34 ms·

Battery Power's Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas

301 points by matt4077 8y ago

asaddhamani 8y ago
One argument that I often hear is that even if we go with batteries, they then need to be replaced every few years, and the electricity is mostly coming from non-renewable sources either way.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  I think the latter is definitely not true. We already are around 37% clean energy in the US already. In many states, the number is already over 50%. Especially with storage, we have a fairly easy path to getting most, or even the vast majority of our electricity from clean sources. (Including nuclear under “clean sources,” too, because while it isn’t intermittent, it also isn’t really dispatchable so it also benefits from storage.)
  - beenBoutIT 8y ago
    Outside of compressed air or springs there isn't currently a clean way of storing power. Batteries are the plastic trash bags of the future and the massive problems they're causing won't cause an uproar until we can see it from outer space, just like the trash island.
    - imtringued 8y ago
      Recovering 95% of the economically valuable materials [0] used in batteries is pretty much a solved problem. Using plastics and other low value materials might ruin that number but there is no reason why governments can't mandate to build batteries that can be easily recycled. [0] https://www.audiworld.com/articles/new-power-from-old-cells-audi-and-umicore-develop-closed-loop-battery-recycling/ https://www.audiworld.com/articles/new-power-from-old-cells-...
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Batteries are super eco-friendly when you're using them unless they start burning. Making batteries and disposing of batteries is when they're damaging the environment.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    What's the energy and resource requirement of recycling grid scale batteries?
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      I hear that recycling li ion batteries requires a lot of pretty nasty chemicals, and wouldn't be surprised if the long tail on handling and cleanup of those plus the actual process is fairly resource intensive. Oil is a pretty nasty chemical too, so I don't know what the balance is.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - acidburnNSA 8y ago
        Besides just batteries, renewable energy circles in China are just now starting to grasp what it's going to take to transport and recycle the gadzillions of solar waste that's going to start rolling in around 2030. Some takes make it sound pretty dire. [1] [1] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002631/the-dark-side-of-chinas-solar-boom- https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002631/the-dark-side-of-chin...
        Brakenshire 8y ago
        That is FUD. > Mary Hutzler, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington D.C., said that solar panels are manufactured using hazardous materials — including sulfuric acid and phosphine gas — making them difficult to recycle. They also contain toxic metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium, which can be harmful to humans and are likely to leak from electronic waste dumps into drinking water supplies. Chromium is only in CIGS, which is 0% of the market, Cadmium is only in CdTe, which is a few percent of the market and only manufactured in the US by First Solar. Lead is just in the solder, which is the same issue as with all electronics. How does the use of chemicals purely as part of the manufacturing process make the panel more difficult to recycle, if the material is not in the finished product? IER is a Koch funded nonsense.
- ogrisel 8y ago
  Li-ion batteries are mostly useful to shift the load by a couple of hours, that is to be able to sell cheap to produce solar power in the evening when the demand is highest and therefore the gross price for electricity the highest. So just a few hours worth of storage are actually really useful to integrate a significantly higher amount of renewables in the power mix.
  - rstuart4133 8y ago
    I didn't realise just how useful that "shift load by a couple of hours" was until I got a battery installed at home. Before my PV + battery system was installed, I paid about $0.21 for each kW.hr consumed. After it was installed, the same power company offered to pay $0.11 for feed in. So I looked around. There is another company that would charge $0.19 for power consumed, and $0.20 for feed-in, with a catch. The catch is encoded in a complex formula, but it boils down to "we hit you hard if consume power during the 4 hour peak hour period at _any_ time during the 90 day billing period". My battery isn't big enough to supply an entire day or act as a back up during an extended power outage - but it can easily shift the 4 hours power usage this plan needs. Just doing that makes a big difference since we produce twice what we use. Who would have thought just having a 4 hour battery could drop your power bill by 1/3? Even more impressively, the battery says on the box it is good for 6,000 cycles. But they are full cycles, and if I just use it for 4 hours I'll never use a full cycle. It could last over 20 years if I only draw on it 4 hours a day.
- _Microft 8y ago
  Isn't the wear on lithium ion batteries very small as long as they are only charged and discharged in the range of 20-80% of their maximum capacity?
- imtringued 8y ago
  Germany has almost no hydro power compared to the 24% average in the EU. Biomass, PV and Wind Power alone produce 38% of the electricity in Germany. This percentage is growing by 3-4% a year. Combined with nuclear and other zero emission technologies it produces 45% of the electricity without emitting CO2. If Germany had hydro power it would already be at 69% but it wouldn't matter. Despite this massive success the total CO2 emissions haven't changed. The electricity sector is obviously only responsible for around 24% of the total energy used in Germany. Therefore the renewable strategy only amounts to a 12% reduction. One of the biggest problems that Germany suffers from is that the transportation sector still uses gasoline. Over the last 10 years people have started buying more cars and driving them for more miles. Less efficient diesel (which is taxed less than gasoline) cars also resulted in a minor increase in CO2 emissions. This completely negated the CO2 decreases thanks to renewable electricity. If anything what holds back renewable energy is the total lack of mass market electric cars that can compete with ICEs and lack of charging infrastructure. Battery technology is currently improving at such a high pace that we might never even need anything better than lithium ion batteries. Tesla has managed to reduce the cobalt content down from 14% to less than 3%. The yearly cost reductions even make cheap flow batteries which basically are just sulfuric acid with vanadium mixed in uncompetitive.
