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Hydrogen battery startup says it has $700M order backlog
- rch 4y ago> To date, only prototypes of the Lavo domestic system have been built, and the company has not yet decided where to build a factory.
- fuddle 4y agoSurely it can't be that hard to choose a factory location, considering there are $700M of pending orders.
- croshan 4y agoI imagine planning the construction of a factory is harder than writing a product spec for your average software feature. Not sure that order requests speed up the process.
- discordance 4y agoI admire the audacity and the inventiveness of Lavo, but buying these seems nuts to me. A 40 kWh LiFePO4 battery + grid tie inverter can be had for much less. Safe, well tested and already in high volume manufacturing. Shipped to your door tomorrow.
- ParksNet 4y agoCan we ever reasonably expect to use our cars for that, with vehicle2grid? I have a ~60kWh battery sitting around in my garage, that I typically only use 10% for daily driving.
- liketochill 4y agoHow many cycles is that battery good for, and how much would you have to be paid for some of those cycles. Electricity where I live is 10 cents a kWh so there is $6 of electricity in your battery. Is it worth an extra cycle Every day, halving the life of the battery, for some fraction of $6?
- piceas 4y agoIt might if it prevents buying an extra €6100 worth of batteries for the house.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoLast time I costed out an LiFePO4 battery for my house, it looked like it was about $1/kWh, so $20k for 40 kWh still seems like a good trade. However, battery prices may have gone down by that much since 2 years ago.
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- discordance 4y agoHere’s one example ($341.60 / kWh): https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-ll-lithium-battery-24v-200ah/ https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-ll-lithium-battery-24v-200ah/
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThat still seems far more expensive than what tesla pays. 100kwh packs would cost $34,000 and that is NOT what Tesla pays. Replacement (aka likely retail so more expensive than their OEM/component cost) is 13,500$ for a Tesla 100kwhr battery. I get Tesla has so many investements and supply setup to enable that but... 3x as expensive? From a direct-from-china supplier basically? It annoys me how much battery costs are still sky high for consumers of batteries for all the different cases (lawnmowers, snow blowers, etc), but it shows how much future cost drops will happen with battery-electric goods in the future as supply continues to be scaled. 200 wh/kg LFP and 140 whk/kg sodium ion (next year in production, allegedly) should make for some huge cost savings to so many applications. You know, if they passed savings to the consumer. Which is probably a pipe dream.
- umeshunni 4y agoRumors are that Tesla pays less than $100/kwh Also, https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-100-kwh-for-the-first-time-in-2020-while-market-average-sits-at-137-kwh/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-...
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- ZeroGravitas 4y agoYeah, I dont see how this hydrogen battery is a very good battery. If they could get anywhere near lithium battery efficiency for a round trip then the breakthrough in fuel cell efficiency (and possibly also electrolyzer efficiency) required to do that would be the headline. And if they can't, then they'd probably need to be implausibly low cost to make it worthwile, and they don't seem to be that either. Maybe there's some way of using the waste heat that improves it? Still seems unlikely. So just an expensive, awkward low efficiency battery, when cheap, commodity, high-efficiency batteries are available.
- hnov 4y agoEconomies of scale will bring prices down. It's becoming clear that a combination of energy density, capacity and transport requirements are going to make hydrogen a thing for some applications. Remember that in the 90s GM was using lead acid batteries in its electric cars and the general population laughed at them.
- Stevvo 4y agoThe price quoted in the article is $20,000 which is almost exactly the market cost of a 40 KWh LiFePO4 battery, but most people would probably end up paying more than that. The cost is directly comparable, nothing nuts there.
- controversial97 4y agoIf that thing goes seriously wrong it could be an impressive incendiary device. I would want that to be in it's own separate brick outhouse or on a concrete pad twenty feet from anything that should not be sprayed with fire. See this video of taking apart a USB power pack that runs on hydrogen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y48wCuC3KcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y48wCuC3KcA Lavo seems to be claiming that one of their devices will last 30 years, which is better than a flooded lead acid battery system, if that is actually true.
- tppiotrowski 4y agohttps://youtu.be/y48wCuC3KcA?t=1020 https://youtu.be/y48wCuC3KcA?t=1020 TIL: hydrogen soap bubbles float up
- orev 4y agoMany, many places that are not served by gas lines have external propane tanks now, and those are right next to the house. How would this be any different?
- exhilaration 4y agoOne major difference is that hydrogen tanks are subject to embrittlement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
- random42_ 4y agoAt least in the US, there are regulations for placement of a propane tank that depends, among other things, size and capacity of the tank.
- marcosdumay 4y agoFor a start, propane does not leak through solid metal. It also requires much smaller pressures to be useful.
- controversial97 4y agoI think that a better analogy would be a big tank of acetylene connected to a complicated chemical reactor. Propane does not concern me. A big tank of acetylene would be of concern to insurance companies, the fire brigade and the local safety agency.
- jryb 4y agoI've always wondered why this kind of thing wasn't available much earlier. We've had electrolysis for a long time now - are fuel cells the limiting technology here? Are electrolyzers not as simple as I expect?
- xor99 4y agoPart of it is safety I imagine. Hydrogen can be nasty (e.g. blow up) if not handled correctly in the electrolyser design.
- bparsons 4y agoThey are only 20-30% efficient and have a low energy density compared to hydrocarbon fuel. You need a massive amount of excess grid energy for it to make any sense.
- adrianN 4y agoBatteries were (are?) cheaper and you don't have to handle Hydrogen, which likes to explode.
