171–180 of 311 posts
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Then that’s more the issue with the BMS rather than the cells
In many of the systems, the BMS and battery are one in the same. This article blurs the lines between the cells and battery system, too.
Current prices are kinda nutty and are largely determined by the size of your buy. Retail prices for home batteries (a few kWhs) are roughly $1000/kWh. A Model 3 gets you about $700/kWh (with two free motors and an ipad). A Tesla megapack is $290/kWh, but you have to spend $1000000 to get that price. Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh. Long-term it seems pretty reasonable that retail pric…
At $6343 [1] for 13.5kwh [2], seems closer to $500/kwh? The federal rebate does help substantially, but most folks should qualify. This # is closer to $400/kwh if you buy with solar, and $300 if you're buying a few instead of just one. Re: car batteries, the difference between the rear-wheel drive and long range is about 20kwh (60kwh vs 80kwh), for $8K. That's $400/kwh and doesn't even include all the other trim diff…
You have to charge the battery with electricity (which you could sell or have to buy), and then when you discharge it you are either offsetting electricity you would buy, or selling it. Throughout the process you're losing some of it (~8%), and the battery is degrading in capacity towards eventual replacement.
You also have black swan events - i.e. an early battery death due to manufacturing defects.
i.e. my rooftop solar array sells power at 7c / kWh. When I run the numbers on various offset scenarios, the cost per kWh delivered after all expenses and life time costs that I can find tends to be about 7 - 8 c / kWh. Which honestly makes perfect sense to me: the electricity company, at much more massive scale, can install and run batteries more cheaply then I can.
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It’s not sustainable. Solar panel producers are going to be in big trouble in 8-10 years I think.
This is a controversial hypothesis that is merely from a idiot, being myself. I don't truly believe this but it something I have throught about. Energy costs are THE driving force of prices. The cost of materials is essentially the energy it takes to squire/process/ship them. If energy was free, we would just dig up random patches of dirt and sift it for every material we wanted even in trace amounts. But its not bec…
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When you say $89/kwh, are you talking about just cells, or assembled packs? I’m just about to buy a 5kw Lifepo4 server rack battery from EG4 for a diy project. It’s closer to $220/kwh This is what I’m planning to buy, but you know something better I’d love to take a look. https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-lithium-battery-48...
Do you know if these batteries be used as a replacement for batteries of a lead-acid UPS? I have a Tripp-Lite rack-mount UPS with an extension battery, but its battery has degraded and it can only sustain my computing load for 3-4 hours. It'd be great to replace it with an LFP battery.
Will Prowse on youtube I think has some videos comparing and contrasting the different units for this purpose.
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Why tesla charges 5x for their Powerwall? I know their software is excellent, but I haven’t seen prices like that anywhere.
Because there's value in a brand name, they are using more expensive batteries (or they were, I think just recently they started shipping LFP), and you're paying for the plug-and-play convenience. Buying cells from CATL, adding a BMS, and putting all in a case is easy but still not trivial. Definitely not plug and play. You can absolutely get dirt cheap LFPs (like other people, I hang out on diysolarforum.com too), b…
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Aside from it benefiting energy companies, is there any justification for such a law? In South Africa we’ve had load shedding on and off since 2008. It’s becoming pretty standard for middle class homes to have inverters with batteries and optionally solar. It does create an issue though that when a load shedding window ends, a whole lot of batteries start charging all at once (especially during non-daylight hours). A…
Utilities get a local monopoly and guaranteed tariffs in exchange for the considerable investment in building out the supply grid and generating capacity, and the obligation to maintain it. If individuals are allowed to opt-out, that changes the financial promises made to the utilities. Of course this was mostly done at a time before it was economically feasible for anyone to go off-grid with solar and batteries. I q…
Vermont utility proposes to install battery storage in most homes https://environmentamerica.org/updates/vermont-utility-propo...
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>I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w) For comparison, I've seen pallets of new 24 410w panels at 58€ per panel (transportation included), hopefully I'll see similar deals in the future when I will ready to jump into solar. Edit: I'm mostly worried because I don't know how sustainable the industry is when you can buy solar panels at such dirt cheap prices.
It’s not sustainable. Solar panel producers are going to be in big trouble in 8-10 years I think.
It's an industry that's been driving down prices at an absolutely bonkers rate the entire time it's existed, and any time a company falls behind on that they're immediately in very deep trouble. I think it's basically impossible to make predictions about what an industry like that will be in 8-10 years.
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All of the quotes and interactions I had with the local solar installers were reminiscent of the used car lot if not outright fraud. I was able to do what was permissible myself and a regular licensed electrician did the rest. The equipment is UL listed. There was some learning curve but I found the diysolarforum.com to be a pretty good resource to learn what I didn't know. I ran the whole setup standalone for about…
> All of the quotes and interactions I had with the local solar installers were reminiscent of the used car lot if not outright fraud. I had exactly the same experience. They absolutely would not tell me the actual system cost, only how much I would save on my current bill per month. It felt exactly like a car salesman only talking about monthly payments, and it was horrible.
They were clearly just doing lead generation for some other company they had no direct connection with, and didn’t even have any idea who to talk to that could even answer my question.
I had way better luck just looking online and paying shipping, which is absurd given how they were presenting themselves.
So not even as good as a used car salesman on an actual car lot, more like door to door used car salesman.
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Utilities get a local monopoly and guaranteed tariffs in exchange for the considerable investment in building out the supply grid and generating capacity, and the obligation to maintain it. If individuals are allowed to opt-out, that changes the financial promises made to the utilities. Of course this was mostly done at a time before it was economically feasible for anyone to go off-grid with solar and batteries. I q…
Or perhaps someday the utility will give you a battery: Vermont utility proposes to install battery storage in most homes https://environmentamerica.org/updates/vermont-utility-propo...
There's a lot of solar power here in the state and a good argument for locally "shared" batteries in terms of maintainance, fire safety, etc.
Not much to say on that ATM, back of envelope looks good, there's a report in the works.
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> This blog post is all over the place. Which is sad. He has something useful to say, but destroys his credibility by not focusing. Here's the "poster wall" of the organization he claims to head.[1] "Disciplinary convergence through creative story telling". For a much better summary of the subject, see the cover story in this week's Economist. OK, how cheap can batteries get, really? Well, the price of lithium droppe…
> Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment. ... > This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary. If we're overproducing this doesn't follow. Lithium prices will rise back to the price of production. I'm not an expert but quickly glancing at the futures market and it looks to me like there is only a small rebound predicted ($13.30 -> $17.00/contract…
For stationary battery like the use case describe for in house. I would assume sodium has a much better chance of winning over.