Permaculture, a permanent sustainable culture

Are liquid metal batteries the answer to solve our energy storage needs?

Lithium ion batteries require rare materials that are mined using child labor. Liquid metal batteries are made out of calcium and antimony, two extremely abundant materials.

Unlike lithium ion batteries which can only be charged and discharged a couple thousand times at best, liquid metal batteries can be charged and discharged almost indefinitely. The estimated losses after 20 years of continuous deep cycling are only about 5%

The biggest downside to liquid metal batteries is that they are a novel technology being developed by a single company. They don't have the economy of scale that decades of lithium ion production has behind it.

An off-grid datacenter with geothermal and solar panels is partnering with the battery company, hopefully giving them the funding they need to bring some awesome new sustainable batteries to market!

It's a shame about lead acid's lack of density, because you can disulfate and revive  the vast majority of "dead" lead acid batteries indefinitely.

Are liquid metal batteries the answer to solve our energy storage needs?

Lithium ion batteries require rare materials that are mined using child labor. Liquid metal batteries are made out of calcium and antimony, two extremely abundant materials.

Unlike lithium ion batteries which can only be charged and discharged a couple thousand times at best, liquid metal batteries can be charged and discharged almost indefinitely. The estimated losses after 20 years of continuous deep cycling are only about 5%

The biggest downside to liquid metal batteries is that they are a novel technology being developed by a single company. They don't have the economy of scale that decades of lithium ion production has behind it.

An off-grid datacenter with geothermal and solar panels is partnering with the battery company, hopefully giving them the funding they need to bring some awesome new sustainable batteries to market!

how far are they out from having these for sale, i want one for my house

altho a generator is more cost effective i don't like fuel dependence

how far are they out from having these for sale, i want one for my house

altho a generator is more cost effective i don't like fuel dependence

Unfortunately consumer versions are still years away from market. According to the timeline on their website, they are going to be demonstrating small scale commercial installations this year and ramping up production to 250 megawatt hours of batteries produced by 2023



So unless you work at a datacenter or a power utility company, you probably won't be able to get your hands on these for a while

This guy makes a big compost pile and runs a pipe through it, hooked up to a standard baseboard radiator

Looking at the big picture and numbers of how many people will need to start growing their own food at home and for their local communities.

Do you think it's possible to move 30% of our food production to people's homes, another 30% to medium scale local farmers, in order to reduce our reliance on large scale industrialized food production?

Looking at the big picture and numbers of how many people will need to start growing their own food at home and for their local communities.

Do you think it's possible to move 30% of our food production to people's homes, another 30% to medium scale local farmers, in order to reduce our reliance on large scale industrialized food production?

I really hope that when cultured meat is a widely accepted thing the technology will exist to do it at home. The meat industry is such a huge sustainability problem right now for the entire world.

Imagine being able to grow everything you would eat in an average diet at home

The meat industry is such a huge sustainability problem right now for the entire world.

Side effect of the USA-vs-USSR fight.  They fought on many fronts: proxy wars, puppet governments, the "space race," modernist art, and a "farm war" was one of the ways to undermine faith in the other.  America heavily subsidized farming and claimed it was "capitalism and free-market" that produced so much more than Russia.  Supermarkets were the display case for the excessive production.  These supermarkets wanted to have simple supply chains, so they supported single large producers more than a broader (and more resilient) swathe of small-to-medium producers.  Easier paperwork to get 120,000 tomatoes from one government-subsidized farm than from 4-6 self-sufficient farms.

Reading into how much infrastructure was built for winning the farm war is kinda nuts.  Like, federal promotion of state roadworks because the show-off supermarkets needed those supply chains.

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crayfish and tilapia are considered the goto for meat generation at home.  black solider fly larva is supposed to be viable too.

India wants to build a global power grid to transfer solar energy. That way even when it's dark it'll still be sunny somewhere else! But that's going to take a ton of money to build, and it potentially creates huge interdependent bottlenecks that could fail in a natural disaster or be a target for hacking. Wouldn't it be better to just have small scale, autonomous grids which interconnect organically?

India wants to build a global power grid to transfer solar energy. That way even when it's dark it'll still be sunny somewhere else! But that's going to take a ton of money to build, and it potentially creates huge interdependent bottlenecks that could fail in a natural disaster or be a target for hacking. Wouldn't it be better to just have small scale, autonomous grids which interconnect organically?

if there were a way to shove heat into the earths core and save it for later, then suck it out in other places, that would be really cool. but then people would definitely just keep sucking heat out and in 100 years we'd have a crisis of the earths core cooling down

also if u like reading about global energy stuff, this guys got a 00's style wordpress blog with tons of self published articles.. with sources! http://energyskeptic.com/2020/building-a-national-grid-in-america/

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