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We have the excess electricity already, but I’m not yet at the legally required amount of solar panels.

At work we are investing in energy storage, both batteries and heat storage and looking for more solutions.

For any but the largest commercial solar/wind providers, batteries and heat storage (or cold storage actually too!) are the best uses of overproduction of electricity. Batteries at your location are 90%+ efficient round trip, meaning for every 1kWh you shove into the battery, even after all the conversion and storage costs, you'll be able to get 900Wh or more out of the battery when you have a use for it. Many PV tied batteries are upwards of 97% efficient even!

Heat storage is another great use, whether in water (to mitigate need for new energy expenditure to heat water for use), or in thermal batteries for space heating. Although the biggest downside to thermal batteries are their size. If you've got spare space then they can be effective in a home or business.

I’m looking at hydrogen, because it’s known tech and I dream of finding a way to use it in a more stable chemical form for storage.

I did the same looking at Hydrogen, and its pretty bleak. Not only is creating hydrogen safely (from electrolysis) difficult, but storage is a nightmare. Any kind of gaseous storage is incredibly difficult because of how small a molecule H2 is, and if you're storage is inside a building that leakage creates explosion risks.

The safest way I saw to store and consume hydrogen is absorbed into a metal hydride. The problem there is that fillers (because of pressure) are expensive $2k for the cheapest one I saw, and you need many metal hydride cylinders to store any appreciable amount of hydrogen. So they end up being large, heavy and bulky or relatively little energy storage.

For home use, a regular lithium battery is so much more efficient and safe.

What it looks like this company is building would be partially compatible with that approach.

For the Haber-Bosch process needs input H2 (plus the atmospheric Nitrogen). 33% of what this company is building is an electrolyser. Further, the Sabatier reactor they're using (another 33% of their process) could possibly be swapped out for a Haber-Bosch reactor.

I don't know enough about the environmental conditions needed for handling ammonia vs methane to understand if there are any "gotchas" to creating ammonia in situ.

What are the other options you see for the excess electricity that would be more feasible than this methane approach?

This has the same problem as CO2 capture technologies, that is the relatively low CO2 concentration in the air.

You're correct that the CO2 concentration in atmospheric air is low: 0.04%. Consider the following:

• Each molecule of C02 has a single carbon atom.
• Each molecule of methane also has a single carbon atom.
• So we could say that atmospheric air has 0.04% of methane production capacity.

I would agree with you this would be a waste of time if the goal was CO2 sequestration, but it isn't. The goal is to use otherwise 100% wasted electricity to produce something useful that can be stored long term that there is a market for, in this case methane.

The only way to make this even remotely feasible

What is your definition of "feasible" here? Economically compared to fossil based methane? Volume of production?

... are end of pipe solutions where you directly capture the exhaust of a fossile fuel combustion process. But that in turn is at best a temporary band aid.

The company agrees with you. They called out that being able to direct capture pure CO2 from an industrial application would be ideal, but as they also concluded, thats not where the excess electricity is that is really the primary economic driver of this technique.

LFP

Thank you for that.

Its odd calling LFP "new" and "a change is coming". The first production EV to ship in the USA with an LFP was in late 2021 I think.

I would have thought this might be talking about cheaper chemistry Sodium Ion batteries, which are already on the road in small quantities in China.

Now, what ever happened to regularly riding horses around?

Besides the issue with horse excrement, other issues occurred (Hayden, 2016):

Dead horses often clogged city streets;
In New York City in 1880, 15,000 horses died on the streets, or 41 dead horses a day (which had to be removed);
Some place to stable the 100,000+ horses that operated within New York, and food to feed them;
On a per capita basis, 19th century horse-drawn vehicle accident rates were similar to those of the automobile in the 20th century.

source

Guess you’ve never heard of a fistulated cow before, they can totally connect tubing or pipes to cows to harvest methane straight out of their intestines.

And the cost for fistulating each cow? And how much methane will such a cow produce? How contaminated will the methane be? What methods would be required to refine it to pipeline grade? Further, can you feed a cow with the output overproduction of a PV solar panel?

This is what I meant when I said cows wouldn't be economically viable sources of methane from electricity. If you think cows are they, then I won't stop you though.

Confused, how is this useful?

There are many MANY useful applications of carbon neutral methane. The most beneficial and obvious to me are:

• Useful method of storing excess generated solar and wind power
• Entire industries, markets, and infrastructure already existing for the storage, transportation, and consumption of methane

You can get methane out of a cow’s ass all day long

You cannot get pipeline grade methane out of cows ass, and even if you could, you wouldn't have the technology to capture it for use in the marketplace in any quantity that would be cost effective against fossil fuel based methane. As in, even if you could (and you can't), it would cost so much that no one would buy it and instead just pull more out of the ground. The solution proposed here is on the path to being worth skipping the fossil fuel route for methane and using this instead.

and methane is a greenhouse gas,

So is the CO2 that is being used as the feedstock to create the methane. This would be reducing atmospheric CO2, which I hope you would agree is a useful element when directly combating climate change from C02 emissions.

