4 ms·

More the competition the better for the world. I still feel a well designed Lithium Iron Phosphate or Sodium based battery with > 5000 cycles can prove very co

More the competition the better for the world. I still feel a well designed Lithium Iron Phosphate or Sodium based battery with > 5000 cycles can prove very cost effective if used properly. The high no of cycles reduces the levelized cost of storage significantly. Difficulty is scaling this to beyond 1-2 days at most.

swayvil 4y ago
Competition is just a euphemism for fighting. You're saying that more fighting is better. Isn't that crazy? You'd think that fighting would be wasteful and upsetting. That peace would be better. It's a crazy world.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I'm not convinced competition is a euphemism for fighting. Competition can be friendly.
  - swayvil 4y ago
    You got any examples of "friendly, nonfighting type competition" in the business world?
    - rglullis 4y ago
      All of the oligopolies? Do you really believe that, e.g, tech companies are "fighting" each other? What about Big Pharma? The Food industry? In any case, you are arguing semantics. Competition can be friendly.
      - swayvil 4y ago
        The tech, food and pharma industries fight each other tooth and nail. I don't think this "friendly competition" happens in the business world. It's just an ordinary fight.
        rglullis 4y ago
        I guess we have different ideas for "fighting tooth and nail". - Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt would regularly discuss matters together. - They have pretty solid "do not poach" agreements. - None of them actively blocks their products from running on each other platforms - None of them launch products with the sole intent of destroying each others cash cow. E.g, Google could release flagship products at budget prices forever, just to take from Apple's market share. They certainly wouldn't lose money over it. Why don't they do it? Competition? Ok, but it never comes to the point where they actually want to inflict damage on one another. This is as friendly as it gets.
        8note 4y ago
        Pepsi not releasing coke's formula despite knowing it Bill Gates bailing out apple
    - macinjosh 4y ago
      https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-to-invest-150-million-in-apple/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-to-invest-...
- Bakary 4y ago
  Forget the word competition. Just think of it as smart people having an incentive to produce something with beneficial effects or externalities for once.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
The interesting thing is when they've been around for 30 years (providing they don't decay too much with time). A sodium battery with 100 useful cycles and 10 years left in it is great for cycling once a month. But even without that, if we see costs of $50/kWh then you only need to cycle 300 times to make it more worthwhile than some generation technologies..
- robocat 4y ago
  Don’t some battery chemistries have much higher self-discharge rates as they get older? If so, it might be uneconomic/wasteful to try to use old batteries.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    That's one consideration (and if storage gets as cheap as variable generation it will be the most important one). With the advent of cheap solar the value of moving the energy is a fair bit higher than its cost. So the economics become mostly a matter of cost of storage vs. duration. If you can move energy from a time where it's the least valuable generation of a system that costs $15/MWh net (or even less in future systems) to a time when the cheapest scalable generation is $50/MWh then you've got a lot of room for losing some. There's incentive for the solar system to overbuild 2x or 3x just to sell that 3pm-sunset energy so from their point of view they can sell the sunrise-3pm energy at any price over $0 and be profitable. A hypothetical bad second hand battery might be the most valuable (and thus highest bidding) use, but it will have to compete with other opportunistic loads.
adrr 4y ago
For places with high car ownership, you can use electric cars as the battery storage. Just need lithium iron phosphate batteries to be standard in EVs. Telsa is using them in some of their models in China.

swayvil 4y ago

Competition is just a euphemism for fighting. You're saying that more fighting is better. Isn't that crazy? You'd think that fighting would be wasteful and upsetting. That peace would be better. It's a crazy world.

nicoburns 4y ago
I'm not convinced competition is a euphemism for fighting. Competition can be friendly.
- swayvil 4y ago
  You got any examples of "friendly, nonfighting type competition" in the business world?
  - rglullis 4y ago
    All of the oligopolies? Do you really believe that, e.g, tech companies are "fighting" each other? What about Big Pharma? The Food industry? In any case, you are arguing semantics. Competition can be friendly.
    - swayvil 4y ago
      The tech, food and pharma industries fight each other tooth and nail. I don't think this "friendly competition" happens in the business world. It's just an ordinary fight.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        I guess we have different ideas for "fighting tooth and nail". - Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt would regularly discuss matters together. - They have pretty solid "do not poach" agreements. - None of them actively blocks their products from running on each other platforms - None of them launch products with the sole intent of destroying each others cash cow. E.g, Google could release flagship products at budget prices forever, just to take from Apple's market share. They certainly wouldn't lose money over it. Why don't they do it? Competition? Ok, but it never comes to the point where they actually want to inflict damage on one another. This is as friendly as it gets.
      - 8note 4y ago
        Pepsi not releasing coke's formula despite knowing it Bill Gates bailing out apple
  - macinjosh 4y ago
    https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-to-invest-150-million-in-apple/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-to-invest-...
Bakary 4y ago
Forget the word competition. Just think of it as smart people having an incentive to produce something with beneficial effects or externalities for once.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

The interesting thing is when they've been around for 30 years (providing they don't decay too much with time). A sodium battery with 100 useful cycles and 10 years left in it is great for cycling once a month. But even without that, if we see costs of $50/kWh then you only need to cycle 300 times to make it more worthwhile than some generation technologies..

robocat 4y ago
Don’t some battery chemistries have much higher self-discharge rates as they get older? If so, it might be uneconomic/wasteful to try to use old batteries.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  That's one consideration (and if storage gets as cheap as variable generation it will be the most important one). With the advent of cheap solar the value of moving the energy is a fair bit higher than its cost. So the economics become mostly a matter of cost of storage vs. duration. If you can move energy from a time where it's the least valuable generation of a system that costs $15/MWh net (or even less in future systems) to a time when the cheapest scalable generation is $50/MWh then you've got a lot of room for losing some. There's incentive for the solar system to overbuild 2x or 3x just to sell that 3pm-sunset energy so from their point of view they can sell the sunrise-3pm energy at any price over $0 and be profitable. A hypothetical bad second hand battery might be the most valuable (and thus highest bidding) use, but it will have to compete with other opportunistic loads.

adrr 4y ago

For places with high car ownership, you can use electric cars as the battery storage. Just need lithium iron phosphate batteries to be standard in EVs. Telsa is using them in some of their models in China.