My main concern with these kinds of large appliance applications is battery longevity. How long will the batteries on that stove last after 1 year, 2 years, and so on? How easily can they be replaced?
"How long will the batteries on that stove last after 1 year, 2 years, and so on?"
Answer: Not nearly long enough to make sense.
"How easily can they be replaced?"
Answer: Super easy, assuming you've got enough money, which you almost certainly won't.
Has anybody bothered to run some numbers on how lithium will be needed to store all of this electricity? Because unless there's an order of magnitude increase in capacity and efficiency, this is going to end hilariously.
We would need to know, like through UL or Consumer Reports research, of a battery life cycle. A time measurement might be inappropriate, because it would have the consequence of an "expiration date effect" -- giving false-negative information that causes unnecessary waste of useful products.
First, we'd need to know whether the stove batteries are rechargeable. The stove's cord is almost always hidden, so the stove might need a brain that tells it to recharge when its battery reaches zero or runs below a critically low level if you're cooking.
Alternatively, if the battery is primary (intended to be disposed, like a Duracell) or a car battery (disposable but also chargeable), the stove should be designed to be serviceable. I have my doubts, as the trend is business is for manufacturers (Apple, automakers, farm equipment makers) to make maintenance overly complicated and earn high margins on repairs; or products with low price points and disposability (TV makers).
These will take time, especially for Consumer Reports-style lab testing, which simulates real-world operating conditions and looks backwards. (CR's car ratings, for example, penalize automakers for reliability when a new technology is introduced and it takes about 3 model years to get an accurate baseline of how reliable a car model is. CR does warn readers of this effect in its methodology.)
Enphase has a ten year warranty on its batteries if that is an indication. It's that or 4000 cycles which should be at least ten years (365 x 10 daily cycles).
This was one of my concerns: the other concern that I have is that battery technology is evolving very rapidly, and even if the battery can be replaced with another battery of the same type, it might be difficult to keep "backwards compatibility" with the next generation of batteries that might or might not be lithium based.
Yup - the rapid mindset of Silicon Valley, where a typical smartphone might last two years, is very different from the mindset behind large appliances, many of which last decades.
In my experience, I had an iPhone 4s that I bought new in late 2011 and kept it until the battery finally physically died. It lasted a little more than 8 years. Although in its last 3 years, the battery was notoriously weak and I'd have to carry the charge cord everywhere. My phone before the iPhone 4s was a Nokia that was a primitive smartphone (it had a color screen and a low-res camera but the numbers were still buttons and not a touchscreen). That lasted me 5 1/2 years.
Phonemakers may expect people to swap out phones every 2 years, but physically the phones will last far longer.
@RC, I see efforts in Europe to establish laws to inform consumers of expected battery lifespan (how many charge cycles a battery can withstand before it "dies").
On another front, author and blogger Cory Doctorow is a prominent advocate for "right to repair". The movement is to break the oligopoly of Apple and other companies' high margins made on repair through proprietary parts and a limited channel of qualified repairers. Right to repair seeks three things: a competitive market for skilled repairers, non-proprietary parts, and the return of the right of consumers to be able to perform maintenance on products they own.
Noah, speaking as someone who often disagrees with you because I have a more libertarian perspective, I have to applaud that you are putting your own money into this, not just advocating that taxpayers' money be used.
Money works the same way whether it comes from government or private investors. Government funding doesn't taint the well.
Scott Galloway, marketing professor and entrepreneur, in a No Mercy No Malice blog post called the U.S. government the most successful venture capital firm in history.
There's a chart in particular that shows government was responsible for a plurality, 43%, of basic research funding, with business, universities and nonprofits dividing up the rest of the 57%.
If government were to get out of the research business, the other three entities will have a really hard time backfilling the 43%. Or, other nations lacking a libertarian tradition will fill the void with their government funding and become the drivers of innovation with their clusters of businesses, universities and nonprofit NGOs.
No government funding? So much for the birth of U.S. railroads, the State Land Grant University system (envy of the world), GPS, satellite communication technology development. Silicon Valley was built on government money. Page & Brin used a grant from U.S. Intelligence agencies to build the prototype of a search engine (government wanted to know how to track people and things on the World Wide Web). The U.S. government bailed-out Tesla when it faced bankruptcy. Musk, a constant libertarian critic of government has, at last count, larded his companies with $4.2 billion in government funding. Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Energy all have their snouts in the government trough. Libertarians must live in a parallel universe or on a different planet.
We largely agree, John. Galloway raises the same points you do in the Welfare Queens article he wrote.
Libertarianism is theoretically elegant but practically untenable. See the 43% problem I mentioned. Of $108 billion in 2019 research spending, 43% of that came from government. If you give libertarians the benefit of the doubt and assume that if governments stopped collecting that revenue and redistributing it, then people will just spend the money to get comparable outcomes in the absence of government. That in turn assumes that business, nonprofits and universities will reapportion R&D investments to backfill what would have been the 43% of government contribution and still invest $108 billion among the three sectors.
It'll be pretty obvious to see why in the real world it will absolutely not happen. That $108 billion is a symbiotic relationship among government, universities, nonprofits and businesses. A lot of that money is government transferring funding to the other three, with each having to match through outside fundraising.
Businesses wouldn't jeopardize quarterly income and stock valuations on R&D of dubious prospects. The upshot of government piddling money on R&D that ultimately fails is that there will always be money available for future R&D; an R&D failure in the private sector has a chilling effect on future investment.
Universities -- many of which are government-run -- and nonprofits will have nowhere near the reach of fundraising that taxation provides. This means a shallower pool of money to draw R&D funds from. With less money to go around, it favors conservative R&D investments and incremental refinements but freezes out high-risk, high-reward scientific investments with no obvious market payback (space, in particular).
Here's another vote for government funding. Look at Tesla. It was a government backed success. (I'm talking about the $500M startup loan, not the multi-trillion dollar road system it relies on.) Solyndra may have been a bust, but Tesla did pretty well. The US government has been funding electrical stuff since Samuel Morse switched from painting pictures for them to running telegraph wires.
