US Grid-Battery Costs Dropped 70% Over 3 Years (arstechnica.com) 92
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In recent years, the cost of solar and wind energy has declined precipitously, which has accelerated the growth of these renewable energy technologies. Increasingly, utilities are now planning for a future grid dominated by solar and wind. That will require changes in grid management and transmission upgrades as well as the addition of storage to smooth out the supply from variable generators. Grid storage is still pretty early days, but we're already seeing huge cost reductions as the industry matures. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted this recently, showing that grid-scale battery-project costs in the United States dropped 70 percent in just a few years.
Between 2015 and 2018, average project costs decreased from $2,152 per kilowatt-hour of storage to $625. Costs will need to drop much more for grid batteries to scale, but that's a huge improvement in a short period of time. By the end of 2018, the US had 869 megawatts of battery power capacity and 1,236 megawatt-hours of energy capacity. (Power is the rate at which the batteries can supply electricity, while energy is the total amount it can supply when going from full charge to empty.) EIA also has installation data for 2019, which saw the addition of another 150 megawatts/450 megawatt-hours. And in just the first seven months of 2020, yet another 300 megawatts of power capacity were installed. EIA doesn't see this slowing down. It expects installed battery storage to increase by 6,900 megawatts "in the next few years" -- a figure ambiguous enough to allow for a rapid spike in planned projects.
Between 2015 and 2018, average project costs decreased from $2,152 per kilowatt-hour of storage to $625. Costs will need to drop much more for grid batteries to scale, but that's a huge improvement in a short period of time. By the end of 2018, the US had 869 megawatts of battery power capacity and 1,236 megawatt-hours of energy capacity. (Power is the rate at which the batteries can supply electricity, while energy is the total amount it can supply when going from full charge to empty.) EIA also has installation data for 2019, which saw the addition of another 150 megawatts/450 megawatt-hours. And in just the first seven months of 2020, yet another 300 megawatts of power capacity were installed. EIA doesn't see this slowing down. It expects installed battery storage to increase by 6,900 megawatts "in the next few years" -- a figure ambiguous enough to allow for a rapid spike in planned projects.
Turns out batteries are similar to other tech (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading articles a few years' back saying that battery tech was fundamentally different from other tech advancements, in that because it was about improving chemistry there was a naturally lower limit to the rate of improvement. Seeing the improvements turn out to be every bit as impressive in practice has been pretty exciting, especially as there's clearly much further to go.
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Re: Turns out batteries are similar to other tech (Score:2)
Economies of scale driving costs down is a big part of every tech advance from memory to LCDs
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Portable batteries, storage density and light weight. Grid batteries, long life and low cost. Grid batteries do not need storage density nor do they need light weight, they need to have a very long life and be cheap (how large or heavy, completely arbitrary).
The cheapest battery installation is to fit them to houses. All the connections are already there, the building is already there and you can sell the batteries to them, lease them to them or rent them to them, the house battery and the grid battery. The
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I get the theory, but the facts are that Li-Ion is the chemistry of choice even for grid scale, and even though theory might suggest it ought to be something else.
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Solar, maybe, where the sun hours and economics work, but putting a wind turbine on a house is ridiculous.
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Yep. Air or ground source heat pump would be much better.
Re: Turns out batteries are similar to other tech (Score:2)
You sure its not because its built on the backs of chinese slave labor?
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Yep
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You're also wrong on the facts. 90%+ of all grid-scale batteries in the US are Li-ion. Only 1% is lead-acid. Specifically: "Lead acid covered only 1% of large-scale battery storage capacity installed at the end of 2018 in the United States and has seen limited grid-scale deployment because of its relatively low energy density and cycle life."
Source: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/s... [eia.gov]
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So the cost improvements are for Li-ion. No doubt a combination of supply costs decreasing as economies of scale improve
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The thing is, for long term storage flow batteries are probably the way to go rather than Li-on. This includes things like separable components, pumped hydro, compressed air, heck, even weird ones like pushing train cars to the top of a hill...as long as you've got a big enough hill, but the main thrust should be separable chemistry. You want the components to be separable efficiently with an electric or magnetic field, and to recombine energetically into the original material. And all the components nee
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All that may be true. But the fact is that at present Li-ion is being used for 90%+ of scale battery storage projects in the US.
