4 ms·

$17/kWh and no capacity degradation. Daaammmmmn! For comparison the cheapest LiIon batteries are like $150/kWh today, and degrade significantly over a decade.

$17/kWh and no capacity degradation. Daaammmmmn! For comparison the cheapest LiIon batteries are like $150/kWh today, and degrade significantly over a decade. I guess grid scale storage is a solved problem then? And Tesla battery wall is pointless.

potatochup 4y ago
Do you mean the Tesla power wall? This thing has quite a large footprint (10ft container) so I can see the power wall still being used household backup solution.
- simpleintheory 4y ago
  I think he means the mega/gigapack.
sambeau 4y ago
These are for buffering/load-balancing, not storage. Note the <500 milliseconds response time, that's way faster than pump hydro can respond, even with compressed air. A typical UK household uses close to 50kWh of energy a day, most of it on heating and cars. So, in a zero-carbon future, you'd need a 10-foot shipping container per 20 homes to give them each a single day of storage. You'd need >10x that to ride out a windless cold snap (common in the UK where I am—we even had 2 weeks of no wind power in the height of summer last year so ran 60% gas during the hottest week ever recorded). Grid-scale storage is tens of TWh, still way beyond any battery technology. These are MWh-scale systems. Useful, but not grid-scale storage. A grid would need tens of millions of these. At $17/kWh we're talking $500 billion. They would be useful for keeping the air-con running on hot nights in solar-powered countries though.
uoaei 4y ago
Scaling up manufacturing, and finding places to put (bury) these large batteries, will be a significant effort, but seems straightforward enough that projected future capacity estimates are probably pretty reliable. The hardest part will be effective load balancing strategies, IMO. (Very excited for distributed optimization systems research in this area, personally.)
panick21_ 4y ago
In the real world you can't just announce theoretical cost and then say 'we win give us the money'. Ambri has existed for 10+ years now and they are only gone deploy their first grid battery in 1-2 years. They might have a great product, but they are far away from impacting the market to such a degree that any other battery company is 'pointless'.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Cost is not the only variable. Efficiency and charging/discharging capacity and time are also important metrics. Basically storing heat and converting it back to electricity, you are going to lose quite a bit of energy. And that's before you consider cooling effects. Heating up a large mass is not particularly fast. It takes some time. And then getting a lot of energy out rapidly is also not really that easy. A lithium ion battery has probably well over 90-95% efficiency. It keeps its charge. And you can charge/discharge rapidly. Basically, you cans switch them on fast enough that switching from the grid to a battery when there's an outage, you probably won't notice the switch over. Both have their strong and weak points and there is probably going to be a use for both on the grid.

potatochup 4y ago

Do you mean the Tesla power wall? This thing has quite a large footprint (10ft container) so I can see the power wall still being used household backup solution.

simpleintheory 4y ago
I think he means the mega/gigapack.

sambeau 4y ago

These are for buffering/load-balancing, not storage. Note the <500 milliseconds response time, that's way faster than pump hydro can respond, even with compressed air. A typical UK household uses close to 50kWh of energy a day, most of it on heating and cars. So, in a zero-carbon future, you'd need a 10-foot shipping container per 20 homes to give them each a single day of storage. You'd need >10x that to ride out a windless cold snap (common in the UK where I am—we even had 2 weeks of no wind power in the height of summer last year so ran 60% gas during the hottest week ever recorded). Grid-scale storage is tens of TWh, still way beyond any battery technology. These are MWh-scale systems. Useful, but not grid-scale storage. A grid would need tens of millions of these. At $17/kWh we're talking $500 billion. They would be useful for keeping the air-con running on hot nights in solar-powered countries though.

uoaei 4y ago

Scaling up manufacturing, and finding places to put (bury) these large batteries, will be a significant effort, but seems straightforward enough that projected future capacity estimates are probably pretty reliable. The hardest part will be effective load balancing strategies, IMO. (Very excited for distributed optimization systems research in this area, personally.)

panick21_ 4y ago

In the real world you can't just announce theoretical cost and then say 'we win give us the money'. Ambri has existed for 10+ years now and they are only gone deploy their first grid battery in 1-2 years. They might have a great product, but they are far away from impacting the market to such a degree that any other battery company is 'pointless'.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Cost is not the only variable. Efficiency and charging/discharging capacity and time are also important metrics. Basically storing heat and converting it back to electricity, you are going to lose quite a bit of energy. And that's before you consider cooling effects. Heating up a large mass is not particularly fast. It takes some time. And then getting a lot of energy out rapidly is also not really that easy. A lithium ion battery has probably well over 90-95% efficiency. It keeps its charge. And you can charge/discharge rapidly. Basically, you cans switch them on fast enough that switching from the grid to a battery when there's an outage, you probably won't notice the switch over. Both have their strong and weak points and there is probably going to be a use for both on the grid.