Notably, Tesla's first US factory was a boon for the Bay Area because it reactivated Fremont's famed NUMMI plant. NUMMI was a joint venture between GM and Toyota that allowed GM to learn Toyota's assembly process. This is where the Corolla was built, along with a few other lines. NUMMI closed after GM's bankruptcy in the Great Recession and both automakers dissolved the partnership.
If the weight and size are not an issue, there is a role for these batteries to create fast chargers for EVs in one's garage and short-term power sources for homes experiencing blackouts. Our ground-mounted solar array is generating twice the power we're using year round (4X in the summer months), and we've been looking for a battery option to capture the excess power (that we're now sending to the grid) to serve both those roles. I hope they don't stop with stoves but advance to larger uses. Of course, cost will be key. And, as with all new products, reliability, ongoing maintenance, the availability of timely repairs when needed, safety and expected useful lifetimes will be issues to watch for and address.
I misunderstood your comment. We are generating excess power, so we'd be happy to divert some of it to a battery for backup during frequent power outages. That's practical, IMO, not magical thinking.
As to the trade-off for faster charging an EV, not unlike what is proposed for running an induction stove, where does your estimate of a 40% loss in the conversion come from? We might still choose to do it in our situation, but I'd like to know more about the magnitude of the loss.
I think Tim qualified it by saying that setup is available during an outage. But under normal usage he's getting more solar energy than he can use and would like to store some of that excess energy from his battery option.
I mean, I hate to get nitpicky, but he states two roles for batteries. One is to create fast chargers for other batteries - the ones inside EVs - presumably because the home circuitry doesn't allow for the high voltage/amps (aren't fast chargers like 500V and 100amps?). The other use is to have a battery back up.
It's a cool-ish idea to have a home fast charger and battery back up in one, but the power loss does need to be considered. I'd also guess those fast chargers have a lot of loss and are very expensive (not to mention probably dangerous for home use no?).
Personally, it appears to me that having a really big car battery so that the car can have both long range and serve as the home backup is a better solution. The only real downside there is having to drive around that large battery. Somewhere in the future, maybe the real solution is to have two batteries with some sort of home changing kit. So one battery charges during the day, while you're out driving on the other, then you swap at night. Given that the home backup need is rarely occurring, having a second battery for that purpose is poor value proposition for most people.
That's one of the value propositions of Ford's F-150 Lightning (a vehicle and generator). It's already got around 200,000 pre-orders (as of 2021) sight unseen. Ford can only deliver a few thousand at a time.
Where exactly do you think you are losing this 40%? Lithium ion batteries charge and discharge (for reasonable rates) with near 99% efficiency. DC:DC converters that can fit inside a modern day cellphone charger (those are AC:DC obviously) can be as high as 97% or 98% efficient for reasonable conversion levels.
If the battery was losing 40% of its energy during discharge, you would need a fan to keep it from catching fire during the process.
Thank you for this article, though it does border on cheerleading for your friend’s company Impulse. ;-)
Perhaps you could follow up with an explanation of the environmental impact and costs of mining, refining, and transporting lithium from the places where we source it? Space and time allowing, you could perhaps then address the environmental impact of manufacturing batteries—including Powerwall, along with how long they will last, and how to recycle them.
This latter particularly interests me. How long will such batteries last? Do they degrade or lose recharging capacity at predictable rates? If so, over what time frame? Thereafter, are they simply to become landfill—that is, moving from the deserts of Bolivia to the deserts of, say, Arizona and Nevada? Does lithium then further degrade and affect groundwater? What trash haulers and even facilities would deign even to accept them at their size? How would a building owner or individual household go about removing them? Replacing them?
Then, perhaps later, as I appreciate along with you that these issues are not straightforward, you could compare these answers to the environmental costs of existing infrastructure—including nuclear generators. The arguments against nuclear power are obvious, but they are tired. They must be leavened with the reality of such plants having operated without fault or failure since a relatively small leak at Three Mile Island’s #2 generator more than a generation ago. Yes, Chernobyl. I get it. But Chernobyl used Russian technology far less advanced even than the technology adopted by the U.S. during the same period.
And, yes, nuclear power plants have become bargaining chips in Russia’s war in the Ukraine; I am not ignorant of long-tail risks. But presuming a stable political environment and no threat of foreign invasion by, say, Canada or Mexico (or China!), I think such risk can be ignored: if that happens the world is ending anyway!
With next-generation nuclear power plants apparently now able to use previously spent fuel rods, perhaps there is an option to explore smaller, even safer, micro- nuclear power plants that could without ongoing environmental impacts or health risks operate for decades. Or longer.
I know many get hives when they hear the dread word nuclear. The NIMBY syndrome also comes into play. But we live with nuclear now. In my state, Illinois, we get as 50% of our electrical power from nuclear plants; we’re the most nuclear-reliant state in the US. As of 2017, if Illinois were a nation, it would be the 10th largest nuclear power in the world: plants in the state generate more than ten percent of the nuclear power produced in the country. And we live with it. Ten reactors in Illinois are closer to Chicago than Chernobyl is to Kyiv.
In short, it’s worth being cognizant of where electricity comes from now and where it will come from in future, of the legacy systems in place that we live with, and that have minimal to no ongoing deleterious impact on the environment. If we can use recycled fuel rods, minimizing the effects even of existing uranium mining.
And let’s not ignore the environmental costs of manufacturing, supplying, installing, and maintaining solar panel arrays and/or wind turbines, which latter are not only unsightly but also are dangerous to avian wildlife.
I am neither an apologist for nuclear power, nor am I anti-Green. I favor any effort to improve the impacts we have on our environment, on human health, and on our natural world. But while I guess there is some element to speed of boiling water that could be considered attractive—to some, it doesn’t matter to me. What is more important is understanding the complete dimensions of environmental impacts, when purportedly advanced technologies are proposed.
BTW: While water is boiling on my stove now--which doesn’t take long, really--I can select my tea and fetch the teapot, cups, and cozy, measure out the tea, check my email on my Benedict Sun, text my wife, and heat the pot. So there’s that.
