Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today.
From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $130/kwh and about 26% less efficient in the same form factor. I look forward to this changing.
Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery (lifepo4) and haven't had any problems. I can't imagine ever going back to the power company. Panels have gotten to the point of being ridiculously cheap. I have a lot of space. I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w). They produce about 85% of their nominal rating.
I mention this because other comments mention costs that are much much higher.
Sounds great, but are there actual businesses who will come to your home and do an install, or do you need to to become a mad-scientist electrician and DIY? I got quotes on getting an LG system a few years ago and it was 4X these prices (also for me a problem is that my 'ancient' panels from 2013 use a single inverter instead of microinverters, so if I touch the system I have to replace it all). I keep hoping there will be a bunch of small businesses electrifying everything, I'd love to see - good, practical, safe - EV conversions driving around too, but it just doesn't seem to be materializing.
All of the quotes and interactions I had with the local solar installers were reminiscent of the used car lot if not outright fraud. I was able to do what was permissible myself and a regular licensed electrician did the rest. The equipment is UL listed. There was some learning curve but I found the diysolarforum.com to be a pretty good resource to learn what I didn't know. I ran the whole setup standalone for about 6 months before switching the house over to it. The only problem that happened was a loose battery cable connection which the BMS and inverter alerted to and handled correctly.
> All of the quotes and interactions I had with the local solar installers were reminiscent of the used car lot if not outright fraud.
I had exactly the same experience. They absolutely would not tell me the actual system cost, only how much I would save on my current bill per month. It felt exactly like a car salesman only talking about monthly payments, and it was horrible.
Yup. I’ve (US) also talked to a few local ones to just see if they had a couple panels I could buy off them for close to wholesale for a personal project - which if they were actually involved in installation would be trivial - and just got blank stares.
They were clearly just doing lead generation for some other company they had no direct connection with, and didn’t even have any idea who to talk to that could even answer my question.
I had way better luck just looking online and paying shipping, which is absurd given how they were presenting themselves.
So not even as good as a used car salesman on an actual car lot, more like door to door used car salesman.
These companies are the equivalent of people who received a free product to review and then post a referral link for it in the details. Of course, they glow about how amazing the product is and how you should drop everything and buy it.
Yeah. Talked to a couple of solar companies. They were utterly focused on costs vs utility costs and very opaque about how that was being modeled. And it was based on the rules back then--which of course could not hold. Net metering is a huge subsidy that is already being walked back.
The true value of solar or wind is the cost of the fuel it saves. Nothing more. Even if his numbers come true there's a big problem--bad weather could deplete your batteries. You want to turn to the electric company in that case? You are once again in the situation that the value is only the fuel.
The rule is - if it's going inside the wall, only a licenced electrician can do it. Yes it also extends to things like speaker or HDMI cables. It's mad.
I can understand requiring a license for any power wires behind walls.
I could also see the possibility that it's just an old law that doesn't consider data-only cables which don't have the safety issues that wires carrying power do.
While HDMI can provide a tiny bit of power and there are active cables for signal boosting, HDMI was never meant for power delivery. You might be mixing it with HDMI with Ethetnet.
It's definitely an old law that never took data cables into account, but the current interpretation is that any cable that carries electrical current has to be installed and certified by an electrician.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until you're at Macca's and someone says, "Oi, can you pass me a chippy?" and they get real confused when you go find a carpenter.
in Spain we call them
“chispas”, which literally means sparks. An electrician is someone who knows the home electrical wiring stuff, while a chispas is someone who is skilled in repairing home appliances.
I'm currently in a pickle in this regard, as my new house has solar on Net Metering, but no ATS or battery. While its nice to only pay the base connection fee, I still go dark when the line power does.
I'd love to add at the very least an ATS to keep my fridge and freezer going when the power goes out during the day, if not a battery but I have little to no documentation on the existing solar install, so i'm reaching out to the county to see if permits have any info. Fun times!
It will, but I suspect this will get a lot easier everywhere as more of the problem gets packaged as units that you can just buy off the shelf (and the prices of such units come down).
What voltage are you running your solar strings at? I was wondering what would happen if the loose cable was a cable from the solar panels instead of the low voltage battery.
If you want a DIY-friendly option, it's best to look towards DC optimizers. They are installed on each panel and they provide a steady 48V output. They also do MPPT tracking on the panel level, so you get the best possible performance if you have some shading.
Unlike microinverters that are notoriously unreliable, DC optimizers so far have excellent long-term reliability.
Are you suggesting using a DC Optimizer from your solar panels to charge 48V batteries directly? This would be interesting. It's the first I've heard of optimizers being used for anything other than prior to an inverter.
The panel strings are at ~500v so there are safety, fusing and grounding considerations. Pretty common electrical equipment and cable is rated for use at 600v. There are special locking water resistant connectors for solar panels called MC4.
Are the hybrid inverters you are using be able to detect arc faults (in series) from the strings? Running 500V DC is probably by far the most dangerous thing in your setup, fortunately your solar panels are mounted on the groud.
> do you need to to become a mad-scientist electrician and DIY?
I did my own a couple years ago, and it worked quite well on the first go. I got someone else to build the LiFePo4 battery pack (16 CATL cells for 48v with a JK BMS).
It was fairly easy to build. Mount panels on the roof, and wire everything (PV, battery, grid electricity if you want it, and the output) to the inverter. I added some extra steps to monitor usage and output, and a smart MCB. I also have a small shop that I can feed from solar power if the battery is almost charged and the sunset time hasn't reached yet.
See if you quotation is to export electricity to the grid. Those kinds of setups usually require a certified company to do the installation (to make sure the inverter syncs with the grid), but for off-grid setups, you can definitely DIY.
> but are there actual businesses who will come to your home and do an install, or do you need to to become a mad-scientist electrician and DIY?
A lot of the costs of a real install come from the permitting, doing proper upgrades (you might need a new electrical panel), the warranty, the labor, and other costs.
Every time I browse the DIY solar forums it feels like I see 1 person doing things by code for every 10 people cutting corners or playing loose with the rules. YMMV, but take the DIY cost estimates with a huge grain of salt.
You do not necessarily have to become all these things. There are whole communities around this sort of a thing - Will Prowse's DiY Solar Forum (https://diysolarforum.com/) is an awesome source for learning as an example.
The setup you describe - lacking microinverters - I think there are options there short of wholesale replacement [disclaimer: I, too, am a self-taught in this field, and so am likely wrong in non-trivial ways]
You might need to DIY, but "mad scientist" is doing a lot of work in your statement that I don't think applies. You just need to follow some very-thoroughly-detailed online tutorials. It's one of those things like baking, where as long as you're good at faithfully following directions, everything turns out great.
> I keep hoping there will be a bunch of small businesses electrifying everything
There are a few of these per large city; but they serve companies with large budgets for "becoming carbon negative", not residences trying to do things cost-effectively to lower their electric bills.
I really like the baking analogy! I've installed a set of 10 PV panels with full electric installation including optimizers myself, and in fact the hardest part is finding out which mechanical adaptor parts fits your type of roof, which screws to use etc. The rest is following recipes indeed.
If you're in the US, I don't think you need to pull a permit if it's not on your house. So you could build a small installation in your backyard and hook it up without too much trouble.
This channel on youtube is an excellent resource and explains everything for anyone one who is a DIYer.
Make sure you have a good understanding of what your insurance company will and won't cover for DIY projects. Insurance companies can be skittish about unlicensed electrical work.
For something like this, a worst case scenario is an electrical fire during a drought or a kid gets electrocuted. If you do the work yourself, you're likely on the hook if something goes wrong, even if it's due to a faulty part and you have an umbrella policy that covers liability.
Australia has become SO competitive for solar and battery installation you can actually be fairly safe nowadays just picking any old supplier that has >4.7* on google and there'll almost definitely be <10% price difference (that's the WA experience anyway).
Going with a door knocking sales rep for home batteries would be madness in most countries but chances are pretty good that in Australia you would get a perfectly decent product.
Despite what you get in Australia being pretty reliable, it's too expensive to justify quite yet. My 8kW solar is connected to a Fronius inverter, but until I find a less expensive option I can justify adding a battery.
A 13kWh system is over $AUD10k, and the ROI is on par with the expected lifespan of the battery.
If sodium cells can bring the price down to $AUD100 it would indeed be a massive game changer.
I’ve followed the super cheap Chinese battery options for a while. It’s amazing how cheap they can be, but at the same time the number of early failure stories is alarmingly high. Getting a warranty exchange is hit or miss.
It feels a lot like gambling. You might get one that works for a thousand cycles without issues. You might get one that fails after a week. You might be able to get a warranty replacement, or you might spend hours every week trying to make progress on a warranty claim without any luck.
You’re right that there’s a lot of opportunity if you’re willing to buy used panels, Chinese batteries, and do all of your own work. However, the cost of equipment is falling while the costs of labor are rising, which is why professionally installed systems are still expensive.
There is a lot of information on this on the diysolarforum.com but if you purchase name brand cells, CATL/EVE from a good supplier these are the same ones used by all industry. They have a very good track record. I do not advocate buying from any random seller on aliexpress. There are not any mass market non-chinese batteries available for sale. Virtually all solar equipment of any fashion is chinese made.
I buy that the bms aren't very good and are drastically hurting your system. Much lower key stakes, but I have an Andis Supra trimmer I rely on a lot, but it's charger has basically no low key mode: it will pump 10W+ power into these 2S cells forever. It's criminally bad battery management, will absolutely nuke the heck out of these high end cells, if you forget to pull it off the charger.
To me, the main thing is observability. Too many people trust their systems. We need to see how things are going. As the voltage converges to peak, we should be seeing the amps level out.
We can't just trust the machines, ever. We need to be observant. Ultimately I think we'd be able to review & get rid of bad equipment more effectively, but we should be in tune with what these systems are doing, should be aware that - oh hell - we are at peak voltage and still pushing power in, and we need to stop. These systems need to report what they are doing. Being blind consumers makes the economic system weaker; these systems should all report what they are doing.
The post you were replying to was specifically about cells, and if you’re going for economy, building your own packs are substantially cheaper than buying packs domestically. Also less fraught when you’ve DIYed to diagnose and fix when things go wrong
This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
Depends on how scrupulous Average Person is being. There's codes for electrical and solar installations that can be followed, and it's best to stick to the letter, even if you're certain it doesn't apply. And after that, you should get it certified by a licensed professional, but would also need a licensed professional to hook it up to the grid
I'm not sure where you're jamming the screwdriver, but certainly any wrenches/tools you use should be insulated if you're dealing with very high current and/or high voltage. Enclosures, insulated wires, conduits, terminal covers should be used to avoid short circuits. Also proper earthing and circuit isolation with RCBOs to protect from electric shock and overcurrents frying the wires/you, all which should be switched to the off position when you're poking your screwdriver, eh? ;)
> And they’re big enough, no portable fire extinguisher is going to make a dent either.
If you aren't doing basic safety things and somehow manage thermal runaway on LiFePo4 (pretty hard), you're probably going to melt some copper. Probably best not to put your battery assembly near flammable things, unless you want to see the world burn like this guy (though at low voltage/high current)
Where I live many people DIY as a great many people have mad skills (lots of FiFo workers making a good living from O&G installions and big mining projects).
They build their own houses, their own planes, off grid power systems, water proof EV's to drive across harbour floors, etc.
If you've got a big (shipping container sized) battery pack you need a big thermal blanket to cut off the oxygen or a wide enough fire break about it.
A 5kwh battery contains about 18MJ of energy, equivalent to 4.3KG of TNT. Short that out or puncture on of its component pouches, and it’s going to be very dramatic.
One of them requires a different degree of care than the other.
You're still making the same irresponsible and frankly silly generalisation about "average" people.
Most people, full stop, don't build houses, metal work shops, treat their own sewerage, build their own power systems, etc.
So "average" people just don't start fires or set off bombs because they're not doing anything that dangerous.
Of the people that do, say, build their own glass furnaces, annealing ovens, laying out gas lines and installing small truck sized propane tanks with more energy than a 5kwh battery .. easily less than half, well below the "average" number of people that do such things, have accidents.
Sure, some people do watch Forged in Fire and have a go at knife making in a home built furnace, and then set fire to their barn | house | shed.
Most people don't try, and of those that do have a go most of them don't screw it up.
