8 ms·

People also severely overestimate the cost of battery storage today, and underestimate the cost curve of how it's decreasing. For example, for batteries charge

People also severely overestimate the cost of battery storage today, and underestimate the cost curve of how it's decreasing. For example, for batteries charged directly from a paired solar installation, the cost is estimated to be $85-$158/MWh. [0] The rest of the solar instal costs $28-$37/MWh, unsubsidized. If 3/4 of energy consumption is from the primary solar install, and 1/4 from storage, then you have a firm energy source at a cost of $42-$67/MWh. The national average for generation cost of electricity is something like $50-$60/MWh, (with the rest of the average price of $130/MWh going to transmission and distribution). So today, solar plus storage offers cost competitive, zero carbon energy in the average US location. And costs are going to drop by 50% over the next decade or two. We have a really bright energy future, where energy is cheap and plentiful and carbon free. And the faster we build new renewable resources, the faster the technology gets better, and the faster the prices drop. Slowing down the deployment of renewables is a huge risk that makes us all poorer, and also happens to make our climate challenge worse. We should be doing everything we can to massively expand solar wind and battery production capacity and deployment, as fast as possible. The tech is ready, it just needs to be deployed. [0] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

dahfizz 4y ago
Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. Batteries will not provide grid scale storage in our lifetime, IMO. I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  I’m going to guess lots of factories that we mass produce, aka gigafactories.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? The usual place: factories. Which are getting built as fast as people can get the investment money and the planning permits. > It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, Even if that was correct (from what I've seen, half of what we need is already being planned and is scheduled for completion before 2030), even then it would be fine, as we only have a critical need of them when renewables become a dominant part of the power grid. > assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. We do, despite the memes. > I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times If the whole world did that with fission, we'd run out of fissile materials pretty fast.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    > despite the memes. As far as I can determine the typical commenter believes that a lithium-ion battery is just solid lithium. I believe this is a result of a sustained campaign of disinformation driven by fossil fuel interests. In reality, a standard 18650 cell contains less than a gram of lithium.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Who cares about breakdown by mass. Break a battery cell down by cost: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a... The cathode alone contributes to half of the cost of a lithium ion battery. Shortages of lithium are indeed driving up the prices of batteries. If doesn't matter if a small amount of it is necessary, if obtaining even that small amount is expensive.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        And yet, all battery makers are continuously reducing the need for expensive materials in their cathodes, because humans respond to incentives. Never bet against human ingenuity.
- epistasis 4y ago
  > Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. What is your basis for the second part, that batteries can not scale? This seems to be an article of faith among many, but there's no data that can back it up, and it doesn't pass a basic sniff test, using common comparisons. For example, a car that drives 300,000 miles in its lifetime, at say 30mpg, would consume 10,000 gallons of gasoline, weighing approximately 100,000 pounds. This is an order of magnitude more weight than the battery, and the battery can be recycled into new batteries afterwards, it's not even consumed. Why, with this fantastic reduction in the amount of input materials needed, would batteries of all things run out of materials? State your reasoning, please! We are currently producing ~300GWh lithium ion batteries per year, and will likely 10x our production every five years, according to the industry reference I heard a year or two ago. The idea that we won't have grid scale batteries within our lifetimes is contradicted by actual reality, today. Competing batteries to fission is a sever blind spot that seems endemic. We have a shipping off the shelf tech that is scaling at an amazing rate, yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. This is exactly the blindness people have about batteries, and it's why all the traditional car manufacturers have been caught completely flat footed in the transition to EVs All other areas of energy are going to be caught completely flat footed because Pepe for some reason believe fantasies about batteries rather than the real operating truth right in front of their eyes. What I can't figure out is, why?
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    > yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. That's fusion, not fission. Though certainly it's possible fission has missed the window and, by the time terawatts of it could be designed, approved and built, solar, wind and others will have taken over.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Fission at scale is science fiction. There are no closed loop fuel cycles and 6TWe of PWR reactors would exhaust world reserves un under 5 years. Reprocessing all of the waste adds maybe a year, and enriching the tailings adds maybe another year. Sea mining and breeders are significantly less real than 46% efficient solar or 1200Wh/kg AlS batteries.
- pseudosavant 4y ago
  I think people need to realize that not all batteries are chemical. There are many ways to store/recover electric energy: a motor/generator with weights, a pump/turbine with water, motor/generator with a spinning kinetic mass in a vacuum, etc.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    People also need to realize that none of these solutions have been proven to work at scale.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      So, like nuclear? Which also has not been proven to work at the scale needed to decarbonize the world. In particular, current commercial burner reactors are unsuitable for that, as the uranium runs out very quickly at that scale.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        Not sure which world you've been living in, but nuclear has been proven to work at scale, while requiring significantly less area than solar or wind, and being able to be load bearing and load following.
        pfdietz 4y ago
