Daimler Builds Massive Industrial Energy Storage Systems From Used EV Batteries (computerworld.com) 73
Lucas123 writes: German carmaker Daimler AG is building large battery storage systems for industrial use from the used lithium-ion batteries of its all-electric and hybrid vehicles. The first of Daimler's "2nd use battery storage units" will consist of 1,000 smart electric drive vehicle batteries and have a 13MWh of capacity. It is expected to be connected to the electrical grid in Lünen, Germany early next year. All of Daimler's battery storage units are currently planned to be greater than a megawatt in capacity, meaning they'll only be for commercial, not residential use, but the company said it does expect those batteries to be cost competitive with the ones Tesla announced earlier this year.
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Well, they did have an album called, "High Voltage."
This is great (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apology accepted.
Re:This is great (Score:5, Insightful)
HFT FTW (Score:2)
All the cool technology of HFT without the social stigma of HFT . . .
Re:This is great (Score:4, Interesting)
A similar idea is to use electric vehicles in people's garages to "time shift" demand. Nevada Power (and I'm sure others) offers a rate plan for EV owners where power is much cheaper after 11pm and more expensive in the afternoons. Cars can already be set to start to wait until a set time to begin charging.
Power companies spend a lot of money building "peaker" power plants that are only needed between 4pm and 7pm. Theoretically, when a power company hits its supply limit, it could put a call out to any EV currently plugged in saying "I'll pay 6 cents per kWh for what's in your battery". If they don't get as much power as they need, they would put out another request at 7 cents. If you paid 4 cents the previous night, that's a good deal for everyone. The car would be set up with rules about what price you want and how much power you're willing to part with.
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That would require the power companies to care. Currently they seem to be fighting distributed generation with every ounce of control they can muster. It is sad though that solar panels on your house earn less money for the power during the peak time than you pay during the off peak night for power. It is like they want to pay for everyone's power generation at the lowest rate they can get away with, and charge everyone the highest rate possible. I wonder if we could setup a solar power production union
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That would require the power companies to care.
I explained right up front exactly why they care.
Power companies spend a lot of money building "peaker" power plants that are only needed between 4pm and 7pm.
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A similar idea is to use electric vehicles in people's garages to "time shift" demand. Nevada Power (and I'm sure others) offers a rate plan for EV owners where power is much cheaper after 11pm and more expensive in the afternoons. Cars can already be set to start to wait until a set time to begin charging.
Power companies spend a lot of money building "peaker" power plants that are only needed between 4pm and 7pm. Theoretically, when a power company hits its supply limit, it could put a call out to any EV currently plugged in saying "I'll pay 6 cents per kWh for what's in your battery". If they don't get as much power as they need, they would put out another request at 7 cents. If you paid 4 cents the previous night, that's a good deal for everyone. The car would be set up with rules about what price you want and how much power you're willing to part with.
If I had an electric car, there is no way in hell that I would take that deal. Intentionally increasing the charge/discharge cycles of my $x0,000 car battery to at least double the normal usage to make a few pennies is incredibly foolish.
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to at least double the normal usage
I'm not sure where you're getting that from.
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You'd be an idiot to accept that deal!
1) Your EV's battery doesn't charge/discharge at anywhere near 100% efficiency.
2) Batteries have a fixed number of charge/discharge cycles, so the energy you pull out is significantly more exp
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They would need to build these "peaker" plants even if they will be used once a year only. Random supply of solar/wind doesn't help that much here.
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The same way as they did in the original car?
Very likely, they go through and test all the cells before being used in this system and replace any non working cells. Also, the design of these systems generally isolates each cell within a small steel cage (and electrically) so that if one cell burns out, it doesn't burn out all the cells.
Here is a picture of a Tesla battery pack, lower down in the pictures, there is one with the top off of it, you can see the battery isolation clearly in that picture. This
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It is really great that you are so willing to announce all of your failures repeatedly. I appreciate your candor on posing them to almost all of my posts. So, the question becomes when you will answer my challenge, as you still haven't answered the question.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
A bridge provides no ability to do what you claim. So, care to try again to prove my knowledge inaccurate. Or will you just shitpost some more and prove your lack of knowledge?
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Except that's not a viable business model. It costs way the hell too much money to build a huge energy-storage facility, to not maximize day-in, day-out profits. In other words, you can't leave your battery-bank half-charged every day, waiting around for the occasional free electricity to take advantage of. In fact it's most profit
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No doubt advances in storage technology would go a long way towards making renewables feasible, however the prices need to come down for that to become a reality. Teslas power wall for example will run $3,000 - $3,500 for the battery pack alone (not including inverter & installation. It doesn't appear powerful enough to handle your average homes peak wattage draw, it maxes out at 3.3 KW. I have a small RV generator that can handle 4.5 KW peaks and cost me about $220, most whole house generators put o
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No doubt advances in storage technology would go a long way towards making renewables feasible, however the prices need to come down for that to become a reality. .....
I wondered what the value of this was but saw a pun in your post.
There is data center storage and off peak electric storage and load leveling.
Buildings full of robots, food, data, semiconductor fabrication, assembly,communication equipment all have
large downtime risks and orderly shutdown risks.
Since these are pulled from recycled battery packs the costs are interesting.
These are lithium based -- I think the heavy iron based battery technology is
the most likely urban future. Install them in underground va
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I can see uses in whole-building UPSs. Now a power outage doesn't mean the office has to shut down for the day. The TCO might be lower than generators - more expensive to install, but costs next to nothing to maintain.