- CabSauce 4y agoI'm not an expert at all, but I was under the impression that hydrogen requires electricity for it to be synthesized. And that it's quite a bit more efficient just to use electricity in a battery directly instead of going through the process to create hydrogen, store it, and use it. I do think it could be used in situations where the energy density benefits are important (planes, racing).
- bzxcvbn 4y agoWhat do you believe is inside a standard battery? Pure electricity? That doesn't exist. It's a compound that goes through a chemical reaction when you charge it, and which goes through another one when you discharge.
- CabSauce 4y ago"...lithium-ion batteries are 70-80% efficient, and hydrogen is only 25-30% efficient." Source: <https://www.motorbiscuit.com/hydrogen-fuel-cells-vs-batteries/ https://www.motorbiscuit.com/hydrogen-fuel-cells-vs-batterie...>
- xcskier56 4y agoBeen thinking (daydreaming) a lot about a fully off-grid house and how in the summer, you get more solar than you need and in the winter you use much more electricity than you produce. What I'd love to see is some sort of system that used batteries for short term storage, and then during the summer, would convert excess energy to a long-term storage format like methane or LNG. I have not run any numbers on this, but the idea behind it is to stockpile your energy in the summer to be able to make it through the winter without having to resort to some outside source of energy like wood or gas delivery. I initially thought about hydrogen, but given it's storage density, and the problems that SLS has had with leaks, taking the additional step to convert into methane would greatly simplify storage and use, and likely improve reliability since you'd be able to use COTS products for natural gas instead of custom hydrogen storage
- dasudasu 4y agoVanadium redox flow batteries have a decent energy storage density and can scale very well but ultimately it does add to the cost of the energy being produced as opposed to some tech that doesn’t need it.
- bufferoverflow 4y agoIdeas are easy. Implementations are either hard or expensive. Converting solar to hydrogen, then to methane, then to electricity requires a pretty big setup. If you want to be efficient, you have to do all that at a large scale with a proper power plant turbine. It will not work well at a scale of one house.
- beambot 4y agoIs hydrogen -> methane -> turbine more efficient for electricity generation than just hydrogen -> fuel cell?
- bufferoverflow 4y agoProbably not, fuel cells are quite efficient. The problem is, do you want to deal with storing hydrogen? It's very annoying.
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- ngcc_hk 4y agoDoes it leak? It is a solid state and I guess unlike the nasa liquid one and no senator become the administrator game etc, it is easier. But at least someone has to ask the question. Hence, does it leak? The other issue is how it compete with lithium battery it also used. May be unlike car …
- mgkimsal 4y agoMight be a dumb question, but would they be profitable? I worked at a small company that had $1.5M in 'backorders'. But it was going to take more than $1.5M to fulfill the orders, which ... is not a place you want to be in (regardless of how many zeroes?). Half the company was laid off shortly after this 'milestone' was reached. Now.. perhaps with more zeroes... there's seemingly enough wiggle room to move stuff around in the books to balance things out...? Also, I realize it might be premature asking that type of question, but... having been burned once, it sticks to top of mind.
- tootie 4y agoThey're not even in production, so nobody knows really. Reading the article they have accepted $65M AUD in deposits which may or may not be refundable. The $1B AUD in demand seems to be a very speculative number likely based on the amount of interest they've received rather than any actual commitments. Probably a ton of customers saying "We'll buy these if you can actually make them". We've seen enough this flame out to stay skeptical, but the fact that they have a prototype and cash deposits is at least a positive sign.
- Kasutaja11 4y agoPatents for such things that would help humanity and earth get better should be invalidated. Fuck your profits, let's have better battery tech. Patent your iphone round corners all you want
- controversial97 4y agoIt appears that this system turns tapwater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. I'm not a chemist, but I messed around with electrolysis decades ago when I was a teen who was into chemistry sets. I am not convinced that tapwater is anywhere near pure enough that this system can work without frequently changing electrodes and removing gunge, even with some filtering. Electrolysis does not just split the water molecules, there is a chemical reaction with whatever else is dissolved in the water.
- theincredulousk 4y agoGood intuition about the importance of pure water. In professional engineering, filtering water is a sufficiently solved problem. Even for consumer use, you can buy multi-stage filters for home use that perform well enough to make water taste "bad" because it is so pure. It would likely require periodic replacement, proportional to use, of relatively expensive filter(s) - not regularly changing electrodes or invasive deep cleaning.
- controversial97 4y agoWhat would you make the electrodes out of? Copper will react with the chlorine in tapwater and make an insoluble green scum of copper chloride. Electrolysis with stainless steel makes highly toxic hexavalent chromium. Platinum is astoundingly expensive, even for plating. How expensive a filter is needed to remove 99.999% of the chlorine? The thing with electrodes is that a fiftieth of a millimeter of non-condutive crap on the surface hugely reduces the effectiveness. Around here the bottom third of my kettle has a tenth of a mil of limescale.
- theincredulousk 4y agoeven type II water, which is a standard output of off-the-shelf lab water filtration systems, only has <= 5 ug/L of chlorides, sodium, silica. And Platinum is like $30 a gram. There is 1/5th of a gram of Gold in a standard desktop computer and Gold is twice as expensive as Platinum.
- gamblor956 4y agoA lot of people didn't read the article before commenting. 1) This battery is not affected by hydrogen embrittlement, in which hydrogen reacts with metals to form hydrides, and is not explosive like compressed hydgrogen, because it stores hydrogen in the form of metal hydrides (but note that hydrides are still very flammable). They did not disclose what metal(s) are used for storage. 2) They don't have a factory, but have been in talks to outsource the actual manufacture of the utility-scale version of the product.
- panick21_ 4y agoAnd there are 10s of EV firms with billions in orders.