I know this post is well meaning but it reflects a lack on insight into the costs of batteries and their environmental impact. It would be very expensive for every household to buy battery powered high energy appliances sufficient for cooking and heating. This would further increase the already huge demand for batteries, which has resulted in prices now increasing. Because of advances in battery manufacturing 70% of lithium ion battery costs are for ingredient, which are now limiting and increasing in price. Thus lithium ion battery costs are unlikely drop further without a large expansion of mining, which will take some time. Lithium ion batteries have a substantial environmental impact because of the large amounts of minerals and energy required to manufacture them, and recycling is currently inefficient and energy intensive. It better for the environment and climate to have the grid provide reliable electricity 24/7 so that batteries can be reserved for light vehicle transport and low energy appliances. We can easily do this by using what is by far the safest and cleanest form of reliable energy, nuclear power. No, it is not more expensive than renewable, when you include the costs of dealing with intermittency and expanding the grid to accommodate solar and wind, which are not strongest in the places where people live. This is especially true when solar and wind penetration reach high levels of penetration as curtailment becomes frequent. If you disagree with this please explain why installation of solar and wind is correlated with increased electricity prices. It was the opposite when nuclear power was expanded in the previous century. I know you dislike nuclear and seem to think that because so many other people also dislike nuclear there is something badly wrong with it. You are discounting the highly effective multi decade misinformation campaign which has resulted in inappropriate fear of radioactivity and a very stringent regulatory regime. Do you know that the safe level for radioactivity exposure is 100 fold lower than the level shown to cause any harm? In comparison the safe level for pm2.5 air pollution is set ABOVE the level known to cause a 2% increase in mortality. That is why burning coal kills 1000 times more people than nuclear power, and yet people are more afraid of nuclear power. This is insane.
As for lithium mining, I am concerned (although uninformed, would appreciate resources) about it. I just don't see nuclear energy adoption happening. Yes, the public is misinformed, but it is the public that politicians have to appease and if they don't want nuclear plants, there will not be nuclear plants. So I guess I'm unsure if (1) making people like nuclear energy is easier or harder to do than (2) make lithium supply chains better?
A grid powered by solar and wind will require far more environmental damage because of their huge environmental footprint. Experience in countries like Germany and the UK show that the public rejects this. The only way around this is to import renewable energy, which is what Germany aims to do for 70% of its energy needs (via biofuels and ammonia produce abroad). That exports the damage to other countries, reduces energy security, and further increases the cost of electricity.
The solar and battery supply chain is heavily focused on China and much is produced by slave Labour.
So there is a huge ethical problem facing a 100% renewable system,
Personally I think we will either continue to use mainly fossil fuels or we will switch to nuclear. We may have to wait for the older generation to die before the switch to nuclear happens, but it seem inevitable. You cannot ignore reality.
Very interesting. Just commenting: at the city level, the countercyclical effect of a million plugged-in EVs will arrive much sooner and at vastly greater scale. (But I hope the company and your investment outperforms!)
Hey, so this is a general category of thing I have been researching for awhile as a green-adopter homeowner and I even have my own Substack about it, thisgreenhouse.substack.com. End of plug.
Some things folks should know about this category of thing:
1. The battery-backed-stove market is already shaping up to be competitive, see channingcopper.com (I am *not* an investor in their company, at least not now; I heard about them through a relative and we are now on their pre-order waitlist)
2. If you, a homeowner, want to start greening and demand-time-shifting your home right now without major electrical work or appliance install cost, one thing to look into is a 120V heat pump water heater. This is a fairly recent innovation, HPWHs used to all be 240V, but AIUI there are now a couple of companies making 120V ones. The most well-known seems to be the Rheem ProTerra line. Water heating is typically a bigger source of gas usage than cooking, and the heated water acts as a thermal battery to time-shift electrical demand much as a Powerwall does.
3. An even bigger thing you should be doing if you haven't already is getting an EV and setting the EV and home charger up to be V2H ready, i.e. making it so that your car battery can be a backup for your house and a demand-time shifter. Again this is a recent-to-market thing, most EVs and chargers sold so far are sadly not V2H compatible but some of the newest ones are.
4. Also, when you get a heat pump to replace your gas furnace, see if it supports smart thermostat control that can help with demand-time shifting. And if you're in the market for *both* a new furnace and new water heater, check out Harvest Thermal, https://www.harvest-thermal.com/, which makes a combined heat pump system that uses a hot water tank as a thermal battery for both HVAC and actual water heating.
Interesting. How much of the importance of this is driven by the weak 120V standard electricity in the US? Anyone who has ever boiled a (electric) kettle knows that it takes ~twice as long when powered from a standard US outlet as it does from a standard UK (or EU) outlet. Standard UK outlets are 13A 240V, ie 3.1 kW; standard US outlets are 15A 120V, ie 1.8kW.
Obviously storage is still good, but I wonder if home-wide storage (like the Tesla PowerWall mentioned) is more appropriate here in Europe where we already have much more power in every wall socket.
Batteries in a refrigerator make sense. For a DW, or W/D, you could much more easily achieve the same 'moving energy around in time' effect through 'delay' timers that are already widely available. For example we do the dishes after dinner but set up the DW to run 2-8 hours later when electricity usage and rates are lower.
There are large appliances in the US (such as electric stoves and dryers) that run off of 240 volts instead of 120, but you sometimes need an electrician to put in the 240 volt plug before you can use them.
Shouldn’t we inspect our assumptions here? Why do we need the power to boil water in 40 seconds? Is that value add really worth all the trouble with batteries or re-wiring?
This seems like a novelty luxury item, not at all a game changing idea.
And dude, no one wants to dry their clothes in 2 minutes. That’s a great way to ruin your clothes!
Being able to cook and dry clothes faster literally helps 99% of families in the US. It’s a great type of “atoms” improvement (after a long National focus on bits).
Not really. Most cooking is not power/heat limited in conventional cooktops (how often are you cooking at max settings? I know for myself it’s almost never and almost exclusively limited to bring water to a boil). I doubt the total time to prepare food drops substantially, thus making the added cost and eco-damage of a battery questionable.
