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Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake

pv-magazine-usa.com

81–90 of 187 posts

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

#81
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.

> That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning.

It should be noted that peak energy expenditure for air conditioning happens more or less at exactly the moment when the influx of energy from the Sun is also at its peak. That's, like, a gigantic hint that mother nature is dropping on you, hoping you'll notice it. The disease, and its cure, are gushing forth from the same place at the same time.

Probably most of the energy for air conditioning in the future will not come out of storage, but it would be produced at the moment when it's consumed, by solar panels or some other solar technology.

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

#82
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…

If you have a look through some of the Google datacenter tours you'll see they actually implement this idea on a massive scale, though I believe they use lead-acid batteries... Every motherboard in the datacenter has a small battery capable of powering it for a long enough period of time for the backup generators to kick on and take over.

It's definitely a clever idea! Makes maintenance much less risky as it's distributed, and also reduces the chance of having a single large UPS fail when it takes over the load!

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

#83
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maximum discharge speed (which is one of the very few storage characteristics I can think of to be measured in GW) is pretty much irrelevant for storage systems. Add a few quick discharge capacitors that cost almost nothing and boom -- your max discharge speed shoots through the roof (but speed goes down for a very short time). Maybe sustained charge speed is a (little bit) more meaningful thing you can express in GB…

Your instincts would be wrong on this one. This is a technical article, that talks about all the right things for grid storage: value stacking, $/kWh (note the h), various install locations such as behind-the-meter, etc. They know what they are talking about. Currently, grid discussions happen mostly in the MW or GW space. Maximum instantaneous discharge speed is pretty much the most important characteristic for stor…

Well, it depends on who wrote the article. I see science journalists get this wrong frequently.

And really, as you say, everybody talking about storage systems should be quoting both energy and power.

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, in Norway most of the heating is done with electricity (they have loads of hydro power).

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

#85

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…

Pretty sure they will also use the batteries in their powerwall's as well (I seem to remember that the grid storage in CA was produced with batteries from the gigafactory)

I would imagine they would quickly switch the powerwall to use the new battery size that the gigafactory is producing..

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

#86
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maximum discharge speed (which is one of the very few storage characteristics I can think of to be measured in GW) is pretty much irrelevant for storage systems. Add a few quick discharge capacitors that cost almost nothing and boom -- your max discharge speed shoots through the roof (but speed goes down for a very short time). Maybe sustained charge speed is a (little bit) more meaningful thing you can express in GB…

Your instincts would be wrong on this one. This is a technical article, that talks about all the right things for grid storage: value stacking, $/kWh (note the h), various install locations such as behind-the-meter, etc. They know what they are talking about. Currently, grid discussions happen mostly in the MW or GW space. Maximum instantaneous discharge speed is pretty much the most important characteristic for stor…

> They know what they are talking about.

In this article, which is what we're discussing here, it is very clearly either a typo, or it's some journalist spouting off above their pay grade.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Gigafactory operates seven days a week with two shifts.

didn't they change it to three shifts to reduce injuries because of human error from being tired

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

for those of us too lazy to read about the difference between power and energy, there is EEVBLOGs recent video explaining it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdbhnmA4M9g

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

#90

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…

The TV plot sounds like an updated version of Operation Yashima.
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