Off grid energy storage has been severely hampered by the lifecycle cost of $ per kWh stored. Lead acid batteries suck, lithium ion/liPo has until very recently been very expensive in $/kWh. Other energy storage systems have been limited in scale or are only feasible at very specific places, such as large scale pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
If the cost of $$$/kWh stored comes down far enough, it will be entirely possible to build a home that has no connection to the electrical grid at all. Assume this prototypical home is in an American city where electricity from the grid costs 8 cents per kWh. If you make a refrigerator sized battery low enough cost it may be possible with TODAY's cost of solar panels to have a lifecycle cost of 6 cents per kWh consumed. While simultaneously having the effect of making that home energy-independent from the grid and the whole thing being its own immense UPS.
The powerwall is the first step towards this.
They work (as in: are being used in Africa & South America to power mobile networks). Also my (office) building is powered by one.
They don't cost much more than lead-acid
They last much, much longer than lead-acid or lithium*
There is no limit to the number of power cycles(!!) and they can be deep-discharged.
They do have disadvantages - they aren't suitable for cars, and are currently fairly noisy when cycling, and have lower power density than lithium* batteries. They also need to be periodically complete discharged (although most have software to make sure each individual cell does this as part of the normal use)
Disclaimer: An investor in Redflow owns my building (hence the power source)[2]
http://www.bluesky-energy.eu/project/redflow-zinc-bromide-ba...
From the wikipedia article, it appears that typical flow batteries only reach 10% to 20% of lithium polymer's power density.
That means that it would take a flow battery that weights 5 to 10 times as the standard lithium polymer batteries that equip a Tesla/Nissan Leaf/whatever electric car you imagine to deliver the same power.
Very true, but, interestingly, large-scale electric vehicle adoption may help this: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/09/3775606/used-sec... as lightly used car batteries may cease being attractive for use in cars but be very attractive in terms of base-load storage.
There is a guy with videos on youtube who has purchased battery packs from crashed Tesla Model S and retrofitted an old volkswagon bus for 100+ mile EV range.
http://insideevs.com/diy-project-salvaged-tesla-model-s-to-u...
"Joe’s “donor” Model S will be brought back to life by Otmar in the form of a stretched Volkswagen Vanagon called Strechla.
The Vanagon will exist only on the outside. On the inside, underside and everywhere in between, you’ll find Model S."
edit: added more words
https://www.youtube.com/user/jehugarcia/videos
scroll down a bit into the older videos and you will see the VW.
And a battery trailer, inspected by the DMV.
I am too lazy to put numbers on this, but this cost is currently much too high to make it economically viable to use car batteries for energy storage.
Electric car batteries can endure thousands of full cycles before their useful capacity drops down to 80%. That figure can be as high as tens of thousands, depending on who you ask.
Suprisingly, for LiMn, temperature and age have a much greater effect on lifetime than cycles.
PS: The real advantage of hydro is you can invest in capacity or peak load as more or less separate things.
5.5 years is about the lifespan of servers in a datacenter. What's wrong with managing energy storage the way we manage datacenters? We don't expect servers to last 20-50 years. And no doubt, as battery tech improves, the lifespan will improve too. But the infrastructure to get good storage needs to start somewhere. Run them as datacenters for now while waiting for battery tech to get better.
Don't forget computer investment has long operated under the assumption of rapidly declining prices. With that slowing data centers may go to a 10+ year cycle.
I agree with you on hydro, gravitational storage is relatively simple to do. But it takes space. Batteries could make more sense for microgrids.
That 200 mile charge may still be perfectly usable in a house, particularly given you can fit a couple cars worth into your basement without issues. The resulting battery cluster doesn't have to be particularly compact or light-weight.
The real question is "how much space are you willing to sacrifice for energy self-sufficiency?"
In the UK, electric bills hover around $1200 a year for electric/gas households and $2000 a year for full electric.
Renewable households will have a HUGE potential market.
U.K. Residential market is 26 million houses. Theoretical price point of $1500 dollars (one years energy cost) = 39 billion dollar market not including the massive combined secondary services in maintenance, installation training providers, parts, etc.
USA residential would be 6 times that and the provision of renewables to corporates is almost incalculable.
It's an entirely new economic ecosystem divorced from petrochemical.
It a price point higher than $3000 dollars we are getting into a market cap of many trillions worldwide.
I had a 3.8kW solar system put in for £5k last year and have yet to really run the numbers on savings; the payback period is 10 years of feed-in tariff cheques. If I went off-grid that would be reduced. I don't really see why I'd want to go off-grid for its own sake, I'd rather better explore the possibilities of net metering and sharing power with the rest of the city.