Similarly, drying clothes is not limited by heat availability. It is limited by the max temperature you want your clothes to reach. Drying clothes fast shortens their life which then adds another cost and waste/carbon footprint.
This idea to put batteries everywhere is just naive adherence to a trendy dogma. Just because you can put a battery in a stove, oven, refrigerator or drier, doesn’t mean you should. We really need practical and wholistic cost-benefit analysis and Noah didn’t do that.
A small correction. Most resistance (traditional) electric stoves will heat water faster than most gas stoves. Especially modern resistance electric stoves. It's a misconception that gas is faster than even traditional electric.
It's certainly my experience that gas stoves heat water faster. I wonder if the misconception stems from the fact that there are a lot of really cheap old electric stoves in vacation rentals and in the apartments people often live in when they're young and relatively poor. I could certainly imagine that if you're willing to spend equivalent $ there are much better electric ranges than what I've experienced.
My wife will give up her gas cooktop over her cold dead body. She says it’s far more precisely controllable than any alternatives (and yes she’s tried them all). So I’d suggest you get some feedback from real consumers before you invest.
My wife said exactly the same thing for years, until three weeks ago when she got an induction range and now raves about it, finds it faster and more controllable. She feels better in the kitchen too because the air quality is dramatically improved. That is feedback from a real consumer.
Yea, as a wife/home cook, I absolutely hate, hate my electric stovetop. Plus, it does nothing to prevent the crazy amount of smoke generated from a wok. Let’s work on more efficient range hoods before getting rid of gas.
My wife says the same thing. I can’t imagine it’s impossible to get precision with electricity. I hope this stove (or other battery powered ones) offer high precision modularity as a feature.
Interesting idea. Although why appliances? It just seems like a gimmick. You're talking about something that's intended for use with a solar system. Many solar systems (don't know what percentage) already have inverters and battery banks. If you've really got better batteries, why not just replace the whole bank instead of selling appliances?
The website is long on marketing but short on geekdom, so it's unclear if they actually have different battery technology (other than lithium). That could be a game changer. Do they, Noah? Or are we talking high power laptop batteries connected to a stove?
Appliances are important because rewiring buildings is expensive, and buildings produce a decent-sized chunk of emissions. The electricity they draw is probably going to be from a power grid, not from home solar.
As for other battery technologies, I assure you they are looking into everything, and they have plans to improve their initial offerings as technology improves. But the tech is pretty damn impressive as things stand!
–The cost of connecting a 240V circuit for a new stove-top really depends on the configuration of the house. For a lot of houses, you could probably get away with 50' of 8/3 romex, a 40A breaker, a plug and 2 hours of an electrical work @ $80/HR. Which is, like, $500 or less, and you can knock out the electrician's cost if you do the job yourself.
–The battery performance will degrade over time, and likely won't be very effective by year 10, if not sooner. How many batteries won't be recycled? What if the company goes bust or stops supporting the product line and the batteries can't be replaced -- does the range need to be replaced then too? A lot of electric stoves/ovens will be perfectly serviceable for decades, with no updates/upgrades/repairs; which means there's a significant long-term financial downside to this appliance/battery concept.
–The key to demand response is not batteries, but signaling. How are millions of loads going to be controlled to balance power flow on the grid? Without an effective signaling and controls regime, all of the energy storage in the world won't net cheaper, cleaner electrical power, and right now utilities haven't figured out how to do this at scale. This is a completely under discussed topic, and it will be way more consequential than whether or not one particular type of load has, effectively, a local backup source. I'm skeptical that littering every big house load with small, localized backup power is going to be an efficient way to deploy energy storage from a grid-systems point of view. At the very least, there are economic and systems issues to study before getting too optimistic about products like these.
–If all you want to do is heat water quickly, why not buy an electric kettle?
You can boil water in the kettle, and then put the boiled water in a pot, if the need is that pressing.
The biggest selling point here is the cost of wiring, but I'm not seeing it. You probably want to run a dedicated circuit for a range, even if it's just a 15A, 120V breaker fed by 12/2 romex. It's really not that much more work to run a piece of 8/3 romex and install 240V plug instead; it would have to be *really* tight fit where a 12/2 cable would work but an 8/3 cable would not. The main difference, then, is the cost of copper, which is significant, but unlikely to be many hundreds of dollars for a typical home.
My main concern with these kinds of large appliance applications is battery longevity. How long will the batteries on that stove last after 1 year, 2 years, and so on? How easily can they be replaced?
"How long will the batteries on that stove last after 1 year, 2 years, and so on?"
Answer: Not nearly long enough to make sense.
"How easily can they be replaced?"
Answer: Super easy, assuming you've got enough money, which you almost certainly won't.
Has anybody bothered to run some numbers on how lithium will be needed to store all of this electricity? Because unless there's an order of magnitude increase in capacity and efficiency, this is going to end hilariously.
Given lithium scarcity, we are probably going to have to get to a different battery chemistry for greatly expanded battery-based energy storage.
Sodium is a really good candidate and there have been some recent breakthroughs, though obviously not quite there yet.
We would need to know, like through UL or Consumer Reports research, of a battery life cycle. A time measurement might be inappropriate, because it would have the consequence of an "expiration date effect" -- giving false-negative information that causes unnecessary waste of useful products.
First, we'd need to know whether the stove batteries are rechargeable. The stove's cord is almost always hidden, so the stove might need a brain that tells it to recharge when its battery reaches zero or runs below a critically low level if you're cooking.
Alternatively, if the battery is primary (intended to be disposed, like a Duracell) or a car battery (disposable but also chargeable), the stove should be designed to be serviceable. I have my doubts, as the trend is business is for manufacturers (Apple, automakers, farm equipment makers) to make maintenance overly complicated and earn high margins on repairs; or products with low price points and disposability (TV makers).