        If the world's entire current primary energy demand were supplied with burner reactors -- about 6000 3MW(th) reactors -- the world's estimated uranium resource would last about five years. Your "at scale" is a tiny fraction of the scale that would be needed, and at that larger, true scale, current commercially demonstrated nuclear technology would quickly fail. Breeders would be needed to enable use of much more expensive uranium ores (or thorium), and those are not demonstrated at even your smaller scale.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load. Where is the uranium coming from? Commercial fast breeders are as mythical as a 10000Wh/kg AlS battery. All nuclear reactors that aren't fiction are just a small multiplier on the U235 supply including DT fusion.
lob_it 4y ago
Diversification already has lingo for this in the 21st century: 1) Blue sky innovation - most intermittent renewables. They have toxic downsides too. 2) Gray sky innovation - Oil, gas, nuclear, etc fit perfectly here. Much of it is tried and true technology... And yes, it has downsides too 3) No-sky innovation - With space exploration, energy on the moon, mars, spacecraft, etc may be better served with laminar flow rotors using light/lasers... Just another option with diversification. It looks like stats on 50% of the plastic on the planet have been created after 2006 seem legit, with the trash heaps in the oceans (not to mention plastic breaking down into water system contaminates). Battery technology recycling just looks like another source of toxic groundwater for future generations, since recycling has been gibberish with pretty words thus far. The reuseable rocket technologies mean that battery technology, nuclear waste, etc can be jettisoned towards the sun after their useful life and that landfills may be a thing of the past. Know your innovations and how well diversification copes with the farce of "one size fits all". Four seasons still exist in many places.
Manuel_D 4y ago
Quite the contrary, people vastly underestimate the cost of battery storage and neglect the fact that it's cost is increasing as input materials become more scarce. Actual real-world cost of deployment is mugh higher than estimates [1] frequently exceeding $500/kWh. Estimates often exclude the cost of installation, maintenance, transformers to handle voltage conversion, etc. This is how $130/KWh battery costs turn into over $500/KWh of real world cost. Furthermore, the existing global production figures are somewhere around 400GWh per year. The world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. Actually attempting to providing a significant amount of battery storage would spike the cost of batteries as demand exceeds supply. The input materials for batteries have seen skyrocketing costs in the last couple years [2], and only 24% of battery cost is manufacturing. The rest is input materials. It is very dubious that batter production can keep up with the massive scale required by grid storage. Batteries can (and are) being deployed. But not at a scale that makes any difference, and it's unlikely they ever will be. 1. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co... 2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium 3. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
- epistasis 4y ago
  > Actual real-world cost of deployment is mugh higher than estimates [1] frequently exceeding $500/kWh. Can you point why you think this number, for installed battery cost, is somehow a contradiction of the numbers I posted? Additionally, temporary supply shortages due to massive new markers opening up as the cost drops is completely expected. All the temporary higher prices finance massive production capacity expansion that drops prices in the future. This is a well understood dynamic that we see again and again, even in fossil due production! > Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. There are two extreme errors with writing something like this: 1) assuming that battery production stays constant, when it has been growing 10x/5 years, and we are seeing unprecedented demand for new applications. 2) Using primary energy production for comparison to electrified electricity use, when electrified versions of the fossil fuel versions require 3x-4x less electricity. This sort of basic error is as bad as comparing 1GW of solar to 1GW of nuclear without correcting for capacity factor. With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade. For comparison, it takes more than a decade for us to build a nuclear reactor in the West, so if we are in course to have a fully scaled battery production supply chain for global use, whereas we can't even scale nuclear construction in the US to match the rate at which we will be retiring our aging fleet over the next 20 years. It's time to take a serious look at what carbon-free energy tech is on the table right now and start deploying it as fast as possible, right now, today. At the same time, we should continue research into fanciful ideas like small modular nuclear reactors, in case they pan out. But we need to go to war with the army we have right now.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> for batteries charged directly from a paired solar installation, the cost is estimated to be $85-$158/MWh This is theoretical. When I got home solar quotes, the difference before incentives between an install with and without 27 kWh Tesla backup was over $1,300/kWh.
- epistasis 4y ago
  $85-$158/MWh is not theoretical, this is real life utility scale installations. Tiny tiny residential scale battery installations have that 5x markup that you are observing. If you were to build your own, it's not hard to get to $300/kWh-capacity, all in, these days, even for small installs of a dozen kWh, using Chinese LFP batteries. But you won't get any of the support that your local installer gives you, and you had better know what you are doing really well...
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > $85-$158/MWh is not theoretical, this is real life utility scale installations Do you have an example? The actual cost in 2019 in the U.S. was $300 to $500/kWh [1]. The cost for the batteries alone was $190, but that’s akin to counting the cost of nuclear power by the fuel alone. [1] https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_battery_storage https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_battery_...
    - epistasis 4y ago
      I think you are comparing two different things. The CapEx and installation costs are typically measured in $/kWh for capacity of the battery (though some costs scale by the $/kW, for example the inverters...). The cost of storing and delivering the energy from the battery over its lifetime, is refered to the level used cost of storage. This includes operations costs, debt service, etc. is measured by the cost of delivering energy to the grid, and grid-scale costs are typically measured in $/MWh (as opposed to residential costs typically quotes in $/kWh).
      - 4y ago

dahfizz 4y ago

Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. Batteries will not provide grid scale storage in our lifetime, IMO. I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load.

