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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

#51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there a reason you did the math with a 13.5kWh battery? Do you heat a large house electrically? Do you need to charge an EV at night off that battery?

Most people can get away with a significantly smaller battery - if your goal is to just get a normal house through a single night. That goal can be achieved pretty economically, especially if you're willing to use grid electricity on mornings with little sun on your panels or nights with unusually high demand.

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

#52
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you would buy a Tesla power wall you actually have a system which would keep running if you have a power outage.

There are plenty of areas which would not mind paying a little bit more for this feature.

If it doesn't make sense for you, all good.

The batteries will get even cheaper I'm pretty sure.

And the big batteries make their money through grid stabilisation.

But there are a few companies which can leverage your battery at home and act as a big battery

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

#53
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a scam, scams requires malice, and it's sufficient that people don't expect exponential change even when it's happening reliably for ages — after all, even when people do learn about exponential growth, many say things like that it has a "knee" or reaches an "inflection point".

There's a survivor bias, many things do stop growing at some point, but these are harder to notice. You're more likely to perceive the things which did scale exponentially.

Sure — all exponentials eventually turn out to be sigmoids, or some quote to that effect — but I'm unclear why this matters as I'm suggesting most people don't even know what an exponential really is and what to expect from them in even the short term?

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in your boots for 15 years, and I barely convinced anyone. Even my thermal panels are viewed with suspiction, and people don't believe me when I told them my hot water come from them with a little help from an electric heater in the winter. They pay themselves once per year, easily. Frustratingly, the more common doubt is "if it's so good, how are there so few people doing it?" At this point I gave up. I en…

Every time I bring up that subject, people get aggravated and point out that lower voltage means larger cables, which is true, but I wonder if the tradeoff of paying more for thicker cables is worth the simplicity it brings.

It might pay for itself eventually.

Suppose I'm making toast -- a process that normally uses around 1100W, anywhere in the world.

At 120V, that's about 9A, which is fine for a 15A branch circuit running with 14AWG wire (the very cheapest of wire that we ever use for this stuff in the States).

At 48V, making toast requires about 22A, and thus needs something more like 10AWG wire, which uses about 2.5x as much copper.

But that bigger wire only needs to be purchased and installed one time, while any efficiency gain gets to be kept (presumably) forever.

And that efficiency gain (achieved by having fewer, simpler electronics between the sun and the toast in my kitchen) means a smaller solar array, and a smaller battery bank -- stuff that does wear out eventually.

So why not do both?

Why not stick with high voltage (because it's cheaper), and also switch some things over to DC?

Neither the wires in my walls nor the electromechanical bits of my toaster know or care if things are being powered with 120VAC or 120VDC. The toast comes out the same either way.

Why must voltage also decrease?

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

#55
post #5

It's easy to explain to finance people. It's a form of commodity speculation. Storage is a buy-low, sell-high business, with a daily cycle. This expansion will continue until peak and valley prices start to level out.

There is significant cost in storage though, so there will still be peaks and valleys.

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

#57
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I'm reading the website right, UK prices for Tesla Powerwall units are now: "1 Powerwall £6,000, 1 Gateway £900": https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/powerwall/get

I think you may be pessimistic about it dying immediately after 80% capacity given most homes won't discharge a thing that size most days, and 10 years is 3652 days which seems like a reasonable number of cycles to 80% for a variety of specific batteries (some do more, some do less, but not only do I not know the cheapest nor do I know what Tesla uses, I wouldn't understand the answer if they gave it to me).

Also, for grid users, it probably matters how many cycles[0] rather than how many years, and how much they cycle them depends on the entire rest of the grid. Also, as space isn't the limiting factor[1], any unit can probably be kept in the system down to 5% of initial capacity.

[0] even that's a simplification, if you can store more joules in total over the lifetime by never charging to a full cycle

[1] look how space inefficient hydro dams are, and yet we still use them; battery tendency towards spicy pillows, however, is always a concern.

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

#59
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a survivor bias, many things do stop growing at some point, but these are harder to notice. You're more likely to perceive the things which did scale exponentially.

Sure — all exponentials eventually turn out to be sigmoids, or some quote to that effect — but I'm unclear why this matters as I'm suggesting most people don't even know what an exponential really is and what to expect from them in even the short term?

