Cleantech: Battery Life
Image via WikipediaI had an interesting conversation today with a couple of folks at OpenCoffee Hamburg. We actually started talking about cleantech and to be honest, I said screw cleantech short-term. Give me a battery for my laptop and mobile phone which doesn't need to be charged every day. Figure that problem out first before you even think of considering the Tesla Roadster ready for mass consumption. The same goes for any other new innovation regarding cleantech. You may set up a bunch of wind farms but you need to store that energy which isn't immediately consumed somewhere: batteries. You can harvest sunlight all you want but yes, you guessed it, you need to store some of that energy: batteries. Even if we manage to figure out how to purify water or whatever else we figure out in the future regarding "green issues", it will need energy to work. That energy needs to be efficiently stored and effectively distributed before we can do a lot of "new" things. Don't get me wrong, I myself am thinking about cleantech more and more every day, especially as an investor deciding where to place my bets. It's time now to be investing in cleantech as one can still be ahead of the curve and there will be Amazons and Googles coming in this sector. But I really dislike when the conversation becomes all visionary and people don't even consider the basics before becoming all "innovative" on you.
In fairness, most of the systems that generate power (wind, solar) don't need to store their power anywhere... the unused power can be injected back into the power grid and sold, which provides an additional economic incentive to use these technologies. Of course that presumes you're in a location physically connected to power infrastructure, but that's a safe bet for most of the developed world.
Selling the power by putting it into the grid is certainly preferable just because it's not going to have the efficiency hit that any sort of battery will.
Posted by:sutha kamal | May 07, 2008 at 07:19 PM
Sutha, you are correct in that this power flows into the grid. Agreed. At the same time, all devices which need to be charged (storing this power) in turn are connected to the grid so indirectly you so at some point need to store the power somewhere unless it's immediately used. But yeah, you're right in that I didn't make it clear what I meant.
Posted by:Paul J. | May 07, 2008 at 07:22 PM