throwaway5959 4y ago
I’m going to guess lots of factories that we mass produce, aka gigafactories.
ben_w 4y ago
> Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? The usual place: factories. Which are getting built as fast as people can get the investment money and the planning permits. > It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, Even if that was correct (from what I've seen, half of what we need is already being planned and is scheduled for completion before 2030), even then it would be fine, as we only have a critical need of them when renewables become a dominant part of the power grid. > assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. We do, despite the memes. > I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times If the whole world did that with fission, we'd run out of fissile materials pretty fast.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > despite the memes. As far as I can determine the typical commenter believes that a lithium-ion battery is just solid lithium. I believe this is a result of a sustained campaign of disinformation driven by fossil fuel interests. In reality, a standard 18650 cell contains less than a gram of lithium.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Who cares about breakdown by mass. Break a battery cell down by cost: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a... The cathode alone contributes to half of the cost of a lithium ion battery. Shortages of lithium are indeed driving up the prices of batteries. If doesn't matter if a small amount of it is necessary, if obtaining even that small amount is expensive.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      And yet, all battery makers are continuously reducing the need for expensive materials in their cathodes, because humans respond to incentives. Never bet against human ingenuity.
epistasis 4y ago
> Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. What is your basis for the second part, that batteries can not scale? This seems to be an article of faith among many, but there's no data that can back it up, and it doesn't pass a basic sniff test, using common comparisons. For example, a car that drives 300,000 miles in its lifetime, at say 30mpg, would consume 10,000 gallons of gasoline, weighing approximately 100,000 pounds. This is an order of magnitude more weight than the battery, and the battery can be recycled into new batteries afterwards, it's not even consumed. Why, with this fantastic reduction in the amount of input materials needed, would batteries of all things run out of materials? State your reasoning, please! We are currently producing ~300GWh lithium ion batteries per year, and will likely 10x our production every five years, according to the industry reference I heard a year or two ago. The idea that we won't have grid scale batteries within our lifetimes is contradicted by actual reality, today. Competing batteries to fission is a sever blind spot that seems endemic. We have a shipping off the shelf tech that is scaling at an amazing rate, yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. This is exactly the blindness people have about batteries, and it's why all the traditional car manufacturers have been caught completely flat footed in the transition to EVs All other areas of energy are going to be caught completely flat footed because Pepe for some reason believe fantasies about batteries rather than the real operating truth right in front of their eyes. What I can't figure out is, why?
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. That's fusion, not fission. Though certainly it's possible fission has missed the window and, by the time terawatts of it could be designed, approved and built, solar, wind and others will have taken over.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Fission at scale is science fiction. There are no closed loop fuel cycles and 6TWe of PWR reactors would exhaust world reserves un under 5 years. Reprocessing all of the waste adds maybe a year, and enriching the tailings adds maybe another year. Sea mining and breeders are significantly less real than 46% efficient solar or 1200Wh/kg AlS batteries.
pseudosavant 4y ago
I think people need to realize that not all batteries are chemical. There are many ways to store/recover electric energy: a motor/generator with weights, a pump/turbine with water, motor/generator with a spinning kinetic mass in a vacuum, etc.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  People also need to realize that none of these solutions have been proven to work at scale.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    So, like nuclear? Which also has not been proven to work at the scale needed to decarbonize the world. In particular, current commercial burner reactors are unsuitable for that, as the uranium runs out very quickly at that scale.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Not sure which world you've been living in, but nuclear has been proven to work at scale, while requiring significantly less area than solar or wind, and being able to be load bearing and load following.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        If the world's entire current primary energy demand were supplied with burner reactors -- about 6000 3MW(th) reactors -- the world's estimated uranium resource would last about five years. Your "at scale" is a tiny fraction of the scale that would be needed, and at that larger, true scale, current commercially demonstrated nuclear technology would quickly fail. Breeders would be needed to enable use of much more expensive uranium ores (or thorium), and those are not demonstrated at even your smaller scale.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load. Where is the uranium coming from? Commercial fast breeders are as mythical as a 10000Wh/kg AlS battery. All nuclear reactors that aren't fiction are just a small multiplier on the U235 supply including DT fusion.

