Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries disrupt

It was a nice intro about how power shutoffs impact people with different means.

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.” ""

Is this actually better than just putting in dry ice?

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.

How was someone able to raise $14 million by putting a Peltier chip, some batteries, and an ESP32 in a box?

What happens if you put 100 of these in a box? I have a feeling it's going to be tough keeping the ones in the center cool.

A private equity firm once asked the consulting firm I worked at to do a due diligence of a cold chain logistics company. It was ~5 years ago so perhaps things have changed, but some interesting tidbits:

+ 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.

This doesn't sound like a suuuuper interesting application to be honest because there's already a way to do this directly, i.e. use chemically stored energy to keep stuff cool: phase change material (PCM) cool packs, especially when packaged into containers using vacuum insulated panels (VIPs, which achieve phenomenal U-values ). A PCM cool pack has a pretty constant temperature while absorbing heat and a VIP-clad container by itself has pretty phenomenal insulation already. There's no moving parts and no battery chemistry to degrade and no UNECE Dangerous Goods in these.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40822633

Hem... It's of course "cool" but... At scale of supermarkets fridges not lab specimens, especially in not-so-cold climate the needed energy to keep food cool off grid it's MASSIVE. Of course the future of a grid with most customers with local storage at least for 24h, local p.v. and negotiated charge from the grid (to help keeping the frequency, consume where there are more renewable than demand etc) is a probable one, but honestly a small refrigerated micro-fridge can't be compared, so the first part and the second part of the article are totally disconnected. The device itself might have some interesting applications but in terms of environmental limits, price, reliability I doubt it can became spread much.

There are existing well established companies already doing this (active cooling).

https://www.worldcourier.com/

This is one we use all the time.

This is a bit of tangent but could the heat from fridges be harvested?(maybe it already is by some companies?) Would it be worth it?

Hmm. I wonder what happens when you fill a shipping container (enclosed space) with these. Can they still hold constant temperature?

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.

To the people who think this is easy because they could build this with sparkfun parts:

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.

Imagine getting funding for reinventing the cooled down container.

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.