qoobaa

This makes me feel that i.e. looking for bone marrow donors may become obsolete in some cases, if we know the gene sequence responsible for the disease. Instead of looking for donors, it may actually be possible to repair bone marrow cells and inject them back, fixing the problem. Am I missing something here?

That's interesting. How does it work in Spain?

It's even more terrifying considering the fact that it took millions of years of to accumulate such amounts of energy in fossil fuels (it's literally sun energy laying underground). Sooner or later, we'll run out of it…

BTW, it's not 10 kW/h, but 10 kWh in a litre of petrol.

I think @gravypod actually meant parallel connection, it might be quite dangerous in fact - you don't even need to draw anything from the battery to mess things up. If you connect a 100 cells in parallel and one cell dies creating a short in the circuit, the rest of cells will discharge through the shorted one. When you short a single 18650 cell, it outputs about 6-7 A of current on average. Multiplying by 100 gives you 600-700 A of current flowing through a single cell. That's why people use fuses to create parallel modules.

You're right. I normally use <abbr> for that, but I forgot this time. I'll fix it.

It's not pretty,but it's practical. Especially when it comes to electricity - watts and hours are quite easy to work with.

Interesting, is it Tesla? Which model is it?

I know it's not as simple as "connecting 10k batteries together". It's an interesting topic anyways, there are a few guys already doing it with promising results (check HBPowerwall on youtube for instance).

BTW: I haven't even connected these cells together yet - even that is not as simple as it may look like.

Thanks, I fixed the title. I'm not an English native, so I make a lot of errors like this :-).

The question was if it's possible to use someone's else electricity when the sun isn't shining in your place. While it's technically possible and in many cases economically reasonable, you probably won't see countries giving up their electricity production and importing power from overseas - the main reason is politics.

You can use aluminium instead of copper (see HVDC Gotland).

I didn't say it's just about "connecting countries with a common grid". Switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources is much more challenging than that. However, transmitting lots of power over long distances is doable and cheaper than many people think.

Let me quote Ramez Naam here:

Transmission costs money, but less than many believe. The cost of high voltage DC (HVDC) transmission lines is roughly 1 cents per kwh for 500 miles, or 1.5 cents per kwh for 1,000 miles transmitted. Over 1,000 miles, an HVDC line may lose 5% or so of the electricity it transmits.

I don't consider 5% per 1000 miles an "absurd" amount.

It's a very good question. I always thought that it's because of technical difficulties when transmitting electricity over long distances, but it turns out we already do it well (HVDC). When you think about it on a continent scale: why not move all PV panels from Germany to sunnier regions of Europe like Spain or Portugal where you can generate twice more power with them (in average 200 W/m² instead of 100 W/m²). The answer is simple: we'd need to have a common grid across EU member countries, but such a thing doesn't exist and it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. It turns out the biggest issue on this planet is always politics.

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