The point being, this:
> Also prone to average people setting themselves or their houses on fire, eh?
is just silly.
Average people don't attempt this, and of the people that do attempt such things most don't cock it up.
Perhaps your personal experience differs.
Maybe you can't dig your own septic system and fit it out without shit running back into your house.
Near as I can tell, you literally never even read my comment.
So seriously, WTF?
You’re doing on this weird rant, when I literally just said average people shouldn’t be assembling their own multi-kWh lithium battery packs unless they want to burn their houses down.
Which is, indeed, good advice. And pertinent to the discussion.
Where this bizarre tangent you keep going off on is not.
Near as I can tell, you literally never even read my comment.
Consider that I explicitly stated:
* They build their own ... planes
* They build their own ... off grid power system(s)
* They ... water proof EV's to drive across harbour floors
and you responded that "No, you’re talking about building structures. I’m talking about assembling a bomb."
Let me remind you that aircraft are bombs, off grid power systems are bombs, water proof EV's with battery packs large enough to drive 7 km's underwater have the same issues you're talking about.
You apparently didn't pause to read the content of my comment before launching into a "Yes, but ..."
> average people shouldn’t be assembling their own multi-kWh lithium battery packs unless they want to burn their houses down
Average goofs shouldn't be assembling their own solar system and battery setups. Even an average person will apprise themselves of the know-how to proceed safely, and are legally obliged to do so. If average person is not interested in doing that, they'll call on a professional, and in some places, that is the only legal option. But perhaps there are contradictory stats out there to show that there's a real widespread phenomenon of well-meaning Average Joes and Janes that are burning down houses with DIY batteries.
This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
> Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery
Were you able to disconnect that home from the grid? Most places you're required to maintain a grid connection unless the home is in an exceptionally remote location.
While pricing tends to be usage-based, true costs tend to be dominated by the capital expense of building base-load capacity for the few days your home might need to run fully on grid power. So as long as you're connected to the grid, you're still forcing the utility to spend about the same amount of money even if you only use grid power a few days out of the year.
Over provision the panels by a good margin and have them at a more southerly angle (for northern hemisphere). You can play around on nrel pvwatts to see what configuration produces the most even expected monthly output: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
Most solar charge controllers allow a certain amount of PV overprovisioning.
It is often surprising that most of the US is south of most of Europe (the common reference is that Chicago and Rome are both 42N. The jet stream complicates the effect on overall climate, but latitude is pretty much the only thing that matters for solar power.)
Solar panels are mildly more efficient when colder, the same latitude in an area with similar cloud cover in north America is probably generally slightly better for solar than Europe because it is colder, not sure if it would ever be more than a rounding error though.
The difference between surface solar radiation levels in the US and Europe are wild[1], fully agree on the rounding error view. Anchorage seems to receive the same level of watts per area as Germany and Poland.
Need a renewables feasibility index that accounts for the amount of solar, wind, hydro vs climate and typical weather. And bin plot population vs that.
Seems obvious that Norway, Washington State have lots of hydro. Places like Spain and California have lots of steady sun. Scotland, no sun in the winter but lots wind all the time. Those places renewables aren't problematic.
Northern Europe is much further from the equator than most of the rest of the world. To the point where rooftop solar stops being a great option. That said there’s a few ways to boost that 10%.
PS: Geothermal can also slash energy needed for heating. Ground sourced heat pumps are the only reasonable small scale solution, but in urban areas going a little deeper starts to make a lot of sense.
> To the point where rooftop solar stops being a great option.
Perhaps as a complete energy solution. But it is already the case today that a domestic rooftop solar in Europe (maybe not in the very north) has payback times <10 years. And that's without factoring in batteries which (as the OP describes) are rapidly approaching affordability.
In southernmost Sweden, just above Germany, solar production is only 5% in December compared to June. In northernmost Sweden the sun doesn't even rise above the horizon for most of December.
This is in the american southwest so winters are very mild and the sun is still strong. Summer is the much more demanding part where AC is 90% of electricity use for the year. There would certainly be challenges in other locations but I think you could do the napkin math on it with panels being as cheap as they are. The solution to pretty much any deficit these days is to just add more panels. The biggest issue there is, is if you do not have sufficient space. My panels are ground mounted.
Using an overprovisioned quantity of cheap cells is part of it.
Insulating and air sealing your home well is part of it.
Thermal mass approaches are part of it. Without cheap batteries, it's very possible to store a great many kwh in volumes of soil, water, or sand riddled with pipes and resistive heaters.
This year it has been pointed out that vertical bifacial solar panels radically outperform tilted arrays if snow is a possibility. Expect this to be the new normal at high latitudes as cell area is very cheap now.
In jurisdictions where that's not legal, can you realistically maintain a connection for just the cost of the customer fee and draw no other power? Or are there typically other roadblocks to installing solar in such places?
Great job! Over the last half a year my feelings about rooftop grid-connected solar (net energy metering, feed in tariff which are subsidised by the electricity bills of others) have changed somewhat, but going off-grid you've put in the investment to be energy independent.
When you say $89/kwh, are you talking about just cells, or assembled packs? I’m just about to buy a 5kw Lifepo4 server rack battery from EG4 for a diy project. It’s closer to $220/kwh
It would be for the completed battery units with BMS. You would have to install the batteries into the battery cases. It is a bit tedious but it was otherwise straightforward. The batteries are extremely heavy.
I have always had good experiences with signature solar. My inverters are EG4 and I am very happy with their product after trying A LOT of others. I think the primary reasons for the price difference is that you are purchasing US inventory (it's already here), it's preassembled and warrantied as a unit, they provide pretty decent support and their battery packs use 100ah cells instead of 280ah+ cells. So you are buying ~3x as many BMSs, connecting cable ($$$$) and cases for the same power.
Their rackable units are not light but can be moved by a capable person without too much fuss. A fully loaded 280ah unit in it's case is over 250lb so you really need a lift cart or such. The 280ah units and now maybe 320ah are more economical.
There's some very significant additional costs of bus bars & holding racks, but holy heck man EVE LF280K batteries are amazing. Usually 300Ah cells/<$90. That's basically 1kWh of energy (~3.2V average ish).
Building a big 14s 14kWh serial pack is really not hard, albeit those small hardware costs (bus bars) can add up. Most people don't need that much energy, probably, but these cells are just epic, maybe go 24v if you want less. 8k cycle life makes them good for a much much much longer time than most cells.
Do you know if these batteries be used as a replacement for batteries of a lead-acid UPS? I have a Tripp-Lite rack-mount UPS with an extension battery, but its battery has degraded and it can only sustain my computing load for 3-4 hours.
You can't use LFP batteries as a direct replacement in your UPS, no. The voltages and charge characteristics are different. What you can do is replace the UPS with a portable battery solution, like another poster suggested. I believe the Anker units are one of the few that can function as a UPS. Most sorta-can, but the key difference most of them lack is that they don't turn on automatically after fully discharging when the mains power comes back on. It's up to you if you need this particular feature.
Will Prowse on youtube I think has some videos comparing and contrasting the different units for this purpose.
Also, most of those power banks don’t switch between power sources fast enough to avoid causing problems.
That said, something I can confirm works on that front is getting one of those power banks, plugging the UPS in, and then plugging whatever into the UPS.
I had several days of uptime on Starlink that way, running it 10 hrs or so at a time on a battery bank, the remainder on a cheap generator.
I actually had a good experience replacing a lead-acid backup battery with an LFP battery in my garage door opener. I guess if the battery has an internal BMS and can accept charge at 52V, it might be enough?
So... about 30k for 60kwh to cover 30kwh daily use with solar charging, and probably another 10k for installation. Hmm yes super cheap, might impulse buy later.
Unlikely that you need more than 10kwh. You just want to cover morning and evening electricity consumption. During the day you recharge and consume directly.
Absolutely agree - I think people fall into a major fallacy with sizing their battery systems. Their power consumption probability* distribution is skewed, and they think their battery needs to be sized for 99% or 100% of their daily consumptions. This gives a drastically oversized battery.
Instead, a simple approach is to download the daily power consumption for a year and size the battery for about your 80th-90th percentile consumption. You tend to find the sizing is not that sensitive to whether you go for 80th or 90th percentile, and in any case the batteries come in standard sizes.
If you've sized your battery system economically, it should be empty a good proportion of the time, but that just doesn't "feel right" to consumers.
* Yes I mean frequency not probability but I didn't want to cause confusion with electrical frequency
Maintaining reliable access to off grid electricity and going net zero are very different applications requiring very different expenditures. Both are valid choices, but going net zero relies on a great deal of grid infrastructure investment and maintenance, and the understanding is that utilities in high home solar areas will rapidly de-emphasize per-kwh pricing in favor of per-month access pricing.
It depends on how many cloudy/winter days you want to be proof for right? There needs to be some backup capacity for when you won't be able to fully recharge for weeks on end.
Although I suppose it is cheaper to oversize solar and not the battery, but that's usually already maxed out and limited by roof space. Maybe a small wind turbine to compensate for stormy days...
>I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w)
For comparison, I've seen pallets of new 24 410w panels at 58€ per panel (transportation included), hopefully I'll see similar deals in the future when I will ready to jump into solar.
Edit: I'm mostly worried because I don't know how sustainable the industry is when you can buy solar panels at such dirt cheap prices.
This is a controversial hypothesis that is merely from a idiot, being myself. I don't truly believe this but it something I have throught about.
Energy costs are THE driving force of prices. The cost of materials is essentially the energy it takes to squire/process/ship them. If energy was free, we would just dig up random patches of dirt and sift it for every material we wanted even in trace amounts. But its not because unfortunately, we are still primarily a fossil fuel economy for many reasons (legacy, price, chemical properties) and their cheap price relative to labour is acting as a subsidie to renewables pricing. So if the availability of fossil fuels deminishes it seemed logical that the price of inputs goes up and so too would renewable manufacturing. We would then see an inverted bell shaped curve on pricing over time. I have long suspected we would see this trend of lowering prices revert around the 2020s. So far I have been pleasantly wrong.
But fossil fuels like almost all minerals is fighting an uphill battle on availability and ore quality as we used the best stuff first. The US isnt fracking at the pace it is because they just wanted a laugh. It is due to the primary "conventional" stuff couldnt keep up. But that is a whole different issue.
If renewables were offsetting fossil fuel usage, this wouldnt be a problem but it is merely being added on top of it. Thus Jevons paradox in full swing. If we can over come that then this whole idea can be thrown in the recyling bin.
When we can make a solar panel with the outputs of a solar panel, then that is the escape velocity moment. And I don't just mean counting the joules and ignoring the energy fungability.
I am much more optimistic about this in the last few years but im not sure we are there yet. It is looking reasonable now.
I've read some heretic economists that say that instead what orthodox economists claim that energy contributes 10% to GDP it's much higher closer to 100%. You get outside economics into accounting and as you chase the supply costs down you run into energy and scarce resources as the driver of cost.
Maybe 20 years ago I had the thought that ever never was enough supply of fossil fuels to lift the remaining 2/3rds of humanity out of poverty[1]. But there is enough solar and wind to give people a low energy middle class life. And the cost reduction since I think can do better than that.
[1] China I think burned half it's coal reserves in last 40 years. Modern China is basically built on coal. And much of the world doesn't have anything like that.
> China I think burned half it's coal reserves in last 40 years.
As a point of nomenclature isn't that always the case for any resource?
Given that "reserves" are drill tested known quantities that are tested, proven, modelled, and queued up for mining .. most reserves having been taken past "economic feasibility".
Hasn't the usual pattern in mining for some three thousand years since the oiriginal Rio Tinto Gold Mine been that reserves are mined and as they are exhausted, an exploration phase ramps up to prove inferred resources and raise them to reserve status?
Core belief of Howard Scott's Technocracy Now movement,
> At the core of Scott's vision was "an energy theory of value". Since the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned "that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy", and that by using an energy metric instead of a monetary metric (energy certificates or 'energy accounting') a more efficient design of society could be made
I can see why 8-10 years looks like a wall in terms of how much total solar we want.
However panels age which costs ~1% of capacity per year even before they need to be replaced, and global electricity demand tends to increase 2+%/year. So the more solar you install the more you need to install every year just to keep providing the same percentage of total electricity.
On top of this lower prices mean you it's still worthwhile even if a larger percentage of output gets wasted. Similarly, as storage gets cheaper (inflation adjusted) there's going to be more demand to cheaply charge it thus raising the demand for panels.
