When that fateful morning comes that your car no longer roars to life with a quick twist of the key, but rather groans its displeasure at the sad state of your ride’s electrical system, your course is clear: you need a new battery. Whether you do it yourself or – perish the thought – farm out the job to someone else, the end result is the same. You get a spanking new lead-acid battery, and the old one is whisked away to be ground up and turned into a new battery in a nearly perfect closed loop system. Contrast this to what happens to the battery in your laptop when it finally gives up the ghost. Some of us will pop the pack open, find the likely one bad cell, and either fix the pack or repur
Falling solar panel prices coupled with favorable national and state policies are giving energy storage technologies the jolt they need to electrify the market place. The latest such example is Pacific Gas & Electric that wants to install four battery projects totaling 2,270 megawatts. Energy storage could be anything from shaving peak load to storing and injecting wind and solar electrons onto the grid. "Energy storage plays an increasingly important role in California's clean energy future, and while it has been a part of PG&E's power mix for decades – starting with the Helms Pumped Storage Plant in the 1980's – recent decreases in battery prices are enabling energy storage to become a com
Demand for cobalt is affecting battery markets, but luckily not all lithium-ion batteries require the metal. If you’ve been paying attention to the debate about lithium-ion battery materials, then you will know there is a price problem with lithium, but the real market danger is with cobalt. While experts doubt that cobalt scarcity will halt the growth of the lithium-ion battery business, demand for the metal is affecting battery markets and increasing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s stranglehold on supplies. To the uninitiated, this might seem like a major threat to the lithium-ion energy storage business. But it’s not, for the simple reason that not all lithium-ion batteries nee
