Batteries: How cheap can they get?(aukehoekstra.substack.com) |
Batteries: How cheap can they get?(aukehoekstra.substack.com) |
Cost per bit of internet plans has also gone down a lot in the past decade, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing on account of all the new JavaScript, ads, and other website bloat.
Using less exotic materials is exciting, though! Regardless of whether the cost feels different.
How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet? Oh well that’s for young people and future generations to care about!
The most useful idea to think about here, for me, is not what the raw market of economics batteries might be. Rather, the societal good that there would be if the state stepped in and just made batteries infinitesimally cheap for everyone.
The state provides a lot of things that lubricate society: just as they send electricity to our homes, provide a central bank for the economy, schools for our children, and courts to mete out justice — so too could they potentially ensure every citizen has X number of 18650 cells (or future equivalent) available to them to use as they see fit.
I know this was rhetorical, but the standard method in the literature is Optimal Taxes on Fossil Fuel in General Equilibrium (2014).
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.
The thing is that they have been exponential so far. clean energy forecasts based on linear trends, not on doubling of installations or on halving of prices have been consistently too pessimistic.
We can expect this to continue for a short while longer, until inflection points are reached.
I’d be with you if the author was just hand waving their way to this conclusion but they seem to have done their research and used real numbers.
From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $130/kwh and about 26% less efficient in the same form factor. I look forward to this changing.
Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery (lifepo4) and haven't had any problems. I can't imagine ever going back to the power company. Panels have gotten to the point of being ridiculously cheap. I have a lot of space. I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w). They produce about 85% of their nominal rating.
I mention this because other comments mention costs that are much much higher.
I did my own a couple years ago, and it worked quite well on the first go. I got someone else to build the LiFePo4 battery pack (16 CATL cells for 48v with a JK BMS).
It was fairly easy to build. Mount panels on the roof, and wire everything (PV, battery, grid electricity if you want it, and the output) to the inverter. I added some extra steps to monitor usage and output, and a smart MCB. I also have a small shop that I can feed from solar power if the battery is almost charged and the sunset time hasn't reached yet.
See if you quotation is to export electricity to the grid. Those kinds of setups usually require a certified company to do the installation (to make sure the inverter syncs with the grid), but for off-grid setups, you can definitely DIY.
The setup you describe - lacking microinverters - I think there are options there short of wholesale replacement [disclaimer: I, too, am a self-taught in this field, and so am likely wrong in non-trivial ways]
A lot of the costs of a real install come from the permitting, doing proper upgrades (you might need a new electrical panel), the warranty, the labor, and other costs.
Every time I browse the DIY solar forums it feels like I see 1 person doing things by code for every 10 people cutting corners or playing loose with the rules. YMMV, but take the DIY cost estimates with a huge grain of salt.
This channel on youtube is an excellent resource and explains everything for anyone one who is a DIYer.
> I keep hoping there will be a bunch of small businesses electrifying everything
There are a few of these per large city; but they serve companies with large budgets for "becoming carbon negative", not residences trying to do things cost-effectively to lower their electric bills.
So yeah, there are businesses that'll do it.
It feels a lot like gambling. You might get one that works for a thousand cycles without issues. You might get one that fails after a week. You might be able to get a warranty replacement, or you might spend hours every week trying to make progress on a warranty claim without any luck.
You’re right that there’s a lot of opportunity if you’re willing to buy used panels, Chinese batteries, and do all of your own work. However, the cost of equipment is falling while the costs of labor are rising, which is why professionally installed systems are still expensive.
Were you able to disconnect that home from the grid? Most places you're required to maintain a grid connection unless the home is in an exceptionally remote location.
While pricing tends to be usage-based, true costs tend to be dominated by the capital expense of building base-load capacity for the few days your home might need to run fully on grid power. So as long as you're connected to the grid, you're still forcing the utility to spend about the same amount of money even if you only use grid power a few days out of the year.
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...
I have always had good experiences with signature solar. My inverters are EG4 and I am very happy with their product after trying A LOT of others. I think the primary reasons for the price difference is that you are purchasing US inventory (it's already here), it's preassembled and warrantied as a unit, they provide pretty decent support and their battery packs use 100ah cells instead of 280ah+ cells. So you are buying ~3x as many BMSs, connecting cable ($$$$) and cases for the same power.
Their rackable units are not light but can be moved by a capable person without too much fuss. A fully loaded 280ah unit in it's case is over 250lb so you really need a lift cart or such. The 280ah units and now maybe 320ah are more economical.
Building a big 14s 14kWh serial pack is really not hard, albeit those small hardware costs (bus bars) can add up. Most people don't need that much energy, probably, but these cells are just epic, maybe go 24v if you want less. 8k cycle life makes them good for a much much much longer time than most cells.
It'd be great to replace it with an LFP battery.
https://geizhals.de/?cat=bmseswresp&sort=t&hloc=at&hloc=de&v...
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.
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), but it is not a competitor with the Powerwall unless you want something to tinker with or are simply too budget constrained to buy the brand name product.
I'm probably not the only one wondering: does ordering from these Chinese suppliers require reaching out to them over email? I looked at both websites, and while Seplos asks to write in, CATL doesn't even have battery listings or sales contact information.
I'd love to order LiFePo4 batteries to put in some old UPSes of mine.
EVE cells are very famous in the DIY scene, you can get them via Alibaba/Aliexpress, or if you're in Europe from nkon.nl, they have a very good reputation.
