ARPA-E Batteries to Challenge Tesla?
March 3rd, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar Power systems in New Zealand.
—
If you’re interested in energy generation and storage technologies that will actually be for sale in the near to medium term, you can safely ignore most press releases about new energy technologies working only in labs. That stuff might as well be on a different planet when one considers how far away it is from being ready for end users.
So, Ellen Williams doesn’t think what Tesla is doing is so great. Ok. Where’s the ARPA-E product I can offer to my solar customers? What’s the capacity? How much does it cost?
*crickets*
And it would be nice to know what the U.S. Government is actually holding along these lines after decades of black projects and energy research and trillions of missing dollars. You know, before more trillions are spent to supposedly come up with the new new thing.
Yeah, yeah.
*crickets*
Via: Reuters:
A wing of the U.S. Department of Energy focused on breakthrough technologies may soon give billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s most recent foray into energy storage a run for its money, the unit’s director said.
Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, which funds projects meant to transform energy markets, has made huge strides over the last few years on next-generation batteries that could make electric cars and renewable energy cheaper and more accessible, Ellen Williams said in an interview this week.
The battery division of Musk’s Tesla Motors turned a profit in the fourth quarter, after the first shipments of its rechargeable products helped to reduce losses from the company’s auto business. Its Powerwall batteries store energy that homes and small businesses generate with solar panels. The Powerpack model is designed for large commercial facilities.
Williams said her agency has helped kickstart a dozen high-risk projects based on newer technologies that could soon outperform Tesla batteries.
“What Musk has done that is creative and important is drive the learning curve. He’s decided to take an existing, pretty powerful battery technology and start producing it on a very large scale,” she said.
“But it’s not technology innovation in the sense of creating new ways of doing it. We are pretty well convinced that some of our technologies have the potential to be significantly better,” Williams said.
Whatever happened to EEStor?
It appears to have been either a fraud or an orders of magnitude error in energy density calculations… Except that Lockheed Martin saw something about it that they liked, and they have since not mentioned it. So, I dunno.