3 ms·
We _need_ grid access, for now. Batteries are getting so crazy cheap. LFP is hitting the market en masse, and right behind that is sodium ion to halve the price
by pkulak 2y ago
We _need_ grid access, for now. Batteries are getting so crazy cheap. LFP is hitting the market en masse, and right behind that is sodium ion to halve the price again.
And, at least where I am, grid _access_ isn't really the biggest cost, capacity is. My power company would love it if I hooked some batteries up to solar and used that during peak hours so they don't have to upgrade every transmission line between me and a bunch of coal in Idaho. In fact, I know this because they pay me to do *exactly that with time-of-use metering.
* I don't actually have any solar, but I do have an electric water heater and an electric car, which are both huge batteries, and easy to time shift the charging of.
- hedora 2y agoIf you get two EVs equivalent to average size American cars, that’s over 200 kwh of storage. That’s equivalent to roughly 15 tesla powerwalls, and newer models can charge your (tiny) house battery as needed during power outages. Having said that, community net metering makes way more sense in urban areas than per-building solar. The idea is that, by law, you can buy a small fraction of a neighborhood wide solar or wind farm (e.g. on a commercial parking lot, or a few blocks away, etc), and the power company offsets your power consumption bill with the electricity your fraction of the solar installation produced.
- bmicraft 2y agosodium ion tech is largely on hold because LFP got cheaper than expected and made it largely non-viable at current pieces. The expensive thing about batteries aren't the raw materials but manufacturing the cells, and those costs increase massively when you're trying to match kWh produced with a lower energy chemistry.