Panasonic Battery Could Power House for 1 Week

No way in hell that little piece of junk will heat a 2500 square foot home in wisconsin in january for even one hour. It would probably burst into flames in under 5 minutes if you tried.

How can it be emission free?

Batteries need to be charged you know, and where does that electricity come from?

If this is true I can see this being very usefull in an off the grid solar powered house. Use the surplus electricity to charge the battery durring the day. If up north you would probably couple it with a geothermal system with radiant tubing in the floor to reduce the electrical demand. If solar panels get more effiecent by 2011 they could end up selling a good amount of these. My two cents.

Ya, a real good amount of them. You'd need a few hundred of them to be of any use. my $0.02

If this was a real thing it would be used in a car and not power a whole house...

Yes, to store enough energy to make off the grid solar work, you would need several dozen, if not more to provide enough power. This would also cost an exorbitant amount of money. And then it will cease to work after 10 years. So, more money. Complete fantasy at this level of technology.

Solar panels more efficient by 2011? I'm not saying it can't happen, but unless a major breakthrough is made in photovoltaics, there is no way solar panels can get more efficient.

Holy crap, it's made of radioactive decay!


(j/k)

Would be better if they were working with that new battery technology developed by Arizona State University.

11 times the capacity of Lithium ION, but 1/3 the manufacturing cost.

And I heard recharge times somehow stay about the same too.

The thing is..,u could install it in ur homes and a variety of electrical sources can be used in the future to recharge it. So it's providing flexibility for the future since the method of renewable energy is still undecided at the moment.

Please dont talk in japanese or african home. talk in KiloWatts
2000$ 20-kilowatt-hours battery powering a house for full day.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/ho [...] rt&mag=pop

Why li-ion?!? Li-ion cells still suffer from 4-5 year shelf life until they are close to worthless, no matter how light the duty cycle you put them through.

Since these packs are meant to be set in the house and left there, there's no point in using li-ion for the high energy density and low weight. It's not like you'll have to carry it around...
For this application, buying half a dozen deep cycles that are cheaper, much more robust and won't start a lithium fire if they fail makes much more sense.

It sounds like they just bought a li-ion manufacturing plant so they're looking for ways to start making money off of the "green zero emission".

Fact: the battery is the size of a truck

Can I use that as my PSU?

1. Americans use WAY too much power - so they won't last as long on this as the japanese would.
2. The idea is brilliant, but some numbers like Amp hours on it would be sweet.
3. Lower prices on solar panels and this device would be excellent, esp. for people that want to live off grid
4. If this device is as good as they say, then I would get one and drop the gridpower

aah no wasn't him, was just that they made it out of a new cheaper material that was more effective and a lot cheaper to mass produce

I do not agree with the above statement, people thought that we would be the jetson by now. Jet packs, flying cars.. space ship flying to distant planets... When it comes to power, cheapest wins, right now its oil. Some say we are running out but tech will get us to new places and new supplies that we have not been able to tap into before.

Nuclear isn't emissions free - ever heard of radioactivity?

Anyone who wants to use one of these cells or move off grid is going to have to examine every aspect of energy consumption in their home. Heating with electric radiators of some type? You will need such a huge battery the cost will be prohibitive.

The cheapest thing is always to not use the power. If you don't use a KWH you don't need to size your battery to store it, don't need to dig out and burn coal, import oil or add an extra solar panel. I am not talking about conservation, but rather energy efficiency.

Unfortunately the average North American home consumes vast amounts of energy (I think I heard the average is about 35kwh of electricity plus Gas, oil or electric for heating). You will probably have to bulldoze and properly re-design 80% of homes to make them truly efficient (which then causes its own inefficiencies).

Oh well I don't think anything substantial will change for a decade or more and then people will only change when the cost of continuing exceeds the short term cost of making appropriate changes. In some ways I consider it unfortunate that financial efficiency is almost always more important than energy efficiency. If the world had been capable of reversing these two 100 years ago then our resources might have truly been infinite and our pollution issues negligible.

Awsome! So how many would I need to power my SHTF/TEOTWAWKI Bug Out Location/Counter-Zombie command center for 3 months? This would be a lot better than storing thousands of gallons of gasoline/diesel and propane(ahh sweet propane). Plus being a battery this means no noise generation. Which is great when your trying to hide from Zombies, Looters, and FEMA agents.

My $.02, we are so far in debt with the Chi-coms we can never pay them back, I mean never! We need to dig, drill, blow the shit out of the mountains to get as much fossil fuels (coal, natural gas & oil) we can out & use that to pay off the Chi-Coms. People, we are headed for bankruptcy & the Commies hold are debt. What if that happens, how are we going to pay them, are we going to inflate our money, if so we all starve & burning any trees we can find, we are back in the middle ages again. Who will be the superpower then, China & are they going to care about the environment like we do? Do you think China will give $100,000,000,000 a year to help other countries clean up their environment, no? I think American’s are pretty good with the environment compared to other growing nations; we try to keep things clean here.
What is China going to do after they figure out we cannot pay them back, will they try to take our natural resources at gun point. So we can sale it to them now or we will give it them later at gun point, anyway you look at it, we are in big problem & fossil fuels are the key.

We need to stop listening to these enviro-commies that love China/Russia & start listen to common sense & the American way.

It would be nice to live in a world that did not revolve around money but the simple fact is the cheapest energy will be what is used no matter what and oil is the cheapest right now. For the record, fires, volcanos,earth quakes and other natural disaster polute more than man can do in a single day. So many improvements have been made over the past 100 years that no one ever thinks about it. People used to toss human waiste out in the streets. Every home burned wood or coal making the streets, air, black with ash and dust.

Hmmm.... now I can use this to power my Nanosuit II

Nuclear is the cleanest, but coal is still the cheapest. It will remain so until the day that natural gas beats coal as the cheapest. Nuclear will likely never be the cheapest. The future is methane, ammonia, urea, hydrogen peroxide, cyanogen, hydrazine, hydrogen, and acetylene...imo. Wind/solar are dead ends for all but small handheld devices and some minor houshold appliances.

the biggest advantage I can see of something like this is in the temporary storage that is necessary on city wide scales due to changes in electrical usage. A normal house's electrical use drops to almost nothing at night, but the power generation is still there. Therefore many cities do things like fill a resevoir with the excess nighttime power then drain it to reclaim the energy. This is not a very efficient way to do things, but there isnt much of an alternative.

Giving houses a high density power cell that could store excess energy during low use regions of the cycle could remove the necessity of actions like this, and increase energy efficiency greatly.

In terms of the more experimental, higher efficiency batteries that exist in research labs you need to realize that the distance between working model in a lab to a manufacture ready system is absolutely massive.

We probably have a better chance of developing super conductive wires than producing zero emission power plants.

BTW I think we are ignorant to think we as human beings can change this world on a whim, even if we had never developed emissions the temperature of this earth would still increase whether we like it or not. This planet has done it before with out our help.

This battery is only worth having like the battery for your computer's power strip, just enough time to shut the thing off properly. I also woulda been happier with numbers than a comparison, especially a comparison some people have no idea about.