Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Panasonic tells porkies?

I found an interesting story on the news wires this morning.

Apparently, Panasonic is about to market a new battery that could be used as an energy reservoir, capable of powering the average house for up to a week.

Ohhh... Ahhh...

Yes, that's the sound of greenies gasping in awe of this announcement.

Traditionally, houses that rely on solar and/or wind to power them have required massive banks of deep-discharge lead-acid batteries to provide the necessary storage of power when becalmed overnight. What's more, such batteries are typically only good for a few days -- not a whole week.

So what's this great breakthrough from Panasonic?

Well call me a skeptic but if the picture on this page is a true representation of the product then it's really nothing new at all.

This seems very much like just a box stacked with regular 18650-sized lithium ion cells like these.

And, in case you're not aware, even the world-famous Tesla Roadster is powered by a big brick of these 18650-sized Li-Ion cells from China.

So it would appear that Panasonic might just be trying to simply steal some of the market from existing lead-acid (LA) battery makers by bundling up a big block of these cells and flogging them as something new and exciting.

That's a cunning move on their part and it might even be a good idea for the energy self-sufficient community who have had to make do with toxic, expensive LA technology to date.

Looking at the picture, there's probably about 144 of these cells in that battery box -- which would mean (if it is a 48V battery) they are wired as a 13S12P (a series of 13 blocks of 12 paralleled cells) which, assuming 2500mAH cells, constitutes a total energy storage of 30AH at 48V, or just 1.4KWH.

Hmmm.. if these new batteries are to run your house for a week then you'd better only be drawing 200 watt/hours per day.

Of course I could be wrong -- the cells maybe larger than the standard 18650 and the capacity may be higher -- but I'm still thinking that no lithium battery of that size is going to have a week's worth of storage for an average (even energy-efficient) house.

And then there's the price...

One of the big advantages of LA technology is that it's cheap. It's also quite reliable and long-lived.

At Deal-Extreme's prices, a gross of 18650 cells will cost you $US576. You can get a pretty damned good deep-discharge LA setup with more than 1.2KW/H of capacity for the same money.

When I first saw this announcement from Panasonic I was quite excited. The prospect of a small, affordable battery that could hold enough energy to run your house for a week really would be a major breakthrough in bringing renewable energy to the masses.

Unfortunately, without any evidence to the contrary, I fear this is simply a "ho-hum" story instead of an "ooh-aah" one.

Late update: after doing some Googling, I came up with this story which seems to confirm my own estimates (more or less).

It seems that hype is not just the domain of the "run your car on water" scammers these days. Even the big-names are engaging in it.

What a shame.

Now get back to work so you can afford to pay that next power bill.

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say on this...

PERMALINK to this column

Oh, and don't forget today's sci/tech news headlines

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font