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

#91

Post by kragen » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #54

standardUser wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"..cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption..." That seems like a meaningless metric. No one is designing a global battery system to power the entire planet. What matters is how battery systems integrate with generation systems. "People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change..." Why do you assume people assume this?

Why do you think that this is a meaningless metric. It seems to me that we need at least enough storage to last for a night. Realistically we need enough storage to cover reduced production and increased demand through winter.

It's cheaper under most assumptions to build enough solar panels that the reduced production during winter is still enough to cover your increased demand, rather than to build seasonal utility energy stores. See my calculations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20664835 which show that 50x panel overprovisioning is cheaper than a week’s worth of battery backup. 26 week backup would then be a higher cost than overprovisioning panels by 1300x. The actual seasonal variability in panel output is normally less than a factor of 2, nowhere near 1300. Unless you're in Antarctica or something.

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

#92

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #88

maxerickson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barely. The temperature of the earth is a function of the balance between energy inputs and energy outputs. The solar input is much much more power than total human utilization, so adding "human" amounts of power won't shift the balance very much.

We're talking “long-term” here, as in when the humans are using over a thousand times as much energy as they are now, so that it's cheaper to launch solar panels into fricking space than to upgrade the ocean-carpeting solar panel rafts blanketing much of the oceans to be 90% rather than 75% efficient. So yes, even before that point, solar energy harvesting will begin to have noticeable climatic effects.

1000x would make human use ~20% of the earth system, but earth side solar wouldn't get counted twice, so it would be less. I agree that would have an impact, but I doubt the other poster was imagining the 1000x scenario.

The numbers are something like 20 terawatts for current human utilization and 100 petawatts for solar power.

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

#93

Post by Brakenshire » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #26

dwheeler wrote: post #17

If this prediction turns out to be true, it would be a real boon for reducing carbon emissions. Changing from 7% to 40% of electrical generation is a big deal. I'm sure it's not enough, but it sounds like a start.

It's pretty much guaranteed: even current photovoltaic pricing, let alone another factor of ten down the learning curve, means energy in the daytime is super cheap to free. This creates an immense market opportunity for utility-scale storage.

And for finding ways of using energy at peak times. I could imagine everyone charging their cars at work if it turns out the electricity is cheap at that time.

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

#94

Post by rsuelzer » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 10:56 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #63

dharma1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maxwell, now owned by Tesla. I think Tesla will become a big player in the battery tech space

Maxwell dry battery electrode tech [1] is going to rapidly drive down cell costs (while increasing energy density) for Tesla. I posit this is also how they intend to pack 200kw of storage into the 2020 Roadster. Disclaimer: TSLA investor [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-...

So far Tesla has not really done much in terms of battery tech. Pretty much everything they are doing with 18650 cells in their cars and power walls is hardly ground breaking science. They have managed to make things look incredibly beautiful, but 18650 batteries have been around for a long time. If Tesla starts to do more with different chemistries that will be interesting.

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

#95

Post by DennisP » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 10:56 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #21

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of our global storage needs do you believe are "long term" in this dichotomy? Is this at the "electric cars can't do my daily commute" or "electric cars can't tow my boat 600 miles without stopping, once a year" stage? Seems like most of the world just needs solar to last until the next day with a decent chunk of that power needed immediately after the sun sets and any wind power available could get s…

Short term = diurnal Long term = weeks to seasonal Batteries, especially that sort of cheaper battery, would be great for diurnal load leveling. Long term storage is probably more hydrogen and mass thermal storage. The tradeoff would be capital cost per unit stored energy vs. efficiency. Storage competes with and complements two other approaches: overinstallation of generation capacity w. curtailment, and dispatchabl…

Another option for seasonal variation is to overbuild. Build enough solar for winter and just discard or figure out something to do with the excess power supply in summer.

(I'm not sure that would be cheaper, it's just another possibility.)

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

#96

Post by kragen » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

dwighttk wrote: post #90

kragen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn it off. Solar panels can be turned off in nanoseconds with nothing more than a transistor. Or you can invest the zero-cost energy in something potentially useful that doesn't need a constant power supply: electrowinning metals, removing corrosion, heating the hot tub back up, making ice to run your fridge or air conditioner when there's less sun, running low-cost machine tools (the kind where the depreci…

or you could have some batteries, save the energy for a cloudy day, and have a smaller installation of panels.

Right, the problem is that a week’s worth of batteries is an immense cost that is reducing only slowly, while waiting a few days to wash your laundry is close to free.

Let's say you use 1 kW on average in your house. You'll need about 4 kWp of panels to supply that with a typical capacity factor of 25%—a bit more panels than that if you're in Scotland, a bit less in Perú, but about that. At current prices that's US$800 of low-cost panels.