Re: Turns out batteries are similar to other tech (Score:2)
Lithium iron phosphate can store for months without losing charge. Try it yourself and see! Itâ(TM)s also thermally stable.
Re:Turns out batteries are similar to other tech (Score:4, Interesting)
And the funny thing is, grid storage solutions are currently way more expensive than cell costs. Namely, because a company like Tesla is far more keen to put $10k of cells into a $45k EV than to put $10k of cells into a $13k grid buffer. Current cell shortages favour EVs at the expense of grid buffers, inflating the latter's cost. Also it should be noted that current systems are designed around the concept that you're only buffering an hour or two; costs per kWh are inherently lower the higher the ratio of energy to power in the system (the less power electronics per kWh of capacity).
There's a fascinating report [rethinkx.com] that came out the other day looking at the consequences of current solar, wind and battery price trends, and I strongly recommend people read it. The basic premise is that solar, wind, and battery price trends show no signs of stopping any time soon, and this, combined with the U-curve, leads to a curious phenomenon beyond "very cheap power in general" (3-4 cents per kWh): the cheapest way to build a 100% renewable system in 2030 will not be "weeks of battery backup" as the media often presents it, but to overbuild generation, say fourfold, with only a couple days of battery backup. This gives you a massive abundance of even-cheaper "super power" for almost all the year only curtailed at very limited times due to weather. So anything that can tolerate being shut down (potentially up to weeks on end) can consume insane amounts of power at little cost.
This "super power" in turn renders a massive array of things that currently fall under "We'd love to do them but they're too expensive because they consume too much electricity". To pick an example, desalination - you basically render the concept of water shortages a thing of the past, for all but far-inland areas lacking even access to brackish water. Indeed, due to the U-curve, you can get a ~50% increase in "super power" beyond the base at only a ~20% cost increment, as your extra generation capacity saves you in terms of battery needs.
A key part of the argument lies on price trends continuing. I don't follow wind and solar enough to be able to comment on this, but on batteries, I can say they're spot on. The paper also is too conservative in some regards. For example, they don't even consider long-distance HVDC links, pumped storage, smart grids, and a whole host of other things.
All of these things are notions that I've had playing around in my head for quite a while; none of them were "new" to me. But it puts them together so succinctly - it's very well done. A key point is that people tend to assume that a disruption of a system will build a new version of that system. In reality, disruptions generally build entirely new types of systems with entirely new properties. And the disruptor tends to be larger system overall than the disrupted.
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Ed: way more expensive than cell manufacturing costs.
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Power that's too cheap to meter and all that. And still partly fuelled by nuclear, just at a distance of 93m miles.
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Chemistry is a factor but there are many others. Mass production ramp-up for electric vehicles has massively reduced the cost of batteries. Technologies like high capacity pouch cells (instead of ones in a metal cylinder) have pushed down costs too.
The construction of the battery packs themselves has evolved rapidly so that the support structures and thermal management don't take up so much space. Semiconductors have improved too so that higher voltage packs are now possible, further increasing density and
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Yep, I know. That was the point I was making: claims that chemistry problems would slow the improvements of battery tech turned out to be over-blown, both because chemistry improvements have been better than expected, and because there's plenty of other angles to work, some of which you laid out.
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This isn't about improving chemistry, this is about improving production. The chemistry problem very much exists. There are still many fronts working on the next quantum leap in battery performance.
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You're not reading what I wrote. I wrote that chemistry was supposed to be a rate-limiting step (geddit?) for battery improvements cf other technology improvements eg LCD screens, SSDs, what have you. And that hasn't turned out to be the case. And improvements in chemistry have been a part of the story just as much as greater volumes allowing purchasers to bear down on supply costs. Battery power density has improved markedly, for example. That's why my Zoe 50 can go 245 miles with a pack the same size and
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The chemistry may be the same, but a few years ago there was very little demand for trailer sized batteries. You can get a trailer sized battery by filling a trailer with D cells, but that is not going to be the cheapest way to do it. There is a lot of resources (time and money) devoted to packaging individual cells. There is a lot of economies to be gained by getting rid of all that packaging.
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I know; see my comments to other posters. And the chemistry turned out to be a lot more amenable to improvement than folks anticipated too.
