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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

#61

Post by baybal2 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #52
baybal2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wonder how much of this is simply the Gigafactory coming online at full production + others trying to keep their factories running. The "Gigafactory," is a drop in the ocean if you count noname Chinese factories, but it will be one of the biggest market players outside of China

We have different ideas about 'drops in the ocean' :-) See this article ( http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/elon-musk-china-battery/ ) for some numbers. Projected Gigafactory production (as more come on line) could continue to be 25 to 35% of the global production of batteries. My father-in-law, who is a big booster of South America, feels that if Argentina, Brazil, and Chile got together they could move up the 'value ch…

I have no idea of where they get those digits. Chinese ministry of commerce posted back in 2015 that, the amount of battery capacity used by biggest Chinese EV makers alone (excluding PHEW manufacturers) was 16.9GWh. And the amount of battery sales to car makers make less than 10% of the market in China.

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

baybal2 wrote: post #40
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…

>I wonder how much of this is simply the Gigafactory coming online at full production + others trying to keep their factories running. The "Gigafactory," is a drop in the ocean if you count noname Chinese factories, but it will be one of the biggest market players outside of China

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by aphextron »

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…

>Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal element).

Not entirely. The real killer feature of LiPo which has allowed things like Roadster and Model S to exist is their high discharge, or "C" rating. The power density of LiPo is far beyond any previous chemistry available for batteries at scale. Energy density and power density are two completely different things [0].

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-power-d... [0]

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

#64

Post by StillBored »

wongarsu wrote: post #43
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 lit…

Yah, lithium's power/weight advantages had driven so much investment that its now has awesome power/volume advantages too. The result is that even things which don't care about the weight (http://www.storagereview.com/apc_backups_pro_500_lithium_ion...) are starting to switch from lead acid because its no longer the super cheap solution.

That is something I've found really curious because if you tear into just about any lead acid battery it still looks like technology from the 1950's. Just about everything else has shrunk, become lighter, used less material, etc. But lead acid's last major "breakthrough" was in the 1970's with gel cells. I would have expected lead acid to look more like a capacitor at this point (thin layers of material rolled/folded up) but its still these fairly thick plates sitting in electrolyte with non-existent charge control. Surely some creative person sitting in a lab could come up with way to minimize sulfation or to decompose the lead sulfate within the battery without basically melting them down and building new ones.

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

#65

Post by aphextron »

_JamesA_ wrote: post #54
EngineerBetter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Texas summer is brutal [1]. Last month my average home used between 100 and 120 kwh per day [2]. Luckily we rarely have to heat in the winter - although it's not uncommon to have the A/C running for Christmas. [1]: http://www.statesman.com/news/local/wipe-that-brow-austin-re... [2]: http://imgur.com/a/45oGu

>Last month my average home used between 100 and 120 kwh per day [2].

That's half of my entire energy usage for a month...

Have you considered a swamp cooler?

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

#66

Post by nabla9 »

Someone wrote: post #6
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…

Why wouldn't recycling be an option? Chances are that, if large batteries become commonplace, it will be cheaper to mine lithium from used batteries than to do so from the earth because they will have very high lithium content. Also, covering 1/3 of daily use seems low to me. It wouldn't get one through a few windless winter days with dense cloud cover, for example.

Extraction of lithium from old batteries is five times more expensive as mining lithium. At some point it may become profitable.

On the other hand, there is lots of lithium. If the environmental impact of lithium mining going off the roof is not a problem, there is no reason to reuse.

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

#67

Post by k__ »

agumonkey wrote: post #57
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…

Will the GigaFactory operate on weekends ? 1400~ car per day .. I'd love to see that on video.

What is this? 1 car per minute?

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

#68

Post by ChuckMcM »

baybal2 wrote: post #61
ChuckMcM wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have different ideas about 'drops in the ocean' :-) See this article ( http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/elon-musk-china-battery/ ) for some numbers. Projected Gigafactory production (as more come on line) could continue to be 25 to 35% of the global production of batteries. My father-in-law, who is a big booster of South America, feels that if Argentina, Brazil, and Chile got together they could move up the 'value ch…

I have no idea of where they get those digits. Chinese ministry of commerce posted back in 2015 that, the amount of battery capacity used by biggest Chinese EV makers alone (excluding PHEW manufacturers) was 16.9GWh. And the amount of battery sales to car makers make less than 10% of the market in China.

Here is an educated guess that it takes a kilogram of lithium salts to make a 10kWh battery[1]. (not my work but it looks like a reasonable process). That can help you create an estimate of how much lithium salt production is required to meet various market requirements.

It is just another way of checking various numbers. You can start from world production of Lithium salts. And remember that they are used in all lithium batteries not just the rechargeable type like we're talking about here.

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/

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

#69

Post by ChuckMcM »

aphextron wrote: post #60
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…

>with a nominal 90 kWh battery Model 3 has a base 60kWh battery, with upgrade available to 75.

Ah thanks, for some reason I read the 60 as 90.

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

#70

Post by zip1234 »

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.

Most likely not using electricity for heating/cooling?
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