Germany Finances Major Push Into Home Battery Storage For Solar 282
mdsolar writes with this bit of news from Green Tech Media "The German government has responded to the next big challenge in its energy transition – storing the output from the solar boom it has created — by doing exactly what it has successfully done to date: greasing the wheels of finance to bring down the cost of new technology. ... Now it is looking at bringing down the cost of the next piece in the puzzle of its energy transition — battery storage. ... KfW’s aim, according to Axel Nawrath, a member of the KfW Bankengruppe executive board, is to ensure that the output of wind and solar must be 'more decoupled' from the grid. ... This is seen as critical as the level of renewable penetration rises to around 40 per cent — a level expected in Germany within the next 10 years. ... According to Papenfuss, households participating in the scheme will spend between €20,000 and €28,000 on solar and storage, depending on the size of the system (the average size is expected to be around 7kW for the solar array and around 4kWh for the battery)."
Re:so green (Score:5, Insightful)
That's only a few car batteries.
However the problem still exists the second you scale up.
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
If it was easy to store electricity efficiently, we wouldn't need all this "always-on" peak demand power generation. We'd just store everything generated at night already and then release it the next day.
Fact is, as soon as you get into storing electricity, you're into massive efficiency drops.
Re:Germany is fucked (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:so green (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I prefer my home steam generator. It uses 100% renewable, carbon-cycle, eco-friendly biofuel (wood) to generate steam that drives a turbine generator. I can get about 3kW out of my setup.
Home-built or off-the-shelf? Link to plans or manufacturer or re-seller, please ;-)
Re:Disaster waiting to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
A central power system is also a single point of failure, distributed power generation is the way forward once they've got power storage sorted and cheap. The grid can be used as a back up system
Bout time (Score:4, Insightful)
Been saying we should have started doing this in the USA two decades ago when i worked home construction.
Every one of those subdivision mcmansion homes we have built should have come with a solar panel on the roof and 2 volt battery array.
We built MILLIONS of them. Hell the people buying 40k homes for 200k+ you could have even sold it to them as a 'feature' and not subsidize it at all.
Between that and all the big box stores having an array on the roof. We could be powering half the entire country by solar now. And it would have cost less than a month of one of our 'wars'.
But no. Because socialisim or something. Or no wait. Solar is for hippies. Or no wait.. It's expensive. Or no wait. Solar sucks. Or no wait whats the excuse of the day now?
We're dumb.
Re:Germany is fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Get Real (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.
Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.
You get your CO2 back in 3 - 6 Months! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the CO2 return of invest of a windturbine. Solar panel is around 10 - 15 Months or so.
Re:Disaster waiting to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
The batteries will last for more than a year, will be phased in over time, and will be fully recyclable.
Re:house in Germany (Score:4, Insightful)
And my house is barely 20 years old. I'm not against somebody who wants to put all these things into their home, but for this home owner, none of these things make any economic sense
Germany has buildings that are a thousand years old.
I'm sure there's enough buildings between 20 and 1000 years old such that a national program of improvements is a good idea