Rather invest in energy storage than nuclear (Score:2)
Re:Rather invest in energy storage than nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe I'm agreeing, but your phrasing was ambiguous:
It's important to keep in mind that energy storage is not a one-size-fits-all field. Small/light/dense energy storage is important for flying cars and robot butlers, but for grid storage none of that matters. The only real concern there is cost per kWh per year, including maintenance, safety, and any clean-up concerns. With up-front cost as a secondary concern, since you're always gambling that competing technology won't undercut your costs before you recoup the investment. Which is why things like pumped hydro are so promising for grid storage - they're big and heavy, but can potentially undercut chemical battery prices by several orders of magnitude.
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I shudder to think of the efficiency losses and/or cost of insulation, particularly if they're actually freezing instead of just liquefying. I suppose the square-cube law would help out considerably as you scaled up though.
But yeah, there's actually lots of options to store electricity if you don't care about mobility.
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The only real concern there is cost per kWh per year, including maintenance, safety, and any clean-up concerns.
I would disagree with this assessment that kWh is the "only" concern. While kWh is a large concern there are other considerations as well such as siting and resilience. There is a huge advantage to being able to co-locate energy dense batteries on existing permitted land. And a higher number of small micro-grids would mean that even if a tree takes out one power line, fewer customers lose power if they have storage in their neighborhood. Especially looking at California at the moment with their issues
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A fair point on regulatory compliance.
As far as density is concerned though, I don't think there are *any* batteries with such low volumetric density that it would interfere with distributed placements. The worst I can think of offhand are the Aquions, and they're still better than half the density of lead-acid - fill a basement with them an you could power blocks for days.
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From a national point of view, esp. national security, we NEED to have not only storage, but also nuclear, geothermal, hydro, along with solar/wind.
Making it out to be 1 or the other is not only short sighted, but will likely destroy the west.
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From a national point of view, esp. national security, we NEED to have not only storage, but also nuclear, geothermal, hydro, along with solar/wind.
We don't need solar. Solar is worse than the others you listed on land use, raw material needs, labor, safety, and even CO2 emissions. The gap on many of these metrics will be an order of magnitude wide. There's CO2 produced in the manufacture of the silicon for PV cells from the coal used in it's refining. Silicon is refined by putting quartz and coal in a big pile where it is heated to the point that the oxygen on the silicon "jumps" to the carbon in the coal, and the resulting CO2 just floats away in
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repeated verbal diarrhoea about solar again. The article is about batteries.
The article is about the need for cheap batteries given the growth in wind and solar power production.
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And given that we would need batteries for storage for wind even if utilities chose to follow your mad advice not to deploy solar as well, your point is still pointless in this context, as well as wrong.
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And given that we would need batteries for storage for wind even if utilities chose to follow your mad advice not to deploy solar as well, your point is still pointless in this context, as well as wrong.
Onshore wind is cheaper than solar. This is made doubly so since wind would need less battery capacity as it has a higher capacity factor and the pattern of wind output better matches demand. The best times of the day for wind is at dusk and dawn, both being peaks of electricity demand. Solar power has maximum output during the lunchtime valley in demand and little to no output in the morning and evening demand peaks.
Just about every source of electricity we have available to us would benefit from low co
Re: Rather invest in energy storage than nuclear (Score:2)
trade winds are generated by planet spinning. However, that is in a narrow area. Most wind , esp on land, comes from differential heating/cooling of land/water. Most of your winds occur when greatest temp differentials occur. These are not at dawn/sunset. Just the opposite. Those are dead periods. Pilots like to fly during that time. Commercial passengers afraid of turbulence should fly those times. Water skiers LIVE for skiing at sunrise/set. The w
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The article was about batteries. Wind needs batteries. You've said it. I've said it. We all agree. The article was not about solar, yet here you are, banging on about solar once again.
Re: Rather invest in energy storage than nuclear (Score:2)
Batteries at utility level are wasted. But distributed and allow for control by utility makes great sense.
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Solar is worse than the others you listed on land use, raw material needs, labor, safety, and even CO2 emissions.
I call bullshit on 'raw material needs' and 'CO2 emissions'. Both of these are easily approximated by looking at the cost of a solar panel: when a panel costs $100, then at most $100 in materials plus energy has gone into producing it. PV installations break even within 1-2 years, which means that in that time the panel has produced more energy than is consumed during production, and has saved more CO2 than is generated during production.
