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Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake
- nabla9 9y ago$200/kWh by 2019. Assuming that households consume between 30 kWh and 15 kWh electricity daily on average and you want to have storage capacity for 1/3 of daily electricity consumption to get wind or solar energy work, you need 10-5 kWh per household. That's $2000 - $1000 per household. If that battery lasts 10 years, its $200 - $100 per year. It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that happen? (recycling is not reuse)
- merpnderp 9y agoThat wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago100 kWh/day is just incredible. The average consumption per person in the nordics is about 1500 kWh per YEAR.
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoI would have thought that heating would require a lot of energy in the Nordic countries - but perhaps that doesn't use much electricity? I live in the NW US, in a heavily-insulated passivhaus with a 5kW PV array on my roof, and my average usage is 13kWh / day (though I am also charging a PHEV vehicle's battery some days, and still using an ineffecient old hex-core Xeon workstation on top of heating and cooling, heating water, cooking etc.).
- skummetmaelk 9y agoElectrical heating is not used when it can be avoided. It is much better to use waste heat from energy production and industry to heat your home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoActually, in Norway most of the heating is done with electricity (they have loads of hydro power).
- baybal2 9y agoI believe, they don't use electricity to heat the house in -20C, and few live in detouched houses.
- zip1234 9y agoMost likely not using electricity for heating/cooling?
- pjc50 9y agoThat doesn't quite seem right: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity-consumption http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity... (Interestingly Canada's per capita consumption is comparable to the US despite being much further north)
- skummetmaelk 9y agoI should have edited my post to say just Denmark. Sweden and particularly Norway use much more energy.
- Gravityloss 9y agoIf it's 10 cents per kWh, that's only 10 dollars per day or 300 per month. Investing in insulation or other things might or might not make sense. High electricity price for a long future period would also encourage investment. Alternatively, constructing your house in a benign climate, if you do a lifecycle analysis and look at the upkeep cost.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoI would think that for that use case, using thermal storage should be more efficient? Don't store electricity to run AC later, but run AC to cool down water or the ground beneath your house or something, and then cool your house with that later.
- cobookman 9y agoOr build something like an Earthship (http://earthship.com/ http://earthship.com/). I know that these can air condition a house in New Mexico through geothermal heat transfer, however no idea how they handle the more humid summers of the South East.
- yourapostasy 9y agoThey work, but aren't as comfortable as in drier climes. Humidity is tough to control with low-energy, low-maintenance solutions. Unfortunately, many people's discomfort perceptions are heavily influenced by humidity.
- biomcgary 9y agoI recently moved from Nashville (quite humid) to Flagstaff (quite dry) and the difference is amazing. Large temperature swings are barely noticeable in the dry climate, but would require substantial changes in weight of clothing in the humid one.
- djrogers 9y agoThat would require a huge amount of work and expense, and at the end of the day cold water isn’t very good at cooling off giant masses of air and furniture.
- maxerickson 9y agoThey are sized for bigger installations, but time shifting energy consumption using ice storage is basically an available commercial product. Here's one company that makes them. http://www.calmac.com/ http://www.calmac.com/
- EngineerBetter 9y agoWow - that's a crazy amount of energy. As a Brit who's never been the south of the US, is that figure really true? 100kWh is about 300 miles in a Tesla, or boiling a kettle constantly for about 30 hours. If that's really accurate, then I'm staggered at how much energy folks must be using to keep cool, and makes my efforts at saving energy seem paltry in comparison.
- 2sk21 9y agoI live in New Jersey and just had solar panels installed on my roof. Peak power is about 7.8 KW. On clear days, power production in the summer is about 50 kWh I have been keeping daily logs this summer and find that my daily power consumption swings between about 25 kWh on cool days to 65 kWh on really warm days. Definitely a lot lower than 100 kWh mentioned previously.
- jessriedel 9y agoNeedless to say, NJ is very different the South, and in any case this is highly dependent on the size of the house and the amount of insulation.
- lossolo 9y agoIt's 24/7 air conditioning working. In EU you get around 100kWh per day also if you use home air condition 24/7.
