71–80 of 297 posts
> Can "second life" EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage? Yes is it profitable? probably not. Looking at the price for brid battery storage, and its dropping precipitously. The cost isn't as much in the batteries them selves, it packaging, placing and then controlling them. For example if you want to have a 200Mwhr 100Mw storage site, you'll need to place it, join it to the grid, all doable. Then you need t…
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In 2040 fusion energy advancements will have gotten far enough to be the next technological step and make this redundant anyway
There's currently no technological path for fusion to be cheaper than fission. It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined. And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear. And solar and storage are getting cheaper at a tremendous rate. It's hard to imagine a scenario where fusion could ever catch up to solar and storage technology. It may be useful in places with poor sola…
Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).
Or it might be that the attempts at building such a prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's enough data to say one way or the other.
> And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.
It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true. If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.
I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to get there, but that too will likely require fundamental breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air batteries).
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Very interesting - I did not know this was possible. A few questions: 1. Does the solar inverter do away with the need for a V2G or V2H unit? 2. What are the limitations vs a dedicated V2G/H unit? 3. Is generator input on your solar inverter a common feature across inverters?
1. It does. The only issue is that the car can only output about 2kW sustained (this is a model limitation). That's fine since I have batteries in the house. 2. Tbh not super familiar with V2G/V2H, other than it being super expensive for both the wall box and the car (only high end models tend to support it)/ 3. No idea, but it's not a high end feature, I wouldn't count on any inverter to just have it, but if you're…
As long as the inverter can also provide charging this definitely has some potential.
Personally speaking, having just bought an Ioniq 5 and installing solar at home what I see as the near future improvement is adding V2L functionality, which I can hook up to the generator input of my solar inverter, essentially adding another 60kWh buffer to my grid storage. Considering how expensive residential batteries are and how quickly EVs depreciate, I think soon it'll be cheaper to get a used EV as a cheap so…
In the US, V2L limits your ability to output power from the car to about 1500 W. It's not going to power your house as more than a stopgap, even if you do have supplementary house batteries. V2H/V2G justify their complexity by solving that problem, along with all the ancillary grid benefits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 2040 fusion energy advancements will have gotten far enough to be the next technological step and make this redundant anyway
There's currently no technological path for fusion to be cheaper than fission. It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined. And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear. And solar and storage are getting cheaper at a tremendous rate. It's hard to imagine a scenario where fusion could ever catch up to solar and storage technology. It may be useful in places with poor sola…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been intrigued by used solar panels for sale, seems like you can get an amazing price for ones that are only lightly degraded. Is there a downside, or do you just mean that it isn't popular currently?
In addition to my sibling comment: The cost of the panels is a rather small fraction of the total cost of a typical installation. Most of that cost ist labor, some regulatory requirements and the inverter. Whether you pay a factor of 2 for the panels or not typically doesn't matter. In other words: Reusing used panels will only ever be able to safe you a minuscule amount.
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I've been intrigued by used solar panels for sale, seems like you can get an amazing price for ones that are only lightly degraded. Is there a downside, or do you just mean that it isn't popular currently?
How much of a difference does it actually make in terms of the all-inclusive price of installation (e.g. panels, inverters, mounting hardware, and labor)? (Asking because I genuinely don't know, not because I have a specific answer in mind.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's currently no technological path for fusion to be cheaper than fission. It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined. And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear. And solar and storage are getting cheaper at a tremendous rate. It's hard to imagine a scenario where fusion could ever catch up to solar and storage technology. It may be useful in places with poor sola…
> It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined. Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrate…
> but what if they could drain every last drop of energy from those batteries before recycling them? Again batteries are an energy store and not an energy source. The fact the author cannot distinguish that makes the their opinion less credible.