Very few of the people that would currently benefit from a domestic backup battery could afford $2k, and most of the people who do have $2k to spare don’t live in places with unreliable electricity.
The overlap isn’t zero, but… for example, I visited Kenya with an ex of mine, we met a local friend of hers, that friend would’ve benefited from a more reliable electricity bill, but her monthly rent and utility bills combined was equivalent to about $85 and she couldn’t afford to move.
California, a state of 40 million people, would disagree with you ;)
Not just referencing the blackouts we had last summer: CA also is heavily invested in solar power, and as a result, power is much cheaper during the day than at night (assuming you opt into time of use pricing). A battery for $2k would pay for itself in California quickly, because you can charge it when power is cheap during the day and run off battery when power is expensive at night.
Plenty of other US states have had blackouts as well; my parents in PA now own a generator due to repeated blackouts last year. If they could have bought a battery for $2k, they probably would have: generators are loud and dirty. And Texans certainly had a bad time with blackouts recently as well.
Anyone who can find a spare $2k can buy one and quickly find they now have more than $2k spare, but you’d be amazed how many people, even in a rich part of the world like CA, don’t have as much spare cash as the average developer.
https://samvimesbootstheory.com/
Like I said, “not zero, but…”
You just need to count the number of rooftop solar installations there are in the world to get an idea of the market size. Another $2k investment to get significantly more value out of an existing multithousand outlay would be a no brainer for most of them.
Mainly I’m expecting grid-corrected batteries of this type to be owned and operated by power companies and governments rather than by individual home owners; and most privately owned batteries to be the ones in cars rather than permanently attached to houses.
How explode-y is this battery? I hear California also has this problem with forest fires and it seems a fire and giant batteries all over the place would be two flavors that do not go well with each other.
https://madison.com/wsj/huge-grease-fire-was-a-hot-mess/arti...
> With so much oil-rich food on hand, including lard, cheese and more than 10 million pounds of surplus butter stored by the federal government, the fire was a hot mess — fast-moving, destructive and difficult to put out.
My expectation is that with climate change, unreliable electricity is going to affect a lot more places. The polar vortex that knocked out the Texas grid is likely to be a more frequent and more extreme event. ACs running more frequently will likely lead to more brown outs.
Assuming our grids don't get major updates (I'm pretty pessimistic about this), we are looking at more and more outages in the future. It's certainly possible that smart grids could significantly reduce outages, but that will take too many actors working together to ever really fly.
For example, if the grid could coordinate with your heating and cooling, you could distribute AC usage to avoid tripping the grid.
Barring such a grid, homes having batteries would allow owners to skate through brown outs. Further couple that with solar and they could survive even major outages (hours or even days).
> The overlap isn’t zero, but… for example, I visited Kenya with an ex of mine, we met a local friend of hers, that friend would’ve benefited from a more reliable electricity bill, but her monthly rent and utility bills combined was equivalent to about $85 and she couldn’t afford to move.
A 1kwh battery would probably be a pretty positive impact. Add on a 300W solar panel and you'd have something that would extend the amount of electricity the have. That'd come in at ~$400 (assuming $50/kwh). Not enough to run an AC, but enough to keep the lights on and maybe run a fridge.
Otherwise... yeah... not much good news for places that can't afford such batteries.
This is already done. It’s a blunt system, but it is done.
I was offered $5/month off my electric bill to add a device to my AC unit that would be able to turn it off for up to 15 minutes per hour. (I declined, because my AC at that time was not able to keep up even running constantly.)
There is no advantage using Lithium batteries (at present) as size and/or weight is not critical for domestic applications.
The whole point of the discussion is that Lithium is still not cheaper than Lead acid.
If those weren't enough, even when treated well (not discharged too deeply) lead-acid batteries don't last for as many discharge cycles as lithium iron phosphate cells. If you do the math, for batteries cycled daily modern LiFePo batteries are about the same TCO as lead-acid despite the higher up-front costs because the lithium batteries will last significantly longer and you don't need to buy as much absolute capacity for the same effective capacity. Here's a good presentation on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqRDZh74F0
[1] http://omahamakergroup.org/2015/05/14/battery-derating-and-c...
[2] https://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/lead-acid-batteries/char...
[3] https://www.solar-electric.com/media/wysiwyg/cyclelife2.gif (Graph shows cycles (y-axis) vs average depth of discharge (x-axis) for a typical "deep cycle" lead-acid battery. Note the y-axis is logarithmic.)
Increasing the mix of renewables in the electricity networks will mean most people live in places with unreliable electricity going forward. The proposed $2k 30kWh home battery backup could well be the adaptation many of us have to make.
A home battery in many places is basically free money. Renewables mean there is an extreme oversupply at some times and an undersupply at others. Owning a battery hooked up to the grid means you buy power at oversupply times where the power goes in to negative pricing and then sell it back at other times in the same day where it is very expensive.
Reusing old car batteries for this purpose might become the next bitcoin mining with warehouses full of repurposed batteries buying and selling power.
Only if its a free battery. Otherwise, its an income stream with an up front cost.
An old tesla battery with only 50% capacity remaining is still perfectly good for this kind of use even if not so great for driving.
Maybe briefly, especially where retail customers with some installed renewable generating capacity can leverage the latter to take advantage of net metering laws designed to bring renewable capacity to the grid, because otherwise their stuck buying at retail and, if allowed to sell back at all, selling at wholesale.