- OtterCoder 9y agoRemember, the south of the US is in the subtropics, roughly level with the north of Africa. Imagine living in Egypt and not running the AC constantly.
- widdershins 9y agoThere are a lot of people living in Egypt who don't have to imagine that.
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- sp332 9y agoIt's only prime solar hours if you point your solar panels due south. That gets you a higher figure on paper, but if you need the power later in the day you could point them a bit more to the west and get a lot more usable power when you need it. With solar panel prices falling, it's a race to see if it's cheaper to over-provision solar panels or batteries.
- beefield 9y ago> deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan. That applies to lead acid batteries. Lithium ones are much more forgiving on that (as long as you stay within design limits.)
- kilroy123 9y agoThere are far cheaper ways to keep your house cool, though they require an upfront investment. http://energyblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/17/10-myths-about-geothermal-heating-and-cooling/ http://energyblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/17/10-myths...
- baybal2 9y agoThis digit is unbelievable. A good aircon can pump 4 gigacalories per hour using 1kw/h while running at full power with +40C and 40% humidity outside. 5gkal per hour is more than enough to keep a 50m2 room with huge windows at 21-22C in scorching heat. If your house is huge, like 200m2 McMansion, and your ventilation does no recuperation whatsoever, and you have near nil heat insulation (like most of housing in US,) you will barely use 50kw/h per day even if you live in the middle of Sahara
- zip1234 9y ago200m2 is about 2/3 of the area of what a McMansion would be. Many are twice that.
- zip1234 9y agoEven if the hottest part of the day is past prime solar hours, with a solar system you won't be discharging the battery as fast since the system will be powering the AC for most the day. Also, with that much usage, it might be time to investigate insulation.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago> That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. It should be noted that peak energy expenditure for air conditioning happens more or less at exactly the moment when the influx of energy from the Sun is also at its peak. That's, like, a gigantic hint that mother nature is dropping on you, hoping you'll notice it. The disease, and its cure, are gushing forth from the same place at the same time. Probably most of the energy for air conditioning in the future will not come out of storage, but it would be produced at the moment when it's consumed, by solar panels or some other solar technology.
- clock_tower 9y agoFrom the grandparent's post: > "The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours."
- jamestnz 9y agoFor those interested in more info on this, it's called Temperature Lag. There's also the related phenomenon of Seasonal Lag, which is where the hottest part of the year comes somewhat after the period of maximum solar radiation, not during it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diurnal_temperature_variation#Temperature_lag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diurnal_temperature_variation#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_lag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_lag
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoThere's still significant overlap, it should be used.
- usrusr 9y agoA well insulated water tank that is electrically chilled during peak solar and used to cool down air later in the day/night could solve that storage problem without any cell degradation. Theoretically, with perfect insulation, this could even reduce the total electricity demand, when the conversion from electricity to a temperature gradient happens during a time when the base temperature is low.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago> When does that happen? Soon. https://electrek.co/2015/08/16/the-power-of-controllable-charging-load-is-tesla-working-on-a-bi-directional-charging-station/ https://electrek.co/2015/08/16/the-power-of-controllable-cha... https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png
- barrkel 9y agoI couldn't find the information about reusing lithium on those links?
- toomuchtodo 9y agoSorry, I thought you meant grid storage. Tesla has a link on their site about their closed loop recycling program.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoAre you asking if you couldn't find it?
- Someone 9y agoWhy wouldn't recycling be an option? Chances are that, if large batteries become commonplace, it will be cheaper to mine lithium from used batteries than to do so from the earth because they will have very high lithium content. Also, covering 1/3 of daily use seems low to me. It wouldn't get one through a few windless winter days with dense cloud cover, for example.
- dougmwne 9y agoIs it possible that perfect is the enemy of good here? You could choose a lower ratio of battery storage to average use and just use non-carbon neutral peaker plants for the few days in winter where there's a shortfall of renewable energy. Still a huge boost to renewable energy, still a huge reduction in carbon emissions.
- nabla9 9y agoExtraction of lithium from old batteries is five times more expensive as mining lithium. At some point it may become profitable. On the other hand, there is lots of lithium. If the environmental impact of lithium mining going off the roof is not a problem, there is no reason to reuse.