These will take time, especially for Consumer Reports-style lab testing, which simulates real-world operating conditions and looks backwards. (CR's car ratings, for example, penalize automakers for reliability when a new technology is introduced and it takes about 3 model years to get an accurate baseline of how reliable a car model is. CR does warn readers of this effect in its methodology.)
Enphase has a ten year warranty on its batteries if that is an indication. It's that or 4000 cycles which should be at least ten years (365 x 10 daily cycles).
I would compare against a central, big battery storage in the basement. And against that it should be easier and cheaper to replace.
Perhaps they can have a robust trade-in program?
In general, the larger lithium batteries are, the better they are for recycling, and I'm assuming the batteries in the stove are decent size.
Not sure if that would make business sense or not, or if their batteries were designed for recycling.
This was one of my concerns: the other concern that I have is that battery technology is evolving very rapidly, and even if the battery can be replaced with another battery of the same type, it might be difficult to keep "backwards compatibility" with the next generation of batteries that might or might not be lithium based.
Yup - the rapid mindset of Silicon Valley, where a typical smartphone might last two years, is very different from the mindset behind large appliances, many of which last decades.
In my experience, I had an iPhone 4s that I bought new in late 2011 and kept it until the battery finally physically died. It lasted a little more than 8 years. Although in its last 3 years, the battery was notoriously weak and I'd have to carry the charge cord everywhere. My phone before the iPhone 4s was a Nokia that was a primitive smartphone (it had a color screen and a low-res camera but the numbers were still buttons and not a touchscreen). That lasted me 5 1/2 years.
Phonemakers may expect people to swap out phones every 2 years, but physically the phones will last far longer.
@RC, I see efforts in Europe to establish laws to inform consumers of expected battery lifespan (how many charge cycles a battery can withstand before it "dies").
On another front, author and blogger Cory Doctorow is a prominent advocate for "right to repair". The movement is to break the oligopoly of Apple and other companies' high margins made on repair through proprietary parts and a limited channel of qualified repairers. Right to repair seeks three things: a competitive market for skilled repairers, non-proprietary parts, and the return of the right of consumers to be able to perform maintenance on products they own.
Noah, speaking as someone who often disagrees with you because I have a more libertarian perspective, I have to applaud that you are putting your own money into this, not just advocating that taxpayers' money be used.
Why not use taxpayer goals though?
Money works the same way whether it comes from government or private investors. Government funding doesn't taint the well.
Scott Galloway, marketing professor and entrepreneur, in a No Mercy No Malice blog post called the U.S. government the most successful venture capital firm in history.
https://www.profgalloway.com/welfare-queens/
There's a chart in particular that shows government was responsible for a plurality, 43%, of basic research funding, with business, universities and nonprofits dividing up the rest of the 57%.
If government were to get out of the research business, the other three entities will have a really hard time backfilling the 43%. Or, other nations lacking a libertarian tradition will fill the void with their government funding and become the drivers of innovation with their clusters of businesses, universities and nonprofit NGOs.
No government funding? So much for the birth of U.S. railroads, the State Land Grant University system (envy of the world), GPS, satellite communication technology development. Silicon Valley was built on government money. Page & Brin used a grant from U.S. Intelligence agencies to build the prototype of a search engine (government wanted to know how to track people and things on the World Wide Web). The U.S. government bailed-out Tesla when it faced bankruptcy. Musk, a constant libertarian critic of government has, at last count, larded his companies with $4.2 billion in government funding. Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Energy all have their snouts in the government trough. Libertarians must live in a parallel universe or on a different planet.
We largely agree, John. Galloway raises the same points you do in the Welfare Queens article he wrote.
Libertarianism is theoretically elegant but practically untenable. See the 43% problem I mentioned. Of $108 billion in 2019 research spending, 43% of that came from government. If you give libertarians the benefit of the doubt and assume that if governments stopped collecting that revenue and redistributing it, then people will just spend the money to get comparable outcomes in the absence of government. That in turn assumes that business, nonprofits and universities will reapportion R&D investments to backfill what would have been the 43% of government contribution and still invest $108 billion among the three sectors.
It'll be pretty obvious to see why in the real world it will absolutely not happen. That $108 billion is a symbiotic relationship among government, universities, nonprofits and businesses. A lot of that money is government transferring funding to the other three, with each having to match through outside fundraising.
Businesses wouldn't jeopardize quarterly income and stock valuations on R&D of dubious prospects. The upshot of government piddling money on R&D that ultimately fails is that there will always be money available for future R&D; an R&D failure in the private sector has a chilling effect on future investment.
Universities -- many of which are government-run -- and nonprofits will have nowhere near the reach of fundraising that taxation provides. This means a shallower pool of money to draw R&D funds from. With less money to go around, it favors conservative R&D investments and incremental refinements but freezes out high-risk, high-reward scientific investments with no obvious market payback (space, in particular).
Here's another vote for government funding. Look at Tesla. It was a government backed success. (I'm talking about the $500M startup loan, not the multi-trillion dollar road system it relies on.) Solyndra may have been a bust, but Tesla did pretty well. The US government has been funding electrical stuff since Samuel Morse switched from painting pictures for them to running telegraph wires.
Notably, Tesla's first US factory was a boon for the Bay Area because it reactivated Fremont's famed NUMMI plant. NUMMI was a joint venture between GM and Toyota that allowed GM to learn Toyota's assembly process. This is where the Corolla was built, along with a few other lines. NUMMI closed after GM's bankruptcy in the Great Recession and both automakers dissolved the partnership.
If the weight and size are not an issue, there is a role for these batteries to create fast chargers for EVs in one's garage and short-term power sources for homes experiencing blackouts. Our ground-mounted solar array is generating twice the power we're using year round (4X in the summer months), and we've been looking for a battery option to capture the excess power (that we're now sending to the grid) to serve both those roles. I hope they don't stop with stoves but advance to larger uses. Of course, cost will be key. And, as with all new products, reliability, ongoing maintenance, the availability of timely repairs when needed, safety and expected useful lifetimes will be issues to watch for and address.
You'll lose 40% on the conversion each time. Using a battery to charge a battery thinking it's a viable solution is the epitome of magical thinking.
