> Very few of the people that would currently benefit from a domestic backup battery could afford $2k

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.

> A battery for $2k would pay for itself in California quickly

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…”

This is such an unrealistically pessimistic assessment.

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.

I’m not saying nobody will value them ever under any circumstances, I’m replying to someone saying “Who wouldn't get one?” with “you’d be surprised…”

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.

> California, a state of 40 million people, would disagree with you ;)

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.

Probably less explody than a propane tank. Turns out that pretty much any form of energy storage can release a bunch of energy in a short time if pushed hard enough.

I was thinking the same thing until someone pointed out that lard stores a ton of energy but you can't really make it explode. I hope.

But you can make it burn!

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.

Now I want to know if someone has made a butter-fuelled hybrid rocket, and not why not.

Home Storage is typically LFP (LiFePO4) nowadays. And those are hard to ignite.

> 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.

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.

> For example, if the grid could coordinate with your heating and cooling, you could distribute AC usage to avoid tripping the grid.

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.)

A 1KWh battery is affordable now using off-the-shelf lead acid batteries.

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.

Lead acid batteries suck for more reasons than just their size and weight. One major disadvantage is that the faster you discharge them the less of their charge you will actually recover[1]. Additionally, discharging them below 50% capacity significantly reduces their life in terms of total cycles (even for cells rated for "deep cycle" operation)[2][3] so you need to oversize your battery system to get the same effective capacity if you want your cells to last. Lithium batteries suffer from neither of those drawbacks.

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.)

"most of the people who do have $2k to spare don’t live in places with unreliable electricity"

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.

um, no, we are not going to have unreliable electricity because people's lives depends on it. We will have grid scale batteries, and the grid will charge you more or less depending on when you are using energy. it does not make sence to have such essential equipment randomly distributed through the population where I have to fight my landlord to repair the damn thing or have it not cause a house fire, while the guy is out of the country on holiday and couldn't give a rat's ass

It does make sense to invest, but also makes sense to build these things at scale. Having a team of people micromanage your roof and electrical system already costs nearly same as equipment.

um, yes, it's happening already in areas where intermittent supplies make up a sufficient percentage of the energy mix (e.g. South Australia). In an ideal world we'd keep the rollout of intermittent sources below the level at which they cause instability until grid scale batteries are invented, however that's not the world we live in.

My understanding is that neither of the major outages in SA in recent times have been related to intermittent supply issues (i.e. the first major incident was related to trips caused by weather, the second was related to a gas using supplier failing to increase supply due to some market regulation minutiae that was subsequently changed).

Regardless of the realities in SA (I’m not convinced by the offical explanation of the first outage at least, there are credible alternative theories), it’s well understood that beyond a certain level, introducing intermittent suppliers into a network designed for baseload generation will cause instability. I don’t have the figures to hand but IIRC more than very low double figures as a percentage starts causing trouble.

> and most of the people who do have $2k to spare don’t live in places with unreliable electricity.

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.

> A home battery in many places is basically free money.

Only if its a free battery. Otherwise, its an income stream with an up front cost.

Which is why its not common, but with battery prices coming down and dirt cheap second hand batteries on the horizon, this is going to become a big industry.

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.

> Which is why its not common, but with battery prices coming down and dirt cheap second hand batteries on the horizon, this is going to become a big industry.

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.

Old car batteries are at the end of their life because they have low capacity or have shorted cells.

A battery with only 50% capacity is pretty useless for a car but if you get it for cheap, its a great deal for a home battery.

The realities of batteries is that most of the cells will be at 90% capacity while a few will have dropped to 50%. So recycling really can be just plucking out the good cells and breaking down the few old cells.

Those 90% cells will also have a pretty nice degradation curve as most of the loss happens within the first few years of operating.

1. Here in CT with our abundance of trees, a large fraction of the state loses power for the better part of a week every couple of years when a windstorm comes up the coast.

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.

Value for money is not my argument.

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 understand your point.

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.

My electricity uptime has never been as low as 99%. South coast UK for the first 18 years of my life, total downtime would’ve been at most half a day, in 30-60 minute fragments, ~99.992% uptime. Never once failed when I was back there for 7 months to help provide care for my mum. Likewise Sheffield for about a year, and that place had an annoying prepay electricity meter.

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 don't doubt that electrical service in nearly all the UK has _much_ higher uptime than the service here in Connecticut.

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.

There are plenty of places in US where electricity is not entirely reliable, and that includes some fairly wealthy suburbs. FWIW I'd get such a thing for myself even though we see outages maybe once a year - it's less hassle than a generator to keep the fridge running.

$2k maybe not but you can grab some chinesium 1 kW generator pack for well under 200$ these days, and fuel it with distilled alcohol. Good enough for a grid backup to keep the refrigerator and lights running.