- Zekio 9y agoit is probably also cheaper to extract lithium from sea water than to extract it from old batteries
- hwillis 9y ago>Extraction of lithium from old batteries is five times more expensive as mining lithium. Even as an upper bound that's still a silly thing to say. It means comparing a lab-scale extraction with massive multinational, highly-automated mining operations. At scale lithium recycling would certainly be much cheaper than five times more expensive.
- Beltiras 9y agoThere is another way of thinking about the economics of this. IIRC the typical price is 12 cents per kwhr. You would need to utilize the battery in sold energy no less than 2000 cycles just to break even. About 5 1/2 years of constant monetized operation (which is a ludicrous proposal). And this assumes no cost on the energy production side.
- Zekio 9y ago12 cents is cheap! in denmark the average price is 37 cents per kW/h
- markvdb 9y agoElectricity price is more like .26€ here(~.31$), and this is certainly not the most expensive place in the EU. Mostly network charges and taxes. Going off the electric grid should become fairly easy. Cheap solar and storage should make this feasible for an eco-conscious household...
- marcosdumay 9y ago> recycling is not reuse Reusing the lithium from the batteries means recycling the batteries.
- hwillis 9y ago>It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that happen? (recycling is not reuse) I assume you mean reuse is not recycling ie using old batteries as lower-capacity storage is not workable indefinitely. First off the most pressing issue is that there is no practical replacement for cobalt in many li-ion applications. Chemistries without cobalt, like lithium titanate or iron phosphate, have a price and weight premium and reduced capacity. Cobalt is rarer than lithium, makes up more of the battery, and is harder to mine. The price might go up very quickly past a certain point, if supply from the DRC becomes tighter. Lithium is very widespread and relatively abundant but most importantly its final impact on the price of a battery is only a few percent. If it becomes more expensive to reclaim or mine, it will still have a pretty small impact on the cost of batteries.
- scythe 9y agoSulfur beats cobalt on energy density by a significant margin; its theoretical specific energy is 5x as large, although the chemistry is much more complex: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hong-Jie_Peng/publication/316982512_Review_on_High-Loading_and_High-Energy_Lithium-Sulfur_Batteries/links/592280b9a6fdcc4443f60bff/Review-on-High-Loading-and-High-Energy-Lithium-Sulfur-Batteries.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hong-Jie_Peng/publicati... There is one company in Colorado making Li-S batteries at small scale: http://www.solidpowerbattery.com/ http://www.solidpowerbattery.com/
- hwillis 9y agoLiS8 + silicon batteries would be a dream: immediate 8x boost in capacity for a given weight and the size is halved. Unfortunately the damn thing tries to swell to 200% size when you charge it and lasts for six cycles. Someone may figure out how to make it work but most likely itll use nanotech (like a123 did with FePO4, or a graphene coating). The fact is its such a hard problem there are very few ways it could be done cheaply. Right now LiS is only applicable to very, very niche applications. SolarImpulse used them. They come at a very high price and limited longevity.
- fenwick67 9y ago> By 2025, the world’s base of cumulative installed storage capacity will reach 52 GW, IHS Markit says, up from around 4 GW today. Last year, 1.3 GW of grid-connected storage was deployed globally, and this rate is poised to accelerate to 4.7 GW a year by 2020, and 8.8 GW annually by 2025. GW is not a unity of energy storage capacity. It's a unit of power.
- epistasis 9y agoGW is, however, a characteristic of an energy storage system, and just a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores.
- Gracana 9y agoThe maximum output is interesting to know, but if you asked how much my car's fuel tank held and I told you "100mph," you'd be understandably confused.
- epistasis 9y agoBut we're not talking about cars, we're talking about the electrical grid. In the current stage of the grid and storage, storage capacity is used not for long duration transmission of energy, but shorter term filling in of power gaps. In the past few years that's been frequency regulation, and now the replacement of peaker plants, or instantaneous response when waiting the 10-15 minutes for a peaker plant to come online.