I misunderstood your comment. We are generating excess power, so we'd be happy to divert some of it to a battery for backup during frequent power outages. That's practical, IMO, not magical thinking.
As to the trade-off for faster charging an EV, not unlike what is proposed for running an induction stove, where does your estimate of a 40% loss in the conversion come from? We might still choose to do it in our situation, but I'd like to know more about the magnitude of the loss.
No. I'd be using the solar array to charge the battery, not battery to battery.
Wait, didn’t you just say you’d go solar -> wall battery -> car battery?
I think Tim qualified it by saying that setup is available during an outage. But under normal usage he's getting more solar energy than he can use and would like to store some of that excess energy from his battery option.
I mean, I hate to get nitpicky, but he states two roles for batteries. One is to create fast chargers for other batteries - the ones inside EVs - presumably because the home circuitry doesn't allow for the high voltage/amps (aren't fast chargers like 500V and 100amps?). The other use is to have a battery back up.
It's a cool-ish idea to have a home fast charger and battery back up in one, but the power loss does need to be considered. I'd also guess those fast chargers have a lot of loss and are very expensive (not to mention probably dangerous for home use no?).
Personally, it appears to me that having a really big car battery so that the car can have both long range and serve as the home backup is a better solution. The only real downside there is having to drive around that large battery. Somewhere in the future, maybe the real solution is to have two batteries with some sort of home changing kit. So one battery charges during the day, while you're out driving on the other, then you swap at night. Given that the home backup need is rarely occurring, having a second battery for that purpose is poor value proposition for most people.
That's one of the value propositions of Ford's F-150 Lightning (a vehicle and generator). It's already got around 200,000 pre-orders (as of 2021) sight unseen. Ford can only deliver a few thousand at a time.
Where exactly do you think you are losing this 40%? Lithium ion batteries charge and discharge (for reasonable rates) with near 99% efficiency. DC:DC converters that can fit inside a modern day cellphone charger (those are AC:DC obviously) can be as high as 97% or 98% efficient for reasonable conversion levels.
If the battery was losing 40% of its energy during discharge, you would need a fan to keep it from catching fire during the process.
Thank you for this article, though it does border on cheerleading for your friend’s company Impulse. ;-)
Perhaps you could follow up with an explanation of the environmental impact and costs of mining, refining, and transporting lithium from the places where we source it? Space and time allowing, you could perhaps then address the environmental impact of manufacturing batteries—including Powerwall, along with how long they will last, and how to recycle them.
This latter particularly interests me. How long will such batteries last? Do they degrade or lose recharging capacity at predictable rates? If so, over what time frame? Thereafter, are they simply to become landfill—that is, moving from the deserts of Bolivia to the deserts of, say, Arizona and Nevada? Does lithium then further degrade and affect groundwater? What trash haulers and even facilities would deign even to accept them at their size? How would a building owner or individual household go about removing them? Replacing them?
Then, perhaps later, as I appreciate along with you that these issues are not straightforward, you could compare these answers to the environmental costs of existing infrastructure—including nuclear generators. The arguments against nuclear power are obvious, but they are tired. They must be leavened with the reality of such plants having operated without fault or failure since a relatively small leak at Three Mile Island’s #2 generator more than a generation ago. Yes, Chernobyl. I get it. But Chernobyl used Russian technology far less advanced even than the technology adopted by the U.S. during the same period.
And, yes, nuclear power plants have become bargaining chips in Russia’s war in the Ukraine; I am not ignorant of long-tail risks. But presuming a stable political environment and no threat of foreign invasion by, say, Canada or Mexico (or China!), I think such risk can be ignored: if that happens the world is ending anyway!
With next-generation nuclear power plants apparently now able to use previously spent fuel rods, perhaps there is an option to explore smaller, even safer, micro- nuclear power plants that could without ongoing environmental impacts or health risks operate for decades. Or longer.
I know many get hives when they hear the dread word nuclear. The NIMBY syndrome also comes into play. But we live with nuclear now. In my state, Illinois, we get as 50% of our electrical power from nuclear plants; we’re the most nuclear-reliant state in the US. As of 2017, if Illinois were a nation, it would be the 10th largest nuclear power in the world: plants in the state generate more than ten percent of the nuclear power produced in the country. And we live with it. Ten reactors in Illinois are closer to Chicago than Chernobyl is to Kyiv.
In short, it’s worth being cognizant of where electricity comes from now and where it will come from in future, of the legacy systems in place that we live with, and that have minimal to no ongoing deleterious impact on the environment. If we can use recycled fuel rods, minimizing the effects even of existing uranium mining.
And let’s not ignore the environmental costs of manufacturing, supplying, installing, and maintaining solar panel arrays and/or wind turbines, which latter are not only unsightly but also are dangerous to avian wildlife.
I am neither an apologist for nuclear power, nor am I anti-Green. I favor any effort to improve the impacts we have on our environment, on human health, and on our natural world. But while I guess there is some element to speed of boiling water that could be considered attractive—to some, it doesn’t matter to me. What is more important is understanding the complete dimensions of environmental impacts, when purportedly advanced technologies are proposed.
BTW: While water is boiling on my stove now--which doesn’t take long, really--I can select my tea and fetch the teapot, cups, and cozy, measure out the tea, check my email on my Benedict Sun, text my wife, and heat the pot. So there’s that.
