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Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

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Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#41

Post by marcosdumay »

nabla9 wrote: post #2

$200/kWh by 2019. Assuming that households consume between 30 kWh and 15 kWh electricity daily on average and you want to have storage capacity for 1/3 of daily electricity consumption to get wind or solar energy work, you need 10-5 kWh per household. That's $2000 - $1000 per household. If that battery lasts 10 years, its $200 - $100 per year. It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that h…

> recycling is not reuse

Reusing the lithium from the batteries means recycling the batteries.

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#42

Post by maxerickson »

djrogers wrote: post #22
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that for that use case, using thermal storage should be more efficient? Don't store electricity to run AC later, but run AC to cool down water or the ground beneath your house or something, and then cool your house with that later.

That would require a huge amount of work and expense, and at the end of the day cold water isn’t very good at cooling off giant masses of air and furniture.

They are sized for bigger installations, but time shifting energy consumption using ice storage is basically an available commercial product.

Here's one company that makes them.

http://www.calmac.com/

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#43

Post by wongarsu »

comicjk wrote: post #38

Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal element). Now, it seems the development effort devoted to lithium-ion has paid off so well that they are the best OVERALL battery solution. The single-minded effort we put into cell phones and cars is so strong that it now reaches all the way to homes and the gri…

In the last three decades battery technology was mostly about powering small, lightweight gadgets. Now that there's massive amounts of money to be made with car batteries and grid-level storage, I certainly expect some great battery technologies that focus on that in the next decade or two.

That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium: nobody is going to power the world on lithium, it's just the cheapest method right now because of the massive amounts of research money already dumped into it, and great economies of scale. Other technologies will catch up as their use-cases become more valuable.

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#44

Post by beefield »

merpnderp wrote: post #3
nabla9 wrote: post #2

$200/kWh by 2019. Assuming that households consume between 30 kWh and 15 kWh electricity daily on average and you want to have storage capacity for 1/3 of daily electricity consumption to get wind or solar energy work, you need 10-5 kWh per household. That's $2000 - $1000 per household. If that battery lasts 10 years, its $200 - $100 per year. It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that h…

That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.

> deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.

That applies to lead acid batteries. Lithium ones are much more forgiving on that (as long as you stay within design limits.)

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#45

Post by kilroy123 »

merpnderp wrote: post #3
nabla9 wrote: post #2

$200/kWh by 2019. Assuming that households consume between 30 kWh and 15 kWh electricity daily on average and you want to have storage capacity for 1/3 of daily electricity consumption to get wind or solar energy work, you need 10-5 kWh per household. That's $2000 - $1000 per household. If that battery lasts 10 years, its $200 - $100 per year. It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that h…

That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.

There are far cheaper ways to keep your house cool, though they require an upfront investment.

http://energyblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/17/10-myths...

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#46

Post by blacksmith_tb »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #31
merpnderp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.

100 kWh/day is just incredible. The average consumption per person in the nordics is about 1500 kWh per YEAR.

I would have thought that heating would require a lot of energy in the Nordic countries - but perhaps that doesn't use much electricity? I live in the NW US, in a heavily-insulated passivhaus with a 5kW PV array on my roof, and my average usage is 13kWh / day (though I am also charging a PHEV vehicle's battery some days, and still using an ineffecient old hex-core Xeon workstation on top of heating and cooling, heating water, cooking etc.).

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#47

Post by michaelbuckbee »

EngineerBetter wrote: post #14
merpnderp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.

Wow - that's a crazy amount of energy. As a Brit who's never been the south of the US, is that figure really true? 100kWh is about 300 miles in a Tesla, or boiling a kettle constantly for about 30 hours. If that's really accurate, then I'm staggered at how much energy folks must be using to keep cool, and makes my efforts at saving energy seem paltry in comparison.

I can't find where the site now, but there was a fairly compelling argument that it was overall still more energy efficient for people to live in Arizona and AC dropping the temp from 90F to 70F than to live in a northern state where for 6 months out of the year you have to heat the house from 20-40F up to 70F.

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#48

Post by wongarsu »

derefr wrote: post #39

Hah, I misinterpreted "storage" here, and thought this was going to be about Li-ion cells getting cheap enough to replace the capacitors in the Power Loss Protection circuits in hard drives/SSDs/NVMe boards. Which doesn't make sense, after giving it a second's thought—batteries wear out after just a few years, while capacitors (very nearly) don't, so it'd put a hard lifetime on drives. (Though, for server use-cases w…

Keeping the disks alive is certainly doable. At a rough estimate of 10W per drive, even storage servers would only need very moderate batteries. But what would you gain by that?

More interesting (in my eyes) would be to power down spinning disks and processors, but keep caches and ram alive. Then once power is restored, you could basically supply power and continue where you left off, without any reboots etc.

Then again, power loss should be fairly infrequent, and you have to architect against connection cuts or physical disruptions anyway.

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#49

Post by baybal2 »

merpnderp wrote: post #3
nabla9 wrote: post #2

$200/kWh by 2019. Assuming that households consume between 30 kWh and 15 kWh electricity daily on average and you want to have storage capacity for 1/3 of daily electricity consumption to get wind or solar energy work, you need 10-5 kWh per household. That's $2000 - $1000 per household. If that battery lasts 10 years, its $200 - $100 per year. It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that h…

That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.

This digit is unbelievable. A good aircon can pump 4 gigacalories per hour using 1kw/h while running at full power with +40C and 40% humidity outside.

5gkal per hour is more than enough to keep a 50m2 room with huge windows at 21-22C in scorching heat.

If your house is huge, like 200m2 McMansion, and your ventilation does no recuperation whatsoever, and you have near nil heat insulation (like most of housing in US,) you will barely use 50kw/h per day even if you live in the middle of Sahara

Re: Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

#50

Post by skummetmaelk »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #46
skummetmaelk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 kWh/day is just incredible. The average consumption per person in the nordics is about 1500 kWh per YEAR.

I would have thought that heating would require a lot of energy in the Nordic countries - but perhaps that doesn't use much electricity? I live in the NW US, in a heavily-insulated passivhaus with a 5kW PV array on my roof, and my average usage is 13kWh / day (though I am also charging a PHEV vehicle's battery some days, and still using an ineffecient old hex-core Xeon workstation on top of heating and cooling, heati…

Electrical heating is not used when it can be avoided. It is much better to use waste heat from energy production and industry to heat your home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
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