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- mulmen 9y agoA watt is a measure of power, not distance. The equivalent unit for a car would be horsepower. You could express the capacity of your fuel tank in horsepower hours. Since both are measurements of power and horsepower is defined in terms of watts you could even measure the capacity of your fuel tank in kilowatt hours. Similarly, you can define the output of your engine in kilowatts.
- mavhc 9y agoI paid $354/kWh last month for 24kWh of batteries (inc 20% tax), and I got a free car that goes around it
- dangoor 9y agoWhat kind of electric car costs $8500? Used Leaf?
- wlesieutre 9y agoI heard from a friend that the Leaf's battery pack had a major redesign of the cooling system in recent models, that might have driven down the value of used older versions with worse anticipated battery wear.
- mavhc 9y agoYeah, that's why I got the 2014 version. Turns out it also had the 6.6kW charger, even though it wasn't advertised as such, that was nice. You'd think the Nissan dealer would know something about the cars they were selling.
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- aphextron 9y agoI just bought a 2011 Leaf with 40k miles in mint condition for $5,000. They are insanely cheap right now, and amazing cars if the range works for you (I get about 60-70 miles on mine). Also with the free quick chargers everywhere in the Bay Area I literally drive for the cost of car insurance now. I think it's just a combination of fear from the consumers and lack of knowledge on used dealers part combined that has left these things dirt cheap.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI wonder how much of this is simply the Gigafactory coming online at full production + others trying to keep their factories running. If you look at Tesla's plan to be making 10,000 model 3's a week, with a nominal 90 kWh battery in each that is 900 MWh a week of capacity or 46 GWh capacity a year. But it is all tied up in cars of course[1]. The power companies have been screwing around with rate plans to keep grid-tied solar from being as economic as it could be and so I do see a lot of people such as myself moving to a whole house storage system at some point. [1] I fully expect a TV show to have a scene where they need more power and the 'genius' hero looks out the window and sees a row of electric cars charging and "hacks the system to feed the car's energy into the power grid for the extra energy needed to save the day" along with the gratuitous cars exploding as they are being drained too quickly but reaching the minimum level of power at just the right time to save the world.
- baybal2 9y ago>I wonder how much of this is simply the Gigafactory coming online at full production + others trying to keep their factories running. The "Gigafactory," is a drop in the ocean if you count noname Chinese factories, but it will be one of the biggest market players outside of China
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWe have different ideas about 'drops in the ocean' :-) See this article (http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/elon-musk-china-battery/ http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/elon-musk-china-battery/) for some numbers. Projected Gigafactory production (as more come on line) could continue to be 25 to 35% of the global production of batteries. My father-in-law, who is a big booster of South America, feels that if Argentina, Brazil, and Chile got together they could move up the 'value chain' and produce batteries for export. I do know that much of the raw lithium comes from Argentina and Chile so I expect there is some truth to that idea.
- baybal2 9y agoI have no idea of where they get those digits. Chinese ministry of commerce posted back in 2015 that, the amount of battery capacity used by biggest Chinese EV makers alone (excluding PHEW manufacturers) was 16.9GWh. And the amount of battery sales to car makers make less than 10% of the market in China.
- comicjk 9y agoUsing lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal element). Now, it seems the development effort devoted to lithium-ion has paid off so well that they are the best OVERALL battery solution. The single-minded effort we put into cell phones and cars is so strong that it now reaches all the way to homes and the grid. To me, this suggests that all sorts of cool technologies might be possible if we as a society could concentrate on making them work.
- wongarsu 9y agoIn the last three decades battery technology was mostly about powering small, lightweight gadgets. Now that there's massive amounts of money to be made with car batteries and grid-level storage, I certainly expect some great battery technologies that focus on that in the next decade or two. That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium: nobody is going to power the world on lithium, it's just the cheapest method right now because of the massive amounts of research money already dumped into it, and great economies of scale. Other technologies will catch up as their use-cases become more valuable.
