Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Undecided with Matt Ferrell" channel.

  1. If they can build batteries lasting 30000 cycles without temperature control and do it for less than $100/kWh, that would be easily be the product of the decade! It currently seems that Li-ion batteries are not going to reach $100/kWh level for the cells alone given current tech (the price was falling for years but it has now started to rise again with the minimum cell price briefly hitting $105–110/kWh levels a couple of years ago). Never mind actual batteries that need additional parts, too. Full Li-ion battery systems have minimum cost closer to $150/kWh right now.
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  2. I think any new innovation should be able to beat {PV -> electrolysis of water -> synthetic methanol -> methanol fuel cell} cycle or it doesn't make much sense. That cycle should get close to 0.3 * 0.3 * 0.7 = 0.06 or about 6% end-to-end efficiency. Methanol is easy to store and with this new technology called MOST having efficiency around 3% doesn't sound good. The only exception would be if manufacturing that MOST molecule was really really cheap and you could have lots and lots of panels filled with that. From the video it appeared that it still needed at least one glass panel to capture the sunlight so that alone sets minimum cost for MOST compatible panels and the flow rate for the liquid seemed to be really slow.
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  3. 9:10 I'm pretty sure "Ah" is not an unit of energy. You need to multiply that with voltage to get energy.
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  4. Using vertical panels as a fence around your plot makes a lot of sense, especially if your neightbor is not doing the same so you can collect the solar energy from his or her side, too.
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  5. 12:05 So they're no longer promising solid state batteries 5 years into the future, but 4 years into the future...
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  6. I would have guessed that the extra yield is combination of collecting energy from albedo, keeping the panels cleaner because less crap sticks to vertical surface and the cooling is more effective because vertical draft air movement from heating the surface happens easier for the direction that goes parallel to gravity.
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  7. This far the two biggest problems have been endurance (typically a membrane or catalyst is quickly destroyed by impurities in actual use) and storage of the actually produced hydrogen. If you compress the gasous hydrogen for store in tanks, that requires a lot of energy to compress the gas, plus the tanks are very expensive. In addition, to actually use the hydrogen you either need a super expensive fuel cells or you have to burn the oxygen the traditional way and suffer ~60% energy loss to heat instead of back to electricity. This far it has appeared that hydrogen is just lower quality battery in practice. Li-ion battery has had better efficiency and lower cost per kWh in long run. And li-ion batteries are insanely expensive.
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