I thought we wanted less methane, not more.

This wouldn't be producing net more methane. The market is already consuming all of methane it demands. This would replace some of the supply that is currently being fulfilled by carbon positive fossil fuel sources.

I didn't see anything in the article at all regarding speculation or futures markets of electricity with the one exception being a mention of some industrial operators signing long term contracts to buy oversupply.

Can you refer me to the section of the article you're responding to?

I think the "swapping" may be a different use case the author is talking about. I don't think the author was referring to an end-user executed swap to simply put in a charged battery.

This would be a service center option where a mechanic would have to take tools and removed panels and connectors to make the swap. Something done maybe only a few times, if ever, for a car during its life.

A structural battery pack is constructed to not be serviced in parts. The author calls this out with his comments on "replacing a single bad cell". He's right that this is a concern for structural battery packs. Here's a Tesla structural battery pack when it was attempted to be disassembled:

There was more of that pink foam wrapping around the cells now exposed. All of that pink foam is needed for strength and its thermal properties because the battery pack is part of the structure of the vehicle carrying load forces.

Clearly replacing a bank of cells would be difficult to do if there was a cell failure, and no wear near cost effective for a consumer to have done on their car. The author is suggesting having some of THIS type of battery, but also another part of the battery in the standard hard plastic modular cases where the whole module could be removed and replaced ("swapped")

The author is suggesting SOME of the battery be the pink foam type that is unserviceable, and SOME of the battery be behind panels in cases that a technician can swap at a service center when the module has reached the end of its life.

I had spare batteries for my smartphone for events like all-day conferences/conventions to swap batteries in the afternoon.

Sure, but how often are you going to all-day conferences. Once a year? Twice? Is it worth having the possibly 20% less battery capacity the other 363 days a year for that swapability?

Something seems missing from the description. What would make the most sense with the articles description is if there were two packs each with different chemistries. One cheap and low density, such as NA-Ion (Sodium-Ion) that could take care of 90% of EV driving needs for trips under, say, 100 miles. The second pack being a much higher density chemistry like NMC (Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt) which could add significantly more range for the same cubic cm of volume in the vehicle, but the battery would have far fewer cycles compared to other chemistries.

The idea being, beat the heck out of the Sodium Ion battery and make it easily serviceable/replaceable at the cost of range for the same volume consumed, while the NMC battery would be gently cared for and only called on in the more extreme demands of range.

If that's what the author was trying to say, it was not clear.

This article is a bit confusing because its talking about the theoretical use cases of structural battery packs in EVs, the possible problems, and possible mitigations.

The Tesla Model Y has been using a structural battery pack for over 2 years (since 2022 model year, I think). While Hyundai/Kia may make different choices, the pros and cons from Tesla's choices can be used as at least one path for what Hyndai/Kia want to keep or what they would want to change from Tesla's choices.

Here's the articles cited problems:

However, placing cells inside load-bearing components would also make them hard to replace, offsetting this practice.

In practice almost no service of the battery is done at the shop where the car is. If there is a fault anywhere in the pack, from a cell to a BMS component, the entire pack is swapped.

Most EV drivers rarely use all of their battery range; they only need it on long trips. Therefore, batteries built into load-bearing automotive components would not be needed for daily use; they could be maintained at the ideal charge level for the battery formulation and rarely used except for long trips.

This is such a strange description. This isn't how EV batteries are used at all today, as far as I know, because it would be very inefficient in regular use. You wouldn't want to put extra strain/stress/charge/discharge on specific cells in the battery. That would lead to unbalanced packs. Further it would be much less efficient and slower to charge the segregated pack that the article is describing. The more full a cell gets of charge, the harder/more power you need to work it to take additional charge. Also, deep discharge of cells significantly shortens their life. The author's design description of a segregated pack would also experience much worse cold weather range reduction.

if the carmaker were to use modular battery packs, it would reduce the related cost of repairs across all of the car batteries; if they had better batteries, the need to replace them would be substantially reduced

Several automakers have tried making modular packs the way the author is describing them here. They turn out to be a bad choice because of all the extra stuff you have to do to make it flexible to accept fewer or more modules. This same thing happened to mobile phones. You used to have a removable battery, which was nice. However to make the battery removable, you had to add spring contacts, a separate tray to hold the battery, and a battery door. All of these things took space. The only time you'd ever use these, practically, would be years into the phone's life you'd open it up to replace the battery once, maybe twice in the phone's entire life. Manufacturers could just put a larger battery in and make it cheaper. Many phones don't live long enough to ever kill their first battery.

The author of the article is well credentialed and has worked in the tech and automotive industry for years, so I'm very confused as to the content of this article. Its almost like it was written 3 years ago, even though it is showing a Feb 14th 2025 dateline.