lob_it 4y ago

Diversification already has lingo for this in the 21st century: 1) Blue sky innovation - most intermittent renewables. They have toxic downsides too. 2) Gray sky innovation - Oil, gas, nuclear, etc fit perfectly here. Much of it is tried and true technology... And yes, it has downsides too 3) No-sky innovation - With space exploration, energy on the moon, mars, spacecraft, etc may be better served with laminar flow rotors using light/lasers... Just another option with diversification. It looks like stats on 50% of the plastic on the planet have been created after 2006 seem legit, with the trash heaps in the oceans (not to mention plastic breaking down into water system contaminates). Battery technology recycling just looks like another source of toxic groundwater for future generations, since recycling has been gibberish with pretty words thus far. The reuseable rocket technologies mean that battery technology, nuclear waste, etc can be jettisoned towards the sun after their useful life and that landfills may be a thing of the past. Know your innovations and how well diversification copes with the farce of "one size fits all". Four seasons still exist in many places.

Manuel_D 4y ago

Quite the contrary, people vastly underestimate the cost of battery storage and neglect the fact that it's cost is increasing as input materials become more scarce. Actual real-world cost of deployment is mugh higher than estimates [1] frequently exceeding $500/kWh. Estimates often exclude the cost of installation, maintenance, transformers to handle voltage conversion, etc. This is how $130/KWh battery costs turn into over $500/KWh of real world cost. Furthermore, the existing global production figures are somewhere around 400GWh per year. The world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. Actually attempting to providing a significant amount of battery storage would spike the cost of batteries as demand exceeds supply. The input materials for batteries have seen skyrocketing costs in the last couple years [2], and only 24% of battery cost is manufacturing. The rest is input materials. It is very dubious that batter production can keep up with the massive scale required by grid storage. Batteries can (and are) being deployed. But not at a scale that makes any difference, and it's unlikely they ever will be. 1. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co... 2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium 3. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

epistasis 4y ago
> Actual real-world cost of deployment is mugh higher than estimates [1] frequently exceeding $500/kWh. Can you point why you think this number, for installed battery cost, is somehow a contradiction of the numbers I posted? Additionally, temporary supply shortages due to massive new markers opening up as the cost drops is completely expected. All the temporary higher prices finance massive production capacity expansion that drops prices in the future. This is a well understood dynamic that we see again and again, even in fossil due production! > Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. There are two extreme errors with writing something like this: 1) assuming that battery production stays constant, when it has been growing 10x/5 years, and we are seeing unprecedented demand for new applications. 2) Using primary energy production for comparison to electrified electricity use, when electrified versions of the fossil fuel versions require 3x-4x less electricity. This sort of basic error is as bad as comparing 1GW of solar to 1GW of nuclear without correcting for capacity factor. With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade. For comparison, it takes more than a decade for us to build a nuclear reactor in the West, so if we are in course to have a fully scaled battery production supply chain for global use, whereas we can't even scale nuclear construction in the US to match the rate at which we will be retiring our aging fleet over the next 20 years. It's time to take a serious look at what carbon-free energy tech is on the table right now and start deploying it as fast as possible, right now, today. At the same time, we should continue research into fanciful ideas like small modular nuclear reactors, in case they pan out. But we need to go to war with the army we have right now.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> for batteries charged directly from a paired solar installation, the cost is estimated to be $85-$158/MWh This is theoretical. When I got home solar quotes, the difference before incentives between an install with and without 27 kWh Tesla backup was over $1,300/kWh.

epistasis 4y ago
$85-$158/MWh is not theoretical, this is real life utility scale installations. Tiny tiny residential scale battery installations have that 5x markup that you are observing. If you were to build your own, it's not hard to get to $300/kWh-capacity, all in, these days, even for small installs of a dozen kWh, using Chinese LFP batteries. But you won't get any of the support that your local installer gives you, and you had better know what you are doing really well...
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > $85-$158/MWh is not theoretical, this is real life utility scale installations Do you have an example? The actual cost in 2019 in the U.S. was $300 to $500/kWh [1]. The cost for the batteries alone was $190, but that’s akin to counting the cost of nuclear power by the fuel alone. [1] https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_battery_storage https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_battery_...
  - epistasis 4y ago
    I think you are comparing two different things. The CapEx and installation costs are typically measured in $/kWh for capacity of the battery (though some costs scale by the $/kW, for example the inverters...). The cost of storing and delivering the energy from the battery over its lifetime, is refered to the level used cost of storage. This includes operations costs, debt service, etc. is measured by the cost of delivering energy to the grid, and grid-scale costs are typically measured in $/MWh (as opposed to residential costs typically quotes in $/kWh).
    - 4y ago