Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?

Post by pfdietz » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 11:32 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #290

pfdietz wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can save some maintenance cost by operating at low capacity factor. But this is a minor part of the cost of nuclear energy, so you don't save much. Nuclear simply isn't constituted to be useful as a dispatchable source. The technical ability to ramp up/down is beside the point; it's the financial ability to do so that matters. What nuclear did in France half a century ago is irrelevant. What matters is if n…

Nuclear can be made flexible, that's my point. It works best as a constant baseload, but it's mostly because the current plants were not designed for dispatchable use (except for some plants in France). Nuclear plants do not degrade at a constant rate, regardless of their power. By idling the plant, you extend its service life, essentially amortizing the capital cost over a longer period of time. And the capital cost…

Post by kragen » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #292

kragen wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, you're right that a counterflow heat exchanger could indeed provide 600° output by cooling a hot dirt pile most of which is well below 600°. I hadn't thought of that, even though I knew it in other contexts. I mistakenly thought that only the heat over the output temperature would be available. The only drawback is that, when you're heating the pile, most of the time you are only heating part of it (the cold par…

I don't think it's necessary for the pipes in the piles to be operating at the pressure of the steam in the turbines. There could be an intermediate heat exchanger to transfer heat from the low density steam (or air) in the pipes to the high pressure steam in the turbine loop.

Post by Xemplolo » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

metalman wrote: post #258

Xemplolo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NO!" while companies already do this successfully. But hey, why not being negative first eh? ;P

successfull?, maybe, we will see if fires, insurance, and end of life disposal costs leave any roe, plus there are no large scale used car battery grid storage plants, just green washing for data centers, where they are most definitly worried about fires, given the huge spacing between units, green washing/cred,scamenomics,, but most certainly, not grid scale

Post by cyberax » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:03 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #291

cyberax wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear can be made flexible, that's my point. It works best as a constant baseload, but it's mostly because the current plants were not designed for dispatchable use (except for some plants in France). Nuclear plants do not degrade at a constant rate, regardless of their power. By idling the plant, you extend its service life, essentially amortizing the capital cost over a longer period of time. And the capital cost…

You ignore the counterargument I already gave you to what you're saying there. Nuclear can be made technically flexible. It can't be made economically flexible. The large fixed costs prevent the technical ability you are describing there from being useful. It's pyrrhic engineering, straining to achieve an outcome that's useless. Even France depends largely on the rest of Europe to deal with variations in demand rathe…