51–60 of 311 posts
What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?
I'd rather hear a projection from an engineer/scientist/operations person in the industry. This kinda reads like it's written by an armchair expert who thinks about batteries a lot, but doesn't have much to do with building that future being described. Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.
IMHO, the theme of this century is making cheap, sustainable energy so ridiculously abundant that we'll be wondering what the hell we were doing before and how we managed without it. There are so many technological breakthroughs converging on making that happen that IMHO this is just going to happen. It's a question of when, not if. The timelines are uncertain, but not really. The author of this article is extrapolating a few trends over a time scale that is rather short. He could be wrong. Even by a factor 5. And it would still happen on a reasonable timeline. And I don't think he's going to be that far of the mark. 2030-2035 it will be RIP ice engines and fossil fuels. You'd be out of your mind to use anything else than dirt cheap electrons stored in dirt cheap batteries. At 50$ per kwh, it's a no brainer. At 5$/kwh, you'd have to be bat shit crazy to use anything else. That's 'only' a 10x improvement.
Assuming all innovation grinds to a halt in 2024 and that no technical progress will happen beyond 2024 seems like the naive point of view when there's so much happening that is well funded and seemingly on track to get some kind of results. The opposite view on this is of course that progress is a foregone conclusion. Some things will taper off and other things we haven't even thought off might pick up the slack. Between now and 2030, you can make a few educated guesses though. Which is what this author is doing.
Anyway, cheap, clean energy is transformative. Most of the major challenges right now are directly or indirectly bottle necked on energy. Making energy cheaper matters. 2x is nice. 10x is nicer. 100x is what we might actually see in a few decades. Anything in between would be transformative. Anything beyond that is hard to imagine but yet not unlikely. We might actually nail fusion at some point. Who knows? It might even become cheap to do it.
But we have a nice fusion plant that we orbit around beaming down orders of magnitude more energy than we actually need. We're learning how to harvest it using solar panels; a trick plants and trees have of course mastered ages ago. This article is about leveraging batteries for storage. The two things combined are a thing of beauty.
The point about sodium ion is that there are no exotic/scarce materials in there. The materials are cheap. And we're not going to run out of them. How many twh. of battery could we need. Tens, hunders, thousands? We only use about 25pwh per year worth of electricity right now. That number is going to go up of course. What would you do with 25000 twh of battery? Annual production is about to cross the 1twh/year. And most of these batteries last a few decades. 25pwh of charged batteries is a lot of power. And yet we might have that sitting around in a few decades.
Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today. From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $13…
Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today. From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $13…
How is this cheap? How much did you pay for the whole package?
It's $900 + inverters for 10 kWh. A Tesla Powerwall 2 (14 kWh) is $10k (inverter included).
I doubt the inverters cost more than $1k.
Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today. From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $13…
>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.
This blog post is all over the place. The 2030 price projections are taken from extrapolations of Lithium battery costs, but he’s assuming Sodium chemistry batteries will take over and become ubiquitous at rock bottom prices. The first Sodium batteries barely became available within the past year. He’s also treating batteries like the only component of the system. The associated charging, inverter, and physical struc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Totally disconnected, zero power bill. That home is in a jurisdiction where that is permissible.
How do you get through winter? I’m asking in good faith, I‘m using a PV installation myself and cannot see how I could realistically get off the grid.
Most solar charge controllers allow a certain amount of PV overprovisioning.
Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today. From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $13…
All this to underpin the grand illusion of capitalism that exponential YoY growth is sustainable to justify insane VC valuations. Which is even more perverse when all this is done in the name of saving the planet.
I would love a 5-20kwh battery backup in my home, I even have a place for it. But when I called my local solar/battery installer they said that it was illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home. I live in Minnesota. They even told me the power from a hypothetical solar rig is sold to the grid utility, not stored, and they give a discount on future winter rates as payment. This seems like a lousy deal.
Now imagine you produce 95% yourself. Instead of typical 15kw installation you only need 500w for when sun doesn’t shine. Thats a reduction of 30x! Far cheaper inverters, thinner lines, etc. Unfortunately no one in the supply chain has wants this because thats lost profit.