  - miskin 8y ago
    Less efficient diesel regarding CO2 emisions? One of the reasons diesel engines were pushed in EU was due to better CO2 emmisions by diesel engines compared to petrol engines.
    - chopin 8y ago
      The average car has gotten bigger.
  - gridlockd 8y ago
    > Combined with nuclear and other zero emission technologies it produces 45% of the electricity without emitting CO2. Which is pretty embarrassing, given the huge investment made. By that same measure, France is at almost 90% (74% nuclear, 15% renewable). Without further nuclear developments, Germany will depend either on fossils or on massive technological breakthroughs in solving the fluctuations caused by wind energy.
shaki-dora 8y ago
It‘s most fascinating when you realize that wind & solar will, very soon after being competitive with new coal and gas, become cheaper even than existing fossil fuel plants. That’s because renewables are almost entirely front-loaded: upkeeps is somewhat neglible in comparison to construction. For fossile fuels, the fuel itself is a dominating cost. Meaning: in some countries, we are on the brisk of an inflection point, after which growth of clean tech will be limited only by our ability to increase production. I saw a graph, which I can unfortunately not find now, predicting 2021 for some European countries and some regions in the US. There isn’t much speculation in a time frame of only two years.
- _Microft 8y ago
  An article arguing that this has already happened came through the frontpage during the last few days. -> I can't find it. Can anyone help?
  - spatten 8y ago
    I think it was this one: http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-energy-will-be-the-most-disruptive-yet/ http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-ene...
    - _Microft 8y ago
      Yes, it is, thank you!
- beefield 8y ago
  As solar is growing globally something like 30% p.a., one could argue that we have already been limited by the ability to increase production. Just for comparison, Apple has never had a 100% y.o.y increase of iPhone over two full production years, and that was a consumer device with explosive growth. I would not expect that it could be feasible to have similar growth numbers in energy infrastructure than iPhone.
  - 8y ago
matt2000 8y ago
The decreases in battery cost in this report are pretty spectacular, but it's missing comparisons to costs for traditional generation. As best as I can tell from https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... - the LCOE for gas generation is around $40/MWh. So this article's cost of $187/MWh for batteries is still a lot higher, but the battery cost has dropped 35% in one year so it could get there soon. What I'm still not sure about is if you need to include the LCOE of the original generation method in the cost of the battery system? In that case the total LCOE for say wind+battery would be ~$210.
- tlb 8y ago
  LCOE includes all the costs, including the power to charge the batteries (assumed to be 60% of wholesale power price, since you can charge whenever it's cheapest in the daily cycle.)
- beefield 8y ago
  Batteries have cycle life of thousands of cycles so you can't really compare the costs of production and storage directly.
  - jsight 8y ago
    I'm sure his numbers take that into account. The cost per MWh for batteries would be at least an order of mangnitude higher if he did not.
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      You are correct. Capital cost of battery systems is closer to $800/MWh Page 11: https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-40-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
      - jsight 8y ago
        I'm curious how they come up with that, actually. Aren't batteries at ~100/KWh at the moment? I would have expected a MWh to be closer to $100k. If I'm not mistaken, 1000 cycles at that rate would get you close to $100/MWh. Obviously I am misunderstanding something in these calculations.
acidburnNSA 8y ago
This says that if you take ~~free~~ (see edit) energy, store it in batteries, and pull it back out later, you will have to pay $187/MWh. Meanwhile natural gas turbines cost $40/MWh to generate power whenever, wherever. To say batteries are competing with gas in the US is very misleading. Reliable electricity is worth an incredible amount to customers. Unfortunately natural gas is very high carbon and cannot continue in a carbon-constrained world. In any case, it's obviously time to roll back tax incentives on wind and solar generating capacity alone. They worked perfectly, bringing prices of advanced tech down near market levels. Now let's incentivise deep decarbonization schemes that can handle seasonal intermittency and decarbonize the heating, industrial, and transportation sectors. Edit: The $187/MWh number includes an extremely low battery charging cost of around $0.033/kWh (it's reasonably assumed that charging will occur during energy oversupplies, so it's nearly free).
- beefield 8y ago
  > This says that if you take free energy, store it in batteries, and pull it back out later, you will have to pay $187/MWh. Yes, but with that cost you can repeat that thousands of times instead of just once.
  - CompelTechnic 8y ago
    Capex for lithium batteries is on the order of $100/kWh (kilo- not mega-). Other battery technologies will not be much better. You are confusing amortized cycle costs for capex costs.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Nope. That's capital cost, which is closer to $800/MWh. See page 11 of Lazard for details. https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-40-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
    - beefield 8y ago
      sorry, that was a brainfart from me.
williesleg 8y ago
Thanks Tesla! Let the haters hate!
wesammikhail 8y ago
A friend of mine (CEO of Enerpoly) recently got his PhD in this space and have made a breakthrough in the battery space (extreme life cycle extension). His most recent prototype can reach less than 40euro / kWh. The space certainly is exciting and will be fun to watch over the next few years! http://enerpoly.com/technology/ http://enerpoly.com/technology/
- tim333 8y ago
  Glad to see that sort of stuff is coming along. I was thinking there must be something more cost effective than LiIon when you don't need to worry about the weight.
  - webninja 8y ago
    NiMH takes up more space than LiIon but costs less for the same amount of energy storage capacity. Toyota uses them in their hybrid cars primarily for cost reasons.
  - Iv 8y ago
