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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

#91

Post by Zekio »

nabla9 wrote: post #66
Someone wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it is probably also cheaper to extract lithium from sea water than to extract it from old batteries

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

#92

Post by the8472 »

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 principle redox flow batteries should offer better scaling properties for stationary storage, but Li batteries have a process advantage of several years. So the picture might change down the road as long as there is still enough money flowing into alternative research.

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

#93

Post by Zekio »

Beltiras wrote: post #19
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…

There is another way of thinking about the economics of this. IIRC the typical price is 12 cents per kwhr. You would need to utilize the battery in sold energy no less than 2000 cycles just to break even. About 5 1/2 years of constant monetized operation (which is a ludicrous proposal). And this assumes no cost on the energy production side.

12 cents is cheap! in denmark the average price is 37 cents per kW/h

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

#94

Post by widdershins »

OtterCoder wrote: post #28
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.

Remember, the south of the US is in the subtropics, roughly level with the north of Africa. Imagine living in Egypt and not running the AC constantly.

There are a lot of people living in Egypt who don't have to imagine that.

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

#95

Post by revelation »

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.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, 100kWh is not the "low limit" of how much energy you need to get an temperature controlled home in the South for a day.

This is the figure in an environment where electricity costs nothing and there is zero pressure from home design to the actual AC unit to reduce consumption. Let's face it, this attitude isn't going to fly in the future. You could probably cut that figure by a good 10% by installing your choice of solar panels or a bunch of trees, just from less sun hitting the structure.

(Cut it in half if you consider the average American in the South lives in a freakishly large house fit for a queen with entourage and is cooling all of it..)

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

#96

Post by milesvp »

Zekio wrote: post #87
toomuchtodo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

God I hope so. Ford figured this shit out over 100 years ago... 3 shifts maximized factory output. Also having 5 day vs 6 day work weeks didn't significantly reduce factory output, but helped significantly reduce turnover.

I swear, it's Musk's biggest weakness, not realizing the costs of mistakes people make when they're tired. I couldn't get through his recent biography because I kept seeing mistake after mistake being chronicled that wouldn't have happened if people were working reasonable hours. I figured the setbacks to SpaceX due to sleep stupid were at least 6 months before I had to stop reading somewhere around their early launches...

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

#97

Post by epistasis »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #79
epistasis wrote: post #7

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…

>Wrong.

At no point do you actually say what was wrong about what you quoted. What do you feel is in error?

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

Yes, obviously. This is HN. Generally it pays to assume that people know what they are talking about around here.

It may be that you don't care about the power rating of the storage instance, but a utility does! They care about the power rating just as much as the total storage amount, as they are both essential design parameters. Particularly in the case of lithium ion, since many applications use discharges or charges less than an hour long (lithium ion batteries are typically designed with a W:Wh ratio of 1:1 - 1:4).

The original article is citing a market report from IHS Markit. Now, I can't find the particular news release for this one, but IHS Markit uses both terms GWh and GW when talking about storage, and as market researchers if they were messing that up it would be a worthless report. So lets look at one of the recent reports:

https://technology.ihs.com/590967/global-battery-energy-stor...

and one easier to check number:

> This was largely a result of over 100 MW of projects being completed and commissioned in California in early 2017 as part of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric’s response to the Aliso Canyon gas leak.

Let's look at this other report on that 100 MW:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/aliso-canyon-em...

>(CPUC) expedited the approval of around 100 megawatts of energy storage in Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric territories, in response to the Aliso Canyon blowout.

>Tesla, Greensmith Energy and AES Energy Storage celebrated the completion on Monday of three large-scale lithium-ion battery projects totaling 70 megawatts -- consisting of 20 megawatts, 20 megawatts and 30 megawatts, respectively.

Now, here all megawatts! And the mean it, because these the AES batteries were 37.5MW and 150MWh, and the Tesla battery is 30MW and 80MWh:

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/inside-construction-of-the-w...

So yes, they mean GW and not GWh, and yes, that is a very meaningful statistic when talking about the grid. It's not the only one, and for bystanders, maybe they care about the Wh more than the W, but it's not like you can design a system without known both.

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

#98

Post by gozur88 »

the8472 wrote: post #92
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 principle redox flow batteries should offer better scaling properties for stationary storage, but Li batteries have a process advantage of several years. So the picture might change down the road as long as there is still enough money flowing into alternative research.

I wonder. One of the reasons internal combustion has lasted so long is great boatloads of cash get showered on the technology trying to eke out that last 0.2% of efficiency, and when that's the situation eventually someone has a bright idea that makes a bigger difference.

If lithium ends up with the same advantage, other technologies that ought to be better may end up lagging even in the long term.

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

#99

Post by epistasis »

baybal2 wrote: post #56

>IHS Markit expects li-ion battery prices to fall below $200/kWh by 2019 In that article they claim the digit of $200, while you can buy an assembled 1kw/h battery pack in China in retail quantities for around $120 today.

Is that NCA or NMC?

Typically grid storage batteries are rated to 10+ years or ~5000 cycles or something on that order of magnitude.

One way to get your cells to last that long is to lessen the discharge depth; that may account for some of the price difference.

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

#100

Post by fiter »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #79
epistasis wrote: post #7

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…

GW is a very important characteristic of an energy storage system, especially as a ratio of GWh. A technology could store 100TWh, but if it can only release 1kW, I'm not interested.

The comment you replied to said "just a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores". The comment didn't say power was the same thing as energy, it says that the power is as important as the energy. I don't think this would fail high school physics.

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