That's not true. PbA is used in the small scale but there is no standard for the large scale. Among the largest battery backups out there today are the NiCd battery backup for Fairbanks, Duke Energy's lead-acid Notrees battery, and AES's li-ion Laurel Mountain battery. Vanadium-redox is fairly common. Sodium-sulfur has some use too. There is no single standard.

And it's simply not true that "power is useless for backup". Quite to the contrary, high power output battery backups are incredibly valuable for peaking. This is especially important with renewables like solar and wind whose output can change rapidly.

They're going to be constantly replacing LiOn packs on any appreciable sized system.

And why would they be doing that?

Let's say it all together now: "Li-ion != Cell phone batteries". Li-ion is a whole broad range of chemistries that follow a basic mechanism of action involving the intercalation of lithium ions on either side of a membrane. There are an incredibly wide range of anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, and membranes, and these offer widely varying performance in terms of power density, energy density, cost, cycle life, and shelf life. Cell phone and laptop batteries are li-ion batteries specifically engineered with design life deemphasized in favor of high energy density in order to keep their products small and light. They're not climate controlled and they're generally run at high depths of discharge. This is not what you do with all li-ion battery types. Where longevity is of concern, you more carefully control temperature, control charging more carefully, you have many cells in parallel that can allow for individual cell failures, you use a lower DoD, and you use a chemistry that sacrifices some energy density for greatly improved cycle life.

The exact same rules apply to NiMh. You can get NiMH with high energy density by sacrificing cycle life. A typical NiMh hybrid battery pack only achieves its lifespan by running at a tiny 20-40% DoD range.

And another thing: it's the 2010s. Where's my flying car?

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SpaceX Model M Details Revealed
Posted by timothy on 11:23 AM -- Wednesday June 14 2019
from the gotta-find-something-new-to-complain-about department.

Julian86 writes :

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), fresh off their merger this spring with Tesla Motors, has provided the first sneak-peak at the new hybrid electric/LOX/H2 SpaceX Model M. Boasting 800 miles of all-electric range and 3800 m/s delta-V, it is said to be capable of driving from Albuquerque to Los Angeles on a single charge and achieving Low-Earth-Orbit atop a moderate-sized flyback booster. The press conference was widely attended by the press but was briefly disrupted when former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson had to be rushed to the hospital after repeatedly slamming his head into a brick wall in a desperate cry for attention.

Will you please stop with these mundane, low-hanging fruit goals and try something lofty and ambitious for once? It's always the same-old, same-old, doing-what-everyone-else is doing with you, isn't it?

Indeed, the raw materials for li-ion batteries are cheap, especially if it's a non-cobalt-based chemistry. It's all about optimizing mass production. Which is precisely what the gigafactory is all about.

My only question, where does the LiOn come from?

Sub-saharan Africa.

You see running from the legal system of two countries, both of his choosing, over him F*ing a sleeping girl to work around her refusal to consent to his preferred form of sex, to be "a sacrifice he's made, willingly or not, in standing up to powerful interests"?

Which takes extra hardware and power, the two of which would be heavier than the O2 needed for a single person. It'd also raise your development cost.

KISS.

A person can be hopped up out of their gourd and still manage to use the restroom. It happens every day on this planet already.

We're talking a mix of drugs that make a person happy, content, and sleepy, which won't kill them in under half a year. There's no shortage of possibilities.

I did not say "in a coma". I said "drugged out of their gourd". This does not imply "comatose". No catheter.

  If they were comatose, their consumables would be even less.

Nukes, solar, wind, wave means what? Those are energy generation technologies, not desalination technologies. $0.50/m is actually a rather cheap rate for water desalination, most is more expensive at current power prices.

Wake me up when "nukes, solar, wind, wave" means "desalination water costs only a couple cents per cubic meter".

You know, this gets me thinking... what's really the minimum necessary for a person to stand a chance of making it to the surface of Mars alive? Let's say:

1) 150 days transit
2) Passenger remains drugged out of their gourd during the whole voyage so that they don't go crazy in the ridiculously small amount of space they're allocated, nor burn more than a minimal amount of consumables.
3) No extra radiation shielding; craft keeps its thickest end toward the sun and puts its consumables around the passenger but otherwise does nothing special
4) Landing hardware done as an exact duplicate of MSL, no re-engineering. MSL used a 4 tonne spacecraft to deliver a 900kg payload to the surface. An incredibly cramped capsule may fit that payload profile.
5) No attempt to get back or even survive for any significant length of time. Passenger has to be someone who wants to die on Mars.

Normal O2 consumption is 0,9kg/day; let's say 0,7 due to #2. Consumption of pure fat for say 1500 calories per day is 166g; let's say 300. I don't have numbers on CO2 scrubbers, let's put it at the same as O2. Let's say 3 liters (3kg) water consumption per day, 2kg recovered from the air via a chiller, 1kg lost to excretion, so 1kg total per day. Let's say 1kg other consumables per day. No complex recycling systems or anything that could seriously inflate your costs. We're at the ballpark of 3.7kg per day, so 555kg for the journey there, which doesn't need to be landed. Give them 600kg for some margin and a little time alive. These figures probably wouldn't size your spacecraft out of an affordable launch vehicles.

So yeah, if you really wanted to, I bet you could have a moderate chance of delivering a suicidal human alive but very ill to the surface of Mars to live for a short period of time for only a couple billion dollars in development + launch costs.

Who wants to sign up? ;)

Biosphere 2 was pretty flawed but it actually did something. Even had some educational value.

This is just a scam. I think the only unknown is whether the founders believe it to be a scam or whether they're truly convinced by their own BS.

What about the prelatic, mesoperiodic, catechetic and eupotamic values of the US GDP? Should we remove them too?

Aquifers do not fill up with a single rainfall.