We are looking at ordering a lot of these systems in Ukraine to deal with russian attacks on power grid
My system is 5kWp/8kWh @11.500€ three years ago, it would be now a bit different (400V batteries instead of 48V and a hybrid inverter instead of a p.v. string inverter AC coupled with a battery inverter) @~ the same price due to a single inverter and slightly cheaper p.v. modules (@~100€ for a 415Wp). If done by third parties the cheapest proposal back than was ~30.000€. At this prices given current electricity prices and local grid stability it's a nonsense, it's even cheaper a diesel generator.
I know prices in China are FAR lowers, and I've read also on far lower Thailand prices, but compared to local cost of life I can't quantify how much.
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.
Sorry what? Currently I'm happy to buy 5 kWh units for €1300.
He’s also treating batteries like the only component of the system. The associated charging, inverter, and physical structure components aren’t going to follow the same downward curve. Those are fixed costs on top of the battery itself.
Finally, there’s a lot of vague futurist writing mixed in, from congratulating himself on predicting in 2017 that EV trucks would be a thing some day to something about the blockchain for coordinating power grids:
> I think this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss).
This statement doesn’t even make sense when you read it. He defines “an [sic] ‘trustless’ system” as meaning a system that “just works” which suggests to me that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about but has been led to believe that blockchain is the future for everything.
Fun read, but I didn’t get much out of this article other than “prices are going down”
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.
- Incremental RESCI when buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors
- Incremental RESCI when drawing from the product population that shouldn't have passed QA
- Incremental RESCI when buying on AliExpress or random sites
- Incremental RESCI when dropping, hitting with a hammer, leaving in the sun, subjecting to a power surge
- Incremental RESCI from living in a dense neighborhood where dense people are buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors on AliExpress, occasionally dropping or hitting with a hammer, etc.
In the West, we have about a buck's worth of experience with residential electric service. By many measures, it's still much more dangerous than it should be.
The iron battery you are thinking of is a lithium battery. It is not the lithium that is a fire risk; lithium ion batteries do not contain metallic lithium. In an LFP battery the phosphate-oxide bond is much more stable and not subject to thermal runaway compared with e.g. cobalt-oxide.
There's an order of magnitude error here. That's an increase of about 26x. 8 doublings would require an increase of 256x.
Now, anyone can make a simple math error. But, like, it should be totally obvious to anyone that 7 years of 60% annual growth can't possibly be anywhere near 8 years of 100% annual growth? Or if not anyone, then at least for someone like the author who spends the first page of the article bragging about their credentials in reasoning about exponential growth.
Edit: and this isn't just nitpicking, this faulty result is then used as the basis of the cost reduction estimates.
No way is this in anyway close to 8 doublings though. That would take 12 years or by 2035. (1.59^12 = 261x)
One of the things that helped solar take off in California (besides subsidies) was being 'grid tied' relieved you have having to manage all the battery technology. Initially this led to some effective rate plans (trading watts for watts) but once the power companies realized the lack of profit on selling power was affecting their ability both maintain infrastructure AND pay off their monetary judgements levied by courts for blowing up towns and burning down forests they managed to get the CPUC to switch to a model that turns home owners with Solar into sharecroppers for the power company[1]. On the plus side this is rekindling the interest in being 100% "off grid" as that removes the power company leverage and puts pricing control back into the market/consumer's hands.
What I find interesting is that now I am starting to hear rumbles about how the power company wants to use consumer and commercial building "whole building" power systems as back up for the grid in peak power consumption emergencies that would mandate being tied to the grid even if you didn't "need" to be. I have been writing diligently to representatives that I refuse to let the CPUC tell me what I have to sell power back to the power companies to sustain the grid in emergencies and reserve the right to charge what ever the market will bear. It's a bit Texan in its dysfunctionalness but my goal is to encourage zero carbon emission home power grids faster, and driving the existing power companies out of business will assist in that endeavor.
Batteries are a huge part of that and if the author is correct that we can get to $1/kWh batteries by 2030 I feel like I will live to see it which makes me happy.
[1] Am I bitter? What make you say that :-)
Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.
He also seems to be off by one in the cost reduction. At 25% per doubling it takes nine doublings to get to 10% of the current price. So add another year or two to get to $8.
It's still interesting that we could get to $8/kWh by 2040 or so, especially since it seems physically plausible that sodium batteries could get that cheap, and that we could build several days of grid storage using them. And by 2030 we still get a cost drop of almost two-thirds, down to $28/kWh if we accept his claim of $80/kWh in 2023.
(1.59)^7 = 25.69
But yeah, not eight doublings. I guess we'll have to wait another four years then :).
People should really understand how cheap these cells have become and how feasible it is to setup your own battery storage system.
I’m now on a variable (next-day / day-ahead) dynamic electricity tariff that changes by the hour. On some days there are multiple hours where I get Paid to use electricity, it’s crazy that we have such an abundance of wind and solar.
It’s such fun to play with the Tiber API + Python and using those cheap hours to charge my battery a bit, while leaving room for solar.
For me (living in Europe), stable 220V 50Gz from any wall socket is one of the traits of civilization, like potable water tap and flush toilets. "Stormy grid" is something from a rural village lifestyle, with a water well and a cold basement to keep winter food supply. Is it really that huge problem in parts of US?
