Here at EVW I track news about electric vehicles and report on it.  This isn’t exactly news about electric vehicles, but it is news for the green crowd, and good news for our aging grid.

New battery technology promises to store a lot of energy combined with a discharge/recharge cycle that can be run once a day for 10 years.  It comes out of a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices.  The possibility of using these batteries in combination with wind/solar power could decentralize our electrical grid to reduce load on the system and deter those pesky rolling blackouts.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables,” said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. “They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward.”

Making the grid smarter is something that we could try to do, but there are problems with that.

“First you have to rebuild the grid because the one we have now is a creaky machine from the 1920s, and we keep trying to retrofit it,” he said. “Then you’re going to have computers trying to manage the energy, which brings up issues like security. You have to make it really secure so you don’t have people hacking into things. And then politics. Just wait until you try to run power lines through someone’s backyard.

“I can’t imagine anything more secure than generating my own energy with the sun at my house, and now I’ll have a way to store it. It’s the ultimate in security, and the ultimate in control.”

Decentralizing the grid is the best alternative.  And we can do that with the help of these new batteries.  The essence of Ceramatec’s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years.  With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life.  Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.  More

That’s cheaper and green, what else could you ask for?