Au cotraire!I absolutely adore him. I have a thing for geeks though. He’s such an engineer, and I love that he is so dorky yet fabulous rich and cool - he invented the Tesla! I have no idea why I might want this battery but I will need to figure it out just so I can be a part of his dream of the world. Engineers rock!
(heads off to the May the 4th Be With You corporate event where we get photographed with cardboard yodas and R2D2s)
What you describe are my first impressions I have had with smaller towns in western Europe in general.
They are in fact extremely different than our small and rural ones in the US. In a better way all around.
12 volt car battery? The typo monster got you. Have you hooked up a 12 volt car battery to a computer? Just wondering and don’t want to use my computer to test it.
Hrmm… $3K USD is about 18 months worth of power bills for me. Not sure how much money we’d save during the winter months, but it would definitely be a significant cut to our bills in the summer, when the A/C is running during peak hours during the day (we have a programmable thermostat to raise the temperature in the house during the day, but we can’t let it go to high or else the A/C won’t be able to cool the house down to bearable temperatures for the evenings, in those stretches when it’s 95+ for weeks at a time). I’m too tired (it’s Monday morning!) to do the math, but I feel like it probably would still take a while to pay itself off.
Nope. Electric vehicles. Namely this one:
https://hackaday.io/project/5066-luka-ev
Yes, but that requires a different power supply unit; there are PSU boards for ATX computers that can be fed from 12V batteries.
Used it for this portable computer:
http://shaddack.twibright.com/projects/hw_AmmoboxPC/
I love that thing, until you see the back end…
The car, the computer, or both? 
The car. Poor little thing.
It’s a prototype. And it’s quite pretty, I’d say. And lightweight. The back should get tweaked though. But I am only a propulsion/power plant consultant in this project.
Are you really? Cool. I saw this earlier today on Hackaday, and I do love it, just not the boot…
Yup, really. The power traces from the engines are now hosted on my machine, see the link in the hackaday post, acquired by the software I wrote to interface the 'scope (todo: polish up the code, add screenshot capability, release, add features for the digital analyzer, release).
(Also working on software for collecting data from arbitrary number of multimeters at once. That’s for slower measurements - thermal, or charge/discharge processes.)
That car is cooooool!
Well, don’t forget that the batteries actually need energy from somewhere…
We aren’t capturing anywhere near the world energy requirements in renewables yet.
It’s not just big businesses at all. A house could pay this off quite quickly, with no solar power, if the power company has peak pricing.
Example (found elsewhere):
During peak hours, the Bay Area electricity rate is between 29 and 41c / kWh.
During the night, it’s 9c.
If you could store 10kwh (90cents) at night and use it during the day when it would normally be 41c/kWh, you’re saving 32c/kWh. That $3.2/day, or $1168/yr.
At a purchase price of $3500, you can pay that back in 3 years.
Now, most places in the US don’t have anywhere near such a large peak pricing swing for residential customers, but some do, and with more smart grids coming our way, I expect more of us will see peak pricing soon.
The way to make a 3H based beta battery is to bind the tritium - a very convenient material is mischmetall which can absorb 7% atom for atom of hydrogen but there are also alkali metal hydrides. The emitted helium will eventually damage the structure, in which the emitter is interlayered with silicon PN junctions. Releasing the helium isn’t very practical, especially as some of the tritium would be released as well. I guess this is why tritium batteries have never really worked. (it’s amusing that the betavoltaics article on Wikipedia references the article on the betacel, which then in turn references the betavoltaics article, reminding me of a story I read as a child which included an encyclopedia which contained the entries:
Stoat - see weasel
[…]
Weasel - see stoat.)
I just meant that (TTBOMK, anyway) only larger power consumers, i.e., mostly large businesses, get off-peak discounts or pay peak-demand charges.
But, yeah, anyone who gets off-peak discounts or pays peak demand charges could profitably use these as a power buffer, even smaller customers with no solar.
Smart-grid tech could make a huge difference if it penetrates down to the residential level.
Consider the City of Burbank’s smart grid: Burbank buys wind power all the way from… I forget, Wyoming or somewhere…and offers customers with large HVAC installations a deal: install a large water-storage tank attached to your HVAC chiller, and then let the grid manage it: when renewable wind power is available, it’s used to chill the storage tank. When the wind dies down, the grid shuts off the chiller and the HVAC uses the stored cold water instead.
Now, do the same with every house equipped with a Tesla battery: Let the grid charge your battery with cheap renewable energy, then switch to battery to supplement more expensive grid power.
Burbank already has the tech to do that. And other utilities can install it.
Of course the utilities could also build out their own Powerpack farms and quit offering rate discounts. to anyone, so ya gotta be careful the future doesn’t get ahead of you… (-:
Random thought. What about some nanostructured material with clusters of vacancies where the waste helium can be stored without damaging the structure? Having layers of such “nanosponge” within the structure?
Todo: look at the detailed structures of betavolcaic systems…
It’s what makes 107Pd so attractive as a beta fuel. Only problem is that there’s only a little of it in the nasty mishmash that is high level radwaste. And it might be mixed with some other isotopes of Pd that are not so civil and decent.
But, it is a metal, and the end product is a very similar metal. Makes low-energy beta, and not a lot of other stuff. Not sure how quickly its physical structure degrades, but it would be far better than ending up as helium.
[edit] … looking over the fission product list, I see that shaddack’s original suggestion is a good one. Just keep the spent fuel around for about a thousand years to get rid of the short-lived hot stuff, then separate the transition metals from about technetium to about tin. Among the long-lived isotopes, most of them meet the requirement of being beta sources and producing another metal.
3He sells for a few thousand dollars a litre of gas so if beta batteries ever existed on a commercial scale it’d be evonomic to recycle the gas
This is actually possibly the best strategy for high level nuclear waste anyway. The level of terror created by waste repositories seems to me out of all proportion. There are places in Cheddar still contaminated by waste from Roman lead mines, but somehow people survive.