    In Japan the technology that is installed is sodium-sulfur [1] It operates at 350 celcius, is full of dangerous chemicals and require a certain size to be interesting, but under these conditions, it seems to beat other techs [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery
dylan604 8y ago
Is it better to try to build city-wide battery storage or per house storage? Not knowing the economy of scale of these things, it seems like it would be more affordable to build the smaller per house units like the one Tesla builds. After all, it is the homes that primarily need power at night. Big commercial buildings close at night, and need much less power. Or am I just really naive on the subject?
- zacharyaustin11 8y ago
  batteries help with supply and demand, more transmission lines also help to get power to places that need it. To fully utilize small batteries need smart meters and smart grid. your Tesla could be used to run the dishwasher at 6 pm peak usage and get recharged at 2m when there is abundant hydropower. Australia uses Tesla large scale battery system to infill gaps like the time between when demand spikes and a generator comes online. very profitable. supply - makes sense to have large batteries to store excess energy produced for power (I like the combo of wind turbines and flywheels allowing more uniform power to be distributed) demand - makes sense for every house to have its own battery to arbitrage on the price difference with real-time pricing. putting a floating price on consumption will hopefully lead to a more efficient market and less coal.
- kahnjw 8y ago
  I'm certainly no expert but I think tiers of battery storage will be necessary. Some collocated with generation sites, some at distribution sites in cities, and probably local batteries in commercial real estate and neighborhoods if not households. There are both local and global shifts in demand. If it were the case that only local storage options existed the system would be extremely inefficient during abnormally high peak demand that was localized to one area. Think of a heat spell in Central Valley of California. Storage would need to move from tiny batteries scattered throughout The Bay Area to be routed to the Central Valley to power AC units. It would be more efficient if there were larger local storage sites in Sacramento and Fresno. On the other hand if we only had huge storage sites that are collocated with generation sites then as an individual you might be able to game the market through arbitrage with one big highly efficient battery. Take in power at night when its cheap and sell it when it's expensive during the day. Of course everyone will catch on to this and want a battery of their own. This depends on battery efficiency, but if you can get near the efficiency of the battery at the generation site then you can undercut their profit margin. You could at the very least use the local battery when possible to power your own home/business to save some money on your power bill.
outside1234 8y ago
On this topic: Does anyone know why we haven't started to utilize electric cars as a mechanism for nighttime home energy? It seems like having these batteries centralized is actually not the right solution, but instead that they should be at the edge, and connected to the home grid, such that they can be charged during the day, and decharged during the night to some maximum amount specified by the user. A Tesla has 50kWh capacity and I typically use 6kWh at night - it seems like an obvious place we could leverage batteries already in existence to reduce the demand on central generation.
- Retric 8y ago
  Rang is a rather big deal in electric cars. You would need to be able to tell the car, I don’t need X range today before discharging it to the grid is a good idea. On top of that, discharge cycles reduce battery lifespan so you need to make a lot bore they are worth using. The reverse was considered viable as nighttime energy was cheap and as long as you charged before X AM users would presumably not care.
- goodcanadian 8y ago
  It has started: https://www.indra.co.uk/v2g https://www.indra.co.uk/v2g Disclaimer: I am an employee.
- matt4077 8y ago
  We (somewhat) have. I was part of a focus/design thinking group for VW working on this. I think what’s mostly holding it back right now is the relative low prevalence of electric cars and that, as far as I can tell, we have not yet reached the point where renewable energy actually needs batteries. The scheme only makes sense when Wind & Solar actually exceeds demand for significant stretches of time. After that, there are some issues: car manufacturers need to somehow find a scheme for them to make it worthwhile for them. Owners need to be compensated at least for whatever wear it inflicts on batteries. They had simulations showing the scheduling would actually be somewhat easy. This was three or four years ago, and their algorithms were already almost perfect in predicting when you would need your car.
- qqqwerty 8y ago
hinkley 8y ago
The history of battery tech has been a very steady drum beat of small, slow improvements in battery capacity of a few percent per year, slowly working in the opposite direction of inflation. The bad news of that 'law' is that you're not going to get a device with 2x battery time next year. The last time I remember Apple pulling off a 2x it was due to a 30% larger battery with 30% higher power density (itself a combination of smaller packaging and better power density) with OS improvements to reduce average power draw. The good news is that eventually there will be a battery that stores 2x as much charge for the same price. So if storage batteries can be profit neutral now, in 5 years you could be looking at a 25% reduction in material costs. And if you can improve labor and installation overhead you might be looking at a profit margin you can sell.
- skybrian 8y ago
  The comparison to Apple seems pretty unhelpful? Utility-scale batteries are a very different market than batteries in electronics, even if they use some of the same technology. If you can add capacity by making batteries bigger or heavier without increasing cost, that would be fine for storage batteries.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Because these conversations happen all the time, have been happening for at least twenty years, will continue to happen for at least the next twenty, and somehow always feature the same whataboutism responses. It's my preemptive retaliatory strike to bring up a high profile case of someone looking in the press like they pulled of a 2x improvement in 4 years and really they did no such thing at all.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  For grid scale batteries, capacity/density are much less important than cost, which went down 35% in less than a year.
