I've been experimenting with this idea too. The idea is to drive a fan, which blows on metal heatsink attached on the cool side of the TEC. The air stream further accelerates the fire, so this becomes a reinforcing circle. Directly wiring it is not enough, you need a battery to start, buffer, then you need a controllers, never had time for this
There is a company making beautiful camping stoves with TECs and fans: www.bioliteenergy.com
Langtool[1] is Open Source and can be either used with a subscription or selfhosted. Works well when used in combination with a few gb of n-grams [2]. There is also a Libreoffice plugin and most important also one for emacs.
I'm not sure if costs of cells are the dominating factor. My gut feeling would be that the power electronics/inverters and transformers are at least 50% off the cost off such a system. And inverter costs seem to be falling more quickly.
As a side note, since the article also mentions that:
Since 1/10 Austria and Germany are not in the same energy zone anymore, the pricing zone was split up. This was done because too much renewable power feeding in at near zero cost in Germany was flooding the markets and pushing too much strain on the grid. Heavily needed power lines weren't built because people were protesting.
So the first week has passed were the zones are actually split up and we can see that energy prices are way higher in Austria than in Germany, see [1]. Sure, a more definite answer would need to look at a longer time span. The highest difference actually was on 3/10, where baseload in Germany was 18.29 €/MWh compared to 60.40€/MWh. And peakload on 3/10 was 17.13 €/MWh in Germany compared to 65.83 €/Mwh in Austria. Solar generation on 3/10 in Germany was 12.5 GW!
So far good for Germany, since they anyway subsidize solar and wind heavily and now have the low prices more or less for them self (not totally because cross border capacities, [4])
I haven't looked so far in the costs of the auxiliary energy, really curious how they develop. Germany has in total probably around 385 MW in battery storage already [3] and lots of battery storage projected for 2019.
What everybody misses is the different need during the spikes due out the day. In the morning and at noon the grid needs for a short time a massive amount of energy, which can only be provided by such "pump batteries". That's why Austria can sell this peak energy at much higher prices. On the other side the new northern german wind energy cut the prices dramatically on the non-peak hours.
My idea on this was to use the batteries of the new electric cars to store energy and take it for the peaks. This would need cooperation with the carparks of the big companies to provide free battery loading during the day vs sucking off peak voltages in the morning and at noon. In the late afternoon the battery must be full, what happens in the morning and at noon is for the grid. This solves the electric car problem, and the grid problem with not enough north-south lines.
That kind of integrated approach--with vehicle-to-grid power flow alongside more general coordinated charging--could have clear advantages, especially given the possible growing pains from uncoordinated charging.[0][1] V2G isn't a new subject; it's been around for a while now, and the UK even announced a large research grant on the subject earlier this year.[2] Most of that research looks at V2G in terms of how it can be used to help mitigate the impacts of EV charging in particular and short-term spikes associated with them, rather than say general grid storage. So it's more of a longer-term matter, than the immediate concerns of building out storage capacity.
One of the biggest difficulties is going to be dealing with the economics of battery degradation. You can limit the pull on any given battery to somewhat lessen the impact, but doing so also limits V2G's impact on the grid. Presumably, utilities would pay for battery usage. If so, how does that affect the economics: I can't say either way, but I'd expect the marginal cost of 'renting' EV batteries to be greater than just buying your own for dedicated storage.
2) This is incorrect. Plants are not efficient, photosynthesis needs only a tiny part of the spectrum. Just he numbers, the efficiency of photosynthesis is 3-6% while the majority of the solar cells have around 16% efficiency or even higher. Hence it makes absolutely sense to cover everything with panels and use leds to produce the exact amount needed.
My 3 year old loves excavator and robot videos. Suddenly all this strange videos were recommended. Search "bad baby" to see what I mean. They also pop up in youtube for kids and they have thousands of views, unbelievable!
I did a search for "mickey mouse" and found a bunch. Two of them, Super Mickey TV and Kids Toon TV, have been up since 2009 and gotten over 350M views combined.
