"For the light bulb to be successful, wires will have to be run to every house in the country..."

[wtmusic]

and that is clearly never going to happen."
Anecdotal story of a venture capitalist's discussion with Thomas Edison

The temptation here is to apply that principle to any new technology, in essence, "where there's a will, there's a way." But it's important to look a little deeper at the potential rewards and downsides, and it really all boils down to value: How much will it cost? How will it benefit the consumer?

Edison's bulb clearly made life better for everyone who adopted it. Unlike gas lamps or candles it was clean and there was little hazard of fire - t was instantaneous light. Running wires was a relatively inexpensive investment in infrastructure for the immense gain in convenience and safety. Conversely, Edison contemporary Nikolai Tesla's dream of wireless energy transport never materialized largely because the expense and technological hurdles were not a fair trade for potential benefit.

A small piece of the story at the link, which (more importantly) illustrates how energy giants like "clean coal" advocate Duke Energy are already intent on monopolizing grid storage:

"Third and finally, David (Mohler, Chief Technology Officer for Duke Energy) made an interesting remark about the ownership of energy storage systems on the grid. David said that many questions about energy storage technology still need to be resolved, including who will own the assets. In posing the question about ownership, David answered his own question, saying “I hope I (i.e., Duke Energy) will.” He said this at least twice. I was counting.

That statement really caught my attention. I have talked for some time about my view that utilities will invest in storage as much as a defensive strategy as for immediate return. The long term value of most electric utility companies lies less in the value of their assets than in their close relationship with electricity customers. That relationship is the legacy of a historic monopoly market structure. Energy storage is potentially transformational to the utility industry because of storage’s ability to change, or, at a minimum, significantly to affect, that relationship. Distributed energy storage is a technology that is coming to the grid; the only question is when. Electric utilities that fail to be first movers in deploying this technology and instead let it be deployed and developed on the customer side of the meter or under the control of third parties will forfeit a significant market advantage and seriously impair their long-term equity value."

http://theenergycollective.com/jim-greenberger/64935/duke-energy-and-outlook-energy-storage?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+%28all+posts%29

[FreakinDJ]

1. Duke Energy is the Wormiest, Union Busting pieces of Shit out there

Why are you posting their picture as if it is any thing Working Class Americans want to see

[wtmusic]

2. How could that nice smiling man be considered wormy?

Here's another photo of what Duke is doing to Appalachia - perhaps more representative.



We don't need photos of what Duke is doing to working class Americans.

[HillbillyBob]

5. a good chunk of our power comes from Duke

We belong to a coop, and I don't / can't really find out all the structure..since they thought me adding solar / grid tie to our house was a foolish Idea we plan to be off grid in 10 yrs..in Four years we have reduced our power by 3/4. from 3300 kwhrs to around 1000. We have still to install the solar water heater, bought the base unit then ran on hard times, poor health, and no $ to build the support structure..yet. We still have to replace the fridge, dryer and about 2 dozen cfls for leds. We have already replaced the most used lights with LEDs, from the range hood to the kitchen ceiling lights, and all the bathrooms. I also went to lowes and bought twist timer mechanical switches that fit in place of the exhaust fans and closet light switches.. They come in 15, 30,1hr, and longer I bought the 15 minute ones..i recomment the 1 hrs ones for bath exhausts, but its nice they shut off so they are not forgotten and suck all the heat or ac out of your house..its a two wire connection easy to do.

[truedelphi]

3. The real reason that Tesla's universal energy supply was

Shut out as an option was because his business partner (I am forgetting if it was Westinghouse or some other big conglomerate) realized that if he did this, it would impact the profit margin, and we cannot have that. So the Corproate Giant with the deep pockets pulled their funding out of the project before it could succeed.

There are numerous accounts of amazing things that Tesla did. For instance, he took a news reporter for a ride in a car that he'd designed and built and that needed no external fuel source, other than the earth itself. The car did top speeds and drove for hours.

There is a museum devoted to Tesla and his inventions in Belgrade Serbia. Amazing devices, ideas, etc.

Without his ideas we wouldn't have had the telegraph. Marconi credited Tesla for being instrumental in the work on the telegraph M. was able to bring about.

Radar systems were also something that Tesla played around with - some forty five years before the US government fully developed radar.

[femrap]

4. Tesla doesn't get the credit

that he deserves.

[HillbillyBob]

6. He worked with both Edison and Westinghouse

I can't recall exactly who he worked with first but kind of ended up being along and broke.

[immoderate]

7. Telegraph -- Morse. Marconi -- radio.

I think that Tesla's radiative energy powered car was taken by UFOs.

--imm

[truedelphi]

11. Sorry about that. More holes in my memory than in

Swiss cheese. (Swiss cheese is the cheese with holes in it, isn't it? And it's also what the moon is made of?)

[wtmusic]

9. Tesla made important discoveries, but wireless power wasn't one of them.

His car was a hoax, which doesn't lend a lot of credence to his other work (if the car didn't need any external fuel source other than the earth itself, why couldn't it run forever?)

[truedelphi]

12. It couldn'r run forever because it needed a human to

Steer it.

