Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries disrupt
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It doesn't seem the startup is intent on addressing this at all.
I dont think leasing a cube to preserve luxury food is targeted at that market.
Having a cube that requires USB-C charging is also a gamble when your power is cut off.
Though the 5L storage container might not be based on USB charging at all.
Hopefully whatever gives it energy will store enough of it for 70h - 90h without requiring more energy.
""" r. She had been researching how power shutoffs in California, which are intended to limit wildfire risk, had disproportionate effects on people of different means.
She noticed that utilities were spending more on generators and microgrids in wealthier communities, leaving smaller, poorer communities in the lurch. “I saw the impact of what happens during a 56-hour shutoff if you’re a small business and your refrigerator loses power and all of a sudden you have to buy more inventory,” she told TechCrunch. “That was kind of this ‘ah ha’ moment.” ""
As I understand the article this isn't about luxury food, but about medical samples.
I wanted more details, honestly. Very, very few people in California have been subject to wildfire safety power shutoffs. That origin story made me think the whole thing might be a grift.
It seems that dry ice has 571 kJ/kg latent heat at -78.5 C sublimation, while lithium batteries have around 250 Wh/kg = 900 kJ/kg, but with batteries you have the extra weight of the refrigeration system plus whatever loss of efficiency it causes, as well as the risk of mechanical/electrical failure.
It seems that charging batteries is much cheaper though, with dry ice seemingly going for 2-6$/kg and electricity 0.1688 $/kWh = 0.04$/kg to charge batteries.
I'm bootstrapping a startup and while the big player are dumping billions into sexy, expensive AI there are fundamental needs that get overlooked everyday.
I witnessed a startup disrupt a legacy $40k-a-device business with a raspberry pi and some adafruit sensors (eventually building their own boards after proving it worked), 90% of the success was from the founder's relationships and sales skills, not the tech.
Building a $40k device for cheap is amazing, but only part of the problem. After that, you need to salesmanship to get the device in front of customers, and persuasiveness to get them to try it, and business acumen to scale and provide support like the big kids do.
Once you do that, you can disrupt a $40k device with a rasp pi and some adafruit sensors.
It's easy to split hairs over what background can or cannot give to a company, but one thing is definitely true: An inept salesman from almost any background isn't going to close (by definition of ineptitude). I think at this point it's a matter of opinion, but I suggest it's definitely not "Just" an aristocracy and definitely is enough of a skill-based game that it's fair to call it a meritocracy.
"How is someone able to combine a few open source libraries, do a little hacking, and disrupt ______". Yet we all know it happens, and so it's worth funding.
You're severely underestimating building a business, let alone the technology required.
This doesn't apply if the the these packages have some internal heat source.
The thermostats in the middle of the pile would stay on the setpoint, so no energy needed or used.
https://lairdthermal.com/products/thermoelectric-cooler-modu...
Efficiency is much lower than pumped-refrigerant systems. Access to a flow of cool ambient, external air will be critical.
+ Makes sense that this startup is starting with medical applications -- vaccines going bad because of poor refrigeration is a well-studied problem
+ I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in. So you want boxes that have backup batteries that can remain unplugged for a few days while going through customs checks
+ High end seafood is another big application -- the company we were looking at started transporting lobster before moving upmarket
At the time there was a PE blitz to get into cold chain -- it had a lot of factors that they look for -- high margin, recession proof (at least the medical applications), etc.
It's not a solved problem, and in fact it's a serious problem, pretty much anywhere outside the OECD.
This is very interesting. Is there not a problem with battery-powered devices operating in a cargo plane? The whole point of batteries is that they have a lot of energy in them, which is why they get hot while operating and sometimes simply catch fire. I thought there were a lot of restrictions on transporting them.
This is one we use all the time.
It's not going to be economically viable to harvest heat waste from a fridge.
Burritos and ice cream :-)
Never made ginger ale from a mother, always used fresh ginger, but I should try it some time.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether somehow having the hot side go outside (like with a heat pump) would make sense during the summer, so it acts as part of the air conditioning.
It would, but then the house needs to be build around the fridge. No moving the fridge to clean behind it. No trading it in for a different model. When it breaks you have to get a technician out for a few hours labor - there is no option to go to home depot and bring home a new one.
It would be quite inflexible now when it’s custom and there’s no standard for such things.
Cold air enters the house, gets heated up to 22°C by a heat pump, circulates through the house, then gets drawn into the ventilation system where it is cooled back down to around 2 °C before going out of the house, and the extracted heat is upgraded to 60°C hot water. There is an electric heater taking the water further up in temp.
Our system is a retrofit, it draws around 1.2 kW peak and only provides hot water. For new builds, the bigger units drawing ~4kW peak are used, which provide both hot tap water and subfloor heating by water circulation.
Your average refrigerated truck exchanges heat with the outside, these exchange it with the inside of the truck.
Probably irrelevant for a day or two though.
I don’t think anyone is planning on using them that way though.
I shouldn’t say no way. Maybe if you cooled the boxes down to temp before stacking them in racks with spacing and they were very well insulated, so that the heat pumps almost never ran while stacked.
Hardware is fucking hard. Peltier coolers are not nearly as trivial as they sound, they're wildly inefficient and get exponentially more inefficient as the temperature differential between the sides increases. To actually get the theoretical max duration out of the batteries you need to have thermal simulations and modeling to create the interfaces on each side such that the pelt isn't just sitting there freezing one side and melting the other while nothing happens to the payload. You need to have drive electronics that allow the pelt to run at a steady state instead of slamming it on and off randomly. You need a PID loop that's tuned for the thermal mass of the enclosure and payload. Finally, you need a ton of engineering on the enclosure and insulation such that it is volume optimized for the exact maximum duration that they're targeting.
Tl;dr the coolers are inefficient enough that you need to very heavily optimize your design if you intend on making this actually work for more that a few hours.
Side note, that's also why modern fridges and freezers all have fans on the inner side at least, it massively helps with preventing ice buildup.
The valuation is still crazy high. They were pretty smart to go after the medical field though, where you can tack on an extra zero or two on the end and no one cares.
What did she think ? That no one was shipping cooled of items ? I get it. It's because its battery enabled and sounds eco friendly.
It was a very minor problem. They got help from the folks who own Dippin' Dots, who had made a business out of exactly that problem 3 decades ago, and some research that put more confident bounds around where and when in the distribution you absolutely needed specialty refrigeration.
Fun tangeant, Dippin Dot's as a business basically died, because nobody in the 90s was willing to pay $8 for a mildly interesting physical form of ice cream. The company managed to reinvent itself as a service provider of novel food modification techniques for bigger food production companies. They sold tech/solutions/services to make flash frozen tiny drops of fats and oils that could be mixed into things like vegetarian burger patties to make them have better mouthfeel.
They still sell Dippin Dots stuff, and in classic venues, like Kennedy Space Center, it's still $8, and it's still hella not worth it, despite the inflation between then and now.