- ajross 8y ago
  The cited numbers in the linked article directly contradict this. Your intuition is about battery "capacity", but the number that matters here is battery cost, which is not the same thing. And batteries are getting rapidly cheaper as production scales past the hand-held devices against which your intuition was calibrated and into the realm of vehicle power and grid buffering.
louwrentius 8y ago
For stationary purposes, why wouldn't Lead-Acid batteries work for distributed power storage? I'm aware that those batteries should not be deep-discharged, but you can just add more to compensate. Lead is toxic but those batteries seem to be very recyclable. Any comments?
- mchannon 8y ago
  Have given this a fair amount of thought and it comes down to a few things: Cycle lifetime of lead is good as long as you don't deep-discharge it, but then if you don't deep-discharge it you need a lot more material. Eventually the lead is going to degrade and then you need a battery changeout, or you need the wherewithal to refurbish the plates and the paste. No one goes to the trouble. Lead-acid doesn't tolerate the cold as much as lithium does. But the big enchirito is the fact that lithium batteries at 100% max capacity are great for cars. After they wear down to 75% max capacity they're no longer suitable (you want a pack with 20 miles' range?) and junk. At that point they're ideal for grid-tie because there's literally not much other use for them. Lead acid requires purpose-building, which I believe would be cost-competitive, but also require a substantial raise for what many consider to be a has-been technology.
  - ericd 8y ago
    This is a great point - there's going to be a lot of used lithium car batteries available x years after electric cars go big, and I don't know of any better use for them than grid storage. So it seems like those will be priced at their value for grid storage. Which means that once there's a sufficient supply, they will almost inevitably become a major force in grid storage.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    My company was designing a product that was solar powered with a battery to keep it running at night. We originally were designing in lead acid batteries and the size of the battery needed for that kind of service was too large. De-rate because you're cycling daily and suddenly you need 3X the battery. De-rate again for environmental conditions and add another 2X. We punted and switched to a lithium iron phosphate battery. Because we could get away with a 2.5 amp-hr lion battery vs a 12 amp-hr lead acid. It's cheaper and we don't have to worry about a workman trying to lug 15-20lbs up a ladder.
tomohawk 8y ago
Cobalt supply seems a bit uncertain. One of the main sources is DR Congo. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-truth-about-the-cobalt-crisis https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-truth-about...
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  Yeah a lot of people point at lithium as the scarce input. But Cobalt for common lion batteries is problematic because it's produced almost entirely as a by-product of copper and zinc (I think) mining. For the other metals used current production dwarfs the supply needed for batteries. However there are lithium iron phosphate batteries.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hamilyon2 8y ago
Just make sure we don't make same mistakes again, ending with a lot of non-recyclable non-reusable obsolete batteries no one cares about and wants 50 years later. The last thing we need is a dumpster full of toxic waste... all in name of green and "renewable" energy generation!
- ausbah 8y ago
  >The last thing we need is a dumpster full of toxic waste... all in name of green and "renewable" energy generation! that reminds me more of pushes to bring back nuclear power
  - justtopost 8y ago
    A tiny bit of spent fuel, and billions of toxic and unrecyclable cells are far different problems.
    - lukeschlather 8y ago
      Both the spent fuel and the cells are totally recyclable (where recyclable means transforming them into some amount of inert nontoxic stuff and some amount of useful stuff.) I would bet that recycling spent fuel rods is more expensive than recycling spent chemical batteries. Also, the spent batteries, while toxic, don't require 24x7 armed security. Also the spent fuel recycling process potentially increases the need to secure the resultant materials, depending on what you're doing.
  - RandomInteger4 8y ago
    In what way does it remind you of pushes to bring back nuclear power? Can you elaborate? Genuinely curious.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    If you had any idea how much nuclear power you can generate before you've filled a single dumpster with spent fuel...
mbostleman 8y ago
What’s the lifetime of these batteries and what’s the environmental impact of their manufacturer and disposal?
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
I wonder if we could end up in a situation where solar and wind power kills traditional generation but still isn't able to provide continuous power. That we might end up with intermittent power by accident.
- xbmcuser 8y ago
  I personally am seeing 2 distinct systems. 1. Outside the cities people will have their own storage and power generation. 2. Inside the cities power companies start renting out batteries when you contract with them. And they only provider the power with solar and the battery they provide stores it for the nights and sun less days.
- Iv 8y ago
  It could, and we could even end up with periods during the day with a lot of free electricity to waste and go crazy with. I expect many interesting innovations to come out of this.
Iv 8y ago
Wait... It costs only $187 to store a MWh? Why isn't there a 200$ device in every home that stores energy for the night?
- yojo 8y ago
  I assume these are the costs at scale. There are likely fixed costs that dramatically increase the unit price of a single home installation.
  - Iv 8y ago
    Still, 1MWh is the average monthly consumption of a single household. That means that for a fixed cost of less than 200$ per family we could solve intermittency problems by building, probably one battery per village or city block. It is cheaper than storing water to put pressure in the network. Something seems off in these numbers.
- Iv 8y ago
  I'll answer my own question: This is not a MWh of installed capacity, this is a MWh of discharge. That is, over the expected lifetime of a storage installation, consuming one MWh from such an installation would cost $187. Still much more expensive than alternatives (about 4x the cost of nuclear) but arriving in the realm of feasibility.

