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The Solar Power House Gets a Revolutionary Battery

Solar power technology for residences has been with us for a while, but it has historically been prohibitively costly.  However, because of new photovoltaic (PV) thin-film chemistry and better manufacturing systems, costs have recently been dropping significantly.  Some solar panel production companies are announcing PV panels for under $2 a watt which is a four-hundred percent price reduction from the $8 it was only several years ago.

The convergence of these improvements with a remarkable new deep-storage battery technology has previously unimaginable implications for the solar power house and our dependence on fossil fuels for electricity production.

A revolutionary new cost-effective, deep-storage battery has arrived that is the result of 10 years of research and testing that's small and safe enough to sit in your home and power it. It is likely to be the single most important new technology to date for the potential supply of sufficient solar power electricity produced in the home.  A company named Ceramatec is the developer on this breathtaking new battery technology.

The the core value of their huge battery technology breakthrough is that high density power storage (high levels) can now be accomplished safely at operating temperatures below 90 degrees C which allows for solid components instead of hot liquid.  This is an astonishing breakthrough because currently most energy-dense batteries are very large containers of very hot highly corrosive and toxic molten sodium - conditions very unsuitable for use in the home.

Ceramatec indicates its new generation of battery, about the size of a refrigerator, can store approximately 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy for 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over about 10 years of battery life.  With the batteries anticipated to sell for about $2,000, this calculates to below 3 cents a kilowatt hour battery cost over its life.  Traditional electricity from the grid usually costs around 8 cents per kilowatt hour, and typical deep-cycling lead/acid batteries typically only last for a few hundred cycles so they expire after only about a year.

Ceramatec’s new battery technology also has profound possibilities for the U.S. electrical grid which is an inefficient, aging approach to energy.  Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would likely extend the system’s life and eliminate the expenditure of hundreds of billion dollars to make it "smart."  Additionally, centralized management of the energy grid requires the use of computers, which brings on potential problems such as hackers and terrorists.  Also, large-scale energy generation from centralized power plants creates the possibility of regional grid blackouts created by a "point failure" on the grid.

The potential  with this new battery is to reduce pressure on the grid and move homeowners closer to greater energy independence. With small-scale solar electrical production and battery storage occuring at millions of individual residences the above problems should be severly reduced.

It’s hard to imagine anything more secure than generating power from the sun at your own solar power house, and having a safe, cost-effective way to store it.  It's the optimum in security, and the optimum in control."

Ceramatec says that they are close to moving from initial scale-up toward a commercial product, and this presents an enormous opportunity for home production of solar power electricity.

About the Author

Carter Reames is an engineer who first became involved in solar and other alternative energy activities during the oil embargo of 1973. Interest waned somewhat during the era of unreasonably cheap fossil energy. But, with fossil fuel’s ever increasing costs and solar energy’s steadily decreasing costs, his interest in solar power is now back with a passion. His blog is http://www.solarpower-house.net/

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