I know this post is well meaning but it reflects a lack on insight into the costs of batteries and their environmental impact. It would be very expensive for every household to buy battery powered high energy appliances sufficient for cooking and heating. This would further increase the already huge demand for batteries, which has resulted in prices now increasing. Because of advances in battery manufacturing 70% of lithium ion battery costs are for ingredient, which are now limiting and increasing in price. Thus lithium ion battery costs are unlikely drop further without a large expansion of mining, which will take some time. Lithium ion batteries have a substantial environmental impact because of the large amounts of minerals and energy required to manufacture them, and recycling is currently inefficient and energy intensive. It better for the environment and climate to have the grid provide reliable electricity 24/7 so that batteries can be reserved for light vehicle transport and low energy appliances. We can easily do this by using what is by far the safest and cleanest form of reliable energy, nuclear power. No, it is not more expensive than renewable, when you include the costs of dealing with intermittency and expanding the grid to accommodate solar and wind, which are not strongest in the places where people live. This is especially true when solar and wind penetration reach high levels of penetration as curtailment becomes frequent. If you disagree with this please explain why installation of solar and wind is correlated with increased electricity prices. It was the opposite when nuclear power was expanded in the previous century. I know you dislike nuclear and seem to think that because so many other people also dislike nuclear there is something badly wrong with it. You are discounting the highly effective multi decade misinformation campaign which has resulted in inappropriate fear of radioactivity and a very stringent regulatory regime. Do you know that the safe level for radioactivity exposure is 100 fold lower than the level shown to cause any harm? In comparison the safe level for pm2.5 air pollution is set ABOVE the level known to cause a 2% increase in mortality. That is why burning coal kills 1000 times more people than nuclear power, and yet people are more afraid of nuclear power. This is insane.
I agree that nuclear energy is less deadly than coal. This (https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/11/5-Bar-chart-%E2%80%93-What-is-the-safest-form-of-energy-2048x1103.png) suggests that solar is safer (just barely) than nuclear, but the differences between these renewables in terms of safety and emissions are small enough not to matter imo.
As for lithium mining, I am concerned (although uninformed, would appreciate resources) about it. I just don't see nuclear energy adoption happening. Yes, the public is misinformed, but it is the public that politicians have to appease and if they don't want nuclear plants, there will not be nuclear plants. So I guess I'm unsure if (1) making people like nuclear energy is easier or harder to do than (2) make lithium supply chains better?
A grid powered by solar and wind will require far more environmental damage because of their huge environmental footprint. Experience in countries like Germany and the UK show that the public rejects this. The only way around this is to import renewable energy, which is what Germany aims to do for 70% of its energy needs (via biofuels and ammonia produce abroad). That exports the damage to other countries, reduces energy security, and further increases the cost of electricity.
The solar and battery supply chain is heavily focused on China and much is produced by slave Labour.
So there is a huge ethical problem facing a 100% renewable system,
Personally I think we will either continue to use mainly fossil fuels or we will switch to nuclear. We may have to wait for the older generation to die before the switch to nuclear happens, but it seem inevitable. You cannot ignore reality.
Sooo much disinformation in one place. I am impressed.
Very interesting. Just commenting: at the city level, the countercyclical effect of a million plugged-in EVs will arrive much sooner and at vastly greater scale. (But I hope the company and your investment outperforms!)
Oh yes, that will be a big countercyclical effect. But every bit helps!
Hey, so this is a general category of thing I have been researching for awhile as a green-adopter homeowner and I even have my own Substack about it, thisgreenhouse.substack.com. End of plug.
Some things folks should know about this category of thing:
1. The battery-backed-stove market is already shaping up to be competitive, see channingcopper.com (I am *not* an investor in their company, at least not now; I heard about them through a relative and we are now on their pre-order waitlist)
2. If you, a homeowner, want to start greening and demand-time-shifting your home right now without major electrical work or appliance install cost, one thing to look into is a 120V heat pump water heater. This is a fairly recent innovation, HPWHs used to all be 240V, but AIUI there are now a couple of companies making 120V ones. The most well-known seems to be the Rheem ProTerra line. Water heating is typically a bigger source of gas usage than cooking, and the heated water acts as a thermal battery to time-shift electrical demand much as a Powerwall does.
3. An even bigger thing you should be doing if you haven't already is getting an EV and setting the EV and home charger up to be V2H ready, i.e. making it so that your car battery can be a backup for your house and a demand-time shifter. Again this is a recent-to-market thing, most EVs and chargers sold so far are sadly not V2H compatible but some of the newest ones are.
4. Also, when you get a heat pump to replace your gas furnace, see if it supports smart thermostat control that can help with demand-time shifting. And if you're in the market for *both* a new furnace and new water heater, check out Harvest Thermal, https://www.harvest-thermal.com/, which makes a combined heat pump system that uses a hot water tank as a thermal battery for both HVAC and actual water heating.
Great comment. HP water heaters deserve more love. Super happy with ours.
Also, it’s a shame that Tesla vehicles aren’t V2H compatible. A Power Wall battery is a fraction of the size of a Tesla Y battery (for example).
Interesting. How much of the importance of this is driven by the weak 120V standard electricity in the US? Anyone who has ever boiled a (electric) kettle knows that it takes ~twice as long when powered from a standard US outlet as it does from a standard UK (or EU) outlet. Standard UK outlets are 13A 240V, ie 3.1 kW; standard US outlets are 15A 120V, ie 1.8kW.
Obviously storage is still good, but I wonder if home-wide storage (like the Tesla PowerWall mentioned) is more appropriate here in Europe where we already have much more power in every wall socket.
If you get enough major appliances with decent sized batteries in them, you can basically back into a setup approaching a power wall.
Distributed, so no single point of failure, too.
Stove, dishwasher, clothes washer, clothes dryer, refrigerator (batteries could be especially helpful there), etc.
Sure, I just suspect that one large battery might be cheaper than a bunch of smaller ones.
Batteries in a refrigerator make sense. For a DW, or W/D, you could much more easily achieve the same 'moving energy around in time' effect through 'delay' timers that are already widely available. For example we do the dishes after dinner but set up the DW to run 2-8 hours later when electricity usage and rates are lower.
There are large appliances in the US (such as electric stoves and dryers) that run off of 240 volts instead of 120, but you sometimes need an electrician to put in the 240 volt plug before you can use them.
Indeed, but my reading of this was that they are using the battery to let them run those appliances off 120.
Shouldn’t we inspect our assumptions here? Why do we need the power to boil water in 40 seconds? Is that value add really worth all the trouble with batteries or re-wiring?
This seems like a novelty luxury item, not at all a game changing idea.
And dude, no one wants to dry their clothes in 2 minutes. That’s a great way to ruin your clothes!