- StillBored 9y agoYah, lithium's power/weight advantages had driven so much investment that its now has awesome power/volume advantages too. The result is that even things which don't care about the weight (http://www.storagereview.com/apc_backups_pro_500_lithium_ion_review http://www.storagereview.com/apc_backups_pro_500_lithium_ion...) are starting to switch from lead acid because its no longer the super cheap solution. That is something I've found really curious because if you tear into just about any lead acid battery it still looks like technology from the 1950's. Just about everything else has shrunk, become lighter, used less material, etc. But lead acid's last major "breakthrough" was in the 1970's with gel cells. I would have expected lead acid to look more like a capacitor at this point (thin layers of material rolled/folded up) but its still these fairly thick plates sitting in electrolyte with non-existent charge control. Surely some creative person sitting in a lab could come up with way to minimize sulfation or to decompose the lead sulfate within the battery without basically melting them down and building new ones.
- derefr 9y agoHah, I misinterpreted "storage" here, and thought this was going to be about Li-ion cells getting cheap enough to replace the capacitors in the Power Loss Protection circuits in hard drives/SSDs/NVMe boards. Which doesn't make sense, after giving it a second's thought—batteries wear out after just a few years, while capacitors (very nearly) don't, so it'd put a hard lifetime on drives. (Though, for server use-cases with constant workloads, they have hard lifetimes anyway...) But it's an interesting question! If—rather than UPSes as specialized enterprise-level hardware—we instead had Li-ion cells on computer motherboards (picture a big brother to the CR-2032 CMOS battery) that kept the disks alive for up to, say, 30 minutes after power loss—could we architect our storage subsystems differently? (Sorry if that's a complete tangent from the topic at hand, but I'm not sure where I'd post this otherwise!)
- wongarsu 9y agoKeeping the disks alive is certainly doable. At a rough estimate of 10W per drive, even storage servers would only need very moderate batteries. But what would you gain by that? More interesting (in my eyes) would be to power down spinning disks and processors, but keep caches and ram alive. Then once power is restored, you could basically supply power and continue where you left off, without any reboots etc. Then again, power loss should be fairly infrequent, and you have to architect against connection cuts or physical disruptions anyway.
- StillBored 9y agoCongratulations, you just invented the ACPI S3 power state. Also known as standby or suspend to ram. I've been pretty happy with it since ~1998 when I started returning hardware that didn't support it properly. Although these days even linux on a laptop tends to work properly with S3 and S4 (hibernate, or suspend to disk). That said the concept was also part of the earlier APM standard which was a lot more hit/miss. Anyway, its great, I used it today to ride out a nearly hour long power outage with a couple of fairly trivial UPSs connected to my NAS, desktop, etc. The desktop was already in standby because that is its default state after being idle for 30 mins. But the NAS went into that mode when the UPS indicated 70% battery life. The problem of course is that UPSs/etc have miserable power conversion efficiencies when supplying just a couple watts of power, like 10-30% efficiency, so they tend to have max run-times less than 2 hours even when completely unloaded. More on point, for servers, if your server is lightly loaded, or loaded for only parts of the day, using WOL to wake it and going into standby after a few minutes can save a fair amount of power. With SSDs, the resume times are generally less than a second unless you have bad cards/drivers that take forever to reinit.
- baybal2 9y ago>IHS Markit expects li-ion battery prices to fall below $200/kWh by 2019 In that article they claim the digit of $200, while you can buy an assembled 1kw/h battery pack in China in retail quantities for around $120 today.
- epistasis 9y agoIs that NCA or NMC? Typically grid storage batteries are rated to 10+ years or ~5000 cycles or something on that order of magnitude. One way to get your cells to last that long is to lessen the discharge depth; that may account for some of the price difference.
- baybal2 9y agoMost likely consumer grade LiCo with carbon anode. LiFePo modules are twice as expensive, demand for them certainly exceeds supply
- youssflazar 9y agocommonte
- youssflazar 9y agocommonte
- burntrelish1273 9y agoAny medium-to-large commercial campus with time-of-use-billing and large electrical bills may likely benefit from building a 500 kWhr - 3MWhr li-ion battery bank, 480VAC inverter, transfer and switchgear to buy electricity off-peak to use at-peak. The costs for lightly-used inverters and LFP module packs make it compelling to evaluate. For example, Jehu Garcia (@jag35) is involved in a 1 MWhr bank for a manufacturing customer in SoCal that looks really P&L sensible.