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At a certain point you would think it's cheaper to soak up excess energy with something other than lithium-ion, like gravity batteries or flywheels, but apparen
by umvi 6y ago
At a certain point you would think it's cheaper to soak up excess energy with something other than lithium-ion, like gravity batteries or flywheels, but apparently not...
- choeger 6y agoActually I think batteries will be the cheapest option for a very long time. They can be produced at a much higher scale than today (I wouldn't be surprised if we see 10x the production in the next five to ten years and consequently prices below $30/kwh) and they can be setup incrementally. Most alternatives are fixed-size all-or-nothing affairs. Oh and the biggest downside of batteries, their low energy density doesn't really matter for stationary storage.
- giarc 6y agoNot an expert by anymeans, but it takes a long time for those to start producing energy when required (5 mins+). I believe in Australia, the Tesla battery was able to start providing energy in seconds.
- rout39574 6y agoI don't know that this applies at utility scale, but on a home scale they respond within the cycle; that is, they take up the slack before the next 60hz peak or trough.
- bpodgursky 6y agoPumped-water storage is a big thing elsewhere, but afaik Texas doesn't have any big mountains to make this convenient. (also, these dams have failed before to great misfortune downstream)
- nine_k 6y agoLithium, iron, phosphorus, and oxygen are all pretty abundant and cheap. The economies of scale and better processes need to kick in (even more) to make them cheaper. Say, steel was very expensive until the Bessemer process became widespread. Gravity batteries are very low-density, and flywheels are prone to dangerous catastrophic failures. They also need mechanical generators which aren't free. I'm suspect that chemical batteries are the future.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoWhat about cobalt?
- nine_k 6y agoThese batteries do not use cobalt, as mentioned in the article; they are lithium iron phosphate. (These are the elements I listed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
- DarmokJalad1701 6y agoNot all batteries need cobalt. These are LiFePO4 batteries.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoIt is actually. Pumped energy storage is crazy cheap and efficient, assuming you have land and water.
- thehappypm 6y agoBatteries are just straight amazing, aren't they? Every other solution is just so complicated. Like pumped storage. You run power to a powerful electric pump, which moves water into a huge reservoir, which produces power through a hydro plant. Or a flywheel. You run electricity to a motor, which spins a huge piece of levitated metal, which then can run a generator. A battery is an inert block you send electricity directly into and get electricity directly out of. It's quite literally a black box of electrical energy storage. No other solution is ever going to be quite that simple -- electricity in, electricity out. There's always some other complexity, some other mechanism, some other pump, some shielding, some motor.
- outworlder 6y agoCapacitors are even simpler. Even supercapacitors cannot compete with old battery chemistries, but it really doesn't get much simpler than storing electrons in conductive material.
- jfengel 6y agoI'm used to thinking of chemistry as a one-way street. The "moving parts" of chemistry are untold gazillions of molecules. That introduces a lot of opportunities for entropy, and makes it very hard to reverse a chemical reaction at anywhere near the efficiency of the forward reaction. But modern battery chemistry upends that intuition. I'll be honest that I'm not 100% certain how. Whatever it is, it works unbelievably well.