5 ms·

> A battery for 100/kwh can be used several 100 to 1000s of cycles. You're making the same error as reitzensteinm. The fact that you can charge and discharge a

> A battery for 100/kwh can be used several 100 to 1000s of cycles. You're making the same error as reitzensteinm. The fact that you can charge and discharge a 1 KWh battery a thousand times doesn't make it a 1 MWh battery. If the United States wants to use 80% renewables we need 12 hours of energy storage, which works out to 6 TWh. Even at a very generous cost estimate of $100/KWh, this works out to 600 billion dollars. The fact that batteries can be cycled for a few thousand cycles doesn't make this any cheaper. It just means we "only" need to spend 600 billion dollars every 5 to 10 years. And we'd still be burning fossil fuels at about 1/3rd the rate we currently do.

adrianN 6y ago
You can avoid a lot of storage requirements by making your grid smarter and electrifying transportation and heating. 60% renewables are possible with hardly any storage at all, certainly less than 12 hours. Shifting demand is always cheaper than storage. Once you've electrified transportation, you have hundreds of millions of car batteries that can help out with demand spikes. That distributes the high upfront cost of battery storage somewhat. Car batteries that are no longer good for transportation can than be repurposed for grid storage, hopefully much cheaper than buying new batteries. To get to 100% renewables you most likely need chemical storage as hydrogen or methane.
- Manfredo_1 6y ago
  Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goes down. A big part of why renewable generation is so high in Germany is because they mostly heat their homes with gas (which emits carbon, but doesn't factor into electricity generation statistics). Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental mismatch between the staggering amount of batteries that get produced and the amount of storage that is required. Not to mention, I'm dubious if this scheme would even work. Why would I hook my car storage up to the grid? It's going to eat away at the battery life of my car. This essentially just offloads the cost of battery storage to consumers by decreasing the battery life of their EVs due to the constant charge and discharging.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Eletrifying heating helps a lot if you integrate it with a smart grid. People generally don't care whether their home is 21 or 23 degrees warm, but the difference enables a lot of load shifting. I know people who take advantage of this today. This is btw, also true for many industrial processes. You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary reward.
    - Manfredo_1 6y ago
      You use the word "smart grid" as though it just automatically makes electricity usage go down. A smart grid works by redistributing load to when there is power. A smart grid almost always needs storage, unless it's doing simple things like running your dryer where it's just a matter of turning on your appliances at a certain time of day. If you're at he from 7pm to 8am, and you want your home to be heated while you're there a smart grid isn't going to help you. A smart grid would tell to to be at home at different hours of the day, but people aren't appliances. And again, car batteries being used or not, we wouldn't have enough battery storage fulfill the storage requirements for decades or even centuries, and by then the first batteries we built will have long since worn out.
      - adrianN 6y ago
        I use "smart grid" to mean that the electricity provider has a measure of control over the load. For example they can turn heating in your home on or off as long as the temperature stays within a band defined by you. This is not science fiction, it exists today. I know people who use it already.
        bosie 6y ago
        How much can the provider shave off the load though? if i set my band between 21 and 23 degrees, is the reduction more than a few percent max? Doesn't seem to make a dent given the peak requirement when the majority of the people all shift locations (i.e. go home)?
- baud147258 6y ago
  Also using car batteries seem an odd choice, as the mismatch between renewable production and electrical consumption (duck curve) happens in the early morning and in the evening, just when people are about to drive (so they don't want to have their batteries emptied by the grid), are driving (so their batteries aren't connected to the grid) or have finished their drive so the batteries aren't full
  - etothepii 6y ago
    Very few commutes require the draining of an electric car battery. If the cars were parked plugged in during the day they whey would likely have sufficient capacity to help with the main after-work spikes, base load nuclear during the evening would then recharge over night.
    - Manfredo_1 6y ago
      Peak demand for electricity occurs in the evening. If you're going to fulfill this demand with nuclear power, the just run the nuclear power plants at full capacity all day and don't bother with any storage or solar panels.
jerven 6y ago
600 billion = +/- overnight cost of 30 nuclear powerplants (AP-1000). And would struggle with providing 500Gw that the battery above could. At that scale everything is expensive, but the market still seems to say that Nuclear is more expensive than the other options. My hand-wavy maths aside, the people who sign the checks seem to agree that today (2020, it is cheaper to get power from solar/wind + battery than nuclear). Cost of wind and solar today is what nuclear needs to beat, comparison to gas and coal are not relevant for new build systems (as in neither are getting the same kind of new build capacity as solar/wind in the coming years).
- Manfredo_1 6y ago
  The batteries need to be replaced every 5 to 10 years depending on how many cycles they can endure. By comparison, the AP-1000 is rated to last 60 years. Furthermore you're being very pessimistic with the $20 billion dollar cost estimate for the AP1000. Plants with equivalent output have been built for less than $10 billion. When you include the cost of storage, solar and wind is still enormously more expensive than nuclear. The reality is that we don't event know what storage at this scale would even look like. It would take 800 years of global battery production at the current production rates to reach the 3 weeks of energy storage required to decarbonize the US with renewables. And that's with the infeasible idea we're dedicating 100% of batteries to grid storage: no EVs, no smartphones, all grid storage. And again, this is just for the US's storage needs. Forget cost, energy storage at this scale isn't event possible with one current levels of technology.
  - nullc 6y ago
    Batteries can be build that last more than 5 to 10 years. e.g. https://ironedison.com/nickel-iron-ni-fe-battery https://ironedison.com/nickel-iron-ni-fe-battery
    - Manfredo_1 6y ago
      Nickel-Iron batteries have 10-20 times less energy density and are more difficult to manufacture. You might get a battery that lasts 30-50 years instead of 5-10 years but at a cost increase that's greater than the gain in number of cycles.