That's what they said about regular electric grid power too - that it "soon" would be so cheap as to be unmetered. That was half a century ago and it didn't pan out...
The reasons for this are entirely political. Technology, left to its own devices, would have followed the usual maturity curve on fission power, which would be universal, ubiquitous, abundant, and cheap.
Solar power has neither the geopolitical problems nor the squishy 'environmentalist' ick factor of fission. There's no reason not to expect another halving or two of PPP dollar per Watt to follow.
In 2011 solar panel producers were in trouble because China was flooding the market with panels sold below cost, which prompted a new set of tariffs. Those panels were around $1/watt in 2022 dollars. Since then, price per watt has apparently dropped _85%_.
It's an industry that's been driving down prices at an absolutely bonkers rate the entire time it's existed, and any time a company falls behind on that they're immediately in very deep trouble. I think it's basically impossible to make predictions about what an industry like that will be in 8-10 years.
Because there's value in a brand name, they are using more expensive batteries (or they were, I think just recently they started shipping LFP), and you're paying for the plug-and-play convenience.
Buying cells from CATL, adding a BMS, and putting all in a case is easy but still not trivial. Definitely not plug and play. You can absolutely get dirt cheap LFPs (like other people, I hang out on diysolarforum.com too), but it is not a competitor with the Powerwall unless you want something to tinker with or are simply too budget constrained to buy the brand name product.
> Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc.
I'm probably not the only one wondering: does ordering from these Chinese suppliers require reaching out to them over email? I looked at both websites, and while Seplos asks to write in, CATL doesn't even have battery listings or sales contact information.
I'd love to order LiFePo4 batteries to put in some old UPSes of mine.
you can order through Alibaba, but there are so many suppliers and not all are reputable, so it's a good idea to search around on some of the solar forums for recommendations.
Yeah I think if you want to order from CATL directly, your chances for a reply are better if your order is worth some billions :-)
EVE cells are very famous in the DIY scene, you can get them via Alibaba/Aliexpress, or if you're in Europe from nkon.nl, they have a very good reputation.
89$/kWh seems way too low. If I'm mistaken please point out where I could buy them cause I'll gladly buy some. On well known Chinese market places the price is 5x to 10x that (I live in Europe)
Can you share places the I can get 1kwh if batteries for 89/kw shipped? I am waiting for a 14kw diy build set at 122/kw, that's the best I could find on Alibaba
Well, here, France, LFP batteries now cost MUCH MORE than just three years ago (final customer price) and... ~1000€ per kWh, while just 3 years ago they was a bit less than 700€ per kWh, the battery alone (with BMS etc) but we also need an inverter witch as well is not much more expensive and I talk about self-assembled systems, here legal, but not legal in large slice of the EU, because retail price of a complete installed system by some p.v. companies are so high that there is no economical reason to install them.
My system is 5kWp/8kWh @11.500€ three years ago, it would be now a bit different (400V batteries instead of 48V and a hybrid inverter instead of a p.v. string inverter AC coupled with a battery inverter) @~ the same price due to a single inverter and slightly cheaper p.v. modules (@~100€ for a 415Wp). If done by third parties the cheapest proposal back than was ~30.000€. At this prices given current electricity prices and local grid stability it's a nonsense, it's even cheaper a diesel generator.
I know prices in China are FAR lowers, and I've read also on far lower Thailand prices, but compared to local cost of life I can't quantify how much.
Unfortunately DIY is limited to what is certified in France, Victron MultiPlus are certified all, Quattro so far are not, the sole battery from this shop allowed for a grid-connected system are the Pylontech. Still MUCH cheaper than what I've found from French shops anyway so a big thanks :-)
This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
That does not include the costs for inverters and other electrical system parts. I am not endorsing these vendors but I am happy with the result. My system paid for itself in less than 18 months. I have many years of experience buying from China in industry. I purchased batteries from Docan Power and BMS/battery housings from EEL Battery. My inverters are from EG4 and UL listed. You can see current pricing on their respective websites. I would say there is some learning curve for a complete novice. The diysolarforum.com is a good vendor neutral and honest resource for information.
This blog post is all over the place. The 2030 price projections are taken from extrapolations of Lithium battery costs, but he’s assuming Sodium chemistry batteries will take over and become ubiquitous at rock bottom prices. The first Sodium batteries barely became available within the past year.
He’s also treating batteries like the only component of the system. The associated charging, inverter, and physical structure components aren’t going to follow the same downward curve. Those are fixed costs on top of the battery itself.
Finally, there’s a lot of vague futurist writing mixed in, from congratulating himself on predicting in 2017 that EV trucks would be a thing some day to something about the blockchain for coordinating power grids:
> I think this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss).
This statement doesn’t even make sense when you read it. He defines “an [sic] ‘trustless’ system” as meaning a system that “just works” which suggests to me that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about but has been led to believe that blockchain is the future for everything.
Fun read, but I didn’t get much out of this article other than “prices are going down”
Which is sad. He has something useful to say, but destroys his credibility by not focusing.
Here's the "poster wall" of the organization he claims to head.[1] "Disciplinary convergence through creative story telling".
For a much better summary of the subject, see the cover story in this week's Economist.
OK, how cheap can batteries get, really?
Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment. Exxon has a lithium production unit, and they're expanding.
New, large lithium mines under construction in Nevada, Sonora (Mexico), five new mines in Western Australia, Quebec, Zimbabwe...
Plus, of course, recycling old batteries, a far more concentrated source than anything in the ground. Lithium supplies do not look like a problem.
The prices do go wildly up and down because the price of raw lithium doesn't affect car sales much in the short term. That's normal behavior for minor commodities.
This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary. This is good, because of the fire risk. For fixed installations and low end car, lithium iron phosphate is cheap, not subject to thermal runaway, and in most of BYD and CATL products right now. (APS, please get with the program and start shipping small UPSs with LiPoFe batteries so those things last 10 years.)
Coming along next are solid state batteries. Huge hype, a few samples, and production cost problems.[3]
Here's the manufacturing process at lab scale, at the Franuhofer Institute.[4] Works in the lab.
Here it is at production test scale.[5] The IEEE consensus is that solid-state battery production technology is about 10 years behind existing lithium-ion production. With production in test everywhere from Shenzhen to Belgium to Maryland, progress is being made rapidly.
This is the kind of process that gets cheaper as it scales up.
Solid-state batteries are important because 10-minute charging is needed to increase consumer acceptance rates.
Between solar and battery technology, fossil fuels are going to be crushed. Soon.
> Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment.
...
> This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary.
If we're overproducing this doesn't follow. Lithium prices will rise back to the price of production. I'm not an expert but quickly glancing at the futures market and it looks to me like there is only a small rebound predicted ($13.30 -> $17.00/contract over a few years, highly illiquid market so take prices with a grain of salt) so the actual story might be "lithium production has become much cheaper".
It also doesn't really matter if you're trying to estimate "it will cost at most this" by looking at sodium ion batteries. I don't think the author really cares if the batteries are sodium or lithium based, just that they don't cost more than sodium based batteries would cost.
> This is good, because of the fire risk
One of the selling points for Sodium ion has pretty consistently been that they are non-flammable. Admittedly this is a function of the electrolyte they use and not a fundamental property of sodium vs lithium, so it might change in the future, but I don't believe it has/it is in anticipated to?
That's a nice production line. It's not unusual. Many of the steps shown, and some of the machinery, are the same as in regular lithium-ion battery manufacturing. Compare with the machinery in [2].
It's not the machinery that's advanced. It's the manufacturing chemistry.
The real breakthrough here is that the ceramic is deposited as a slurry, and through a series of ovens and dehydrators, it becomes the solid electrolyte. There's no high-pressure sintering press step, as there is in the Fraunhofer lab making solid state battery samples.
The process is roll to roll. If that works, the production cost comes way down and the process scales up well.
The next two or three years are going to be very interesting in batteries.
I agree that applying anything to do with blockchain to electricity is dumb - these are already just regular markets, so an inverter/charger could already take price signals from the existing market and do whatever the homeowner wanted, with zero need for blockchain or central control at all. With smart meters (which are becoming more ubiquitous) it's already simple to incentivise using battery power in peak periods when the price is high...
But on inverter/chargers - they will absolutely will follow a downward trend. Maybe not as quickly as batteries but downward all the same. Wide-bandgap semiconductor FETs are getting cheaper and better all the time (higher current and voltage per device), and they allow for power topologies that are more efficient, so cooling gets easier, weight of heatsinks and the amount of material in those goes down, power per unit volume increases and unit mass will decrease, etc. Production volumes will also increase which should lead to economies of scale too.
I can get a 48V DC/230V AC, 8000VA Victron Multiplus 2 inverter/charger for $1.8K USD at the moment (I'm about to buy one for a system I'm DIYing from 31 kWh of AGM batteries I managed to get basically free from a test site of a company that closed down). I wouldn't be surprised if I could get the same capacity inverter/charger for something nearer to half the price by 2030, and a few percent more efficient to boot (this is 95% max efficiency but hopefully 97-98 will be more common by then).
You probably can get plenty of cheaper ones from China already but I want to be absolutely sure it'll meet Australian Standards since this will be grid tied for backup (but able to operate independently during outages), and since it's going under my house I want to know it's safe! Victron have a good track record, especially with a lot of use in maritime and caravan applications where you really don't want them catching on fire so that gives me confidence!
As someone who knows little about battery technology I was interested and trusted the author. But once I read the part about blockchain PoW vs PoS it seemed so off base that it threw the entire article into doubt...
Sure, it'd be great if all the little bumps in the road were already hammered out, but that we all know that's not how massive scale production works.
The two biggest numbers you need to look at in that article are lfp at 200 wh per kilogram and sodium ion at 160 w per kilogram.
Keep in mind that I believe neither lfp or sodium ion needs extensive amounts of cooling like Cobalt nickel batteries and their runaway fire problems. So their pack density is actually better and simpler.
So the 200 watt hour per kilogram basically equates to a 300 to 400 mile and possibly a 500 mile range car depending on efficiencies.
160 watt hour per kilogram sodium ion is the 200 to 300 and possibly 400 car
When you think about it that way consider the implications for electrifying all consumer transportation. The sodium ion density means that the city car that would serve possibly 4 to 5 billion people in the world is a solve technology, borrowing proper scaling.
The lfp density implies probably another billion to 2 billion people that need slightly better range, assuming good infrastructure for recharging.
Now the road maps for lfp and sodium ion. Both are going to probably increase by at least 20% in the next 2 or 3 years. Maybe 5 years tops.
If they can figure out sulfur chemistry versions of lithium sulfur and sodium sulfur then you may be able to double or triple densities in the next 10 to 15 years.
I would love a 5-20kwh battery backup in my home, I even have a place for it. But when I called my local solar/battery installer they said that it was illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home. I live in Minnesota.
They even told me the power from a hypothetical solar rig is sold to the grid utility, not stored, and they give a discount on future winter rates as payment. This seems like a lousy deal.
I have a 3.5 kWh battery backup in my apartment, since December 2022. Which is proving to be immensely helpful right now. I’m living in Kyiv, Ukraine and we have <10 hours of electricity daily these weeks, because lots of power stations are destroyed by Russians, and nuclear power stations are undergoing repairs and fuel recharge.
Aside from it benefiting energy companies, is there any justification for such a law?
In South Africa we’ve had load shedding on and off since 2008. It’s becoming pretty standard for middle class homes to have inverters with batteries and optionally solar.
It does create an issue though that when a load shedding window ends, a whole lot of batteries start charging all at once (especially during non-daylight hours).
Also due to load shedding, I don’t get full use of my batteries. Ideally I would like my batteries to pretty much fully discharge over night with energy from my solar during the day, however, because load shedding is somewhat irregular here, I have it set to not go too low so it has enough energy to tide me over.
Utilities get a local monopoly and guaranteed tariffs in exchange for the considerable investment in building out the supply grid and generating capacity, and the obligation to maintain it.
If individuals are allowed to opt-out, that changes the financial promises made to the utilities. Of course this was mostly done at a time before it was economically feasible for anyone to go off-grid with solar and batteries.
I quite honestly prefer this arrangement. I have zero desire to own and be responsible for the maintenance and safety of tens of thousands of dollars worth of on-premises solar/battery/electrical transfer switch gear. I'm quite happy to pay the local utility to run a cable to my electrical panel and have them be responsible for everything outside the walls of my house.