301 points by matt4077 8y ago

One argument that I often hear is that even if we go with batteries, they then need to be replaced every few years, and the electricity is mostly coming from non-renewable sources either way.

Robotbeat 8y ago
I think the latter is definitely not true. We already are around 37% clean energy in the US already. In many states, the number is already over 50%. Especially with storage, we have a fairly easy path to getting most, or even the vast majority of our electricity from clean sources. (Including nuclear under “clean sources,” too, because while it isn’t intermittent, it also isn’t really dispatchable so it also benefits from storage.)
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Outside of compressed air or springs there isn't currently a clean way of storing power. Batteries are the plastic trash bags of the future and the massive problems they're causing won't cause an uproar until we can see it from outer space, just like the trash island.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    Recovering 95% of the economically valuable materials [0] used in batteries is pretty much a solved problem. Using plastics and other low value materials might ruin that number but there is no reason why governments can't mandate to build batteries that can be easily recycled. [0] https://www.audiworld.com/articles/new-power-from-old-cells-audi-and-umicore-develop-closed-loop-battery-recycling/ https://www.audiworld.com/articles/new-power-from-old-cells-...
beenBoutIT 8y ago
Batteries are super eco-friendly when you're using them unless they start burning. Making batteries and disposing of batteries is when they're damaging the environment.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  What's the energy and resource requirement of recycling grid scale batteries?
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    I hear that recycling li ion batteries requires a lot of pretty nasty chemicals, and wouldn't be surprised if the long tail on handling and cleanup of those plus the actual process is fairly resource intensive. Oil is a pretty nasty chemical too, so I don't know what the balance is.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      Besides just batteries, renewable energy circles in China are just now starting to grasp what it's going to take to transport and recycle the gadzillions of solar waste that's going to start rolling in around 2030. Some takes make it sound pretty dire. [1] [1] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002631/the-dark-side-of-chinas-solar-boom- https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002631/the-dark-side-of-chin...
      - Brakenshire 8y ago
        That is FUD. > Mary Hutzler, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington D.C., said that solar panels are manufactured using hazardous materials — including sulfuric acid and phosphine gas — making them difficult to recycle. They also contain toxic metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium, which can be harmful to humans and are likely to leak from electronic waste dumps into drinking water supplies. Chromium is only in CIGS, which is 0% of the market, Cadmium is only in CdTe, which is a few percent of the market and only manufactured in the US by First Solar. Lead is just in the solder, which is the same issue as with all electronics. How does the use of chemicals purely as part of the manufacturing process make the panel more difficult to recycle, if the material is not in the finished product? IER is a Koch funded nonsense.
ogrisel 8y ago
Li-ion batteries are mostly useful to shift the load by a couple of hours, that is to be able to sell cheap to produce solar power in the evening when the demand is highest and therefore the gross price for electricity the highest. So just a few hours worth of storage are actually really useful to integrate a significantly higher amount of renewables in the power mix.
- rstuart4133 8y ago
  I didn't realise just how useful that "shift load by a couple of hours" was until I got a battery installed at home. Before my PV + battery system was installed, I paid about $0.21 for each kW.hr consumed. After it was installed, the same power company offered to pay $0.11 for feed in. So I looked around. There is another company that would charge $0.19 for power consumed, and $0.20 for feed-in, with a catch. The catch is encoded in a complex formula, but it boils down to "we hit you hard if consume power during the 4 hour peak hour period at _any_ time during the 90 day billing period". My battery isn't big enough to supply an entire day or act as a back up during an extended power outage - but it can easily shift the 4 hours power usage this plan needs. Just doing that makes a big difference since we produce twice what we use. Who would have thought just having a 4 hour battery could drop your power bill by 1/3? Even more impressively, the battery says on the box it is good for 6,000 cycles. But they are full cycles, and if I just use it for 4 hours I'll never use a full cycle. It could last over 20 years if I only draw on it 4 hours a day.
_Microft 8y ago
Isn't the wear on lithium ion batteries very small as long as they are only charged and discharged in the range of 20-80% of their maximum capacity?
imtringued 8y ago
Germany has almost no hydro power compared to the 24% average in the EU. Biomass, PV and Wind Power alone produce 38% of the electricity in Germany. This percentage is growing by 3-4% a year. Combined with nuclear and other zero emission technologies it produces 45% of the electricity without emitting CO2. If Germany had hydro power it would already be at 69% but it wouldn't matter. Despite this massive success the total CO2 emissions haven't changed. The electricity sector is obviously only responsible for around 24% of the total energy used in Germany. Therefore the renewable strategy only amounts to a 12% reduction. One of the biggest problems that Germany suffers from is that the transportation sector still uses gasoline. Over the last 10 years people have started buying more cars and driving them for more miles. Less efficient diesel (which is taxed less than gasoline) cars also resulted in a minor increase in CO2 emissions. This completely negated the CO2 decreases thanks to renewable electricity. If anything what holds back renewable energy is the total lack of mass market electric cars that can compete with ICEs and lack of charging infrastructure. Battery technology is currently improving at such a high pace that we might never even need anything better than lithium ion batteries. Tesla has managed to reduce the cobalt content down from 14% to less than 3%. The yearly cost reductions even make cheap flow batteries which basically are just sulfuric acid with vanadium mixed in uncompetitive.
- miskin 8y ago
  Less efficient diesel regarding CO2 emisions? One of the reasons diesel engines were pushed in EU was due to better CO2 emmisions by diesel engines compared to petrol engines.
  - chopin 8y ago
    The average car has gotten bigger.
- gridlockd 8y ago
  > Combined with nuclear and other zero emission technologies it produces 45% of the electricity without emitting CO2. Which is pretty embarrassing, given the huge investment made. By that same measure, France is at almost 90% (74% nuclear, 15% renewable). Without further nuclear developments, Germany will depend either on fossils or on massive technological breakthroughs in solving the fluctuations caused by wind energy.

