Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries
by baybal2 on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:55AM
(#25728258)
I came to very much the same conclusion few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25651782
The basic math behind the company simply doesn't work. They cannot make money out of it.
Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries
by newyankee on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:29AM
(#25728018)
i have never seen retail prices of lfp batteries below 300$/kwh yet. Although i am confident near future versions of these batteries can last > 5k and may be even 10k cycles
I studied the topic and it appears that none of the manufacturers/retailers is willing to sell at this price to consumers - they already sell all their stock to car manufacturers and the like.
Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries
by newyankee on Monday January 11, 2021 @12:39PM
(#25732532)
Is it because demand greatly outstrips supply at this point and will remain so for a few more years at least till new production capacity catches up ? Or is there any other reason that makes it trickier ? Would appreciate any links if you have some.
My best source was a first-hand account from a business owner who tried to switch from one-off EV projects to an a full-blown assembly line. He called up a few manufacturers and they basically told him to come back when he's at the scale of hundreds of MWh - sort of a chicken-and-egg scenario.
Retailers didn't want to talk about special pricing, regardless of scale.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-...
An ISO container(40ft) of those can store 10-15MWh.
For the cost of the Astravets Nuclear Power Plant in Belarus ($11bln, 2GW) you could have 80GWh worth of batteries - that's a week of backup power for one million households in the EU.
One disadvantage of them has always been their performance in terms of power and energy density, but given that they're currently installed in Chinese-made Teslas, I guess it's more or less a solved problem.