Claims of 10 euros/kwh, months of energy storage:
https://thenextweb.com/news/startup-sand-battery-funding-pol...
How big a battery can you make when it’s made from sand?
The trick with grid is that because you’re building at scale, you can give the benefits to many in one shot and you can build it out of town. Think Australia’s original big battery from Tesla in 90 days vs. messing with installing lots of little ones in houses, with all the maintenance, education and dangers that brings.
Long-term it seems pretty reasonable that retail prices should be a small multiple of the factory price (which keeps decreasing), so I think $1000 for a 20kWh battery is totally reasonable.
Nice to see blog
Remember how tariffs were called "asinine" when the last administration did them?
Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price.
Oh semiconductors are going to double in price too in 2025, buy soon.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156249/us-biden-china-t...
I agree that the tariffs are going to hurt adoption, but the US does have domestic battery and solar manufacturing. Tesla manufactures large quantities of lithium ion batteries in Nevada and Texas.
First Solar (3 manufacturing sites in Ohio): https://www.firstsolar.com/About-Us/Locations
Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing in Georgia: https://apnews.com/article/us-solar-panel-plant-hanwha-qcell...
Actually it's faster to link this report about existing and planned North American solar manufacturing:
https://media-01.imu.nl/storage/sinovoltaics.com/14240/sinov...
There's a lot of work in progress right now but also several operating plants.
Let’s say I have a widget. I sell it for $10, and it cost me $1 for me to produce. There’s a 25 percent tariff, which is 25 cents. Now I sell the item for $10.25 to pay for the tariff.
If the tariff goes up to 100%, that now means that I need to raise the price of the product to $11 to pay for it.
For context, the global electricity consumption in 2019 was around 23 TWh [1].
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?
Industrial battery prices are lowered, in China, definitively not here in the EU, and at this rates the expensive small UPS for a home, that's are such capacity, because to being semi-autonomous a typical home need at least 80-100kWh to avoid too deep DoD and support heating in new all-electric and very well insulated homes. And I talk about mild climate where there is enough Sun in the winter to have not the autonomy but at least margin also in December, January and February. Oh, and I talk about self-assembled systems like mine witch is legal here, but not legal in every countries, because retail prices for a complete systems installed by them are FAR more expensive, about THREE time more, enough to make the investment so expensive to be a nonsense.
Worth remembering that even enthusiastic supporters of the energy transition have underestimated the historical trends in wind, solar and batteries.
It's just hard to comprehend the S-curve ramp.
So why not swap it out for a lithium battery (which still run around $50)? Are there any downsides beyond rewiring the connector types I'm not aware of?
*the battery type is 51R
The price jump from $150 to $250 was in 2017.
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I have a hybrid car - it has both a traditional lead acid battery and a lithium ion battery. And while I also have a lithium ion jump starter battery, they have issues in many situations that make them ill-suited for a cranking starter battery.
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 dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment. Exxon has a lithium production unit, and they're expanding. New, large lithium mines under construction in Nevada, Sonora (Mexico), five new mines in Western Australia, Quebec, Zimbabwe... Plus, of course, recycling old batteries, a far more concentrated source than anything in the ground. Lithium supplies do not look like a problem. The prices do go wildly up and down because the price of raw lithium doesn't affect car sales much in the short term. That's normal behavior for minor commodities.
This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary. This is good, because of the fire risk. For fixed installations and low end car, lithium iron phosphate is cheap, not subject to thermal runaway, and in most of BYD and CATL products right now. (APS, please get with the program and start shipping small UPSs with LiPoFe batteries so those things last 10 years.)
Coming along next are solid state batteries. Huge hype, a few samples, and production cost problems.[3] Here's the manufacturing process at lab scale, at the Franuhofer Institute.[4] Works in the lab. Here it is at production test scale.[5] The IEEE consensus is that solid-state battery production technology is about 10 years behind existing lithium-ion production. With production in test everywhere from Shenzhen to Belgium to Maryland, progress is being made rapidly.
This is the kind of process that gets cheaper as it scales up.
Solid-state batteries are important because 10-minute charging is needed to increase consumer acceptance rates.
Between solar and battery technology, fossil fuels are going to be crushed. Soon.
[1] https://neonresearch.nl/poster-wall/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producer...
[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-cha...
...
> 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 over a few years, highly illiquid market so take prices with a grain of salt) so the actual story might be "lithium production has become much cheaper".
It also doesn't really matter if you're trying to estimate "it will cost at most this" by looking at sodium ion batteries. I don't think the author really cares if the batteries are sodium or lithium based, just that they don't cost more than sodium based batteries would cost.
> This is good, because of the fire risk
One of the selling points for Sodium ion has pretty consistently been that they are non-flammable. Admittedly this is a function of the electrolyte they use and not a fundamental property of sodium vs lithium, so it might change in the future, but I don't believe it has/it is in anticipated to?
But on inverter/chargers - they will absolutely will follow a downward trend. Maybe not as quickly as batteries but downward all the same. Wide-bandgap semiconductor FETs are getting cheaper and better all the time (higher current and voltage per device), and they allow for power topologies that are more efficient, so cooling gets easier, weight of heatsinks and the amount of material in those goes down, power per unit volume increases and unit mass will decrease, etc. Production volumes will also increase which should lead to economies of scale too.