Now consider a couple of alternatives. You can overprovision the panels by a factor of 5 so that even on cloudy days that block 80% of the light, you can continue rocking your one-kilowatt lifestyle. This costs an extra US$3200 of panels. Or you can buy, say, a week of lithium-ion batteries; say you're paying US$150/kWh for the batteries, which is in the ballpark but not exact. You need 7*24 = 168 hours of batteries, which at one kilowatt is 168 kWh. This costs US$25000. In both cases you need some power electronics (charge controllers, inverters, etc.) but this is not a significant cost difference between the two scenarios.

So 5x overprovisioning of solar panels costs you about an eighth of a week’s worth of battery storage. You can overprovision by a factor of 50 for less than the cost of that week-long battery backup. There's a trade-off between the two—more battery storage means you can get by with less panels, and vice versa—but this strongly suggests that in most cases the optimal trade-off is not going to involve multi-day battery banks.

How about a few years in the future? This year, panel manufacturers have apparently sewn up the market in a cartel, preventing prices from falling over the last few months. But sooner or later, the cartel will break down, and panel prices will return to their long-term learning curve, say 20% per year until the raw material costs dominate. In 5 years, panel costs would then be 40% of what they are today: 8¢ per peak watt instead of 19¢. No such dramatic cost reductions are on the horizon for batteries.

But in a lot of cases, shifting demand to times with cheap energy is still going to be cheaper.

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

#97

Post by dharma1 » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 11:12 PM UTC

ridewinter wrote: post #78

toomuchtodo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maxwell dry battery electrode tech [1] is going to rapidly drive down cell costs (while increasing energy density) for Tesla. I posit this is also how they intend to pack 200kw of storage into the 2020 Roadster. Disclaimer: TSLA investor [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-...

If this tech allows BEVs a significantly higher range it would be a game changer. Currently the range is about the same as gasoline cars with a longer refueling time. For your average consumer that’s not an improvement. But if I can go 800 miles per charge all the sudden my BEV looks like an iPhone X compared to your flipphone traditional vehicle.

I think it's 20-30% better energy density than current batteries

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

#98

Post by kragen » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 11:13 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #92

kragen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking “long-term” here, as in when the humans are using over a thousand times as much energy as they are now, so that it's cheaper to launch solar panels into fricking space than to upgrade the ocean-carpeting solar panel rafts blanketing much of the oceans to be 90% rather than 75% efficient. So yes, even before that point, solar energy harvesting will begin to have noticeable climatic effects.

1000x would make human use ~20% of the earth system, but earth side solar wouldn't get counted twice, so it would be less. I agree that would have an impact, but I doubt the other poster was imagining the 1000x scenario. The numbers are something like 20 terawatts for current human utilization and 100 petawatts for solar power.

Yeah, that's about what I calculated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20426368 — 130 petawatts of terrestrial insolation and 18 terawatts of world marketed energy consumption.

I think solar panels will tend to have lower albedo than the surfaces they shade (sunlight they reflect is not available for energy production, and even the 16%-efficient ones that are common today are pretty black), especially before the humans start floating them on oceans. Essentially all the energy they successfully harvest will later be converted to heat on Earth. So they will represent a positive thermal forcing in the climate system. I don't know what you mean about getting counted twice?

I don't know why anyone would propose orbiting solar panels when it's still easy to put solar panels on deserts. So I assumed that was what they were imagining, even though that's not a long-term scenario; it could happen before 2089, which is very short-term.

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

#99

Post by dd36 » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 11:21 PM UTC

rsuelzer wrote: post #94

toomuchtodo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maxwell dry battery electrode tech [1] is going to rapidly drive down cell costs (while increasing energy density) for Tesla. I posit this is also how they intend to pack 200kw of storage into the 2020 Roadster. Disclaimer: TSLA investor [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-...

So far Tesla has not really done much in terms of battery tech. Pretty much everything they are doing with 18650 cells in their cars and power walls is hardly ground breaking science. They have managed to make things look incredibly beautiful, but 18650 batteries have been around for a long time. If Tesla starts to do more with different chemistries that will be interesting.

Thermal tech and longevity have been pushed by Tesla. 18650 is a form factor not a chemistry.

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

#100

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #95

pfdietz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short term = diurnal Long term = weeks to seasonal Batteries, especially that sort of cheaper battery, would be great for diurnal load leveling. Long term storage is probably more hydrogen and mass thermal storage. The tradeoff would be capital cost per unit stored energy vs. efficiency. Storage competes with and complements two other approaches: overinstallation of generation capacity w. curtailment, and dispatchabl…

Another option for seasonal variation is to overbuild. Build enough solar for winter and just discard or figure out something to do with the excess power supply in summer. (I'm not sure that would be cheaper, it's just another possibility.)

That's curtailment. A twist on that is to install some of the solar at an angle appropriate for winter instead of summer.