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The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

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Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#41

Post by jillesvangurp »

audunw wrote: post #4
mathgradthrow wrote: post #2

Gigawatts are not a unit of energy.... something something zalgo.

Installed capacity is sometimes measured by power output rather than energy storage capacity. Both measures are relevant.

Exactly, especially with some types of batteries this is relevant. Redox flow batteries that are being experimented with for grid storage now use a reservoir for storing the anolyte and catolyte fluids. The bit that allows those to interface where the power is generated is much smaller though. So you can take the same battery and trivially double or triple the storage capacity by simply using bigger reservoirs and more liquid but the power delivery would stay the same. These types of battery are potentially great for longer term storage but they aren't necessarily able to deliver the stored energy quickly. It could take days/weeks to deplete them and a similar amount of time to charge them back up.

Lithium ion grid batteries are sort of the opposite. They can deliver a lot of power but usually only for a few hours at maximum capacity until they are depleted. So, you see companies install a few hundred gwh of capacity being able to deliver most of that power in a few hours.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#42

Post by adrianN »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
modeless wrote: post #34

Doubling in 2024 is great but the estimate for 2025 is nowhere near doubling again. How many doublings will we need to store enough energy that solar can replace all non-renewables? I imagine it's still a lot. Edit: this page claims we need 84 times what we had in 2022, the estimate for 2024 is ~3x higher, so call it ~5 more doublings after this year. https://www.alsym.com/blog/how-much-energy-storage-do-we-nee...

The opposite needs to happen, industry needs to adjust to taking advantage of regular daily energy price swings. Plenty of industries can. Instantaneous pricing for electricity motivates people and industry to make better choices. Very cheap energy will enable interesting things too.

Realistically both things will need to happen. There is a lot of demand that can’t be time shifted by more than a few hours. We need storage for a few weeks of consumption eventually.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#43

Post by adrianN »

The_Colonel wrote: post #19
wolverine876 wrote: post #7

How long does the typical battery last before it needs significant new investment (major maintenance or replacement)? In other words, how long before we need to install another 30 GW not to increase capacity, but to maintain it? I'm not a pessimist but I know that at this stage in an adoption cycle, it's all gain, but that's not the long-term reality. I'm wondering what the long-term looks like. In part, if the capac…

Tesla Megapacks come with a 15-year "no defect" and "energy retention" warranty. A 10 or 20 year "performance guarantee" is available for an additional cost. (an example of Li-Ion based storage, I assume it won't differ wildly with other producers) I think they can in principle last longer if used well. You can control the temperature, you can use weather forecast (as part of some network-wide forecast of future requ…

We will probably also switch to different chemistries for grid batteries. Sodium batteries for example are cheaper. Iron oxide is also interesting.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#44

Post by gwd »

The_Colonel wrote: post #19
wolverine876 wrote: post #7

How long does the typical battery last before it needs significant new investment (major maintenance or replacement)? In other words, how long before we need to install another 30 GW not to increase capacity, but to maintain it? I'm not a pessimist but I know that at this stage in an adoption cycle, it's all gain, but that's not the long-term reality. I'm wondering what the long-term looks like. In part, if the capac…

Tesla Megapacks come with a 15-year "no defect" and "energy retention" warranty. A 10 or 20 year "performance guarantee" is available for an additional cost. (an example of Li-Ion based storage, I assume it won't differ wildly with other producers) I think they can in principle last longer if used well. You can control the temperature, you can use weather forecast (as part of some network-wide forecast of future requ…

Two years ago when I was considering installing a battery along with my solar panels, here was the estimations I did:

1. Additional cost of installing a 13.5kWh Tesla Powerwall was quoted as being around £12,000

2. Warranty was 80% capacity after 10 years

Now, my experience with batteries in general is that once they start to go, they deteriorate pretty rapidly; so 80% after 10 years to me basically account 10 years as the lifetime of the battery.

£12k for 10 years is £1.2k per year, or £100 per month: that is, the battery would have to allow me to save £100/month in electricity just to break even -- and that's before factoring in the cost of capital (i.e., if I take that £12k and invested it somewhere else, I'd have a lot more than £12k after 10 years).

Even if the batteries managed to eke out a reasonable capacity for 20 years -- which seems pretty unlikely to me -- I'd still have to somehow save £50/month to break even. All in all the battery just didn't make financial sense for me as an individual.

One expects that the companies doing this on an industrial scale have done the math and managed to find some economies of scale that make it profitable; but it's not out of the realm of possibility that due to a combination of optimism, overselling on the part of battery companies, and FOMO, that they've drastically overestimated the performance of their batteries, and are going to find 15 years down the road that they're beginning to fail without having paid back the capital investment used to buy them.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#45

Post by jillesvangurp »

ChatGTP wrote: post #8

Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impres…

Baseload is indeed meaningless unless you put a number on it in gw and gwh actually needed. People wielding the term without doing that (i.e. most of them), are basically insisting on unspecified amounts of energy to be needed for unspecified amounts of time for unspecified calamities that may need said unspecified capacity. It's usually accompanies by some handwavy statements about clouds, weather, and seasonal darkness and the suggestion that we should instead put all our resources into building nuclear plants.