[truedelphi]

13. Here is some more information:

http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/new/tesla.htm

on edit The modified car was a Pierce Arrow, one of the luxury cars of the period. The engine had been removed, leaving the clutch, gearbox and transmission to the rear wheels undisturbed. The gasoline engine had been replaced with a round, completely enclosed electric motor of approximately 1 meter in length and 65 cm in diameter, with a cooling fan in front. Reputedly, it had no distributor. Tesla was not willing to say who had manufactured the engine. It was possibly one of the divisions of Westinghouse.

The "energy receiver" (gravitational energy converter) had been built by Nikola Tesla himself. The dimensions of the converter housing were approximately 60 X 25 X 15 cm. It was installed in front of the dashboard. Among other things, the converter contained 12 vacuum tubes, of which three were of the 70-L-7 type. A heavy antenna, approximately 1.8 meters long, came out of the converter. This antenna apparently had the same function as that on the Moray converter (see below). Furthermore, two thick rods protruded approximately 10 cm from the converter housing. Tesla pushed them in, saying "Now we have power." the motor achieved a maximum of 1,800 rpm. Tesla said it was fairly hot when operating, and therefore a cooling fan was required. For the rest, he said there was enough power in the converter to illuminate an entire house, besides running the car engine. The car was tested for a week, reaching a top speed of 90 miles per hour effortlessly. Its performance data were at least comparable to those of an automobile using gasoline. At a stop sign, a passerby remarked that there were no exhaust gases coming from the exhaust pipe. Petar answered "We have no motor."

The car was kept on a farm, perhaps 20 miles outside of Buffalo, not far from Niagara Falls.

A few months after this automobile test, and because of the economic crisis at the time, Pierce Arrow had to stop production. It is very likely that the interconnection between the electric motor and the transmission had been performed there. Pierce Arrow's tools were taken over by Studebaker, in South Bend. Not quite 30 years later, that company also vanished to form American Motors, jointly with Nash. Later, some of its fans attempted to resuscitate the Pierce Arrow. Unfortunately, they were not successful.

You can read more about Tesla from this link:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=12430

I used to have the website where the news articles that had photos of the car and the name of the reporters who rode in the car, but alas, my old HD went down and although some 85% of my HD was saved, the Tesla stuff wasn't. (Conspiracy or simple accident - you decide!)

[wtmusic]

15. A hoax.

Tesla, like all geniuses, was either spectacularly right or spectacularly wrong. What funded his experiments was the hucksterism he shared with Edison and Samuel Insull - talk loud, talk fast, and promise the moon. P.T. Barnum in a laboratory.

It was both a gift and a curse, because it left him with the inability to acknowledge his own errors. He claimed at one point that Einstein's relativity theory was "like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king".

[TalkingDog]

8. special circle of hell for all of them

n/t

[kristopher]

10. "who will own storage" and "energy storage technology will become economically viable by 2015

The issue of who will own storage is better expressed in current discussions as "who has responsibility for providing the additional regulation power that is required by increasing amounts of variable power on the grid".

Whenever any generation or transmission is added to the grid there are studies done before construction to determine the consequences to affected local areas - a non-storage issue might be whether it bolsters a specific power node where transmission tends to max out during periods of high demand. In most areas if a wind farm is added to the grid, these studies will identify any additional needs for regulation power that are associated with adding that amount of wind to the local mix. If there is an additional need for regulation power and there already exists the local capability for providing it in some form, then the wind farm developer is charged perhaps two tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour for the service. If local capability is determined to be inadequate then a negotiation ensues about who will be responsible for providing it.

What Duke's Mohler is saying, I believe, is that this should be a function for the utility.

Utilities face a dramatically reduced role in a distributed grid. If they are going to be largely eliminated as power providers, then their role evolves into being primarily power movers and stabilizers. This makes it in the interest of the utilities to invest heavily in all forms of smart grid technologies, not just storage. So the upshot is that Mohler's comment about "who will own storage" reflects an awareness of the need of the utilities for this to be a part of their portfolio of assets.

As to the market by 2015, the author of this piece isn't making sense at all. There already exists a market for grid storage - a considerable one of $5.4 billion in FY 2010.

...The market for electric-vehicle energy storage devices is expected to grow from $7.7 billion in 2010 to $14.5 billion in 2015, according to a report from Lux Research. But that's not the most interesting part of the analyst report that was released last month with seemingly little notice from the media.

Lux Research said that the predicted big growth in the overall market for batteries, fuel cells, and ultracapictors is not going to come from an increase in electric vehicles, but from the explosion of smart grids. In its report "Emerging Technologies Power a $44 Billion Opportunity for Transportation and Grid," Lux Research predicts that the overall market will grow from $21.4 billion in 2010 to $44.4 billion by 2015.

Smart-grid storage will make up the largest energy storage market growing from $5.4 billion in 2010 to $15.8 billion in 2015, according to Lux Research....
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17912_3-10471866-72.html

See also: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/kristopher/745

[txlibdem]

14. The consumer wouldn't really care who owns the energy storage, they benefit from it either way

... due to fewer brownouts and blackouts. With the exception of V2G (electric vehicle) energy storage arrangements that is because it is the vehicle owner who benefits from sharing their stored energy.

I don't have anything against big power companies. What I hate is their 19th century focus on using fossils to produce electrical energy. What's to stop Duke energy or any other utility from bankrolling huge wind farms or rooftop solar agreements with home owners? They're doing it in California if I recall correctly.