Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade • Hacker News Board

Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade

#131

Post by adrianN » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 4:43 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #128

adrianN wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes I meant you need 35 square meters producing peak power 24/7 for a whole year to power one average German's life.

The numbers I've seen suggest that in the case of Germany, wind power can get you most of the way to a carbon free economy, but you still need to cover 1-2% of the land with solar panels (i.e. all roofs and a bit of land). Under the assumption that we also improve energy efficiency by insulating homes, switching to heat pumps, and switching to electric cars. Without those efficiency improvements it was unlikely that we'd have enough space. Under this scheme we'd need a little battery storage (for a day of consumption or so), and power-to-gas for longer periods of low generation.

I'm not sure whether he has talks in English, but Prof. Quaschning has some nice resources in German about this topic.

Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade

#132

Post by sunstone » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #35

michaelt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of our global storage needs do you believe are "long term" in this dichotomy? Solar output in the UK varies substantially between summer and winter [1] - as does demand for heating. As a Brit with solar panels, it would be super neat if I could generate power during the summer, store it for 6 months, and use it for heating during winter. That would reduce my direct carbon emissions relative to the sta…

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.

A HVDC transmission line might be a more practical way to do this.

Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade

#133

Post by sitkack » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

amluto wrote: post #127

Gustomaximus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Easier to just increase the cost of power more than 2x.

Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade

#134

Post by josmala » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

x43b wrote: post #45

josmala wrote: post #41

The numbers given in article the world wide battery installations are predicted in 2040 to cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption assuming it would be equal close to 2016 figures, where majority of world is in relative poverty. It definitely is at least two orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change. Nope, emissions are only r…

I actually work on reducing emissions tangentially and am absolutely not a "denier", but I have not seen any evidence that our models are so accurate that we can predict the tipping point from halting increases to decreases within 1%.

Just took a number which carbon is removed from air-sea-plants natural circulation. The increase in CO2 stops when emissions match the removal of CO2 from circulation as permanent basis. And that figure seems to be about 1% of our emissions. But the key issue is that those two numbers need to match in order to actually stop the climate change permanently which is so far away from every politicians discussion points. All the renewables and storage technologies fail when we start to calculate amount of material required to build them and mining of those resources. Only energy technology so far that could actually do it is nuclear. As for uranium limited reserves they are calculated about 0.1 cent per kwh price limit. It is one of those situations where emotions points towards renewables while numbers are clearly for the nuclear if people could accept tiny risk of having two bananas worth of radiation or even the extreme case of getting so high radiation dose that it would give as high cancer risk as the average alcohol consumption.