I can get a 48V DC/230V AC, 8000VA Victron Multiplus 2 inverter/charger for $1.8K USD at the moment (I'm about to buy one for a system I'm DIYing from 31 kWh of AGM batteries I managed to get basically free from a test site of a company that closed down). I wouldn't be surprised if I could get the same capacity inverter/charger for something nearer to half the price by 2030, and a few percent more efficient to boot (this is 95% max efficiency but hopefully 97-98 will be more common by then).
You probably can get plenty of cheaper ones from China already but I want to be absolutely sure it'll meet Australian Standards since this will be grid tied for backup (but able to operate independently during outages), and since it's going under my house I want to know it's safe! Victron have a good track record, especially with a lot of use in maritime and caravan applications where you really don't want them catching on fire so that gives me confidence!
The two biggest numbers you need to look at in that article are lfp at 200 wh per kilogram and sodium ion at 160 w per kilogram.
Keep in mind that I believe neither lfp or sodium ion needs extensive amounts of cooling like Cobalt nickel batteries and their runaway fire problems. So their pack density is actually better and simpler.
So the 200 watt hour per kilogram basically equates to a 300 to 400 mile and possibly a 500 mile range car depending on efficiencies.
160 watt hour per kilogram sodium ion is the 200 to 300 and possibly 400 car
When you think about it that way consider the implications for electrifying all consumer transportation. The sodium ion density means that the city car that would serve possibly 4 to 5 billion people in the world is a solve technology, borrowing proper scaling.
The lfp density implies probably another billion to 2 billion people that need slightly better range, assuming good infrastructure for recharging.
Now the road maps for lfp and sodium ion. Both are going to probably increase by at least 20% in the next 2 or 3 years. Maybe 5 years tops.
If they can figure out sulfur chemistry versions of lithium sulfur and sodium sulfur then you may be able to double or triple densities in the next 10 to 15 years.
This is all very very revolutionary stuff.
I agree not the same downward curve, but it also has been on the downward curve, although different. Learning rate is rather a common phenomenon.
Estimating the learning curve of solar PV balance–of–system (2018) estimates 11% learning rate for BOS compared to 20% learning rate for module.
Remember a large part of your electrical bill is paying for the grid, not just the energy it transports.
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).
Also due to load shedding, I don’t get full use of my batteries. Ideally I would like my batteries to pretty much fully discharge over night with energy from my solar during the day, however, because load shedding is somewhat irregular here, I have it set to not go too low so it has enough energy to tide me over.
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 quite honestly prefer this arrangement. I have zero desire to own and be responsible for the maintenance and safety of tens of thousands of dollars worth of on-premises solar/battery/electrical transfer switch gear. I'm quite happy to pay the local utility to run a cable to my electrical panel and have them be responsible for everything outside the walls of my house.
But your batteries will last much much longer at the lower cycle depth
> illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home.
I don't know but I am guessing the objections is with the "in home" not the battery backup.
Certainly most of us who think of buying electric vehicles would want to actually drive them around.
The difference is what side of the electrical box your equipment is on.
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.
The added benefit is that well, it's a battery strapped to a car. So if you have an extended power outage, you simply drive your car to a charger elsewhere and come back with a full charge. I'm sure Minnesota wouldn't be stupid enough to outlaw EV charging.
So it would be legal if it were only charged by your house's solar panel? That doesn't sound like a big problem to me.
But the point they're making is reasonable. Just because the author isn't deeply technical doesn't mean they can't fit an exponential and extrapolate correctly.
Exponential growth always has to stop somewhere, but that's not in and of itself a reason to think this year is the year that it will. The napkin math about sodium and battery cost is at least reasonable, it's worth considering seriously rather than handwaving the author away as not an engineer.
Anyone fitting an exponential isn't extrapolating correctly pretty much by definition. As you note:
> Exponential growth always has to stop somewhere, but that's not in and of itself a reason to think this year is the year that it will.
This is a god of the gaps argument. There's no reason it should stop this year, there's also no reason it shouldn't. Fitting the curve is only useful if you're actually presenting an argument as to why for the relevant interval it should continue.
Reminds me of a projection I read back in the early 1960s (I think). The author charted the rise in speed of human beings over ten or twenty thousand years, where that speed had increased when horses were tamed, clipper ships were built, steam trains invented, automobiles, airplanes, and then rockets. (Assuming this was just after Gagarin, that got "us" to 5 miles per second.)
He pointed out that the acceleration was (ahem) accelerating, with thousands of years between humans running and horses being domesticated, vs. about sixty years between the Wright brothers and Gagarin. Extrapolating, it was clear we would exceed the speed of light (using a warp drive or something) by the year 2000.
Of course the current record speed was set in 1968 at about seven miles per second, and not even equaled since 1972. So much for extrapolation.
But well, I haven't seen any that don't have a conflict of interest into claiming fossil fuels will continue to be required. And that's a large part of the problem: you just won't find uninterested experts publishing estimates.
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.
Integrate the new-fangled battery (of whatever specific chemistry), the BMS, and the heater into a box with just two posts on top (just like lead acid batteries have had for over a century). It can be designed to take care of itself.
And if it's cheap enough to produce and sell, and offers good enough performance over its normal usable lifespan, then it doesn't need a diagnostic interface for sorting out issues any more than a lead acid car battery does today.
I understand 12 volts, but why not a 12 volt Li battery? I don't know.
But Lithium batteries can't be recycled. Saying "We are almost there" and "The future looks bright about it" is "moving fast and breaking things" again
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240618645137/en/Gre...
