I wish that cost basis wasn't the only consideration when evaluating energy storage, but we're so accustomed to money being the great equalizer that things without a financial cost associated are often overlooked.

What is the $/MWh cost associated with mining for, recycling, and disposing of battery components? What about the third order effects of centralizing control over the fuel source within only a handful of countries[0]? What's the $/MWh of the political shifts?

I can't safely make assumptions about why you personally stopped reading after cost came up, but it seems to be a common reaction at this point. "Show me the money!" tends to end most conversations about energy these days.

0: https://unctad.org/news/demand-raw-materials-electric-car-ba...

Not to disagree with your underlying point, but I think it might be more constructive to frame the problem as a failure to internalize the costs, rather than a focus on money. Ultimately we do need a fungible way to compare solutions, and money is the simplest way to do that. We just need to figure out how to effectively internalize those externalities to the price.

Cost functions have an implied ethical system behind them. Using money is just waving your hands over it and going “well, money is objective, so we don't need a value system” – but there's still a value system there. It's like “machine learning” in that regard; there's no magic.

Money is just a fungible unit of comparison for types of value, nothing more.

In that case, gas plants are the best peaker option in most places as in most place CO2 and methane emissions cost $0.

Is that a meaningful statement?

I can rephrase to say that the comparator function for money has an ideological bent. It rewards the externalization of costs

Money is a unit of measure. Any other unit of measure you choose will be fungible with it. Money is simply a way of unifying things we care about and translating them into the same space.

In order to compare two actions, you need to normalize their consequences to make them comparable. This is a fundamental requirement of making decisions. 'Money' is simply the unit we choose to do that in our complex society. We can call it utility points or something else, if you want, but it's still the same abstract object.

I agree.

There's so much bullshit in mainstream energy analysis; there's too much incentive. Energy is central to civilization - what we use, where and how we get it, how we use it, how much of it there is and when we can use it - change any of those variables, change the shape of the entire civilization.

Yet the conversation around energy technologies is entirely dominated by dollar cost. This obfuscates so much, and lends a false equivalence to pricing/market/financial mechanisms - it implies that if something can be sold cheaply (low price) then it can be produced/extracted cheaply (low cost).

We are quite capable of, and actively involved in, stealing from our futures (high cost) in order to achieve low prices in the present. The economic externalities of our energy usage don't go away - by definition, that which is finite and we use now to do this, cannot be used later to do that.

That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit. Junk nobody needs that we'll convince them they want anyway.

And why are we doing this mad, insane, thing? Because we're convinced it doesn't matter, we're convinced the price of energy will always be low. We're convinced we're not the ones paying the costs.

Apologies for going full doomer on y'all. https://pics.onsizzle.com/oh-i-made-myself-sad-me-irl-242092...

> That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit.

We should limit it's use to making medicines and materials instead of burning it to heat our homes and propel our cars.

Not only does the latter consume a lot more fossil fuels, it does so by dumping a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere. Plastics consume 14% of global petroleum production today [1].

We could ban all the "disposable, toxic plastic shit" tomorrow (and I agree that we should find ways to create a less disposable culture) and we would still have a huge CO2 problem caused by fossil fuel powered space heating, transportation and electricity production.

1. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-plastics-pipeline-a-surge...

> What is the $/MWh cost associated with mining for, recycling, and disposing of battery components?

A fraction of the cost of the batteries, naturally.

> What about the third order effects of centralizing control over the fuel source within only a handful of countries[0]?

The lead in car batteries is one of the most recycled materials on the plant. Your link is talking about lithium, not lead. Lithium-ion batteries only make sense in portable applications like cell phones and electric vehicles where weight is a major consideration. In stationary applications, heavier batteries like lead-acid are infinitely more practical.

The problem with batteries is that there are a bunch of grid storage chemistries using abundant elements that can scale to 1 GWh but there is almost no demand for grid storage only chemistries so lithium wins by default because it piggybacks of other developments.

> What is the $/MWh cost associated with mining for, recycling, and disposing of battery components?

A chemical battery is rather compact, imagine how much stuff you need to build a gravitational mega-structure.

Here’s what the article says about cost:

> For a 25-year project, he estimates that Gravitricity would cost $171 for each megawatt-hour. Jessika Trancik, an energy storage researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that number is aspirational and still needs to be supported with field data. But Schmidt’s calculation of the lifetime cost per megawatt-hour for lithium-ion batteries, $367, is more than twice as much. Flow batteries, a promising grid-scale technology that stores charge in large tanks of liquid electrolyte, come in at $274 per megawatt-hour

What you have described would last for 1000 days used to even out daily (solar) power demand/supply. So for a 25yr capability it would cost 8x more? I would hope not, and I think you could get 3000 cycles by restricting temperature and charge/discharge, but that still requires 2.5-3x higher cost and puts this solution as very competitive with current battery solutions.

The cost was given purely in terms of MWh.

This doesnt account the short duration of batteries, I have to replace them every time they go past their lifetime, so in the long term their cost is much higher

The heavy machinery with moving parts lifting thousands and thousands of tons is also going to need maintenance and wear&tear replacements. The problem with scale is that all these proposed gravity batteries need much, much more machinery than an equivalent pumped capacity pumped hydro or chemical battery plant.

This is something made easier by the fact that we understand how mechanical designs age. We've built high-standing structures with parts that move in a similar way that last decades. We understand how to maintain those structures without totally replacing them.

Out of interest: do you have experience with mechanical engeneering or is this more of a common sense speculation?

You should finish reading or find a similar storage company that sells batteries and see how much they charge.

Their marketing has the LCOS of those 2 solutions the other way around - $171 for Gravity, $367 for Litium Ion batteries.

See https://gravitricity.com/technology/

Too bad they don't seem to provide the actual report anywhere (and neither does ICL), they just quote a single chart from that without any details. This feels fishy to me - I'd want to look into the cost basis they used, as a key problem with comparisons against batteries is that the battery cost has changed so much over the recent years (halving every 5 years or so), and many studies quote their battery price calculations on older reports that are now off by a large multiple.

$367 of LI batteries at year X is $171 of LI batteries at year X+5 and $86 at year X+10, so it's important to look at what the X is in their study. And of course, we should consider that chemical battery costs are expected to decrease in the near future, while the cost well-established mechanical components would stay stable.

Whilst I agree the components of a mechanical battery are probably going to stay stable, I think Gravitricity have an opportunity to commoditise the design and install near sporadic renewables like wind.

Bias: I participated in their crowdfunding campaign.

The only savings grace with these gravity systems is that they could last 100 years. Gravity is a very poor of storing energy. Height is limited by practicality. Reusing old mine shafts is just a code word for unaffordable. You need to increase the amount of mass that you move around, therefore your system should be infinitely scalable. By limiting yourself to mineshafts you have reduced the scalability option and the entire project becomes a scam.

Car batteries don't last decades. Multiply that $100 by 5 years and you can see how the price racks up