Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

Post by baybal2 » Thu, Aug 03, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Aug 03, 2017, 5:25 PM UTC

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…

Post by leggomylibro » Thu, Aug 03, 2017, 5:30 PM UTC

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…

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Aug 03, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

I wonder how much of this is simply the Gigafactory coming online at full production + others trying to keep their factories running. If you look at Tesla's plan to be making 10,000 model 3's a week, with a nominal 90 kWh battery in each that is 900 MWh a week of capacity or 46 GWh capacity a year. But it is all tied up in cars of course[1]. The power companies have been screwing around with rate plans to keep grid-t…

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Aug 03, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

leggomylibro wrote: post #55

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…

Don't lithium-ion batteries degrade extremely quickly, though? Won't these all be down to half capacity or so within a decade? Is it really worth investing in gargantuan quantities of energy storage if they need to be replaced every few years? I'd be eyeing EDLC technologies or something like molten salts over giant stationary phone/laptop/car/etc batteries.