Land use is also dubious, with most solar panels being installed on ro
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I call bullshit on 'raw material needs' and 'CO2 emissions'.
Here's one source on this -> http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
Both of these are easily approximated by looking at the cost of a solar panel: when a panel costs $100, then at most $100 in materials plus energy has gone into producing it. PV installations break even within 1-2 years, which means that in that time the panel has produced more energy than is consumed during production, and has saved more CO2 than is generated during production.
EROEI of various energy sources compiled from a number of studies is on a chart about 1/3rd the way down this page -> https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
Solar will have an EROEI below 15 with wind, hydro, and nuclear fission having an EROEI over 40. If solar makes back the energy invested in 1 or 2 years then the other sources can get reach break even in a few months.
Land use is also dubious, with most solar panels being installed on rooftops.
Solar can be either inexpensive and take a lot of land, or take little lan
Re: Rather invest in energy storage than nuclear (Score:2)
I think he was referring to industrial grid-sized solar projects more so than home grown. What ever happened to the states that sued to only credit the household at the wholesale rate vs retail? Did those measures skew your 2yr cost recovery metric? I suspect eventually your recovery in cost will be limited to purely the savings in utility bills as these companies find new ways to not pay you.
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The land I want to use for solar is already being used. I can't feasibly plant a garden on my roof. The pitch is to high. And my neighbors wouldn't appreciate a windmill big enough to give useful power.
Re: Rather invest in energy storage than nuclear (Score:2)
1) the generation is done right by where consumption occurs. This drops the transmission losses.
2) rooftops currently absorb light as heat. Nice in winter, but for 3 seasons, the building gets heated by the sun. Worse, for commercial buildings, many actually do not run heaters even in winter time, except at nighttime. So many bodies and electronics generate extra heat, so these buil
Re: Rather invest in energy storage than nuclear (Score:2)
If you think natural gas power plants win on land use, think again.
Take a look at what gas drilling does to the land in satellite view.
https://www.google.com/maps/pl... [google.com]
All this talk about solar costs dropping, well... (Score:1)
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Cheaper is always better (assuming quality is maintained), but solar is already cheaper than coal in most places - the difference being that you're paying for ~20 years of energy all at once rather than by the truckload. Finance accordingly.
Of course that's just the energy, you also need storage. But a 70% drop in the price of grid batteries in three years is roughly halving every 18 months - that's a Moore's-law level improvement. If they can keep it up for just a few more years you'll get your wish.
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Let's consider the goal of installing solar panels and batteries into one's home. That's because solar power may not be the best option.
If the goal is to virtue signal then conspicuously placed solar PV panels on the roof might be the only option. In a suburban environment putting up a windmill might not be an option. In a more rural location a windmill would be cheaper, and more visible to the neighbors, than solar PV panels.
If the goal is to be off the grid then, again, a windmill would likely be more
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Generally speaking, the goal of going solar seems to be to reduce both energy costs and carbon impact. If your roof is well suited to solar, and the electric company is required to buy your excess power at a reasonable rate, a solar installation will generally pay for itself within 5-10 years. If you need batteries sufficient for reliable off-grid operation (i.e. to power you for a few sunless days) that will roughly double the cost. Or at least that was the case a few years ago, The headline suggests it
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solar installation will generally pay for itself within 5-10 years.
This is false. I've done the math, and granted it was 2 years ago but prices seam to be reasonably close to the cheapest quote I had which would pay for it self in about 12 years and that was best case. But wait why is that?
Re: All this talk about solar costs dropping, well (Score:2)
If this country doesnt eat itself in a few more years I will be surprised. More shit happened in 2020 than 2010-2019 combined. If even a couple more years are as event packed as this, the country will be bankrupt from endless bailouts, and the partisan fighting fueled by the need-for-clicks media will spawn a civil war. Only this sort of civil war will be more feudalism than one marked by geographical lines, as both strongly polarized groups live among each other. It wont be a north vs south. It will be thi
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Current cost of solar is already massively subsidized, as it's unprofitable manufacturing in China that's driving prices going down.
The problem is that if you're not in one of the few areas of the planet where solar intensity is high, or you're not valuing self-sufficiency to an extreme degree, residential solar is between a bad idea and a crime against environment. So move to Western Texas, South Australia or Sahara.