As air conditioning, but there are other solutions! Ice has neigh-infinite charge/discharge cycles and big institutions have been doing this for years. If your "campus" is more than a few hundred tons of AC it's probably cooled by ice.
It's not been terribly economical to do this at a small scale but as solar gets cheaper and batteries don't there are people working on the problem.
Batteries, at whatever price you pay for them are a really in-efficient way to store and retrieve energy compared to the grid.
+1
If you haven't, I highly recommend Paul Starr's Social Transformation of American Medicine. The number of MD medical school seats in the US has remained at about 16k-17k for 100 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/starr-medici...
Eventually, yes.
All those unemployed doctors are more likely to settle for working for a cheap hospital and earn 'only' ~$150k than switch careers or stay home on welfare. This would eventually decrease the cost of basic care.
With consolidation of hospitals and other healthcare facilities: less options coupled with desire that even the most expensive healthcare procedures must be available to all irrespective of individual affordability, we are going to have ever increasing healthcare costs.
The thinking behind trying to pump up demand is that if people are buying more, the Fortune 500 will put that money to work selling things.
Traditional supply-side economics is basically "shove money into those companies however possible".. but they're already sitting on piles of cash and doing nothing with it. How does more of that help?
Are you trying to tell me that the money isn't trickling down to the underpaid employees working for those companies? LIES.
Tesla is currently producing around 100,000 cars/year. Each car has about 80kWh of battery on average (the options right now are 75 or 90), so that's about 8GWh. If they meet their goal of 400,000 Model 3s produced in 2018, assuming 55kWh of battery for those cars, that's 22GWh, not counting what goes into continuing Model S and Model X production. I'm not sure it's as small a fraction of global production as you say.
One of the statistics they like to quote about their Gigafactory is that its final production will equal the total global production by the industry when construction started in 2013.
It turns out even with 2Billion Phones at 5Wh, a conservative estimate, we are only at 10GWh. Billion Phones!, 10GWh!, 5 times more then the World Capacity in 2013 from 1 Factory!
All these numbers and scales are so mind bogglingly huge that i fail to comprehend.
I frequently see people discussing range impacts based on a complete misunderstanding of the magnitudes involved. They'll ask about how much range you'd expect to lose from running a dashcam or charging a phone, or recommend turning off headlights to conserve energy.
And of course I can't blame them at all. We're used to battery-powered devices where things like screen brightness are critical to battery life.
But then you run the numbers, and realize that a fully-charged Tesla could run the headlights for over a month before draining the battery, or that it could charge an iPhone 20,000 times....
A more productive criticism would have been to offer an improvement, rather than to just point to the imperfections in an attempt to estimate the future impact of a new technology.
edit: added second paragraph
After a quick Google search, the number of vehicles Tesla sold in 2015 does in fact seem to be a bit uncertain. It seems they sold over 50,000 vehicles, but I've not found a more precise number, in a few minutes of looking.
Sales from previous years seem to be:
2012 - 2,650
2013 - 22,477
2014 - 31,655
2015- ~50,000
though I got these numbers from a quora post, so take them with an adequately large dose of salt.
edit: added google findings, tweaked wording to be more specific
During 2015, we achieved significant efficiencies in Model S production and produced 14,037 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2015. We began production of Model X in the third quarter of 2015. We plan to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 new Model S and Model X vehicles in 2016.
Precision isn't particularly helpful for this sort of rough projection. Which highlights that your original criticism wasn't particularly productive.
clarification: In claiming that we're about where we started, I'm saying that a 10-20% correction doesn't significantly impact a rough order of magnitude estimation. The estimate was in the precision bounds of its stated goal. Therefore the estimate wasn't "ridiculous" at all, or at least, you haven't shown that it was.
Note: This is rough, back of the envelope projection meant to improve on a 5% figure that someone pulled out of the air.
I can't figure out which part of this you object to. You seem to accept all the numbers, but continue to argue about the shape of the box they're presented in.
How delightfully condescending of you. Yes, I didn't realize that the 5% number came from you, that hardly makes me "confused". Taking that into light, it's not obvious to me how a very rough back of the envelop projection is significantly more ridiculous than a number pulled out of thin air. My whole problem is that you called it ridiculous when it was clearly meant to be a rough order of magnitude projection. You can't really criticize a number pulled out of the air, because it goes without any attempt at justification. But a back of the envelop calculation can be improved in a piece-wise fashion to hone in on a better result. So any attempt to model a phenomenon (as long as it doesn't come with unjustified claims of precision and certainty) is an improvement over a number pulled out of the air. But that process is short circuited when people just dismiss the projection out of hand as you did. This is why I appealed for an improvement in my first comment. It's really easy to shit on someone else's effort, but it is completely unproductive. If you see a problem, then fix it. Then you're adding to the conversation, rather than just shitting on a little bit of effort someone put out there.
