Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

Re:Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla c... by outworlder on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @07:23PM (#11858851)

That is a true statement. However, you should not compare car batteries (usually LiFePo, LiMn or whatever it is Tesla uses) with standard laptop batteries.

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.

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Re:Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla c... by Retric on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @08:00PM (#11859033)

2,000 cycles sounds great, but at just once per day that's only 5.5 years. Grid storage needs to be really cheap AND last for 20-50 years. Which is why capacitors and pumped hydro are both used. Capacitors can discharge 1,000's of times a day to maintain the proper wave form and hydro can discharge 1-3 times a day to handle changing demand.

PS: The real advantage of hydro is you can invest in capacity or peak load as more or less separate things.

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Re:Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla c... by PakG1 on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @10:29PM (#11859594)

2,000 cycles sounds great, but at just once per day that's only 5.5 years. Grid storage needs to be really cheap AND last for 20-50 years.

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.

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Re:Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla c... by Retric on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @09:12AM (#11862010)

It's just a question of cost. If it's cheap and lasts for 50 years, great. If it's 1/8 the cost and lasts for 5.5 years that also works. But battery's are still a long way from cheap let alone 1/8th of cheap.

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.

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Re:Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla c... by outworlder on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @08:16PM (#11859115)

Controlling for state of charge, temperature and less deep cycles, it is likely that we can achieve your figures given current tech. The question is the price. If you are not fully using them, then you need more batteries. At which point it becomes economical requires some guesses and heavy number crunching.

I agree with you on hydro, gravitational storage is relatively simple to do. But it takes space. Batteries could make more sense for microgrids.

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