Locally in Western Australia we're having discussion between residents, council and state power about distributed small shipping container sized batteries, one per 200 homes.
There's a lot of solar power here in the state and a good argument for locally "shared" batteries in terms of maintainance, fire safety, etc.
Not much to say on that ATM, back of envelope looks good, there's a report in the works.
I agree it would be much more efficient on the whole if the grid manages energy storage in bulk.
Unfortunately over here we have a monopoly awarded state owned power producer which has a history of incompetence and corruption.
Maybe at some point our grid can be trusted to be reliable, but in the meantime everyone is either installing their own batteries or having no electricity for hours at a time. Tragic, but what else can you do.
If the battery is only ever charged from solar and I uncharge it to the lowest safe level in the evenings, it lets me get the best possible return on my capital expense. How long it lasts doesn’t matter in this regard.
But in terms of using it for UPS purposes, it lasting longer would mean I won’t need to expend capital again as soon.
So I guess it depends on what you want out the battery.
I did some math when I bought the battery and it seemed it would probably pay itself back before needing to be replaced, but it was questionable at our energy prices.
I bought the system mostly for UPS reasons though, especially as I work from home and on a personal note, sitting in the dark several evenings a week or being unable to make coffee when you want, sucks.
I'm sure benefitting energy companies is the real reason... but if everyone had a battery backup and they all started charging at the same time, I suppose it could make it harder to reboot the system after an outage.
Perhaps you could circumvent the regulatory inconvenience by getting your "battery" in the form of a Ford F150 Lightning pickup truck. It can power your home during grid outages, and of course can be charged from solar and/or the grid. One vendor is here: https://www.sunrun.com/ev-charging/ford-f150-lightning
Ouch, starting price $57k (98 kwh battery) and around $70k for the recommended model with 131 kwh. It's a rather large vehicle with poor "gas mileage" of about two miles per kwh. A normal sized electric car gets around 2x that, giving higher grid bills or needing bigger solar arrays (thus, more real estate). Idk if the Ford uses LFP batteries these days.
Certainly most of us who think of buying electric vehicles would want to actually drive them around.
Because grid use (transport) costs 2-3x more than the power itself.
Now imagine you produce 95% yourself. Instead of typical 15kw installation you only need 500w for when sun doesn’t shine. Thats a reduction of 30x! Far cheaper inverters, thinner lines, etc. Unfortunately no one in the supply chain has wants this because thats lost profit.
There’s been some pretty big deals from Ecoflow (I don’t own any of their products nor affiliated). The Delta Ultra was on sale at Home Depot for $2800 before tax, 6 kWh battery, 7kWH continuous supply, with 21kWH peak wattage. Everything is built in including inverter. You can install their smart panel (probably requires a permit) and it’ll switch between grid and battery for you. I’ll be surprised these are illegal in your town but there’s but some crazy local laws.
As someone who is interested in getting some kind of back up battery at some point, ty for making a recommendation. But could you clarify what you mean by the kWH unit you used on 7 and 21? Seems like those should just be kW, a unit of power rather than kWh, a unit of energy.
You might as well just buy an electric vehicle with V2L or V2H functionality, and then add a generator outlet to your electric panel.
The added benefit is that well, it's a battery strapped to a car. So if you have an extended power outage, you simply drive your car to a charger elsewhere and come back with a full charge. I'm sure Minnesota wouldn't be stupid enough to outlaw EV charging.
You charge the EV before the weather event. Not during.
Then when the weather event comes, you still get electricity at home supplied by your car. If the weather event is localized, drive your car to a place with electricity and charge it there and drive back. It's the best.
My concern would be draining the fuel reserves in a vehicle to power my home reduces my mobility. It seems like mixing objectives and in an emergency, I want to keep my super spare backup if I needed to flee.
So you're worried about a weather emergency that takes out your power, followed a few days later by a second emergency that requires you to evacuate a long distance?
I don't think I'd do very much to prepare for that scenario.
I think it's more about the long tail of situations that I'm not really able to imagine, or feasible emergencies but ones where my assumptions aren't valid. So not about a specific situation, more on principle that I want to keep my "get the heck out of dodge" energy store separate from my "hunker down" energy store.
I admit it's less efficient to have 2 energy stores, but given we're already discussing potentially life threatening situations, I'm not really looking to optimize for anything except having as many resources as feasible on hand.
Agreed, there are tradeoffs. But from a principled perspective I recognize the risk in having to choose between escape and home power. Adverse events often stack in unexpected ways at the worst time.
I get your point, but let's assume that you had separate resources for escape and home power, and then you needed home power for an extended period. Wouldn't you like to have the option to be able to use your escape resources to power your home?
I think so, but the tail risk impact is still worrisome. Guess it also depends where you live - I’m in a fair weather state, so powering my home is not a survival issue for the most part.
If I lived in eg Texas, I’d maybe have a BEV that could power my home and a separate vehicle for long range travel. Bit of a luxury.
It can be the same emergency. It doesn't have to be a second one.
You might plan on riding out a storm, thinking utilities might be out a day or two max. Day 5, still no utilities, no known date for resumption of services, and supplies are running extremely low. How do you get out?
In the best case: Just deal with it proactively. Watch supplies, try to stay informed. You mitigate what you can to stretch things out (making French toast in a skillet outside on the BBQ grill in the aftermath of a winter storm may be the best way to use available energy and feed people a tasty meal, even if it does seem absurd). Plan to leave before things become unmanageable, and adjust that plan as things change, and be willing to resolutely execute that plan before things go from bad to worse.
If you forecast that your supplies will be very slim on day 5, and you haven't left for greener pastures by day 3 or 4, then the the worst case is already unfolding. GTFO before the worst-case ever happens.
But in that worst case: One can call on someone else for help. This is one of those situations where it's time to cash in some favors, and/or where it pays off to always be friendly and helpful with to the neighbors even if they really seem like a bunch of assholes. (The time to start being friendly with the neighbors is right now, by the way.)
(My own backup plan only keeps me rolling both semi-comfortably and independently for about 24 or 48 hours without power in the winter, so I'm leaving after the first night or ASAP. I don't have the complications and niceties offered by something like an F-150 Lightning, but finite resources remain finite no matter their form.)
You're either not going to have much meaningful backup power or you're not going to have much usable range if your plan is based on consuming the energy on your car while holed up and also using that energy to potentially drive a couple hundred miles. That's my real point here.
Do you have a destination in mind within a couple hundred miles? I hope you're not setting up to get stranded on the highway.
I think I'd be sorting weather events into two buckets: "I can get somewhere that wasn't hit hard with 50-100 miles of range" or "I need to travel a distance measured in states and refueling will be needed". So the difference between "full battery" and "half battery" is pretty tiny, and I can do plenty of house-powering.
When I think of evacuating a long distance, I think of something like a hurricane where you should be getting out of the way before it hits. If you're in the aftermath of a storm, you don't need to go more than 100 but less than 300 miles.
Waco is a bit over 100 miles from me and would be a potential destination for me in an emergency. It'll probably be massively slammed though if all of DFW needs to evacuate for some reason. Austin is then over 200mi.
Oklahoma City is a bit over 200 miles if I needed to go to the city the next state over. Shreveport is just under 200mi.
If something is making me leave DFW then 50mi isn't going to get me anywhere. That's not even going across the metro area.
What event do you have in mind that very badly affects your location but not those cities, and you don't realize driving there is a good idea until a day or two after the event?
The 2021 Texas ice storm and related power outages would have been one where driving to Oklahoma City or Shreveport would have been a place to go to. That also would have significantly reduced that theoretical 230ish mile range of a Lightning or similar EV.
Lake Dallas dam breaking after major flooding in the Trinity River would cause quite a bit of destruction in DFW and potentially make things pretty unlivable around here and force a lot of people out of here and into the surrounding areas. Also an event that wouldn't necessarily be seen days ahead of time.
I grew up in South Houston, so I had a number of times of hurricanes coming through and not necessarily destroying my house but making the surrounding areas pretty unlivable for days to weeks. Maybe it gets cleaned up enough in a couple of days, maybe it doesn't.
If I had an EV that I could use to run house-sized stuff with, and the power were off for an indefinite time due to a storm or something, then I'd like to think that I'd use that EV just as sparingly as I would my little Jackery device and portable solar panel (that I can coax at most about 80W from on a perfectly-sunny day).
I can use my rig to [sparingly] run some lights, a small fan, and to keep portable electronics going -- with hardwired Internet if that is something that is useful/extant for information or to pass the time with.
But I'm not going to use it to run the fridge, the home theater, the thirsty desktop PC, or using the laundry machines or the HVAC. I'm also not cooking with it.
I have a portable heater that will keep me warm, and enough fuel to do this for a day or two. I know how to keep the water running to keep pipes from breaking. I don't need the fridge: When the power goes off, I can unload the important stuff into my Orca cooler along with the last contents of the self-refilling ice bin in the freezer and it'll stay fine for days. If it's stupid-cold outside, the frozen stuff that I'd like to try to keep can go outside in a tote. I have a propane grill for quick outdoor cooking with plenty of fuel, and a butane burner for indoor cooking that also has a reasonable amount of fuel for making coffee or frying some eggs or whatever.
I've tested these methods off-grid. They work.
While I do enjoy the wonders of modern electrification rather immensely, and TBH I'd find myself struggling to get through a day without some small aspects of it, I don't need a ton of it to feel reasonably comfortable for a limited time.
In this very limited use (which is not dissimilar to car-camping inside of a house), a suitable EV can probably cope for a few days without substantially reducing its immediately-useful range. It'a a small drop in a large bucket of battery power.
It can probably also keep the fridge running, and run a furnace that burns dinosaurs: If the regular F150 Lightning has a 98kWh battery, and one draws an average of 500W from that battery (which is a rather hefty average if living lightly post-disaster), then one uses ~12% of its capacity (or about 28 miles of its 230 mile range) per 24-hour day.
Over two days (48 hours), that's only 56 miles spent of 230 possible miles.
What kind of disaster can you imagine where "losing" that 56 miles of range would be of any consequence -- where 56 miles means the difference between "Oh, we got this. Everything is fine." and "ZOMG if only we could drive a little further! But we can't! We're RUINED!!!"
I can't think of any that have happened around here in my own lifetime,
I've actually been through multiple evacuations before, and practically every mile of energy in our vehicles counted. One time one of our cars literally ran out gas rolling into the first gas station with fuel after leaving with a full tank. When major storms are coming my cars stay topped off and don't get touched except for very purposeful reasons.
And given the fact it might be harder to find a working and available charger while leaving in an emergency I wouldn't want to rely on finding one along the way to wherever I'm going.
When did I say organized? And evacuations can happen before and after an emergency. Evacuating just means leaving the unsafe place for a safe space, it doesn't define the order of things. I've evacuated before and after major storms depending on the circumstances at the time.
Leaving a burning building is still evacuating the burning building. Evacuating a burning building doesn't mean it's an orderly thing before the fire starts.
Might want to check with a diff installer. Lots of solar installers in MN advertise battery backups. In fact a new law signed recently (and goes into effect in the next couple months) adds tax incentives for battery backups in homes.
> If we start with 2410 GWh in 2023 and grow with 59% per year that gives us 61.917 GWh in 2030. That would mean almost exactly 8 doublings in 2030.
There's an order of magnitude error here. That's an increase of about 26x. 8 doublings would require an increase of 256x.
Now, anyone can make a simple math error. But, like, it should be totally obvious to anyone that 7 years of 60% annual growth can't possibly be anywhere near 8 years of 100% annual growth? Or if not anyone, then at least for someone like the author who spends the first page of the article bragging about their credentials in reasoning about exponential growth.
Edit: and this isn't just nitpicking, this faulty result is then used as the basis of the cost reduction estimates.
I think the unit is off. Starting from 2410 GWh & a compound increase of 59% per year gives us: 61,915 GWh (2410 * 1.59^7) which is about 61.915 TWh. So perhaps the author meant 61.915 TWh instead of GWh.