An equivalent LiIon battery would not need to be replaced so quickly.
So at some crossover point the environmental cost of X * recyclable Lead acid batteries is higher than LiIon batteries.
A couple of years ago here in South Africa I paid about ZAR 30,000 (USD 1,650) as a consumer for a 5kw/h battery, and I just checked online now, I can apparently get a similar battery for half that:
https://www.ecohub.co.za/shop/solar-power/lithium-batteries/...
For less than £130/kWh if you're willing to build it yourself, you can get a slightly less capable setup: https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage/...
Where I live there is a warehouse where you can withdraw new MANYI Lifepo4 cells at around 97€/kwh (a single cell) after contacting the seller on Alibaba, so I'm guessing Telsa is getting them at 80 or even less.
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 differences like having dual motors instead of single.
So, it looks like reality is closer to $300-$400/kwh, depending. Not close to your ideal of $50/kwh, but still much better than $1000/kwh.
1) https://www.tesla.com/energy/design/overview 2) https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/Energy/Powerwall/Power...
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.
Do you mean the installed price? Including inverters and such? $1000/kWh is more than 4x what you can buy LFP batteries for off Amazon.
For something like this, a worst case scenario is an electrical fire during a drought or a kid gets electrocuted. If you do the work yourself, you're likely on the hook if something goes wrong, even if it's due to a faulty part and you have an umbrella policy that covers liability.
It's not the machinery that's advanced. It's the manufacturing chemistry. The real breakthrough here is that the ceramic is deposited as a slurry, and through a series of ovens and dehydrators, it becomes the solid electrolyte. There's no high-pressure sintering press step, as there is in the Fraunhofer lab making solid state battery samples. The process is roll to roll. If that works, the production cost comes way down and the process scales up well.
The next two or three years are going to be very interesting in batteries.
But in terms of using it for UPS purposes, it lasting longer would mean I won’t need to expend capital again as soon.
So I guess it depends on what you want out the battery.
I did some math when I bought the battery and it seemed it would probably pay itself back before needing to be replaced, but it was questionable at our energy prices.
I bought the system mostly for UPS reasons though, especially as I work from home and on a personal note, sitting in the dark several evenings a week or being unable to make coffee when you want, sucks.
For stationary battery like the use case describe for in house. I would assume sodium has a much better chance of winning over.
Looking at what happens if growth continues until we get into that range is quite reasonable.
Which he actually does by looking at sodium batteries.
Will Prowse on youtube I think has some videos comparing and contrasting the different units for this purpose.
That said, something I can confirm works on that front is getting one of those power banks, plugging the UPS in, and then plugging whatever into the UPS.
I had several days of uptime on Starlink that way, running it 10 hrs or so at a time on a battery bank, the remainder on a cheap generator.
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.
Unfortunately over here we have a monopoly awarded state owned power producer which has a history of incompetence and corruption.
Maybe at some point our grid can be trusted to be reliable, but in the meantime everyone is either installing their own batteries or having no electricity for hours at a time. Tragic, but what else can you do.
How is that opting out of the grid?
Are you sure you're answering the question that was asked?
The real barrier for recycling waste is sustainability. This is the reason why e.g. TETRABRIK is considered recyclable, but it is actually not (I am posting about this parallel because it has been completely understood for several years)
Anything can be recycled if we are pedantic. But will it actually stop generating waste? (or will they be silently exported ignored?) Will subsidies be sustainable? (not it even asking if it can be profitable) In reality, the "recyclable" brand is for the most part greenwashing.
Now, the business ad about a venture capital bussiness you posted is nothing new. Last year there were 5 such touted recycling plants in Latin America, already. One of them is located in Costa Rica. Costa Rica doesn't have a Lithium battery waste issue. There, the electric cars are very few (and people who got them already want out), there are no electricity storage facilities. I am guessing here that they will import a ton (hundreds of tons) of waste from "Somewhere else"
I am including an article on battery recycling that is easy to read. It is only 40 pages long.
And, for more downvotes: Lithium batteries are as recyclable as a TETRAPAK: still generating waste, most of the time all of it ends up as waste.
People investing in fossil fuel plants need predictions, and despite they wanting to see conservative numbers, that bias means complete doom for them. They need the opposite bias if they want to survive.
Things get a lot more complex once you start to look at components industries. But then, it's not clear they use predictions for anything.
Going with a door knocking sales rep for home batteries would be madness in most countries but chances are pretty good that in Australia you would get a perfectly decent product.
A 13kWh system is over $AUD10k, and the ROI is on par with the expected lifespan of the battery.
If sodium cells can bring the price down to $AUD100 it would indeed be a massive game changer.
Better to DIY or at least do really good market research first.
Instead, a simple approach is to download the daily power consumption for a year and size the battery for about your 80th-90th percentile consumption. You tend to find the sizing is not that sensitive to whether you go for 80th or 90th percentile, and in any case the batteries come in standard sizes.
If you've sized your battery system economically, it should be empty a good proportion of the time, but that just doesn't "feel right" to consumers.
* Yes I mean frequency not probability but I didn't want to cause confusion with electrical frequency
Although I suppose it is cheaper to oversize solar and not the battery, but that's usually already maxed out and limited by roof space. Maybe a small wind turbine to compensate for stormy days...
It's part of a house. Of course it's not an impulse buy. That's not a useful basis for comparison.