shaki-dora 8y ago

It‘s most fascinating when you realize that wind & solar will, very soon after being competitive with new coal and gas, become cheaper even than existing fossil fuel plants. That’s because renewables are almost entirely front-loaded: upkeeps is somewhat neglible in comparison to construction. For fossile fuels, the fuel itself is a dominating cost. Meaning: in some countries, we are on the brisk of an inflection point, after which growth of clean tech will be limited only by our ability to increase production. I saw a graph, which I can unfortunately not find now, predicting 2021 for some European countries and some regions in the US. There isn’t much speculation in a time frame of only two years.

_Microft 8y ago
An article arguing that this has already happened came through the frontpage during the last few days. -> I can't find it. Can anyone help?
- spatten 8y ago
  I think it was this one: http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-energy-will-be-the-most-disruptive-yet/ http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-ene...
  - _Microft 8y ago
    Yes, it is, thank you!
beefield 8y ago
As solar is growing globally something like 30% p.a., one could argue that we have already been limited by the ability to increase production. Just for comparison, Apple has never had a 100% y.o.y increase of iPhone over two full production years, and that was a consumer device with explosive growth. I would not expect that it could be feasible to have similar growth numbers in energy infrastructure than iPhone.
- 8y ago

matt2000 8y ago

The decreases in battery cost in this report are pretty spectacular, but it's missing comparisons to costs for traditional generation. As best as I can tell from https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... - the LCOE for gas generation is around $40/MWh. So this article's cost of $187/MWh for batteries is still a lot higher, but the battery cost has dropped 35% in one year so it could get there soon. What I'm still not sure about is if you need to include the LCOE of the original generation method in the cost of the battery system? In that case the total LCOE for say wind+battery would be ~$210.

tlb 8y ago
LCOE includes all the costs, including the power to charge the batteries (assumed to be 60% of wholesale power price, since you can charge whenever it's cheapest in the daily cycle.)
beefield 8y ago
Batteries have cycle life of thousands of cycles so you can't really compare the costs of production and storage directly.
- jsight 8y ago
  I'm sure his numbers take that into account. The cost per MWh for batteries would be at least an order of mangnitude higher if he did not.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    You are correct. Capital cost of battery systems is closer to $800/MWh Page 11: https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-40-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
    - jsight 8y ago
      I'm curious how they come up with that, actually. Aren't batteries at ~100/KWh at the moment? I would have expected a MWh to be closer to $100k. If I'm not mistaken, 1000 cycles at that rate would get you close to $100/MWh. Obviously I am misunderstanding something in these calculations.

acidburnNSA 8y ago

This says that if you take ~~free~~ (see edit) energy, store it in batteries, and pull it back out later, you will have to pay $187/MWh. Meanwhile natural gas turbines cost $40/MWh to generate power whenever, wherever. To say batteries are competing with gas in the US is very misleading. Reliable electricity is worth an incredible amount to customers. Unfortunately natural gas is very high carbon and cannot continue in a carbon-constrained world. In any case, it's obviously time to roll back tax incentives on wind and solar generating capacity alone. They worked perfectly, bringing prices of advanced tech down near market levels. Now let's incentivise deep decarbonization schemes that can handle seasonal intermittency and decarbonize the heating, industrial, and transportation sectors. Edit: The $187/MWh number includes an extremely low battery charging cost of around $0.033/kWh (it's reasonably assumed that charging will occur during energy oversupplies, so it's nearly free).

beefield 8y ago
> This says that if you take free energy, store it in batteries, and pull it back out later, you will have to pay $187/MWh. Yes, but with that cost you can repeat that thousands of times instead of just once.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  Capex for lithium batteries is on the order of $100/kWh (kilo- not mega-). Other battery technologies will not be much better. You are confusing amortized cycle costs for capex costs.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Nope. That's capital cost, which is closer to $800/MWh. See page 11 of Lazard for details. https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-40-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
  - beefield 8y ago
    sorry, that was a brainfart from me.

williesleg 8y ago

Thanks Tesla! Let the haters hate!