Bur cheaper batteries mean proper utility players (e.g., a joint operation of PG&E and Tesla) are building large, purpose-built storage facilities, often colocated with generation facilities, with lower marginal costs for real estate and interconnection than separate facilities and better access to financing than small operators.
Storage is going to be a big industry going forward, but the period where home storage (or storage by anyone but major utility players) is a viable financial hack rather than just a backup plan for grid failure will probably be brief unless artificially subsidized to encourage distributed storage.
Those 90% cells will also have a pretty nice degradation curve as most of the loss happens within the first few years of operating.
2. Batteries need not just be for power outages. Net metering, granular demand-based energy pricing, etc are all reasons to get a battery for your house.
I’m just saying loads of people for whom it would provide benefit don’t have $2k spare money to invest.
To put a different spin on it: the price point for the cheapest consumer unit should be way lower than that… unless you force landlords to install it at their own cost (as a landlord myself: a $2k legally mandated expense would not be happy fun times, but I could and would suck it up).
And even then, you’re still thinking in terms of the richest economies, and first quartile incomes in developing nations would struggle with $25 backup batteries let alone $2000.
One belief of mine which is shifting from all the replies I’ve been getting, is that I’m increasingly surprised how bad everyone’s telling me that America’s fundamental infrastructure is.
I don't think of the infrastructure here as _bad_, though.
We do have the occasional outage after a storm, as I described. But, even if the uptime were as low as 99%, which it is not, I would not want to pay the cost of making the grid significantly more resilient than it is.
Rural Wales for 3.5 years? 30 minutes of downtime total, ~99.998% uptime. Similar total downtime in Cambridge, but I was there 8.5 years, so 99.9993% uptime. I don’t think it’s ever failed me here in Berlin.
That in particular is why I’m saying here that American infrastructure looks bad. It’s not the only way, TBH, but it is so in a new and relevant way I wasn’t previously expecting.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that the infrastructure in the two places is built essentially the same way. I think the crucial difference is that Connecticut has so many more trees. Downed trees break the lines all over the state whenever a windstorm or a snowstorm comes through. (Come to think of it, most of the UK doesn't get snowstorms, either).
I'm just saying that never for a second would I consider trading any of those trees for additional uptime. Nor do I want to pay the utility providers whatever it would cost to bury all those lines in the ground where they'd be safer from storm damage. I'd rather have a week without power every couple of years.
I'd be curious to know if the story is different in rural or semirural Scandinavia.
Because it would be a lot more than $2k to get put it in your home. If you do the math on a Tesla powerwall, the raw cost of the battery should be right around $2k too. But it actually costs more like $8k per powerwall.
Competition is low. There are only a few players in the home battery space and they are similarly priced.
Demand is high. Even with the higher price, the wait list to get a powerwall is more than a year out.
My expectation is a few things happen over the next 9 years.
I expect that battery production ramps up to a high degree.
I expect that the EV market will eventually be saturated
With those two things, I expect that EV manufactures and the likes of tesla will end up with more batteries than than demand. When that happens, you can expect that the cost of battery products will start to tumble as everyone that manufactures batteries starts to try and sell them for whatever application will buy them.
Things that could spoil my assumptions?
Power companies might decide now is the time to really buy batteries. That could keep demand outpacing supply.
We could see new applications of batteries that aren't currently on the table, such as battery powered trains.
The EV market could not saturate. This could be due to battery production capacity severely lagging EV demand. This could be due to anything from manufacturing plants running into major issues to supply chain problems.
But, I'm an optimist. I expect to see battery tech and manufacturing continuing to build out at a fast pace.
Oh, and eventually the expensive part of a battery system won't be the batteries but rather the install cost.
Batteries could get a train up to cruising speed requiring a smaller train engine and less fuel.
Batteries could save on line expansion, instead of installing a 3rd rail for the whole line, they could go a 3rd rail every 50 miles for 10 miles.
I agree a 3rd rail would be cheaper in the long run. Batteries could help bridge the gap.
Some major cities in the US had overhead powered "trolleys". But, car lobbies destroyed those :(.
If the whole grid goes down, your gas likely won't be there.
If you add solar, then you could indefinitely run in most circumstances.
You could swap out the NG generator for a diesel one with a day tank and then you don’t have to worry about NG service :)
A 30kwH battery wall is going to last 6-12 hours at most anyways.
I can’t recall NG service disruptions on a large scale in my state, and I’m 37.
Point being you could target your outage range based on what you want to prep for at a fairly low cost (assuming $50/kWh).
Add on a solar system to any of these and you'd have indefinite power without a reliance on surrounding infrastructure.
For my home, 30kWh would give me ~24hr of power.
Even if you want a fossil fuel generator, you could have an auto switch to battery for the short outages so you don't have to go crank on the generator.
Cost like 5k and 2K install. Really hard to beat that in the near term with battery.
No it doesn’t do the demand shift part of a battery, but it’s pretty clearly better as an emergency solution, at least for my needs.
However, it's still a lot more hassle to set this up compared to a battery pack that "just works".
It's going to be a shock for a lot of people, specially in techno-optimistic communities as HN.
So next 9 years? My expectation is beyond Tesla, the rest of the industry will have hit on that sub $50/kwh price point. That is going to make a lot of things really interesting. $2000 for a 30kWh home battery backup? Who wouldn't get one?
To further this, with climate change leading to more and more extreme weather, I'm expecting that power outages are going to be semi-common (assuming the grid doesn't invest in battery backup).