No way is this in anyway close to 8 doublings though. That would take 12 years or by 2035. (1.59^12 = 261x)
As a layperson, the first thing the title made me think of is "How safe can they get?" Let RESCI be the Risk of Explosion/Surge/Combustion/Inhalation. Here are some measures that are interesting to me that I can't really approximate when evaluating products:
- Incremental RESCI when buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors
- Incremental RESCI when drawing from the product population that shouldn't have passed QA
- Incremental RESCI when buying on AliExpress or random sites
- Incremental RESCI when dropping, hitting with a hammer, leaving in the sun, subjecting to a power surge
- Incremental RESCI from living in a dense neighborhood where dense people are buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors on AliExpress, occasionally dropping or hitting with a hammer, etc.
In the West, we have about a buck's worth of experience with residential electric service. By many measures, it's still much more dangerous than it should be.
With a lot of new chemistry the risk of fire is greatly reduced. It seems to be an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer, energy density is also lower because of this but it is a reasonable trade off. Also tend to have much greater life time charge cycles. Potential to go tens of thousands of cycles rather than just a thousand or so.
> an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer
The iron battery you are thinking of is a lithium battery. It is not the lithium that is a fire risk; lithium ion batteries do not contain metallic lithium. In an LFP battery the phosphate-oxide bond is much more stable and not subject to thermal runaway compared with e.g. cobalt-oxide.
There's also someone building a factory to make iron-air batteries for grid storage. They're way cheaper than lithium or even sodium, with one of the most common materials on the planet, but only about 50% efficient. They're too heavy for vehicles, and have lower power output so aren't much good as peakers, but if you want four days of grid backup like we'd need with a 100% wind/solar grid, they're great.
I really appreciate folks who include their reasoning with their argument as it makes it possible to evaluate their conclusions through external sources. So hats off here.
One of the things that helped solar take off in California (besides subsidies) was being 'grid tied' relieved you have having to manage all the battery technology. Initially this led to some effective rate plans (trading watts for watts) but once the power companies realized the lack of profit on selling power was affecting their ability both maintain infrastructure AND pay off their monetary judgements levied by courts for blowing up towns and burning down forests they managed to get the CPUC to switch to a model that turns home owners with Solar into sharecroppers for the power company[1]. On the plus side this is rekindling the interest in being 100% "off grid" as that removes the power company leverage and puts pricing control back into the market/consumer's hands.
What I find interesting is that now I am starting to hear rumbles about how the power company wants to use consumer and commercial building "whole building" power systems as back up for the grid in peak power consumption emergencies that would mandate being tied to the grid even if you didn't "need" to be. I have been writing diligently to representatives that I refuse to let the CPUC tell me what I have to sell power back to the power companies to sustain the grid in emergencies and reserve the right to charge what ever the market will bear. It's a bit Texan in its dysfunctionalness but my goal is to encourage zero carbon emission home power grids faster, and driving the existing power companies out of business will assist in that endeavor.
Batteries are a huge part of that and if the author is correct that we can get to $1/kWh batteries by 2030 I feel like I will live to see it which makes me happy.
I'd rather hear a projection from an engineer/scientist/operations person in the industry. This kinda reads like it's written by an armchair expert who thinks about batteries a lot, but doesn't have much to do with building that future being described.
Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.
It does seem to be written by someone who's very far above the ground — even managing to throw the blockchain in there at the end.
But the point they're making is reasonable. Just because the author isn't deeply technical doesn't mean they can't fit an exponential and extrapolate correctly.
Exponential growth always has to stop somewhere, but that's not in and of itself a reason to think this year is the year that it will. The napkin math about sodium and battery cost is at least reasonable, it's worth considering seriously rather than handwaving the author away as not an engineer.
Fair. I guess I have an issue with technology projections that assume the technology will follow some fit, because it always has. Every bit of progress is made with tons of risky work and breakthroughs, and none of it is guaranteed like you would think it is just by looking at a fit.
> they can't fit an exponential and extrapolate correctly.
Anyone fitting an exponential isn't extrapolating correctly pretty much by definition. As you note:
> Exponential growth always has to stop somewhere, but that's not in and of itself a reason to think this year is the year that it will.
This is a god of the gaps argument. There's no reason it should stop this year, there's also no reason it shouldn't. Fitting the curve is only useful if you're actually presenting an argument as to why for the relevant interval it should continue.
There's plenty of reasons it shouldn't end this year. Go look at the battery sizes that we need to switch halfway to electric cars and to stabilize the electrical grid.
Looking at what happens if growth continues until we get into that range is quite reasonable.
> projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability
Reminds me of a projection I read back in the early 1960s (I think). The author charted the rise in speed of human beings over ten or twenty thousand years, where that speed had increased when horses were tamed, clipper ships were built, steam trains invented, automobiles, airplanes, and then rockets. (Assuming this was just after Gagarin, that got "us" to 5 miles per second.)
He pointed out that the acceleration was (ahem) accelerating, with thousands of years between humans running and horses being domesticated, vs. about sixty years between the Wright brothers and Gagarin. Extrapolating, it was clear we would exceed the speed of light (using a warp drive or something) by the year 2000.
Of course the current record speed was set in 1968 at about seven miles per second, and not even equaled since 1972. So much for extrapolation.
To the extent that have been expert estimates out there, they do have been consistently wrong. The same happens to solar and wind generation.
But well, I haven't seen any that don't have a conflict of interest into claiming fossil fuels will continue to be required. And that's a large part of the problem: you just won't find uninterested experts publishing estimates.
Well the other issue though is that people looking for predictions want conservative predictions because they're investing. Over-estimate and you lose money, under-estimate and you leave money on the table but don't trade away future possible gains.
Hum... People investing in renewables and batteries do not use predictions. Those have at most some 3 years of building time, usually a few months.
People investing in fossil fuel plants need predictions, and despite they wanting to see conservative numbers, that bias means complete doom for them. They need the opposite bias if they want to survive.
Things get a lot more complex once you start to look at components industries. But then, it's not clear they use predictions for anything.
And sometimes an exponential is staring you in your face and you just don't realize it. This has happened before. Early computer scientist did not imagine anything like you and I take for granted and put in our pockets without thinking about it every day. That's only a generation or so ago. Two if you are half my age (50).
IMHO, the theme of this century is making cheap, sustainable energy so ridiculously abundant that we'll be wondering what the hell we were doing before and how we managed without it. There are so many technological breakthroughs converging on making that happen that IMHO this is just going to happen. It's a question of when, not if. The timelines are uncertain, but not really. The author of this article is extrapolating a few trends over a time scale that is rather short. He could be wrong. Even by a factor 5. And it would still happen on a reasonable timeline. And I don't think he's going to be that far of the mark. 2030-2035 it will be RIP ice engines and fossil fuels. You'd be out of your mind to use anything else than dirt cheap electrons stored in dirt cheap batteries. At 50$ per kwh, it's a no brainer. At 5$/kwh, you'd have to be bat shit crazy to use anything else. That's 'only' a 10x improvement.
Assuming all innovation grinds to a halt in 2024 and that no technical progress will happen beyond 2024 seems like the naive point of view when there's so much happening that is well funded and seemingly on track to get some kind of results. The opposite view on this is of course that progress is a foregone conclusion. Some things will taper off and other things we haven't even thought off might pick up the slack. Between now and 2030, you can make a few educated guesses though. Which is what this author is doing.
Anyway, cheap, clean energy is transformative. Most of the major challenges right now are directly or indirectly bottle necked on energy. Making energy cheaper matters. 2x is nice. 10x is nicer. 100x is what we might actually see in a few decades. Anything in between would be transformative. Anything beyond that is hard to imagine but yet not unlikely. We might actually nail fusion at some point. Who knows? It might even become cheap to do it.
But we have a nice fusion plant that we orbit around beaming down orders of magnitude more energy than we actually need. We're learning how to harvest it using solar panels; a trick plants and trees have of course mastered ages ago. This article is about leveraging batteries for storage. The two things combined are a thing of beauty.
The point about sodium ion is that there are no exotic/scarce materials in there. The materials are cheap. And we're not going to run out of them. How many twh. of battery could we need. Tens, hunders, thousands? We only use about 25pwh per year worth of electricity right now. That number is going to go up of course. What would you do with 25000 twh of battery? Annual production is about to cross the 1twh/year. And most of these batteries last a few decades. 25pwh of charged batteries is a lot of power. And yet we might have that sitting around in a few decades.
I have 4 x 230Ah LiFePo4 cells in a 12 volt setup to power my solar powered blog during the night. It also runs my computer setup at 90W for many hours using an inverter.
People should really understand how cheap these cells have become and how feasible it is to setup your own battery storage system.
I’m now on a variable (next-day / day-ahead) dynamic electricity tariff that changes by the hour. On some days there are multiple hours where I get Paid to use electricity, it’s crazy that we have such an abundance of wind and solar.
It’s such fun to play with the Tiber API + Python and using those cheap hours to charge my battery a bit, while leaving room for solar.
But with several math errors, which make him off by a decade. He multiplies by 1.59 annually and gets a 25X increase in total battery in seven years. That actually takes eight years, but whatever. Then he says that's eight doublings, but eight doublings is a 256X increase. That would take nine years at 100% annually (first year to go from 1 to 2, then 2^8=256). But we only have a 59% annual increase so getting to 256X takes about 13 years.
He also seems to be off by one in the cost reduction. At 25% per doubling it takes nine doublings to get to 10% of the current price. So add another year or two to get to $8.
It's still interesting that we could get to $8/kWh by 2040 or so, especially since it seems physically plausible that sodium batteries could get that cheap, and that we could build several days of grid storage using them. And by 2030 we still get a cost drop of almost two-thirds, down to $28/kWh if we accept his claim of $80/kWh in 2023.
Lithium batteries still have limitations with charging at low temperatures. OEMs can design systems that will warm the battery up to a temperature where it can be charged after the car is started, but it’s not nearly as simple as dropping a lead-acid battery in.
Integrate the new-fangled battery (of whatever specific chemistry), the BMS, and the heater into a box with just two posts on top (just like lead acid batteries have had for over a century). It can be designed to take care of itself.
And if it's cheap enough to produce and sell, and offers good enough performance over its normal usable lifespan, then it doesn't need a diagnostic interface for sorting out issues any more than a lead acid car battery does today.
I looked at it and couldn’t find any that offered enough cranking amps. I’m not sure how easy it would be to design a lifepo4 battery for the application.
Lithium batteries are more than capable of starting cars, and at a fraction of the size (just look up "car starters" and the like on Amazon - those are usually a tiny lithium battery that you pull 50c from). The thing is they are usually much pricier for an equivalent size battery and have problems in the cold that make them unsuitable in some climates.
The environment be damned: Regarding price / energy density, yes. They even have weight / energy density advantage.
But Lithium batteries can't be recycled. Saying "We are almost there" and "The future looks bright about it" is "moving fast and breaking things" again
Recovering lithium from batteries is not cost effective compared with mining new lithium. However, battery recycling is possible and still worth doing, because it recovers more valuable metals such as cobalt or copper.
And before recycling, reusing! This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
I was wrong for posting what really means "technically not possible"
The real barrier for recycling waste is sustainability. This is the reason why e.g. TETRABRIK is considered recyclable, but it is actually not (I am posting about this parallel because it has been completely understood for several years)
Anything can be recycled if we are pedantic. But will it actually stop generating waste? (or will they be silently exported ignored?) Will subsidies be sustainable? (not it even asking if it can be profitable) In reality, the "recyclable" brand is for the most part greenwashing.
Now, the business ad about a venture capital bussiness you posted is nothing new. Last year there were 5 such touted recycling plants in Latin America, already. One of them is located in Costa Rica. Costa Rica doesn't have a Lithium battery waste issue. There, the electric cars are very few (and people who got them already want out), there are no electricity storage facilities. I am guessing here that they will import a ton (hundreds of tons) of waste from "Somewhere else"
I am including an article on battery recycling that is easy to read. It is only 40 pages long.
I have been predicting over the last year that with many US and European manufacture suddenly giving up on ev growth rate and feed in tariff for solar not getting a good price. The next big thing is going to be home batteries. Looking at what Tesla is charging for powerwall and the actual materials cost which are still dropping people will start trying to get in on these margins.
For me (living in Europe), stable 220V 50Gz from any wall socket is one of the traits of civilization, like potable water tap and flush toilets. "Stormy grid" is something from a rural village lifestyle, with a water well and a cold basement to keep winter food supply. Is it really that huge problem in parts of US?
There were a couple of large scale very long outages in Texas due to very bad weather in the last few years that made the news even on this side of the Atlantic.