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>What sources of energy are not?
"Both strategic nuclear weapons and firecrackers are explosives, what do you mean they're not the same thing, or even in the same order of magnitude?"
Solar is subsidised at every stage, no just "establishing". In most Western nations, you can't even feed electricity into the grid if there's overproduction of solar or wind at that point in time, because they get priority to feed the grid. To the point where everyone else may need to shut down. That alone is far greater subs
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So you're saying new coal or nuclear requires MASSIVE subsidies.
Here's an idea, let's end energy subsidies and let the market decide which is the best.
I recall getting a letter from my electric utility asking if I was willing to pay a slightly higher rate for my electricity so that they could provide me with "green" energy from wind and solar. Of course the electricity coming to my house would still be a mix of everything on the grid but I'd have the assurance from the utility that they produced as much energy as I consumed from wind and solar. I didn't take this offe
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I'm all for ending energy subsidies. Nuclear and fossil fuels will go away pretty quickly then. Might be the only way we can reach our climate goals at this rate.
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Honestly, you could at least agree to euthanise the poor, instead of leaving them to freeze and starve to death in the name of your ideals.
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In a free market, why wouldn't solar and wind get priority naturally?
Because a large boiler in a power plant can't be throttled up and down like a car engine. To quickly reduce output of a thermal power plant to allow intermittent wind and solar on the grid means venting steam that could have been used to produce electricity. Then the boiler needs to be kept hot, by burning fuel, so that it's able to provide power again when the wind and/or solar power disappears from the grid.
Utilities can and do use gas turbines and reciprocating engines to produce some electricity, and
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And nuclear power doesn't? You're nuts.
Of course a nuclear power plant costs money to build and operate. The difference is that a nuclear power plant actually produces energy, and battery merely stores it. And since a battery will lose some of that energy in the process then it's an energy sink.
Given that an electrical utility makes money by selling electricity to consumers it will be to their benefit to spend more of the money they make on electricity sources than on electricity sinks.
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When your slow to respond coal plant is selling it's electricity for negative money, 'buy' it from them and stick it in your battery. Later when the demand is higher, sell it back for a profit.
That's right, and this is what will kill solar power.
Solar power produces the most power during the lunchtime valley in demand, meaning the energy produced has little value. Negative value actually. This costs the utility money, and this cost is made worse in having to pay for batteries to store this energy.
Oh, you want to subsidize the coal and force people to buy it instead of solar and wind for 'reasons'. But still want to pretend it's not a subsidy.
If your coal plant is only profitable in the middle of the night running at 40% capacity and loss making the rest of the time...sell it and buy some batteries instead. Stop looking for handouts.
You must have me confused with the voices in your head. I don't want any energy subsidies. If we were to end energy subsidies then the solar energy industry would nearly collapse. The only people le
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Batteries can easily pay for themselves by soaking up lucrative peak prices. Instead of having a fossil plant on standby to cover short term peaks you can have a battery. And when it's not covering those short peaks it can be smoothing the output from renewables too.
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Except coal plants are going the way of the Dodo.
Further what is replacing coal in the USA (this happened a long time ago in the UK) is natural gas. Now you can convert a coal plant to gas, but it is a *very* stupid way of doing things.
The reality is the proper way to use natural gas to generate electricity is primarily through running what are in effect large jet engines. These throttle down quite quickly (in the order of seconds) and up in the order of minutes. Easy to bridge with grid storage.
For bonus
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>Except coal plants are going the way of the Dodo.
In exactly one nation on the planet. US. Because natgas is cheaper.
Have you ever looked why it is that we developed nations agreed to pay incredible sums of money to developing nations under Paris Agreement?
That's right. It's so that they agree not to build the cheapest, most efficient power generation, and instead buy into much less efficient ones.
So they don't build coal and instead build, CCGTs or intermittents.
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It sure triggered all the right people, who know that they cannot touch the argument presented in the second paragraph and therefore must just deny, deny, and deny.
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In other news, Sun rises from the West, humans are made mostly out of helium and you have a very good grasp on subject we're talking about.
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Panels are regularly under $0.44/watt now, that seems quite reasonable. If you don't want to get nailed on batteries, then use used leaf cells, they are cheap as hell. Lots of people are already setting net benefits from solar systems, if you aren't one of them, no big deal. Solar is already the cheapest energy around, and it's not all about you.