wesammikhail 8y ago

A friend of mine (CEO of Enerpoly) recently got his PhD in this space and have made a breakthrough in the battery space (extreme life cycle extension). His most recent prototype can reach less than 40euro / kWh. The space certainly is exciting and will be fun to watch over the next few years! http://enerpoly.com/technology/ http://enerpoly.com/technology/

tim333 8y ago
Glad to see that sort of stuff is coming along. I was thinking there must be something more cost effective than LiIon when you don't need to worry about the weight.
- webninja 8y ago
  NiMH takes up more space than LiIon but costs less for the same amount of energy storage capacity. Toyota uses them in their hybrid cars primarily for cost reasons.
- Iv 8y ago
  In Japan the technology that is installed is sodium-sulfur [1] It operates at 350 celcius, is full of dangerous chemicals and require a certain size to be interesting, but under these conditions, it seems to beat other techs [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery

dylan604 8y ago

Is it better to try to build city-wide battery storage or per house storage? Not knowing the economy of scale of these things, it seems like it would be more affordable to build the smaller per house units like the one Tesla builds. After all, it is the homes that primarily need power at night. Big commercial buildings close at night, and need much less power. Or am I just really naive on the subject?

zacharyaustin11 8y ago
batteries help with supply and demand, more transmission lines also help to get power to places that need it. To fully utilize small batteries need smart meters and smart grid. your Tesla could be used to run the dishwasher at 6 pm peak usage and get recharged at 2m when there is abundant hydropower. Australia uses Tesla large scale battery system to infill gaps like the time between when demand spikes and a generator comes online. very profitable. supply - makes sense to have large batteries to store excess energy produced for power (I like the combo of wind turbines and flywheels allowing more uniform power to be distributed) demand - makes sense for every house to have its own battery to arbitrage on the price difference with real-time pricing. putting a floating price on consumption will hopefully lead to a more efficient market and less coal.
kahnjw 8y ago
I'm certainly no expert but I think tiers of battery storage will be necessary. Some collocated with generation sites, some at distribution sites in cities, and probably local batteries in commercial real estate and neighborhoods if not households. There are both local and global shifts in demand. If it were the case that only local storage options existed the system would be extremely inefficient during abnormally high peak demand that was localized to one area. Think of a heat spell in Central Valley of California. Storage would need to move from tiny batteries scattered throughout The Bay Area to be routed to the Central Valley to power AC units. It would be more efficient if there were larger local storage sites in Sacramento and Fresno. On the other hand if we only had huge storage sites that are collocated with generation sites then as an individual you might be able to game the market through arbitrage with one big highly efficient battery. Take in power at night when its cheap and sell it when it's expensive during the day. Of course everyone will catch on to this and want a battery of their own. This depends on battery efficiency, but if you can get near the efficiency of the battery at the generation site then you can undercut their profit margin. You could at the very least use the local battery when possible to power your own home/business to save some money on your power bill.

outside1234 8y ago

On this topic: Does anyone know why we haven't started to utilize electric cars as a mechanism for nighttime home energy? It seems like having these batteries centralized is actually not the right solution, but instead that they should be at the edge, and connected to the home grid, such that they can be charged during the day, and decharged during the night to some maximum amount specified by the user. A Tesla has 50kWh capacity and I typically use 6kWh at night - it seems like an obvious place we could leverage batteries already in existence to reduce the demand on central generation.

Retric 8y ago
Rang is a rather big deal in electric cars. You would need to be able to tell the car, I don’t need X range today before discharging it to the grid is a good idea. On top of that, discharge cycles reduce battery lifespan so you need to make a lot bore they are worth using. The reverse was considered viable as nighttime energy was cheap and as long as you charged before X AM users would presumably not care.
goodcanadian 8y ago
It has started: https://www.indra.co.uk/v2g https://www.indra.co.uk/v2g Disclaimer: I am an employee.
matt4077 8y ago
We (somewhat) have. I was part of a focus/design thinking group for VW working on this. I think what’s mostly holding it back right now is the relative low prevalence of electric cars and that, as far as I can tell, we have not yet reached the point where renewable energy actually needs batteries. The scheme only makes sense when Wind & Solar actually exceeds demand for significant stretches of time. After that, there are some issues: car manufacturers need to somehow find a scheme for them to make it worthwhile for them. Owners need to be compensated at least for whatever wear it inflicts on batteries. They had simulations showing the scheduling would actually be somewhat easy. This was three or four years ago, and their algorithms were already almost perfect in predicting when you would need your car.
qqqwerty 8y ago

hinkley 8y ago

The history of battery tech has been a very steady drum beat of small, slow improvements in battery capacity of a few percent per year, slowly working in the opposite direction of inflation. The bad news of that 'law' is that you're not going to get a device with 2x battery time next year. The last time I remember Apple pulling off a 2x it was due to a 30% larger battery with 30% higher power density (itself a combination of smaller packaging and better power density) with OS improvements to reduce average power draw. The good news is that eventually there will be a battery that stores 2x as much charge for the same price. So if storage batteries can be profit neutral now, in 5 years you could be looking at a 25% reduction in material costs. And if you can improve labor and installation overhead you might be looking at a profit margin you can sell.

skybrian 8y ago
The comparison to Apple seems pretty unhelpful? Utility-scale batteries are a very different market than batteries in electronics, even if they use some of the same technology. If you can add capacity by making batteries bigger or heavier without increasing cost, that would be fine for storage batteries.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Because these conversations happen all the time, have been happening for at least twenty years, will continue to happen for at least the next twenty, and somehow always feature the same whataboutism responses. It's my preemptive retaliatory strike to bring up a high profile case of someone looking in the press like they pulled of a 2x improvement in 4 years and really they did no such thing at all.
danmaz74 8y ago
For grid scale batteries, capacity/density are much less important than cost, which went down 35% in less than a year.
ajross 8y ago
The cited numbers in the linked article directly contradict this. Your intuition is about battery "capacity", but the number that matters here is battery cost, which is not the same thing. And batteries are getting rapidly cheaper as production scales past the hand-held devices against which your intuition was calibrated and into the realm of vehicle power and grid buffering.