I think this underestimates the benefits of focus and serendipity and new materials. There’s a non zero chance that grid scale fixed batteries get made from things like sand or liquid metal or (insert cheap thing you can heat here).
How big a battery can you make when it’s made from sand?
The trick with grid is that because you’re building at scale, you can give the benefits to many in one shot and you can build it out of town. Think Australia’s original big battery from Tesla in 90 days vs. messing with installing lots of little ones in houses, with all the maintenance, education and dangers that brings.
Current prices are kinda nutty and are largely determined by the size of your buy. Retail prices for home batteries (a few kWhs) are roughly $1000/kWh. A Model 3 gets you about $700/kWh (with two free motors and an ipad). A Tesla megapack is $290/kWh, but you have to spend $1000000 to get that price. Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh.
Long-term it seems pretty reasonable that retail prices should be a small multiple of the factory price (which keeps decreasing), so I think $1000 for a 20kWh battery is totally reasonable.
At $1k for 20kw/h, I'd be very tempted to massively over-panel the roof and front/back yard on pergolas, install 200kwh of battery and never deal with pg&e again
Exactly. This is what Tony Seba is talking about for 10 years already! He talked about this in his 2014 book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation.
They are the utility company that covers most of California. They recently raised rates and customers are unhappy. They are a for-profit and their lack of spending on maintenance has caused a number of fires which has killed people, leading them to be unpopular, among other reasons.
They killed people thru giant fires exacerbated by climate change then get sued and pay billions of dollars in restitution and then raise the rates for the regular folks.
A couple of years ago here in South Africa I paid about ZAR 30,000 (USD 1,650) as a consumer for a 5kw/h battery, and I just checked online now, I can apparently get a similar battery for half that:
>Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh.
Where I live there is a warehouse where you can withdraw new MANYI Lifepo4 cells at around 97€/kwh (a single cell) after contacting the seller on Alibaba, so I'm guessing Telsa is getting them at 80 or even less.
At $6343 [1] for 13.5kwh [2], seems closer to $500/kwh? The federal rebate does help substantially, but most folks should qualify. This # is closer to $400/kwh if you buy with solar, and $300 if you're buying a few instead of just one.
Re: car batteries, the difference between the rear-wheel drive and long range is about 20kwh (60kwh vs 80kwh), for $8K. That's $400/kwh and doesn't even include all the other trim differences like having dual motors instead of single.
So, it looks like reality is closer to $300-$400/kwh, depending. Not close to your ideal of $50/kwh, but still much better than $1000/kwh.
This is asking the wrong question. The question is what is the cost per kWh of electricity delivered from that battery, which is not the cost per kWh of capacity installed (though it is related).
You have to charge the battery with electricity (which you could sell or have to buy), and then when you discharge it you are either offsetting electricity you would buy, or selling it. Throughout the process you're losing some of it (~8%), and the battery is degrading in capacity towards eventual replacement.
You also have black swan events - i.e. an early battery death due to manufacturing defects.
i.e. my rooftop solar array sells power at 7c / kWh. When I run the numbers on various offset scenarios, the cost per kWh delivered after all expenses and life time costs that I can find tends to be about 7 - 8 c / kWh. Which honestly makes perfect sense to me: the electricity company, at much more massive scale, can install and run batteries more cheaply then I can.
I thought a few years back already that owning a bigger house will be cheaper than ever due to the progress of cheap renewable energy, cheaper and cheaper heat pump technology and batteries.
Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price.
I agree that the tariffs are going to hurt adoption, but the US does have domestic battery and solar manufacturing. Tesla manufactures large quantities of lithium ion batteries in Nevada and Texas.
Just a little math issue here, tariffs jumping from 25 percent to 100% isn’t doubling the price, and the tariff cost used for the percentage isn’t the final retail cost.
Let’s say I have a widget. I sell it for $10, and it cost me $1 for me to produce. There’s a 25 percent tariff, which is 25 cents. Now I sell the item for $10.25 to pay for the tariff.
If the tariff goes up to 100%, that now means that I need to raise the price of the product to $11 to pay for it.
“…this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss).”
What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?
Once material costs fall far enough, other costs start to dominate. Design and permitting, sales and marketing, transport, finance and insurance, installation, support structures, safety systems, interconnections (wires), converters and so on. $11/kWh seems optimistic for 2030.
A small note: I have a domestic p.v. system with small LFP storage and well... It's ~3 years old and now the same battery capacity (8kWh) cost a bit less the THE DOUBLE, witch is ~9000€ instead of a bit more than 5000€...
Industrial battery prices are lowered, in China, definitively not here in the EU, and at this rates the expensive small UPS for a home, that's are such capacity, because to being semi-autonomous a typical home need at least 80-100kWh to avoid too deep DoD and support heating in new all-electric and very well insulated homes. And I talk about mild climate where there is enough Sun in the winter to have not the autonomy but at least margin also in December, January and February. Oh, and I talk about self-assembled systems like mine witch is legal here, but not legal in every countries, because retail prices for a complete systems installed by them are FAR more expensive, about THREE time more, enough to make the investment so expensive to be a nonsense.
I think it would be cool if appliances started coming with batteries. You could give them times of day to charge, and to not use the outlet. And they could work in power outages.
this might not be the right thread to ask this question, but I have an older car and the battery inside went. In the past the battery was $50 to replace. Post-COVID, it runs for a whopping $250 at most automotive places... sometimes cheaper on sale.
So why not swap it out for a lithium battery (which still run around $50)? Are there any downsides beyond rewiring the connector types I'm not aware of?
I have a hybrid car - it has both a traditional lead acid battery and a lithium ion battery. And while I also have a lithium ion jump starter battery, they have issues in many situations that make them ill-suited for a cranking starter battery.
Lowering cost per kWh is great, but if power demand increases at about the same rate or faster, then the impact is minimal.
Cost per bit of internet plans has also gone down a lot in the past decade, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing on account of all the new JavaScript, ads, and other website bloat.
Using less exotic materials is exciting, though! Regardless of whether the cost feels different.
Surely it depends on what country you live in. Battery subsidies are mostly local at least.
How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet? Oh well that’s for young people and future generations to care about!
Thanks for fleshing out my quickly written question. I didn’t really mean anything by it, just that I think it’s an important factor that’s overlooked in the linked article.
The most useful idea to think about here, for me, is not what the raw market of economics batteries might be. Rather, the societal good that there would be if the state stepped in and just made batteries infinitesimally cheap for everyone.
The state provides a lot of things that lubricate society: just as they send electricity to our homes, provide a central bank for the economy, schools for our children, and courts to mete out justice — so too could they potentially ensure every citizen has X number of 18650 cells (or future equivalent) available to them to use as they see fit.
Ladies and gents this is what standard-issue Silicon Valley style grift looks like (following in the footsteps of the great Kurzweil). Ignore basic physics, massage data so you can more credibly fit an exponential curve on it, and extrapolate a fantastic future for it.
All this to underpin the grand illusion of capitalism that exponential YoY growth is sustainable to justify insane VC valuations. Which is even more perverse when all this is done in the name of saving the planet.
We know that tech adoption follows an s-curve that is only exponential in the lower parts. No-one is claiming truly unbounded exponentials for these techs.
The thing is that they have been exponential so far. clean energy forecasts based on linear trends, not on doubling of installations or on halving of prices have been consistently too pessimistic.
We can expect this to continue for a short while longer, until inflection points are reached.
When you’re responding to an article with a large amount of data and sources provided, the burden is on you to show which data is incorrect or which assumptions are too rosy and how you quantitatively arrived at those conclusions.
I’d be with you if the author was just hand waving their way to this conclusion but they seem to have done their research and used real numbers.
Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today.
From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $130/kwh and about 26% less efficient in the same form factor. I look forward to this changing.
Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery (lifepo4) and haven't had any problems. I can't imagine ever going back to the power company. Panels have gotten to the point of being ridiculously cheap. I have a lot of space. I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w). They produce about 85% of their nominal rating.
I mention this because other comments mention costs that are much much higher.
Sounds great, but are there actual businesses who will come to your home and do an install, or do you need to to become a mad-scientist electrician and DIY? I got quotes on getting an LG system a few years ago and it was 4X these prices (also for me a problem is that my 'ancient' panels from 2013 use a single inverter instead of microinverters, so if I touch the system I have to replace it all). I keep hoping there will be a bunch of small businesses electrifying everything, I'd love to see - good, practical, safe - EV conversions driving around too, but it just doesn't seem to be materializing.
All of the quotes and interactions I had with the local solar installers were reminiscent of the used car lot if not outright fraud. I was able to do what was permissible myself and a regular licensed electrician did the rest. The equipment is UL listed. There was some learning curve but I found the diysolarforum.com to be a pretty good resource to learn what I didn't know. I ran the whole setup standalone for about 6 months before switching the house over to it. The only problem that happened was a loose battery cable connection which the BMS and inverter alerted to and handled correctly.
> All of the quotes and interactions I had with the local solar installers were reminiscent of the used car lot if not outright fraud.
I had exactly the same experience. They absolutely would not tell me the actual system cost, only how much I would save on my current bill per month. It felt exactly like a car salesman only talking about monthly payments, and it was horrible.
Yup. I’ve (US) also talked to a few local ones to just see if they had a couple panels I could buy off them for close to wholesale for a personal project - which if they were actually involved in installation would be trivial - and just got blank stares.
They were clearly just doing lead generation for some other company they had no direct connection with, and didn’t even have any idea who to talk to that could even answer my question.
I had way better luck just looking online and paying shipping, which is absurd given how they were presenting themselves.
So not even as good as a used car salesman on an actual car lot, more like door to door used car salesman.
These companies are the equivalent of people who received a free product to review and then post a referral link for it in the details. Of course, they glow about how amazing the product is and how you should drop everything and buy it.
Yeah. Talked to a couple of solar companies. They were utterly focused on costs vs utility costs and very opaque about how that was being modeled. And it was based on the rules back then--which of course could not hold. Net metering is a huge subsidy that is already being walked back.
The true value of solar or wind is the cost of the fuel it saves. Nothing more. Even if his numbers come true there's a big problem--bad weather could deplete your batteries. You want to turn to the electric company in that case? You are once again in the situation that the value is only the fuel.
This approach may vary by country. Not a single sparky in Australia will sign off on someone else's solar/battery install.
Isn't there a distinction between the house wiring and the solar/battery stuff?
P.S. I've never heard of sparky being used as slang for an electrician, sounds very aussie.
> P.S. I've never heard of sparky being used as slang for an electrician, sounds very aussie.
When I moved into a new house in Australia I asked the real estate agent if I could extend the fence, and he said I'd need a cheapie to do that.
I said ok but scratched my head as to why it needs to be cheap, only to find out later what he actually said was chippy, slang for a carpenter.
Chippies are also known as "wood butchers" apparently. Amused me ;)
Next you’ll need a roofie
Why, though? Is there some kind of requirement that only fully trained carpenters can build fences?
Just about everything in Australia needs a license to do. Even down to network cabling.
The rule is - if it's going inside the wall, only a licenced electrician can do it. Yes it also extends to things like speaker or HDMI cables. It's mad.
Mad, indeed. It's hard to imagine those rules are followed, especially for speaker wires and HDMI cables.
HDMI cables? Sounds like protectionism. Invent rules to make yourself more work.
Aren't there power delivery versions of HDMI?
I can understand requiring a license for any power wires behind walls.
I could also see the possibility that it's just an old law that doesn't consider data-only cables which don't have the safety issues that wires carrying power do.
While HDMI can provide a tiny bit of power and there are active cables for signal boosting, HDMI was never meant for power delivery. You might be mixing it with HDMI with Ethetnet.
It's definitely an old law that never took data cables into account, but the current interpretation is that any cable that carries electrical current has to be installed and certified by an electrician.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until you're at Macca's and someone says, "Oi, can you pass me a chippy?" and they get real confused when you go find a carpenter.
Maccas is nz, maccies is Aus
It's definitely Maccas in AU. Maccies must be a UK thing.
in Spain we call them “chispas”, which literally means sparks. An electrician is someone who knows the home electrical wiring stuff, while a chispas is someone who is skilled in repairing home appliances.
We use sparky in the UK for an electrician too.
> P.S. I've never heard of sparky being used as slang for an electrician, sounds very aussie.