The failures often came from BMS or other parts, too. There’s a lot of focus on the cells, but people are buying whole packs with a BMS.
To me, the main thing is observability. Too many people trust their systems. We need to see how things are going. As the voltage converges to peak, we should be seeing the amps level out.
We can't just trust the machines, ever. We need to be observant. Ultimately I think we'd be able to review & get rid of bad equipment more effectively, but we should be in tune with what these systems are doing, should be aware that - oh hell - we are at peak voltage and still pushing power in, and we need to stop. These systems need to report what they are doing. Being blind consumers makes the economic system weaker; these systems should all report what they are doing.
Then when the weather event comes, you still get electricity at home supplied by your car. If the weather event is localized, drive your car to a place with electricity and charge it there and drive back. It's the best.
I don't think I'd do very much to prepare for that scenario.
I think they're talking about the situation where you're still connected to the grid, in which case you don't need to handle the backup capacity.
Most solar charge controllers allow a certain amount of PV overprovisioning.
Using an overprovisioned quantity of cheap cells is part of it.
Insulating and air sealing your home well is part of it.
Thermal mass approaches are part of it. Without cheap batteries, it's very possible to store a great many kwh in volumes of soil, water, or sand riddled with pipes and resistive heaters.
This year it has been pointed out that vertical bifacial solar panels radically outperform tilted arrays if snow is a possibility. Expect this to be the new normal at high latitudes as cell area is very cheap now.
Great job! Over the last half a year my feelings about rooftop grid-connected solar (net energy metering, feed in tariff which are subsidised by the electricity bills of others) have changed somewhat, but going off-grid you've put in the investment to be energy independent.
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 because unfortunately, we are still primarily a fossil fuel economy for many reasons (legacy, price, chemical properties) and their cheap price relative to labour is acting as a subsidie to renewables pricing. So if the availability of fossil fuels deminishes it seemed logical that the price of inputs goes up and so too would renewable manufacturing. We would then see an inverted bell shaped curve on pricing over time. I have long suspected we would see this trend of lowering prices revert around the 2020s. So far I have been pleasantly wrong.
But fossil fuels like almost all minerals is fighting an uphill battle on availability and ore quality as we used the best stuff first. The US isnt fracking at the pace it is because they just wanted a laugh. It is due to the primary "conventional" stuff couldnt keep up. But that is a whole different issue.
If renewables were offsetting fossil fuel usage, this wouldnt be a problem but it is merely being added on top of it. Thus Jevons paradox in full swing. If we can over come that then this whole idea can be thrown in the recyling bin.
When we can make a solar panel with the outputs of a solar panel, then that is the escape velocity moment. And I don't just mean counting the joules and ignoring the energy fungability.
I am much more optimistic about this in the last few years but im not sure we are there yet. It is looking reasonable now.
Maybe 20 years ago I had the thought that ever never was enough supply of fossil fuels to lift the remaining 2/3rds of humanity out of poverty[1]. But there is enough solar and wind to give people a low energy middle class life. And the cost reduction since I think can do better than that.
[1] China I think burned half it's coal reserves in last 40 years. Modern China is basically built on coal. And much of the world doesn't have anything like that.
As a point of nomenclature isn't that always the case for any resource?
Given that "reserves" are drill tested known quantities that are tested, proven, modelled, and queued up for mining .. most reserves having been taken past "economic feasibility".
Hasn't the usual pattern in mining for some three thousand years since the oiriginal Rio Tinto Gold Mine been that reserves are mined and as they are exhausted, an exploration phase ramps up to prove inferred resources and raise them to reserve status?
eg: https://www.ga.gov.au/digital-publication/aimr2021/australia...
> At the core of Scott's vision was "an energy theory of value". Since the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned "that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy", and that by using an energy metric instead of a monetary metric (energy certificates or 'energy accounting') a more efficient design of society could be made
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
If nothing else it's a fascinating lens to view modernity through.
However panels age which costs ~1% of capacity per year even before they need to be replaced, and global electricity demand tends to increase 2+%/year. So the more solar you install the more you need to install every year just to keep providing the same percentage of total electricity.
On top of this lower prices mean you it's still worthwhile even if a larger percentage of output gets wasted. Similarly, as storage gets cheaper (inflation adjusted) there's going to be more demand to cheaply charge it thus raising the demand for panels.
A 410W solar panel at 29€? I really doubt that honestly. Cheaper than plywood.
Comely divorced from the real world materials and ecology.
470W + even cheaper inverters seems likely.
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.
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.
The true value of solar or wind is the cost of the fuel it saves. Nothing more. Even if his numbers come true there's a big problem--bad weather could deplete your batteries. You want to turn to the electric company in that case? You are once again in the situation that the value is only the fuel.
P.S. I've never heard of sparky being used as slang for an electrician, sounds very aussie.
When I moved into a new house in Australia I asked the real estate agent if I could extend the fence, and he said I'd need a cheapie to do that.
I said ok but scratched my head as to why it needs to be cheap, only to find out later what he actually said was chippy, slang for a carpenter.
I'm surprised to find out it's aussie slang; I always thought it was slang local to South Africa :-/
I'd love to add at the very least an ATS to keep my fridge and freezer going when the power goes out during the day, if not a battery but I have little to no documentation on the existing solar install, so i'm reaching out to the county to see if permits have any info. Fun times!
Unlike microinverters that are notoriously unreliable, DC optimizers so far have excellent long-term reliability.