I don't think measuring it in terms of GWh is the best way to go about it, because a huge number of lithium ion batteries manufactured are NOT the type Tesla needs to use. Their battery packs are composed of 18650 size cylindrical cells.
Vast amounts of LiIon batteries manufactured today are pouch/flat type cells for laptops, tablets, mobile phones and other portable consumer electronics.
I would be very curious to see a number of the total estimated quantity of high-capacity 18650 cells manufactured worldwide in one year vs. the number of 18650 cells consumed by Tesla.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/11/18/how-many-ve...
Back in 2013, the global production was estimated to be 35 Gwh (cf. Gigafactory announcement presentation).
How much has it grown in the past 3 years?
The article also mentions 70% growth in the last year. Assuming equal growth in the other years, It would be about a factor of 5.
Interestingly (for me), when I leased my leaf the sales guy was talking about how Nissan could make a car with a much better range, but chose not to. It was amusing hearing it from a (otherwise backwards) dealership.
It makes sense, of course. What I keep wondering is, if energy density (not just cost) increases significantly in the future, couldn't existing electric vehicles be retrofitted with "aftermarket" cells? Currently, resale value is pretty low, mostly due to battery concerns (both longevity - which I think is unfounded - and hopes of better tech). But, with otherwise so low maintenance costs, I figure these cars could have a pretty long life.
Wait, what? How did he justify that? That sounds like saying Apple could easily make a laptop with much better battery life but chose not to. Why would they ever do that?
Elon Musk claims the same thing about Tesla - that he could easily increase the range on Tesla's cars if they wanted to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsixsRI-Sz4 . But with a range of ~300 miles he thinks they're fine.
But I agree, if I was buying an electric car, a standardized battery would be a huge draw.
Although, learn? It's easy to look at things in retrospect and say this billionaire was correct - but one might be committing the Texas sharpshooter error then. Vinod Khosla bet heavily on bioethanol over electric cars.
Better to say that demand is necessary but not always sufficient. Proven demand is a great motivator, but the manufacturers may require a lot of lead time if it's unexpected.
China has much more intervention in their economy to do this sort of thing, with the banks acting as partially privatized central planning. The role of government in economic planning is certainly an area for policy wonks to carefully consider. In a democracy there's a bit too much incentive for the public to, as Marx noted, vote themselves money from the public treasury.
That's exactly why I started http://openbatt.org The problem exists partly because incremental knowledge gains, such as additive formulas, are hard to trade.
I think we need an independent UL/CE for evaluating and lifecycle testing and certifying cells are less likely to short out or die prematurely by digging deep into how a battery is made against its specifications, conducting MTTF tests and many other tests and approaches for holistic grading and improvements. Otherwise, fake and shoddy cells will continue to flood the market with phony and dangerous goods. It can't be leveraged as a bureaucratic industry or incumbent protectionism, but to keep standards high as are for all other wall-powered devices. This will knock players whom can't or won't make good products out of the supply-chain, but they deserve it.
For the nation that is supposed to be the foremost in the world, and has been supposed to be for a century and a half, if that is true, all our talk of technological innovation and futurism is for naught, because we cannot even house and clothe everyone in our collectively agreed upon minimum possible conditions.
My point is systemic changes have to be looked at as a whole system. An economy and 300 million lives is very complex.
I guess what drives the price of batteries is the fabrication process?
What do you mean by this? I was under the impression that "supply side economics" meant throwing money at your problem to solve it (and removing regulation). That sounds like it's exactly what you're arguing against.
People don't get that, on a large industrial scale, you actually have to think about supply. They think you just spend money and supply shows up because they are used to thinking on a household scale where supply is generally infinite for anything they could possibly consume.
I think one pervasive economic fallacy is that any amount of money can fix anything. We just need to find someone to write a big enough check, either the government or wall street and all those batteries will materialize instantly out of some technology horn of plenty. This has driven the focus on "stimulus" and "aggregate demand" in various forms of economic dialogue. We could use more supply side thinking about very large problems that the economy faces, especially in the public sector. Health Care, for example, is one of those things where, if you're not thinking about supply, spending more money just makes everything more expensive.