I'm surprised to find out it's aussie slang; I always thought it was slang local to South Africa :-/
We say the chippie in the UK too.
We also use sparkie for electrician.
It's local to UK and more recent British colonies
ZA and AUS included. USA less so.
In the US, sparky is common slang electrician among the trades, but far loss-so for end customers who are looking to hire one.
Sparky=electrician is common in the US too. I had previously thought of it as meaning a radio operator e.g. on a ship.
I'm currently in a pickle in this regard, as my new house has solar on Net Metering, but no ATS or battery. While its nice to only pay the base connection fee, I still go dark when the line power does.
I'd love to add at the very least an ATS to keep my fridge and freezer going when the power goes out during the day, if not a battery but I have little to no documentation on the existing solar install, so i'm reaching out to the county to see if permits have any info. Fun times!
It will, but I suspect this will get a lot easier everywhere as more of the problem gets packaged as units that you can just buy off the shelf (and the prices of such units come down).
What voltage are you running your solar strings at? I was wondering what would happen if the loose cable was a cable from the solar panels instead of the low voltage battery.
If you want a DIY-friendly option, it's best to look towards DC optimizers. They are installed on each panel and they provide a steady 48V output. They also do MPPT tracking on the panel level, so you get the best possible performance if you have some shading.
Unlike microinverters that are notoriously unreliable, DC optimizers so far have excellent long-term reliability.
Are you suggesting using a DC Optimizer from your solar panels to charge 48V batteries directly? This would be interesting. It's the first I've heard of optimizers being used for anything other than prior to an inverter.
You absolutely can do that. You still need a charging controller and a BMS, obviously. But you can avoid the AC round-tripping.
Nice, the 48V batteries I have already have BMS's...any suggestion for a nominal 48V DC optimizer and charge controller?
Tigo is known to work. I've heard that SolarEdge DC Optimizers don't work without a SolarEdge inverter connected to them.
The panel strings are at ~500v so there are safety, fusing and grounding considerations. Pretty common electrical equipment and cable is rated for use at 600v. There are special locking water resistant connectors for solar panels called MC4.
Are the hybrid inverters you are using be able to detect arc faults (in series) from the strings? Running 500V DC is probably by far the most dangerous thing in your setup, fortunately your solar panels are mounted on the groud.
I think solar credits works into things too. People trying to get a long-term revenue stream.
> do you need to to become a mad-scientist electrician and DIY?
I did my own a couple years ago, and it worked quite well on the first go. I got someone else to build the LiFePo4 battery pack (16 CATL cells for 48v with a JK BMS).
It was fairly easy to build. Mount panels on the roof, and wire everything (PV, battery, grid electricity if you want it, and the output) to the inverter. I added some extra steps to monitor usage and output, and a smart MCB. I also have a small shop that I can feed from solar power if the battery is almost charged and the sunset time hasn't reached yet.
See if you quotation is to export electricity to the grid. Those kinds of setups usually require a certified company to do the installation (to make sure the inverter syncs with the grid), but for off-grid setups, you can definitely DIY.
If your setup burns your house down, will insurance cover it?
> but are there actual businesses who will come to your home and do an install, or do you need to to become a mad-scientist electrician and DIY?
A lot of the costs of a real install come from the permitting, doing proper upgrades (you might need a new electrical panel), the warranty, the labor, and other costs.
Every time I browse the DIY solar forums it feels like I see 1 person doing things by code for every 10 people cutting corners or playing loose with the rules. YMMV, but take the DIY cost estimates with a huge grain of salt.
You do not necessarily have to become all these things. There are whole communities around this sort of a thing - Will Prowse's DiY Solar Forum (https://diysolarforum.com/) is an awesome source for learning as an example.
The setup you describe - lacking microinverters - I think there are options there short of wholesale replacement [disclaimer: I, too, am a self-taught in this field, and so am likely wrong in non-trivial ways]
You might need to DIY, but "mad scientist" is doing a lot of work in your statement that I don't think applies. You just need to follow some very-thoroughly-detailed online tutorials. It's one of those things like baking, where as long as you're good at faithfully following directions, everything turns out great.
> I keep hoping there will be a bunch of small businesses electrifying everything
There are a few of these per large city; but they serve companies with large budgets for "becoming carbon negative", not residences trying to do things cost-effectively to lower their electric bills.
I really like the baking analogy! I've installed a set of 10 PV panels with full electric installation including optimizers myself, and in fact the hardest part is finding out which mechanical adaptor parts fits your type of roof, which screws to use etc. The rest is following recipes indeed.
If you're in the US, I don't think you need to pull a permit if it's not on your house. So you could build a small installation in your backyard and hook it up without too much trouble.
This channel on youtube is an excellent resource and explains everything for anyone one who is a DIYer.
https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse
Make sure you have a good understanding of what your insurance company will and won't cover for DIY projects. Insurance companies can be skittish about unlicensed electrical work.
For something like this, a worst case scenario is an electrical fire during a drought or a kid gets electrocuted. If you do the work yourself, you're likely on the hook if something goes wrong, even if it's due to a faulty part and you have an umbrella policy that covers liability.
Some people cold knocked on my dad's door and 3 weeks later he's got a wall of batteries in the garage. Rural Australia.
So yeah, there are businesses that'll do it.
Australia has become SO competitive for solar and battery installation you can actually be fairly safe nowadays just picking any old supplier that has >4.7* on google and there'll almost definitely be <10% price difference (that's the WA experience anyway).
Going with a door knocking sales rep for home batteries would be madness in most countries but chances are pretty good that in Australia you would get a perfectly decent product.
Despite what you get in Australia being pretty reliable, it's too expensive to justify quite yet. My 8kW solar is connected to a Fronius inverter, but until I find a less expensive option I can justify adding a battery.
A 13kWh system is over $AUD10k, and the ROI is on par with the expected lifespan of the battery.
If sodium cells can bring the price down to $AUD100 it would indeed be a massive game changer.
If you’re in NSW there’s a state government subsidy of $2800 later this year for home batteries.
Yep I agree - I will, however, be happy to install a battery if it doesn't save me money but does represent a carbon price of about $100/tonne
In place where I live you do that and they will rip you off good time.
Better to DIY or at least do really good market research first.
I’ve followed the super cheap Chinese battery options for a while. It’s amazing how cheap they can be, but at the same time the number of early failure stories is alarmingly high. Getting a warranty exchange is hit or miss.
It feels a lot like gambling. You might get one that works for a thousand cycles without issues. You might get one that fails after a week. You might be able to get a warranty replacement, or you might spend hours every week trying to make progress on a warranty claim without any luck.
You’re right that there’s a lot of opportunity if you’re willing to buy used panels, Chinese batteries, and do all of your own work. However, the cost of equipment is falling while the costs of labor are rising, which is why professionally installed systems are still expensive.
There is a lot of information on this on the diysolarforum.com but if you purchase name brand cells, CATL/EVE from a good supplier these are the same ones used by all industry. They have a very good track record. I do not advocate buying from any random seller on aliexpress. There are not any mass market non-chinese batteries available for sale. Virtually all solar equipment of any fashion is chinese made.
That’s the forum I followed.
The failures often came from BMS or other parts, too. There’s a lot of focus on the cells, but people are buying whole packs with a BMS.
I buy that the bms aren't very good and are drastically hurting your system. Much lower key stakes, but I have an Andis Supra trimmer I rely on a lot, but it's charger has basically no low key mode: it will pump 10W+ power into these 2S cells forever. It's criminally bad battery management, will absolutely nuke the heck out of these high end cells, if you forget to pull it off the charger.
To me, the main thing is observability. Too many people trust their systems. We need to see how things are going. As the voltage converges to peak, we should be seeing the amps level out.
We can't just trust the machines, ever. We need to be observant. Ultimately I think we'd be able to review & get rid of bad equipment more effectively, but we should be in tune with what these systems are doing, should be aware that - oh hell - we are at peak voltage and still pushing power in, and we need to stop. These systems need to report what they are doing. Being blind consumers makes the economic system weaker; these systems should all report what they are doing.
Then that’s more the issue with the BMS rather than the cells
Problems with the BMS can become problems with the cells very quickly.
Yeah, but I would just buy the cells and spend more on a BMS. Or you can just use a low voltage cutoff and an active balancer for a smaller setup
In many of the systems, the BMS and battery are one in the same.
This article blurs the lines between the cells and battery system, too.
The post you were replying to was specifically about cells, and if you’re going for economy, building your own packs are substantially cheaper than buying packs domestically. Also less fraught when you’ve DIYed to diagnose and fix when things go wrong
This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
Also prone to average people setting themselves or their houses on fire, eh?
Depends on how scrupulous Average Person is being. There's codes for electrical and solar installations that can be followed, and it's best to stick to the letter, even if you're certain it doesn't apply. And after that, you should get it certified by a licensed professional, but would also need a licensed professional to hook it up to the grid
I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m trying to say.
I’m talking about assembling your own multi-kwh lithium battery assemblies (pre-BMS even).
One wrong poke with a screwdriver, and all sorts of entertainment is likely to ensue eh?
And they’re big enough, no portable fire extinguisher is going to make a dent either.
> One wrong poke with a screwdriver
I'm not sure where you're jamming the screwdriver, but certainly any wrenches/tools you use should be insulated if you're dealing with very high current and/or high voltage. Enclosures, insulated wires, conduits, terminal covers should be used to avoid short circuits. Also proper earthing and circuit isolation with RCBOs to protect from electric shock and overcurrents frying the wires/you, all which should be switched to the off position when you're poking your screwdriver, eh? ;)
> And they’re big enough, no portable fire extinguisher is going to make a dent either.
If you aren't doing basic safety things and somehow manage thermal runaway on LiFePo4 (pretty hard), you're probably going to melt some copper. Probably best not to put your battery assembly near flammable things, unless you want to see the world burn like this guy (though at low voltage/high current)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-nLm6Y
Sure, you're saying some people shouldn't DIY.
Where I live many people DIY as a great many people have mad skills (lots of FiFo workers making a good living from O&G installions and big mining projects).
They build their own houses, their own planes, off grid power systems, water proof EV's to drive across harbour floors, etc.
If you've got a big (shipping container sized) battery pack you need a big thermal blanket to cut off the oxygen or a wide enough fire break about it.
Speaking of DIY home builds, here's a good use of black builders plastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
No, you’re talking about building structures.
I’m talking about assembling a bomb.
A 5kwh battery contains about 18MJ of energy, equivalent to 4.3KG of TNT. Short that out or puncture on of its component pouches, and it’s going to be very dramatic.
One of them requires a different degree of care than the other.
You're still making the same irresponsible and frankly silly generalisation about "average" people.
Most people, full stop, don't build houses, metal work shops, treat their own sewerage, build their own power systems, etc.
So "average" people just don't start fires or set off bombs because they're not doing anything that dangerous.
Of the people that do, say, build their own glass furnaces, annealing ovens, laying out gas lines and installing small truck sized propane tanks with more energy than a 5kwh battery .. easily less than half, well below the "average" number of people that do such things, have accidents.
Sure, some people do watch Forged in Fire and have a go at knife making in a home built furnace, and then set fire to their barn | house | shed.
Most people don't try, and of those that do have a go most of them don't screw it up.
The point being, this:
> Also prone to average people setting themselves or their houses on fire, eh?
is just silly.
Average people don't attempt this, and of the people that do attempt such things most don't cock it up.
Perhaps your personal experience differs.
Maybe you can't dig your own septic system and fit it out without shit running back into your house.
Near as I can tell, you literally never even read my comment.
So seriously, WTF?
You’re doing on this weird rant, when I literally just said average people shouldn’t be assembling their own multi-kWh lithium battery packs unless they want to burn their houses down.
Which is, indeed, good advice. And pertinent to the discussion.
Where this bizarre tangent you keep going off on is not.
Near as I can tell, you literally never even read my comment.
Consider that I explicitly stated:
* They build their own ... planes
* They build their own ... off grid power system(s)
* They ... water proof EV's to drive across harbour floors
and you responded that "No, you’re talking about building structures. I’m talking about assembling a bomb."
Let me remind you that aircraft are bombs, off grid power systems are bombs, water proof EV's with battery packs large enough to drive 7 km's underwater have the same issues you're talking about.
You apparently didn't pause to read the content of my comment before launching into a "Yes, but ..."