Being able to cook and dry clothes faster literally helps 99% of families in the US. It’s a great type of “atoms” improvement (after a long National focus on bits).
Not really. Most cooking is not power/heat limited in conventional cooktops (how often are you cooking at max settings? I know for myself it’s almost never and almost exclusively limited to bring water to a boil). I doubt the total time to prepare food drops substantially, thus making the added cost and eco-damage of a battery questionable.
Similarly, drying clothes is not limited by heat availability. It is limited by the max temperature you want your clothes to reach. Drying clothes fast shortens their life which then adds another cost and waste/carbon footprint.
This idea to put batteries everywhere is just naive adherence to a trendy dogma. Just because you can put a battery in a stove, oven, refrigerator or drier, doesn’t mean you should. We really need practical and wholistic cost-benefit analysis and Noah didn’t do that.
This sounds more like an idea that green energy folks would want to invest in rather than an idea to make successful products
A small correction. Most resistance (traditional) electric stoves will heat water faster than most gas stoves. Especially modern resistance electric stoves. It's a misconception that gas is faster than even traditional electric.
It's certainly my experience that gas stoves heat water faster. I wonder if the misconception stems from the fact that there are a lot of really cheap old electric stoves in vacation rentals and in the apartments people often live in when they're young and relatively poor. I could certainly imagine that if you're willing to spend equivalent $ there are much better electric ranges than what I've experienced.
My wife will give up her gas cooktop over her cold dead body. She says it’s far more precisely controllable than any alternatives (and yes she’s tried them all). So I’d suggest you get some feedback from real consumers before you invest.
My wife said exactly the same thing for years, until three weeks ago when she got an induction range and now raves about it, finds it faster and more controllable. She feels better in the kitchen too because the air quality is dramatically improved. That is feedback from a real consumer.
Yea, as a wife/home cook, I absolutely hate, hate my electric stovetop. Plus, it does nothing to prevent the crazy amount of smoke generated from a wok. Let’s work on more efficient range hoods before getting rid of gas.
My wife says the same thing. I can’t imagine it’s impossible to get precision with electricity. I hope this stove (or other battery powered ones) offer high precision modularity as a feature.
Interesting idea. Although why appliances? It just seems like a gimmick. You're talking about something that's intended for use with a solar system. Many solar systems (don't know what percentage) already have inverters and battery banks. If you've really got better batteries, why not just replace the whole bank instead of selling appliances?
The website is long on marketing but short on geekdom, so it's unclear if they actually have different battery technology (other than lithium). That could be a game changer. Do they, Noah? Or are we talking high power laptop batteries connected to a stove?
Appliances are important because rewiring buildings is expensive, and buildings produce a decent-sized chunk of emissions. The electricity they draw is probably going to be from a power grid, not from home solar.
As for other battery technologies, I assure you they are looking into everything, and they have plans to improve their initial offerings as technology improves. But the tech is pretty damn impressive as things stand!
So we just need politically acceptable, cost efficient, large scale green energy. No problem. :-)
More talented people testing out battery material here in America is absolutely a good thing. Hope your investment pans out.
It’s not for use with a solar system - it’s for use with a grid that has major solar sources on it.
Making that many batteries of varying shapes and sizes emits much more CO2 than simply putting in more robust wiring and repurposing the old wiring
Is this just the stove and not the oven? I have a gas stove/oven combo. What do I do about the oven? I'm very skeptical that this thing is worthwhile.
I think I'd rather install a regular electric stove/oven and have a whole house battery setup. Even if that means running heavier gauge wire for 240v.
Higher voltage requires less heavy gauge. So it also saves copper.
Sure, but the overall power requirement for electric oven/stove is not just higher voltage it's also higher current. 240v 40 or 50 amps.
A few counterpoints on your article:
–The cost of connecting a 240V circuit for a new stove-top really depends on the configuration of the house. For a lot of houses, you could probably get away with 50' of 8/3 romex, a 40A breaker, a plug and 2 hours of an electrical work @ $80/HR. Which is, like, $500 or less, and you can knock out the electrician's cost if you do the job yourself.
–The battery performance will degrade over time, and likely won't be very effective by year 10, if not sooner. How many batteries won't be recycled? What if the company goes bust or stops supporting the product line and the batteries can't be replaced -- does the range need to be replaced then too? A lot of electric stoves/ovens will be perfectly serviceable for decades, with no updates/upgrades/repairs; which means there's a significant long-term financial downside to this appliance/battery concept.
–The key to demand response is not batteries, but signaling. How are millions of loads going to be controlled to balance power flow on the grid? Without an effective signaling and controls regime, all of the energy storage in the world won't net cheaper, cleaner electrical power, and right now utilities haven't figured out how to do this at scale. This is a completely under discussed topic, and it will be way more consequential than whether or not one particular type of load has, effectively, a local backup source. I'm skeptical that littering every big house load with small, localized backup power is going to be an efficient way to deploy energy storage from a grid-systems point of view. At the very least, there are economic and systems issues to study before getting too optimistic about products like these.
–If all you want to do is heat water quickly, why not buy an electric kettle?
An electric kettle is not significantly more efficient than an induction cooktop.
But it doesn't need a battery.
Neither does an induction cooktop.
This is a comment about an essay entitled, "Battery Powered Appliances". It features a company making a range that includes a battery.
Here is a helpful article on Wikipedia when thinking about how to respond to what people write in comment sections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_(language_use)
Most electric kettles aren't designed to cook food in the boiling water after it starts boiling.
You can boil water in the kettle, and then put the boiled water in a pot, if the need is that pressing.
The biggest selling point here is the cost of wiring, but I'm not seeing it. You probably want to run a dedicated circuit for a range, even if it's just a 15A, 120V breaker fed by 12/2 romex. It's really not that much more work to run a piece of 8/3 romex and install 240V plug instead; it would have to be *really* tight fit where a 12/2 cable would work but an 8/3 cable would not. The main difference, then, is the cost of copper, which is significant, but unlikely to be many hundreds of dollars for a typical home.