> it's sufficient that people don't expect exponential change even when it's happening reliably for ages

This sort of implied that people should have been expecting exponential change. But even if you know what exponential growth is, you couldn't know in advance with certainty if it would be the case for battery storage, renewables etc.

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

#60
post #50
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the same reason they're not now, and why you currently don't have batteries and are only just now considering solar panels: cost.

For example, here's the breakdown of the Australian NSW energy regulators supply and demand dashboard: https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...

See the scale on the right for demand? The bottom is 6,000 MW. That's 24/7, all year round pretty much. My home state never drops below 6 GW of constant, continuous demand. That's baseload. Doesn't matter what it's made of, doesn't matter what it's components are, if you want to avoid brown outs or blackouts, then at all times there must be at least 6 GW of generation available overnight.

So, applying the 1:3 rule-of-thumb for LiFePO4 power:energy, overnight we have a period of at least 8 hours where we need at least 48GWh of storage - and we're going to use all of it. Of course, that's a number where you scrape through - because to recharge that storage, you're going to have to supply at least double that amount of energy to support the baseload while you do it. So now you need 96 GWh of generating capacity. But solar doesn't have the capacity factor for it remember - 25% at best, over time. So optimistically we'll need to deploy about 384 GW of solar to charge that system. Only...we can't rely on that either, because 25% is...average over time. And we absolutely have to charge those batteries to make it through the following night.

But wait: there's a big mismatch here. We can't just amortize over 384 GW of solar. Because all of that solar might be generating at full power during the day. Or it might be under-performing, or not performing at all. We have this massive surplus we need to have, but our batteries - 48GWh of them - are going to give us maybe 16 GW of power, and likely they'll be able to absorb energy slower then that (i.e. charging would be maybe 90+% efficient). We can't charge them faster then 16 GW: that big array is solely to try and meet an average amount of charge to get us through the next night - provided nothing else goes wrong. And we can't use it efficiently: because we also need the batteries during the day. Clouds over a solar plant kill the output instantly, so the battery has to step in to compensate and retain grid stability.

So the actual amount of battery capacity we need, to get us through one night is going to get considerably larger then 48GWh (16 GW). In fact ideally we actually need...pretty much 384 GW of batteries. Because if our arrays perform well, we need to be able to soak all that power up to have enough charge to get through the night, but we also need enough batteries to sustain the arrays going down during the day and needing to run the grid off the storage momentarily...but we can't afford not to be charging, because on average we're only getting 96 GW - but the lows and highs are very far from that number.

So from that one bit of analysis - and making no accounting for emergencies, equipment failures, efficiency of individual components (i.e. 90% battery charge efficiency + 10% losses in transmission lines etc.) we're currently at a tally of 384 GW of solar, 384 GW of batteries, and we have no redundancy whatsoever in this system. Because we can't get a reliable 6 GW from solar.

Now obviously the picture gets better if you include other things: i.e. wind tends to match solar dips and does work at night, so a combined solar/wind capacity factor is usually about 50%, and with better modelling you could shave some of these absolute margins into more balanced ones, but the problem remains: you've got to charge the batteries, and there's a limited rate you can do it. And it's a problem which gets worse for something like Pumped Hydro, because pumped hydro can have higher energy storage but it has much lower power output as a proportion - meaning it takes longer to charge (it would however be a good backstop for long term storage if we could build enough of it - can we?) There's also some positives - i.e. over time that giant over-sized battery installation is going to get way better cycle life since it's now >1000GWh of storage capacity and we won't actually be using all of it or even a fraction very frequently. We actually have a pretty good buffer over time if we expand the generating capacity further since we could a couple of weeks over no sun without running down our buffer.

Of course...current Australian generating capacity for solar in 2023 - nationally - is 32.9 GW.[1] And globally...there's about 300 GWh of LiFePO4 in existence at all. And the deeper you regularly cycle your batteries, the more expensive per unit they become.[3] Which is a problem because I've just proposed installing ~USD$154 billion dollars of batteries (assuming low-end cost per kWh estimated)[4], more then the entire world supply, to be able to adequately guarantee baseload electrical supply for one state of my relatively small country. Or about USD$25 billion per reliable GW, in batteries alone. Which makes the current expensive nuclear power plants look downright cheap and ITER would still be competitive when it's actually done.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/australi...

[2] https://www.lifepo4-battery.com/News/10-Largest-BATTERY.html

[3] https://gwl-power.tumblr.com/post/130701906811/faq-lifepo4-c...

[4] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

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