Renewables are driving this, not battery costs (Score:2)
grid battery != car battery (Score:2)
These systems have very different needs. Probably the most notably, the grid doesn't care how much the battery weighs.
This opens up a huge range of options for energy storage that goes well beyond chemical batteries. Some of the best energy storage at these scales is actually kinetic, especially when you consider the total lifetime of the system and maintenance costs.
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The best energy storage system we have is one of the oldest, pumped hydroelectric storage.
While on vacation one summer I happened across a sign pointing to the Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Plant and to took a quick detour to take a look. This was built by the TVA in the 1970s and, as I recall, unlike most other pumped hydro storage systems this was not a retrofit to an existing dam, it was built from the start to be an energy storage facility as opposed to being a combination production and storage faci
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I find the cryo-battery technology fascinating. Trying to keep liquid air (-196.0C) from warming up until needed is the missing piece of the puzzle in my head. Knowing the PVT= (PVT)' I guess it means that the reinforced container won't let the liquid expand and hence remains cold, but for how long? Unattended that container eventually will yield. Fascinating.
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EROEI is nearly the only metric that matters for power generation. It's the reason we can have a high-tech energy-use-intensive society with only a tiny percent of our population producing all our energy. A low EROEI is a proxy for poverty.
Cheap batteries will kill solar power (Score:1)
From the fine article...
But with prices dropping, the economics of adopting significant amounts of storage to pair with cheap but variable generation are improving.
The prices of batteries cannot drop below that of the material needed to make them, and batteries need a lot of materials to make them compared to other current means to manage the variable output from wind and solar. The primary means of managing this being single cycle gas turbines and hydroelectric dams.
I've seen a number of people that study this sort of thing that solar PV power starts to become a real problem to a grid when it reaches about 20% of the supply on the grid. A ru
Never underestimate bandwidth of a station wagon.. (Score:2)
If it's going to be stored in a battery at some point anyways, do you really have to also suffer the losses from transmission lines? This is probably a dumb idea but theoretically, what would be the energy efficiency of physically transporting mass amounts of batteries on a train? Or perhaps electrolyte through a pipeline?
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Sure, bandwidth of transporting batteries can be great, but you are ignoring latency. There are also the inefficiencies of charging batteries, the energy required to transport them, and then the losses involved with discharge as well. It's going to be very, very hard to beat the simplicity and efficiency of high-voltage power lines.
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Anyways I think you're right, it would just be interesting if somebody has run the numbers. Rail transport is pretty efficient.
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The charge and discharge losses though are already incurred if you have to time-shift the wind/solar production to meet consumption.
Fair enough, didn't notice on my first read that you were comparing stationary batteries vs moving batteries.
What may be interesting would be a scheme where latency didn't matter - in other words, a situation where the need is very predictable and can be planned hours or days in advance. That might look like charging batteries in Nevada and transporting them to Seattle or some other place where solar is less viable. With ~100Wh/kg of battery, and 25000kg per shipping container, you could get 2.5MWh of elect
33% true, 33% false, 33% evil... (Score:2)
As hybrid and EV cars began to be produced, car companies had a new problem of what to do with old batteries that still worked, but that didn't work well enough to resell for vehicle use.
Recycling them i
Batteries? So many other ideas there could be. (Score:2)
There is only so much you can use a battery. Only so much energy you can put in and get out, which is always a negative delta. Their life cycle is too short and expensive.
Let's think a bit outside the box. All you need is potential energy storage.
Pushing something up a hill using an electric motor stores energy. Fill up a dam with water, drain water when you need power, and pump it back when you have the solar/wind power available.
Power storage could be done in so many ways. Any ideas?
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Pumped hydro is great but does require a suitable location on an unoccupied hill that can be flooded. And new pumped hydro projects have the same NIMBY problems as any other industrial project in the modern world.
Solar failure (Score:1)
If you are going solar to go green the problem is that the cells are only economically efficient for a short amount of time and they are made of things that are expensive to recycle or dispose of otherwise they are toxic.
This is one of the reasons why the solar leasing company transfers ownership to the panels after 20 years.
By then the panels are not producing enough for their interests and they force the homeowner to shoulder the disposal costs.