That's what they said about regular electric grid power too - that it "soon" would be so cheap as to be unmetered. That was half a century ago and it didn't pan out...
Solar power has neither the geopolitical problems nor the squishy 'environmentalist' ick factor of fission. There's no reason not to expect another halving or two of PPP dollar per Watt to follow.
You might plan on riding out a storm, thinking utilities might be out a day or two max. Day 5, still no utilities, no known date for resumption of services, and supplies are running extremely low. How do you get out?
If you forecast that your supplies will be very slim on day 5, and you haven't left for greener pastures by day 3 or 4, then the the worst case is already unfolding. GTFO before the worst-case ever happens.
But in that worst case: One can call on someone else for help. This is one of those situations where it's time to cash in some favors, and/or where it pays off to always be friendly and helpful with to the neighbors even if they really seem like a bunch of assholes. (The time to start being friendly with the neighbors is right now, by the way.)
(My own backup plan only keeps me rolling both semi-comfortably and independently for about 24 or 48 hours without power in the winter, so I'm leaving after the first night or ASAP. I don't have the complications and niceties offered by something like an F-150 Lightning, but finite resources remain finite no matter their form.)
I admit it's less efficient to have 2 energy stores, but given we're already discussing potentially life threatening situations, I'm not really looking to optimize for anything except having as many resources as feasible on hand.
Money is limited, so sharing resources between situations lets you be prepared for more situations.
We also use sparkie for electrician.
ZA and AUS included. USA less so.
[1] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I5kzJIeV4Ds/VFSHUX3374I/AAAAAAAAA...
Not really a thing in Toronto.
PS: Geothermal can also slash energy needed for heating. Ground sourced heat pumps are the only reasonable small scale solution, but in urban areas going a little deeper starts to make a lot of sense.
Perhaps as a complete energy solution. But it is already the case today that a domestic rooftop solar in Europe (maybe not in the very north) has payback times <10 years. And that's without factoring in batteries which (as the OP describes) are rapidly approaching affordability.
Hamburg is at 53.6 degrees North; Berlin is 52.5. Both are just farther north than Calgary, as a pretty reasonable comparison for the US.
To contrast, New York City is at 40.7 degrees, and Boston is at 42.3 degrees North.
I’m talking about assembling your own multi-kwh lithium battery assemblies (pre-BMS even).
One wrong poke with a screwdriver, and all sorts of entertainment is likely to ensue eh?
And they’re big enough, no portable fire extinguisher is going to make a dent either.
I'm not sure where you're jamming the screwdriver, but certainly any wrenches/tools you use should be insulated if you're dealing with very high current and/or high voltage. Enclosures, insulated wires, conduits, terminal covers should be used to avoid short circuits. Also proper earthing and circuit isolation with RCBOs to protect from electric shock and overcurrents frying the wires/you, all which should be switched to the off position when you're poking your screwdriver, eh? ;)
> And they’re big enough, no portable fire extinguisher is going to make a dent either.
If you aren't doing basic safety things and somehow manage thermal runaway on LiFePo4 (pretty hard), you're probably going to melt some copper. Probably best not to put your battery assembly near flammable things, unless you want to see the world burn like this guy (though at low voltage/high current)
Where I live many people DIY as a great many people have mad skills (lots of FiFo workers making a good living from O&G installions and big mining projects).
They build their own houses, their own planes, off grid power systems, water proof EV's to drive across harbour floors, etc.
If you've got a big (shipping container sized) battery pack you need a big thermal blanket to cut off the oxygen or a wide enough fire break about it.
Speaking of DIY home builds, here's a good use of black builders plastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
I’m talking about assembling a bomb.
A 5kwh battery contains about 18MJ of energy, equivalent to 4.3KG of TNT. Short that out or puncture on of its component pouches, and it’s going to be very dramatic.
One of them requires a different degree of care than the other.
If I lived in eg Texas, I’d maybe have a BEV that could power my home and a separate vehicle for long range travel. Bit of a luxury.
Most people, full stop, don't build houses, metal work shops, treat their own sewerage, build their own power systems, etc.
So "average" people just don't start fires or set off bombs because they're not doing anything that dangerous.
Of the people that do, say, build their own glass furnaces, annealing ovens, laying out gas lines and installing small truck sized propane tanks with more energy than a 5kwh battery .. easily less than half, well below the "average" number of people that do such things, have accidents.
Sure, some people do watch Forged in Fire and have a go at knife making in a home built furnace, and then set fire to their barn | house | shed.
Most people don't try, and of those that do have a go most of them don't screw it up.
The point being, this:
> Also prone to average people setting themselves or their houses on fire, eh?
is just silly.
Average people don't attempt this, and of the people that do attempt such things most don't cock it up.
Perhaps your personal experience differs.
Maybe you can't dig your own septic system and fit it out without shit running back into your house.
So seriously, WTF?
You’re doing on this weird rant, when I literally just said average people shouldn’t be assembling their own multi-kWh lithium battery packs unless they want to burn their houses down.
Which is, indeed, good advice. And pertinent to the discussion.
Where this bizarre tangent you keep going off on is not.
Consider that I explicitly stated:
* They build their own ... planes
* They build their own ... off grid power system(s)
* They ... water proof EV's to drive across harbour floors
and you responded that "No, you’re talking about building structures. I’m talking about assembling a bomb."
