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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

#71

Post by zip1234 »

baybal2 wrote: post #49
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.

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,)…

200m2 is about 2/3 of the area of what a McMansion would be. Many are twice that.

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

#72

Post by keenerd »

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…

> That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium

Who is afraid of that? Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Lithium is #33, estimated at 20 ppm of the crust. We presently mine 64000 tons per year. It is more common than lead, which is #37 and only 14 ppm. Yet we mine 4.8 million tons of lead per year. Now examine boron. #41, 10 ppm and 9.4 million tons per year. Are these unsustainable? Are we on the verge of peak boron and peak lead? Probably not. We have twice as much lithium so we probably aren't going to run out of lithium even if demand increases by a hundred-fold.

I am not a geologist, so maybe much of this lithium is more inaccessible than I'm assuming. But everyone who says we are going to run out of lithium have been only looking at the known deposits and are ignoring the possibility that more mines will open to meet demand.

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

#73

Post by agumonkey »

k__ wrote: post #67
agumonkey wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends on how many hours it's running. 24 ? 20 ? 16 ? someone mention two shifts so I guess it's gonna be above 10.

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

#74

Post by wongarsu »

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.

They degrade extremely quickly in the usage pattern of a typical consumer device (alternating between full charge and full discharge). They last fairly long if you keep them between 30% and 80% charge.

It's not the most long-lasting technology, but we replace most infrastructure every 20-years already. A 10 year lifetime wouldn't be that bad.

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

#75

Post by zip1234 »

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.

Even if the hottest part of the day is past prime solar hours, with a solar system you won't be discharging the battery as fast since the system will be powering the AC for most the day. Also, with that much usage, it might be time to investigate insulation.

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

#76

Post by _JamesA_ »

aphextron wrote: post #65
_JamesA_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've heard they are not effective with our extremely high humidity levels.

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

#77

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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

And by "drop" you mean a blob of water the size of a small moon.

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

#78

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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…

Li-ion batteries have a high energy density in terms of both weight and volume, when compared to other types of batteries. And yes, it's all relative to which tech you're comparing them to, but it's worth remembering that they are both lightweight and physically small, for the amount of energy they can store.

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

#79

Post by Florin_Andrei »

epistasis wrote: post #7
fenwick67 wrote: post #4

> By 2025, the world’s base of cumulative installed storage capacity will reach 52 GW, IHS Markit says, up from around 4 GW today. Last year, 1.3 GW of grid-connected storage was deployed globally, and this rate is poised to accelerate to 4.7 GW a year by 2020, and 8.8 GW annually by 2025. GW is not a unity of energy storage capacity. It's a unit of power.

GW is, however, a characteristic of an energy storage system, and just a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores.

> GW is, however, a characteristic of an energy storage system, and just a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores.

Wrong.

The watt is a measure of power, not of stored energy. These are different physical notions. So, yes, you could say that some storage facility can output up to so many GW, but that's actually a measure of how much energy per second can exit the system when it's being used.

The proper unit for measuring an amount of energy that's stored in the system is the Wh (or its multiple the GWh), which has the same dimension as the joule, which is the standard unit of energy.

GW is like how many liters of water per second can exit the storage tank when it's being emptied. GWh is like how many liters of water total are stored in the full tank. And yes, both are important when designing a battery system. But saying "GW is [...] a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores" would fail you high school physics.

GWh is static energy (or simply - energy). GW is energy moving from point A to point B, which is power.

Here's a brief introduction to the basic meaning of these terms:

https://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/02/power-vs-energy-explana...

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

aphextron wrote: post #63
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 de…

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