Petersen At His Best

John Petersen — an expert whose words are read avidly by the EleBlog’s proprietor — writes regularly. His stuff is posted at SeekingAlpha.com. His thoughts on energy storage, batteries, electric vehicles, wind/solar (and more) are, in the opinion of EleBlog, MUST reading.

Yes — must reading, even if you don’t agree with what he says. Even if you are diametrically opposed to what Petersen believes, you’d be an idiot not to become familiar with the information and ideas in his writing. Yes, it’s that’s good.

With that as intro, please consider going back to Why Energy Storage Investors Must Understand Resource Constraints — a piece posted in 2010. I’ve read it and re-read it a number of times.

Here are three slices:

The biggest challenge of our age is finding relevant scale solutions to persistent shortages of water, food, energy and every commodity you can imagine. The trick will be finding ways to raise the standard of living in emerging economies without crushing our own. We simply can’t dig our way out of this hole.

There is no arguing with this.

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I’m a big fan of lead-acid batteries because the raw materials typically come from recycled batteries and offer a sensible balance between conservation and sustainability. In other words, they’re cheap and plentiful.

Lead-acid may not be the best technology for all uses, and it certainly won’t work in cellphones and other devices where size and weight are mission critical constraints, but for mundane storage applications where costs and benefits matter, lead-acid and perhaps molten salt are the only battery technologies that have a chance of success.

You have to read the full piece to get Petersen’s take on lithium-ion batteries (“too valuable to waste on plug-in vehicles”).

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Notwithstanding a firm conviction that we’re entering a new age, I’m painfully aware that technology alone cannot change resource production constraints, it cannot change population growth, it cannot change the human desire for something better and it cannot change the laws of chemistry. Unfortunately, investors who believe that Moore’s Law and the other rules we learned during the IT revolution apply to cleantech are in for a very rude awakening.

Petersen’s contention is that it may be possible to do some of the things we need and want to do, as part of the “cleantech” revolution. But the roads down which we’ve walked so far (a table he provides highlights ethanol and electric vehicles as failures) . . . aren’t very smart.

Source: http://electricalcontractor.com/?p=6786

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