Do we know how to safely dispose these batteries?
Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
121–130 of 134 posts
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be incorrect, but space based solar would catch energy that would reach the earth anyway, basically shading us. So it would probably be more or less adding the same energy, but sending it to the ground rather than dispersing some in the stratosphere.
That's incorrect, sorry.
ok, but can you explain why, please?
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's incorrect, sorry.
ok, but can you explain why, please?
The satellites would be in wide orbits (typically imagined to be geostationary) that would almost never be on the line between the Sun and the Earth. And if they were between the Sun and Earth, they couldn't beam power to the Earth's night side.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
1000x would make human use ~20% of the earth system, but earth side solar wouldn't get counted twice, so it would be less. I agree that would have an impact, but I doubt the other poster was imagining the 1000x scenario. The numbers are something like 20 terawatts for current human utilization and 100 petawatts for solar power.
Yeah, that's about what I calculated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20426368 — 130 petawatts of terrestrial insolation and 18 terawatts of world marketed energy consumption. I think solar panels will tend to have lower albedo than the surfaces they shade (sunlight they reflect is not available for energy production, and even the 16%-efficient ones that are common today are pretty black), especially before th…
Solar energy gathered and utilized inside the earth energy system doesn't add energy to the system.
So if we were using 5 Petawatts of ground based solar power, we wouldn't be adding much to the overall system. Unless we stored a lot of it and shifted the heat to a different time of year.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another "paradigm" is that full and empty batteries are shipped between regions by boat or truck as needed instead of just waiting 6 months for the planet to move through the cosmos.
Whew, that doesn't sound feasible, but I'd love for someone to do the math for me. It seems much more realistic to build HVDC lines from equatorial regions to the temperate zones, but even that is not very popular anymore as far as I know due to cost and NIMBYs.
I haven't done the math either, but I've seen serious discussions of it.
It requires zero infrastructure investments to load a hundred Tesla batteries on a truck and drive it to place with a different climate situation.
Compare that to long distance HVDC lines, which for the US are desperately needed, have been discussed for decades, and show no signs of ever getting built.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that we're talking about single digit percentages of a battery's capacity being used. Also, its likely that many of the EV-to-grid arrangements will be for fleet vehicles (company/city cars, plus self-driving fleets when they happen), and they will be technically sophisticated enough to negotiate that capacity sharing with the grid operators. So you won't ever actually have a scenario you describe where…
"likely that many of the EV-to-grid arrangements will be for fleet vehicles" Wont these be out and about during the day when the sun is shining and need to be charged during the night? Seems like these are the opposite of storage, they would exacerbate the problem? Creating a lot of demand(lots of buses in lots of cities) charging at night, and driving during the day. "will be technically sophisticated" This is an as…
> if I wake up on the morning of my vacation, and my car is at That will never happen, unless you intentionally jump through several hoops to shoot yourself in the foot.
For example, there's a company called OhmConnect that does aggregated demand response. You can sign up for it, optionally connect your smart thermostat/plugs, and bank account. When there's going to be a high load period, OhmConnect notifies you asking if you want to participate in an upcoming "Ohm Hour". If you do, they will pay you $5-10 for your trouble. So, if you had a vacation the next day, of course you wouldn't opt-in to the demand response event.
Disclosure: I am on a nonprofit board with OhmConnect.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#127It irks me to see predictions talked about as if past events. But this is a more solid guess than most. Actual progress has been impressive: 85% reduction in the 2010-18 period, says the article. Graph here: [1] Getting another 50% in 10 years can probably be done from manufacturing scale alone. Giant battery pack factories seem to be going up all over. This is something that ought to be almost totally automated, but…
Halve the cost and I suspect energy utilities as we know them are in trouble too. Currently solar is a no brainer in my country of Australia. Typically around a 6 year payoff for a 20 year benifit. Batteries are about break over ~10 years payback. But if you could half that it's becomes something many people will do. And once that starts happening it's a death spiral for utilities as they will have a every reducing c…
Residential batteries are currently BS. They serve three purposes IMO:
1. A degree of backup. Solar alone is crappy at backup power. Solar plus battery is okay as long as one’s house is wired appropriately to shed load.
2. They can reduce peak loads. This is called “peak shaving”. If the utility can rely on it, it can genuinely reduce equipment costs to the utility. As far as I know, almost no residential rates give any incentive for peak shaving. Commercial rates give an extremely strong incentive.
3. Batteries can arbitrage nonsensical rate schedules. PG&E will buy a limited but large amount of peak energy from me for over 50 cents/kWh, and it doesn’t really matter that I’m just selling them power that I bought from them for about 12 cents/kWh a few hours earlier. This is the magic of NEM2PS + EV-A (now unavailable, but NEM2PS + EV2-A is still available and is not all that different). It is, IMO, crazy.
Home batteries would need to come down considerably in cost (way more than 2x) to make them worthwhile without these crazy incentives.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what you mean about “square meter years”. Germany is an especially difficult case, being very industrial, very densely populated, and fairly polar, though less so than, say, England. Germany uses about 72 gigawatts of electricity and about 400 gigawatts of fossil fuels, according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany (but converted to SI units). It comprises some 82 million humans, s…
1 square meter year of solar panels is one square meter producing peak output 24/7 for a year, or two square meters producing peak power for half a year. Like a man-month. I was also surprised by that low capacity factor. Before doing the math I estimated maybe 100sqm per person. The US installation averages probably benefit a lot from the deserts and being much closer to the equator. Solar is pretty bad in Germany d…
The part I was confused about was that you said "35 square meter years per person" but I guess you mean per person per year? Then wouldn't that just be 35 square meters per person?
Wind is awesome, but I don't think the total wind resource at tower-like heights is sufficient to wean the humans off fossil fuels; but I don't have hard numbers. Maybe power-to-gas is a solution.
Thank you very much for helping me explore this!
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's about what I calculated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20426368 — 130 petawatts of terrestrial insolation and 18 terawatts of world marketed energy consumption. I think solar panels will tend to have lower albedo than the surfaces they shade (sunlight they reflect is not available for energy production, and even the 16%-efficient ones that are common today are pretty black), especially before th…
Solar energy gathered and utilized inside the earth energy system doesn't add energy to the system. So if we were using 5 Petawatts of ground based solar power, we wouldn't be adding much to the overall system. Unless we stored a lot of it and shifted the heat to a different time of year.
Oh, I agree that you don't add energy to Earth just by harvesting energy that would have been absorbed and converted to heat. So a solar panel on the ocean doesn't warm up the Earth any, because the ocean is just as black as the panel. But you do add energy to the Earth by harvesting, or merely absorbing, energy that would have been reflected into space. So the same solar panel on the Salar de Uyuni will warm up the Earth. That's what my comments above about albedo are about; I'm not double-counting in the sense you thought. Does that clarify?
None of this is significant until solar power generates substantially more power than current world marketed energy consumption, which is to say, for at least a decade or three.
Thank you for helping me to explore these issues!
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, the problem is that a week’s worth of batteries is an immense cost that is reducing only slowly, while waiting a few days to wash your laundry is close to free. Let's say you use 1 kW on average in your house. You'll need about 4 kWp of panels to supply that with a typical capacity factor of 25%—a bit more panels than that if you're in Scotland, a bit less in Perú, but about that. At current prices that's US$8…
Often with residential solar you run out of space. At that point you have to start adding batteries (or thermal or something) for long term storage, or stay connected to the grid.
True! But batteries are very much the most expensive of those options.