Let me remind you that aircraft are bombs, off grid power systems are bombs, water proof EV's with battery packs large enough to drive 7 km's underwater have the same issues you're talking about.
You apparently didn't pause to read the content of my comment before launching into a "Yes, but ..."
I've already linked to locally built ground effect plane (with builders plastic for wings), here's a locally built EV: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-30/nt-world-record-darwi...
Average people are quite capable of doing extraordinary things and not burning down their houses - you just have a low opinion of "average".
Idiots that can't read manuals and installation guides should avoid house grade battery packs, sure.
Average goofs shouldn't be assembling their own solar system and battery setups. Even an average person will apprise themselves of the know-how to proceed safely, and are legally obliged to do so. If average person is not interested in doing that, they'll call on a professional, and in some places, that is the only legal option. But perhaps there are contradictory stats out there to show that there's a real widespread phenomenon of well-meaning Average Joes and Janes that are burning down houses with DIY batteries.
This isn’t running a nuclear reactor it’s following some basic rules and common sense.
Lifepo4 is much more stable than you seem to think.
This is a good source, population by latitude.
http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-lat...
Seems obvious that Norway, Washington State have lots of hydro. Places like Spain and California have lots of steady sun. Scotland, no sun in the winter but lots wind all the time. Those places renewables aren't problematic.
If you counted them and put them on a distribution, how far off the bell curve do you think they'd be?
In fact, they seem rather extraordinary. If they seem average to you, I'd argue your sense of average is rather extraordinary too.
I think I'd be sorting weather events into two buckets: "I can get somewhere that wasn't hit hard with 50-100 miles of range" or "I need to travel a distance measured in states and refueling will be needed". So the difference between "full battery" and "half battery" is pretty tiny, and I can do plenty of house-powering.
When I think of evacuating a long distance, I think of something like a hurricane where you should be getting out of the way before it hits. If you're in the aftermath of a storm, you don't need to go more than 100 but less than 300 miles.
Oklahoma City is a bit over 200 miles if I needed to go to the city the next state over. Shreveport is just under 200mi.
If something is making me leave DFW then 50mi isn't going to get me anywhere. That's not even going across the metro area.
If I had an EV that I could use to run house-sized stuff with, and the power were off for an indefinite time due to a storm or something, then I'd like to think that I'd use that EV just as sparingly as I would my little Jackery device and portable solar panel (that I can coax at most about 80W from on a perfectly-sunny day).
I can use my rig to [sparingly] run some lights, a small fan, and to keep portable electronics going -- with hardwired Internet if that is something that is useful/extant for information or to pass the time with.
But I'm not going to use it to run the fridge, the home theater, the thirsty desktop PC, or using the laundry machines or the HVAC. I'm also not cooking with it.
I have a portable heater that will keep me warm, and enough fuel to do this for a day or two. I know how to keep the water running to keep pipes from breaking. I don't need the fridge: When the power goes off, I can unload the important stuff into my Orca cooler along with the last contents of the self-refilling ice bin in the freezer and it'll stay fine for days. If it's stupid-cold outside, the frozen stuff that I'd like to try to keep can go outside in a tote. I have a propane grill for quick outdoor cooking with plenty of fuel, and a butane burner for indoor cooking that also has a reasonable amount of fuel for making coffee or frying some eggs or whatever.
I've tested these methods off-grid. They work.
While I do enjoy the wonders of modern electrification rather immensely, and TBH I'd find myself struggling to get through a day without some small aspects of it, I don't need a ton of it to feel reasonably comfortable for a limited time.
In this very limited use (which is not dissimilar to car-camping inside of a house), a suitable EV can probably cope for a few days without substantially reducing its immediately-useful range. It'a a small drop in a large bucket of battery power.
It can probably also keep the fridge running, and run a furnace that burns dinosaurs: If the regular F150 Lightning has a 98kWh battery, and one draws an average of 500W from that battery (which is a rather hefty average if living lightly post-disaster), then one uses ~12% of its capacity (or about 28 miles of its 230 mile range) per 24-hour day.
Over two days (48 hours), that's only 56 miles spent of 230 possible miles.
What kind of disaster can you imagine where "losing" that 56 miles of range would be of any consequence -- where 56 miles means the difference between "Oh, we got this. Everything is fine." and "ZOMG if only we could drive a little further! But we can't! We're RUINED!!!"
I can't think of any that have happened around here in my own lifetime,
And given the fact it might be harder to find a working and available charger while leaving in an emergency I wouldn't want to rely on finding one along the way to wherever I'm going.
If you're part of an organized evacuation, you're doing this before the storm -- correct?
And if that's the case, then: It doesn't matter how long an EV will or will not run the stuff inside of your home, because you won't be there.
Leaving a burning building is still evacuating the burning building. Evacuating a burning building doesn't mean it's an orderly thing before the fire starts.
Lake Dallas dam breaking after major flooding in the Trinity River would cause quite a bit of destruction in DFW and potentially make things pretty unlivable around here and force a lot of people out of here and into the surrounding areas. Also an event that wouldn't necessarily be seen days ahead of time.
I grew up in South Houston, so I had a number of times of hurricanes coming through and not necessarily destroying my house but making the surrounding areas pretty unlivable for days to weeks. Maybe it gets cleaned up enough in a couple of days, maybe it doesn't.
I can understand requiring a license for any power wires behind walls.
I could also see the possibility that it's just an old law that doesn't consider data-only cables which don't have the safety issues that wires carrying power do.
