Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months
by toomuchtodo on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @07:36PM
(#11625086)
What if we used tens of millions of electric vehicles on the road as grid storage?
Tesla has already planned on it: https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png | https://i.imgur.com/pectzXn.png
Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months
by ssmoot on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @07:38PM
(#11625098)
That's over 3 Powerwalls every second. And I've got to think you're not going to see more than 75% original capacity in ten years as a best case?
I'm not as concerned about the factory as the supply chain, can we actually supply that much raw material, and what will mining it do to the environment? I assume lithium is much rarer than iron or copper. But I don't really know.
For reference 16 million vehicles were sold in the US in 2013, but many (most?) of those were trucks and large SUVs, which AFAIK aren't on the roadmap for any EV manufacturer right now. And then there's fleet/work vehicles, single car families in states without long distance transportation or quick chargers (like TX).
It makes me wonder if 20 years from now fuel cells won't completely obsolete batteries?
A single gigafactory is going to produce 35 GWh in a year, which is about 5.3 million power walls a year. If their lifespan is 10 years, than we need to produce 1e9 power walls / 10 years = 100 million powerwalls/year to maintain that capacity.
So we'd only need 20 gigafactories worth to do this. And with wind and proper grid interconnects we won't even really need much storage at all to keep the electricity going; the national weather is very very consistent.
We will need enough lithium for our ~300 million cars and their batteries, which are probably going to be 50-100kWh each, which is far far more than storing half a days worth of electricity.