louwrentius 8y ago

For stationary purposes, why wouldn't Lead-Acid batteries work for distributed power storage? I'm aware that those batteries should not be deep-discharged, but you can just add more to compensate. Lead is toxic but those batteries seem to be very recyclable. Any comments?

mchannon 8y ago
Have given this a fair amount of thought and it comes down to a few things: Cycle lifetime of lead is good as long as you don't deep-discharge it, but then if you don't deep-discharge it you need a lot more material. Eventually the lead is going to degrade and then you need a battery changeout, or you need the wherewithal to refurbish the plates and the paste. No one goes to the trouble. Lead-acid doesn't tolerate the cold as much as lithium does. But the big enchirito is the fact that lithium batteries at 100% max capacity are great for cars. After they wear down to 75% max capacity they're no longer suitable (you want a pack with 20 miles' range?) and junk. At that point they're ideal for grid-tie because there's literally not much other use for them. Lead acid requires purpose-building, which I believe would be cost-competitive, but also require a substantial raise for what many consider to be a has-been technology.
- ericd 8y ago
  This is a great point - there's going to be a lot of used lithium car batteries available x years after electric cars go big, and I don't know of any better use for them than grid storage. So it seems like those will be priced at their value for grid storage. Which means that once there's a sufficient supply, they will almost inevitably become a major force in grid storage.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  My company was designing a product that was solar powered with a battery to keep it running at night. We originally were designing in lead acid batteries and the size of the battery needed for that kind of service was too large. De-rate because you're cycling daily and suddenly you need 3X the battery. De-rate again for environmental conditions and add another 2X. We punted and switched to a lithium iron phosphate battery. Because we could get away with a 2.5 amp-hr lion battery vs a 12 amp-hr lead acid. It's cheaper and we don't have to worry about a workman trying to lug 15-20lbs up a ladder.

tomohawk 8y ago

Cobalt supply seems a bit uncertain. One of the main sources is DR Congo. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-truth-about-the-cobalt-crisis https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-truth-about...

Gibbon1 8y ago
Yeah a lot of people point at lithium as the scarce input. But Cobalt for common lion batteries is problematic because it's produced almost entirely as a by-product of copper and zinc (I think) mining. For the other metals used current production dwarfs the supply needed for batteries. However there are lithium iron phosphate batteries.

deleted 8y ago

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hamilyon2 8y ago

Just make sure we don't make same mistakes again, ending with a lot of non-recyclable non-reusable obsolete batteries no one cares about and wants 50 years later. The last thing we need is a dumpster full of toxic waste... all in name of green and "renewable" energy generation!

ausbah 8y ago
>The last thing we need is a dumpster full of toxic waste... all in name of green and "renewable" energy generation! that reminds me more of pushes to bring back nuclear power
- justtopost 8y ago
  A tiny bit of spent fuel, and billions of toxic and unrecyclable cells are far different problems.
  - lukeschlather 8y ago
    Both the spent fuel and the cells are totally recyclable (where recyclable means transforming them into some amount of inert nontoxic stuff and some amount of useful stuff.) I would bet that recycling spent fuel rods is more expensive than recycling spent chemical batteries. Also, the spent batteries, while toxic, don't require 24x7 armed security. Also the spent fuel recycling process potentially increases the need to secure the resultant materials, depending on what you're doing.
- RandomInteger4 8y ago
  In what way does it remind you of pushes to bring back nuclear power? Can you elaborate? Genuinely curious.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  If you had any idea how much nuclear power you can generate before you've filled a single dumpster with spent fuel...

mbostleman 8y ago

What’s the lifetime of these batteries and what’s the environmental impact of their manufacturer and disposal?

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

I wonder if we could end up in a situation where solar and wind power kills traditional generation but still isn't able to provide continuous power. That we might end up with intermittent power by accident.

xbmcuser 8y ago
I personally am seeing 2 distinct systems. 1. Outside the cities people will have their own storage and power generation. 2. Inside the cities power companies start renting out batteries when you contract with them. And they only provider the power with solar and the battery they provide stores it for the nights and sun less days.
Iv 8y ago
It could, and we could even end up with periods during the day with a lot of free electricity to waste and go crazy with. I expect many interesting innovations to come out of this.

Iv 8y ago

Wait... It costs only $187 to store a MWh? Why isn't there a 200$ device in every home that stores energy for the night?

yojo 8y ago
I assume these are the costs at scale. There are likely fixed costs that dramatically increase the unit price of a single home installation.
- Iv 8y ago
  Still, 1MWh is the average monthly consumption of a single household. That means that for a fixed cost of less than 200$ per family we could solve intermittency problems by building, probably one battery per village or city block. It is cheaper than storing water to put pressure in the network. Something seems off in these numbers.
Iv 8y ago
I'll answer my own question: This is not a MWh of installed capacity, this is a MWh of discharge. That is, over the expected lifetime of a storage installation, consuming one MWh from such an installation would cost $187. Still much more expensive than alternatives (about 4x the cost of nuclear) but arriving in the realm of feasibility.