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... more expensive to install, but costs next to nothing to maintain.
Because Lithium Ion batters never wear out or need replaced? Where did all these come from? Oh yeah, they're used.
FWIW, I don't think they're a bad idea, but I wouldn't use them as a one-or-the-other in place of a generator... at least not at this time.
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This is true, but even without renewables energy storage is a good tool to have available to the grid. Batteries and inverters are capable of sourcing and sinking power, as well as ramping up and down fast, making them good candidates for frequency regulation [energystorage.org] and other ancillary services. For example, by spacing storage systems around, you can also help avoid congestion on large transmission lines.
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Err... You know, it's not about the direct value of the electricity stored but what that electricity is capable of. If that electricity can keep your server farm going for a while longer, as a form of redundancy, and you're making a few million dollars per hour at that server farm then it's money well spent. It's nice to complain and all but it's better, I think, to look at the entirety of the picture before making such complaints.
Just because you're poor and unimaginative does not mean the rest of the worl
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Many things have very different values depending on -time-. If it was cheap then and is expensive now, you need to take that into account in your calculations.
If there is no other source of power right -now-, then your battery pack might have a value that is three or four orders of magnitude greater! 8-)
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for example you have headlines about how for one day or so you'll have some country or region produce more power than it needs using wind, but they miss that the vast majority of the time this extra power is wasted
That is incorrect. Even countries like Denmark, Portugal and Germany that have a very high wind production rate, usually have no problems transporting the energy elsewhere.
Yes, the news are full about the fact that germany is at the edge of its transportation capacity, however it happens rarely th
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.... And if one is a smaller, isolated grid, such as many islands, this problem is even more severe. But you are right that "vast majority" was probably too strong especially in the context of Western and Central Europe which has done a good job integrating their grids.
Interesting concept: Storage as an alternative to Transmission.
Maybe it would not replace Generation, so much as Transmission. (Explains why the power companies are scared.)
But transmission is still more efficient, so I see them working together. Except for the isolated places, as you mention.
By the way, power companies have tested other means of storage (besides hydro pumping). I remember a couple of reports of large flywheels in a vacuum on magnetic bearings, which is surprisingly efficient.
buy our dying batteries (Score:4, Informative)
Translation: The company [Daimler AG] said that they hope to charge about as much for their old used nearing end-of-life batteries as Tesla is charging for brand new batteries and that customers will not be smart enough to understand the difference.
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That's fine, assuming that they're priced appropriately for their storage capacity.
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The part about this scheme that concerns me is that Daimler is working hard to create as much value as possible from older, deteriorating batteries, while they continue to deteriorate.
For some reason, the idea of banking all the old deteriorating batteries together in a big mass and working hard to keep squeezing energy into and out of them seems like there might be certain hazard in it.
Maybe I'm just not thinking things through, because I'm not involved in the project in any way, but don't those old batter
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It are lithium batteries. There is no hazard in totally running them down, if charged properly. The capacity simply goes down to the point where it is no longer worth it.
Part of the process of breaking down is physical erosion of the sealed cases the batteries are contained in. So you've got ten thousand pounds of lithium in a small contained space. The time is ticking away until one of the batteries erodes to the point where the seal is breached and the lithium inside the battery ignites. The heat and f
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Just where exactly do you think that Tesla puts all the old used batteries from its cars?
I'm sure they have a wall somewhere that they stack them up against. A Wall of Power or such-like.
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waste not want not.
uh, no (Score:2)
If you look at the weight of the power packs, it is obvious that there are a lot more cells than the size calls for.
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To be fair it's a totally different product. Tesla makes relatively small packs for home use. This thing is grid scale. Delivering a few kW from a battery pack is very different to delivery a few MW from a battery pack.
It's actually relatively small by grid standards - Japanese manufacturers have been offering 50MW+ batteries for getting on a decade now, but because it recycles cells it's still pretty interesting. I guess the target market will be wind/solar farm owners looking to smooth their output or sto
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So.... (Score:3)
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Tesla announced 3 years ago that they would be re-using the cells for doing homes. And Daimler, upon seeing that Musk is doing this, is now trying to copy it.
Great for commercial use (Score:2)
http://media.daimler.com/dcmed... [daimler.com]
"However, the battery systems are still fully operational after this point, as the low levels of power loss are only of minor importance when used in stationary storage."
The amount of productive use before a set recharging as part of a routine understood. The count of expected recharges is understood over time. So the later commercial use is und
Just wait... (Score:2)
Daimler's batteries are used (Score:2)
and they'll be cost competitive with Tesla's new batteries? One would hope so.
Lünen (Score:1)
A simplistic dream (Score:2)
A simplistic dream would be a power grid:
- that anyone can buy power from at a "retail" price
- that anyone can sell power to at a "wholesale" price
- where the difference is used only to maintain the grid (ie. non-profit)
- where prices may fluctuate hourly to reflect supply/demand
- that has no other rules, to keep it simple.
I say a "simplistic dream" because, as I understand it, there is no simple way of actually doing that given how our power grids currently work. Plus there are the politics.
The goals
For small loads, a UPS (Score:1)
If you only need a small storage system, try a UPS like we use for computers. Some good ones even allow you to connect larger batteries for longer runtime. And the converter hardware has "economy of scale" that brings the price down.
But don't try to run your air conditioner off of it! 8-P