Here's a drawback - outrageous cost

Lithium batteries work great. The newer ones light Altair, A123, Nanosafe, etc, all are much safer than the ones in your laptop. I think any discussion of putting high energy density batteries anywhere, whether it's in your car or your home, is under the assumption that these batteries will have the safety problem solved.

The reason that these companies are not any bigger than they are, and that they are not producing mass quanities of these batteries, is quite simple. They cost a fortune. I mean, your old run of the mill lithium laptop battery cost about $100. That's like 6 c-cell sized batteries. So a closet full of advanced chemistry lithium batteries is going to cost what, $40,000? It's the same problem the electric car makers have, only people need car batteries and are willing to pay for them a lot more than they are home batteries. It's why the Tesla etc are going to cost a hundred grand.

I don't even believe that you'll want to use your car battery to feed power back into the grid, as these 'Vehicle to Grid' scenarios suggest. That's just a lot more wear and tear on your very expensive vehicle battery - more cycles that will eventually kill the batt.

Sure, they have nice batts now. The real key is to make them big and make them cheap. Only when they do that will all of these lovely scenarios make any sense whatsoever.