adrianN 6y ago

You can avoid a lot of storage requirements by making your grid smarter and electrifying transportation and heating. 60% renewables are possible with hardly any storage at all, certainly less than 12 hours. Shifting demand is always cheaper than storage. Once you've electrified transportation, you have hundreds of millions of car batteries that can help out with demand spikes. That distributes the high upfront cost of battery storage somewhat. Car batteries that are no longer good for transportation can than be repurposed for grid storage, hopefully much cheaper than buying new batteries. To get to 100% renewables you most likely need chemical storage as hydrogen or methane.

Manfredo_1 6y ago
Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goes down. A big part of why renewable generation is so high in Germany is because they mostly heat their homes with gas (which emits carbon, but doesn't factor into electricity generation statistics). Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental mismatch between the staggering amount of batteries that get produced and the amount of storage that is required. Not to mention, I'm dubious if this scheme would even work. Why would I hook my car storage up to the grid? It's going to eat away at the battery life of my car. This essentially just offloads the cost of battery storage to consumers by decreasing the battery life of their EVs due to the constant charge and discharging.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Eletrifying heating helps a lot if you integrate it with a smart grid. People generally don't care whether their home is 21 or 23 degrees warm, but the difference enables a lot of load shifting. I know people who take advantage of this today. This is btw, also true for many industrial processes. You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary reward.
  - Manfredo_1 6y ago
    You use the word "smart grid" as though it just automatically makes electricity usage go down. A smart grid works by redistributing load to when there is power. A smart grid almost always needs storage, unless it's doing simple things like running your dryer where it's just a matter of turning on your appliances at a certain time of day. If you're at he from 7pm to 8am, and you want your home to be heated while you're there a smart grid isn't going to help you. A smart grid would tell to to be at home at different hours of the day, but people aren't appliances. And again, car batteries being used or not, we wouldn't have enough battery storage fulfill the storage requirements for decades or even centuries, and by then the first batteries we built will have long since worn out.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      I use "smart grid" to mean that the electricity provider has a measure of control over the load. For example they can turn heating in your home on or off as long as the temperature stays within a band defined by you. This is not science fiction, it exists today. I know people who use it already.
      - bosie 6y ago
        How much can the provider shave off the load though? if i set my band between 21 and 23 degrees, is the reduction more than a few percent max? Doesn't seem to make a dent given the peak requirement when the majority of the people all shift locations (i.e. go home)?
baud147258 6y ago
Also using car batteries seem an odd choice, as the mismatch between renewable production and electrical consumption (duck curve) happens in the early morning and in the evening, just when people are about to drive (so they don't want to have their batteries emptied by the grid), are driving (so their batteries aren't connected to the grid) or have finished their drive so the batteries aren't full
- etothepii 6y ago
  Very few commutes require the draining of an electric car battery. If the cars were parked plugged in during the day they whey would likely have sufficient capacity to help with the main after-work spikes, base load nuclear during the evening would then recharge over night.
  - Manfredo_1 6y ago
    Peak demand for electricity occurs in the evening. If you're going to fulfill this demand with nuclear power, the just run the nuclear power plants at full capacity all day and don't bother with any storage or solar panels.

jerven 6y ago

600 billion = +/- overnight cost of 30 nuclear powerplants (AP-1000). And would struggle with providing 500Gw that the battery above could. At that scale everything is expensive, but the market still seems to say that Nuclear is more expensive than the other options. My hand-wavy maths aside, the people who sign the checks seem to agree that today (2020, it is cheaper to get power from solar/wind + battery than nuclear). Cost of wind and solar today is what nuclear needs to beat, comparison to gas and coal are not relevant for new build systems (as in neither are getting the same kind of new build capacity as solar/wind in the coming years).

Manfredo_1 6y ago
The batteries need to be replaced every 5 to 10 years depending on how many cycles they can endure. By comparison, the AP-1000 is rated to last 60 years. Furthermore you're being very pessimistic with the $20 billion dollar cost estimate for the AP1000. Plants with equivalent output have been built for less than $10 billion. When you include the cost of storage, solar and wind is still enormously more expensive than nuclear. The reality is that we don't event know what storage at this scale would even look like. It would take 800 years of global battery production at the current production rates to reach the 3 weeks of energy storage required to decarbonize the US with renewables. And that's with the infeasible idea we're dedicating 100% of batteries to grid storage: no EVs, no smartphones, all grid storage. And again, this is just for the US's storage needs. Forget cost, energy storage at this scale isn't event possible with one current levels of technology.
- nullc 6y ago
  Batteries can be build that last more than 5 to 10 years. e.g. https://ironedison.com/nickel-iron-ni-fe-battery https://ironedison.com/nickel-iron-ni-fe-battery
  - Manfredo_1 6y ago
    Nickel-Iron batteries have 10-20 times less energy density and are more difficult to manufacture. You might get a battery that lasts 30-50 years instead of 5-10 years but at a cost increase that's greater than the gain in number of cycles.