This indeed bullshit. Because as soon as you specify these numbers these things, it becomes a simple engineering challenge with some clear economics that you can model for different solutions.

Numbers for domestic solar indeed are such that most installations pay back within a few years in most parts of the world. The largest cost these days is not even the hardware but the installation cost and getting the time of the certified experts that can do this. But even factoring in all that, you basically end up earning your money back.

If you plop down enough panels and batteries, you won't need anything else.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#46

Post by ssl-3 »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
modeless wrote: post #34

Doubling in 2024 is great but the estimate for 2025 is nowhere near doubling again. How many doublings will we need to store enough energy that solar can replace all non-renewables? I imagine it's still a lot. Edit: this page claims we need 84 times what we had in 2022, the estimate for 2024 is ~3x higher, so call it ~5 more doublings after this year. https://www.alsym.com/blog/how-much-energy-storage-do-we-nee...

The opposite needs to happen, industry needs to adjust to taking advantage of regular daily energy price swings. Plenty of industries can. Instantaneous pricing for electricity motivates people and industry to make better choices. Very cheap energy will enable interesting things too.

Indeed.

As a consumer in Ohio, variable-rate pricing kind of scares me: It's nice to be able to run the clothes dryer without any concern over what time of day it is. We don't do variable-rate pricing here (at least for residential users).

But I'd manage to sort it out in pretty short order, I think: It usually isn't very important to me what time of day the clothes get dried (as long as they don't sit long enough to get stinky), so I would indeed be motivated to pay attention to that. I, myself, would even become motivated to automate it so that the clothes begin drying automatically when energy is [relatively] cheap.

I can also imagine things like automating water heating: Burn Joules when it is cheap to do so, and store [most of] them for later use at a time that may be more convenient to me. (The math gets interesting on this one.)

Having very cheap energy be available occasionally would also be neat: I've got computationally-intensive tasks that need to get done some day. These cost real money to run on the hardware that I have. It sure would be nice if I could save some money by only doing these tasks when power is cheaper. (Right now, I do try to optimize timing them for energy efficiency. For instance, in the summer it is cheaper to run them on cool nights when the windows might be open than during a hot, sunny day when the aircon might barely be keeping up.)

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#47

Post by ZeroGravitas »

wolverine876 wrote: post #7

How long does the typical battery last before it needs significant new investment (major maintenance or replacement)? In other words, how long before we need to install another 30 GW not to increase capacity, but to maintain it? I'm not a pessimist but I know that at this stage in an adoption cycle, it's all gain, but that's not the long-term reality. I'm wondering what the long-term looks like. In part, if the capac…

The doubling of production is also what drives the learning curve cost decreases at a rate of 20% per doubling. Which is what has reduced battery costs by 90% over the last two decades and is widely predicted to continue.

https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#48

Post by ChatGTP »

lgbr wrote: post #30
ChatGTP wrote: post #8

Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impres…

> Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas pe…

I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece.

This is what I'm questioning though, 30 years of hand waving about "base load", and all the stories about how renewables aren't sufficient, but then, oh wait, actually, we can probably do it now.

Maybe, just maybe the tech wasn't there, but it is convenient that when push comes to shove, we do have the technology. If the investment was there 30 years ago, it feels like we could've made a lot more progress. But the narrative persisted.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#49

Post by ChatGTP »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #45
ChatGTP wrote: post #8

Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impres…

Baseload is indeed meaningless unless you put a number on it in gw and gwh actually needed. People wielding the term without doing that (i.e. most of them), are basically insisting on unspecified amounts of energy to be needed for unspecified amounts of time for unspecified calamities that may need said unspecified capacity. It's usually accompanies by some handwavy statements about clouds, weather, and seasonal dark…

it becomes a simple engineering challenge with some clear economics that you can model for different solutions.

This 100%, this is exactly how I felt about it too. Now it's a simple engineering and IMO economics challenge, it turns out, it's quite possible.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#50

Post by ChatGTP »

XorNot wrote: post #25
ChatGTP wrote: post #8

Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impres…

How much energy storage do you think those 14 gigawatts of batteries represent? How long do they provide 14 gigawatts for? Then go cost out how much it would cost you to deal with say, 3 days of solar under production due to grey skies for your house. In most studies, the capacity factor of a solar plant is about 25% at best, so that 550W panel is worth about 137W over the course of a year, presuming you can store al…

In this case , yes, why can't my energy requirements be supplanted with a fully charged battery grid, solar from somewhere else, or gas peaker or something similar?

Doesn't seem like a compelling case for running coal power plants 24/7 to be honest.

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