I've already linked to locally built ground effect plane (with builders plastic for wings), here's a locally built EV: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-30/nt-world-record-darwi...
Average people are quite capable of doing extraordinary things and not burning down their houses - you just have a low opinion of "average".
Idiots that can't read manuals and installation guides should avoid house grade battery packs, sure.
None of these people seem to meet any definition of population average I've ever seen or heard of.
If you counted them and put them on a distribution, how far off the bell curve do you think they'd be?
In fact, they seem rather extraordinary. If they seem average to you, I'd argue your sense of average is rather extraordinary too.
> average people shouldn’t be assembling their own multi-kWh lithium battery packs unless they want to burn their houses down
Average goofs shouldn't be assembling their own solar system and battery setups. Even an average person will apprise themselves of the know-how to proceed safely, and are legally obliged to do so. If average person is not interested in doing that, they'll call on a professional, and in some places, that is the only legal option. But perhaps there are contradictory stats out there to show that there's a real widespread phenomenon of well-meaning Average Joes and Janes that are burning down houses with DIY batteries.
FUD.
This isn’t running a nuclear reactor it’s following some basic rules and common sense.
Lifepo4 is much more stable than you seem to think.
This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
> Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery
Were you able to disconnect that home from the grid? Most places you're required to maintain a grid connection unless the home is in an exceptionally remote location.
While pricing tends to be usage-based, true costs tend to be dominated by the capital expense of building base-load capacity for the few days your home might need to run fully on grid power. So as long as you're connected to the grid, you're still forcing the utility to spend about the same amount of money even if you only use grid power a few days out of the year.
Yes. Totally disconnected, zero power bill. That home is in a jurisdiction where that is permissible.
How do you get through winter? I’m asking in good faith, I‘m using a PV installation myself and cannot see how I could realistically get off the grid.
Over provision the panels by a good margin and have them at a more southerly angle (for northern hemisphere). You can play around on nrel pvwatts to see what configuration produces the most even expected monthly output: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
Most solar charge controllers allow a certain amount of PV overprovisioning.
In central/northern Europe in january solar goves 10% of the output of summer, and you need 3-4x power to heat compared to cooling down in summer.
It is often surprising that most of the US is south of most of Europe (the common reference is that Chicago and Rome are both 42N. The jet stream complicates the effect on overall climate, but latitude is pretty much the only thing that matters for solar power.)
Solar panels are mildly more efficient when colder, the same latitude in an area with similar cloud cover in north America is probably generally slightly better for solar than Europe because it is colder, not sure if it would ever be more than a rounding error though.
The difference between surface solar radiation levels in the US and Europe are wild[1], fully agree on the rounding error view. Anchorage seems to receive the same level of watts per area as Germany and Poland.
[1] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I5kzJIeV4Ds/VFSHUX3374I/AAAAAAAAA...
Amusing southern California is getting more watts per m2 then A lot of North Africa.
This is a good source, population by latitude.
http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-lat...
It's missing the "most population in smallest (circular) area" view, as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle .
Need a renewables feasibility index that accounts for the amount of solar, wind, hydro vs climate and typical weather. And bin plot population vs that.
Seems obvious that Norway, Washington State have lots of hydro. Places like Spain and California have lots of steady sun. Scotland, no sun in the winter but lots wind all the time. Those places renewables aren't problematic.
I’ve been in northern France for a couple weeks in a January and didn’t see the sun once…
Not really a thing in Toronto.
Solar panels don’t need sunshine they need light.
gonna have a lot lower performance in cloudy conditions
Northern Europe is much further from the equator than most of the rest of the world. To the point where rooftop solar stops being a great option. That said there’s a few ways to boost that 10%.
PS: Geothermal can also slash energy needed for heating. Ground sourced heat pumps are the only reasonable small scale solution, but in urban areas going a little deeper starts to make a lot of sense.
> To the point where rooftop solar stops being a great option.
Perhaps as a complete energy solution. But it is already the case today that a domestic rooftop solar in Europe (maybe not in the very north) has payback times <10 years. And that's without factoring in batteries which (as the OP describes) are rapidly approaching affordability.
Where in central Europe is it 10%? And you get extra in summer, the actual overprovisioning is when you compare to the equinoxes.
In southernmost Sweden, just above Germany, solar production is only 5% in December compared to June. In northernmost Sweden the sun doesn't even rise above the horizon for most of December.
This is in the american southwest so winters are very mild and the sun is still strong. Summer is the much more demanding part where AC is 90% of electricity use for the year. There would certainly be challenges in other locations but I think you could do the napkin math on it with panels being as cheap as they are. The solution to pretty much any deficit these days is to just add more panels. The biggest issue there is, is if you do not have sufficient space. My panels are ground mounted.
Right now?
Using an overprovisioned quantity of cheap cells is part of it.
Insulating and air sealing your home well is part of it.
Thermal mass approaches are part of it. Without cheap batteries, it's very possible to store a great many kwh in volumes of soil, water, or sand riddled with pipes and resistive heaters.
This year it has been pointed out that vertical bifacial solar panels radically outperform tilted arrays if snow is a possibility. Expect this to be the new normal at high latitudes as cell area is very cheap now.
In jurisdictions where that's not legal, can you realistically maintain a connection for just the cost of the customer fee and draw no other power? Or are there typically other roadblocks to installing solar in such places?
> Totally disconnected, zero power bill.
Great job! Over the last half a year my feelings about rooftop grid-connected solar (net energy metering, feed in tariff which are subsidised by the electricity bills of others) have changed somewhat, but going off-grid you've put in the investment to be energy independent.
When you say $89/kwh, are you talking about just cells, or assembled packs? I’m just about to buy a 5kw Lifepo4 server rack battery from EG4 for a diy project. It’s closer to $220/kwh
This is what I’m planning to buy, but you know something better I’d love to take a look. https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-lithium-battery-48...
It would be for the completed battery units with BMS. You would have to install the batteries into the battery cases. It is a bit tedious but it was otherwise straightforward. The batteries are extremely heavy.
I have always had good experiences with signature solar. My inverters are EG4 and I am very happy with their product after trying A LOT of others. I think the primary reasons for the price difference is that you are purchasing US inventory (it's already here), it's preassembled and warrantied as a unit, they provide pretty decent support and their battery packs use 100ah cells instead of 280ah+ cells. So you are buying ~3x as many BMSs, connecting cable ($$$$) and cases for the same power.
Their rackable units are not light but can be moved by a capable person without too much fuss. A fully loaded 280ah unit in it's case is over 250lb so you really need a lift cart or such. The 280ah units and now maybe 320ah are more economical.
There's some very significant additional costs of bus bars & holding racks, but holy heck man EVE LF280K batteries are amazing. Usually 300Ah cells/<$90. That's basically 1kWh of energy (~3.2V average ish).
Building a big 14s 14kWh serial pack is really not hard, albeit those small hardware costs (bus bars) can add up. Most people don't need that much energy, probably, but these cells are just epic, maybe go 24v if you want less. 8k cycle life makes them good for a much much much longer time than most cells.
Latest prices for highthium cells are $40/280ah
Do you know if these batteries be used as a replacement for batteries of a lead-acid UPS? I have a Tripp-Lite rack-mount UPS with an extension battery, but its battery has degraded and it can only sustain my computing load for 3-4 hours.
It'd be great to replace it with an LFP battery.
You can't use LFP batteries as a direct replacement in your UPS, no. The voltages and charge characteristics are different. What you can do is replace the UPS with a portable battery solution, like another poster suggested. I believe the Anker units are one of the few that can function as a UPS. Most sorta-can, but the key difference most of them lack is that they don't turn on automatically after fully discharging when the mains power comes back on. It's up to you if you need this particular feature.
Will Prowse on youtube I think has some videos comparing and contrasting the different units for this purpose.
Also, most of those power banks don’t switch between power sources fast enough to avoid causing problems.
That said, something I can confirm works on that front is getting one of those power banks, plugging the UPS in, and then plugging whatever into the UPS.
I had several days of uptime on Starlink that way, running it 10 hrs or so at a time on a battery bank, the remainder on a cheap generator.
I actually had a good experience replacing a lead-acid backup battery with an LFP battery in my garage door opener. I guess if the battery has an internal BMS and can accept charge at 52V, it might be enough?
The Anker units that are at minimum $600 per kWh? At that point we've completely lost the cheap factor.
They can be used to replace ups.the voltages are close enough with lfp cells. I've done it. So long as you have a bms, there is nothing to worry about
For that low a power need Anker and some others make ready to go units you can buy off of amazon that are pretty reasonable.
Current European/German prices for home storage of 2-10kwh are at 400-500 EUR per kwh.
https://geizhals.de/?cat=bmseswresp&sort=t&hloc=at&hloc=de&v...
From that page: Pylontech 5 kWh for 1198€ - so 250€/kWh is also possible :-)
So... about 30k for 60kwh to cover 30kwh daily use with solar charging, and probably another 10k for installation. Hmm yes super cheap, might impulse buy later.
Unlikely that you need more than 10kwh. You just want to cover morning and evening electricity consumption. During the day you recharge and consume directly.
Absolutely agree - I think people fall into a major fallacy with sizing their battery systems. Their power consumption probability* distribution is skewed, and they think their battery needs to be sized for 99% or 100% of their daily consumptions. This gives a drastically oversized battery.
Instead, a simple approach is to download the daily power consumption for a year and size the battery for about your 80th-90th percentile consumption. You tend to find the sizing is not that sensitive to whether you go for 80th or 90th percentile, and in any case the batteries come in standard sizes.
If you've sized your battery system economically, it should be empty a good proportion of the time, but that just doesn't "feel right" to consumers.
* Yes I mean frequency not probability but I didn't want to cause confusion with electrical frequency
Maintaining reliable access to off grid electricity and going net zero are very different applications requiring very different expenditures. Both are valid choices, but going net zero relies on a great deal of grid infrastructure investment and maintenance, and the understanding is that utilities in high home solar areas will rapidly de-emphasize per-kwh pricing in favor of per-month access pricing.
It depends on how many cloudy/winter days you want to be proof for right? There needs to be some backup capacity for when you won't be able to fully recharge for weeks on end.
Although I suppose it is cheaper to oversize solar and not the battery, but that's usually already maxed out and limited by roof space. Maybe a small wind turbine to compensate for stormy days...
> There needs to be some backup capacity
I think they're talking about the situation where you're still connected to the grid, in which case you don't need to handle the backup capacity.
> Hmm yes super cheap, might impulse buy later.
It's part of a house. Of course it's not an impulse buy. That's not a useful basis for comparison.
>I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w)
For comparison, I've seen pallets of new 24 410w panels at 58€ per panel (transportation included), hopefully I'll see similar deals in the future when I will ready to jump into solar.
Edit: I'm mostly worried because I don't know how sustainable the industry is when you can buy solar panels at such dirt cheap prices.
It’s not sustainable. Solar panel producers are going to be in big trouble in 8-10 years I think.
This is a controversial hypothesis that is merely from a idiot, being myself. I don't truly believe this but it something I have throught about.
Energy costs are THE driving force of prices. The cost of materials is essentially the energy it takes to squire/process/ship them. If energy was free, we would just dig up random patches of dirt and sift it for every material we wanted even in trace amounts. But its not because unfortunately, we are still primarily a fossil fuel economy for many reasons (legacy, price, chemical properties) and their cheap price relative to labour is acting as a subsidie to renewables pricing. So if the availability of fossil fuels deminishes it seemed logical that the price of inputs goes up and so too would renewable manufacturing. We would then see an inverted bell shaped curve on pricing over time. I have long suspected we would see this trend of lowering prices revert around the 2020s. So far I have been pleasantly wrong.
But fossil fuels like almost all minerals is fighting an uphill battle on availability and ore quality as we used the best stuff first. The US isnt fracking at the pace it is because they just wanted a laugh. It is due to the primary "conventional" stuff couldnt keep up. But that is a whole different issue.
If renewables were offsetting fossil fuel usage, this wouldnt be a problem but it is merely being added on top of it. Thus Jevons paradox in full swing. If we can over come that then this whole idea can be thrown in the recyling bin.
When we can make a solar panel with the outputs of a solar panel, then that is the escape velocity moment. And I don't just mean counting the joules and ignoring the energy fungability.
I am much more optimistic about this in the last few years but im not sure we are there yet. It is looking reasonable now.
I've read some heretic economists that say that instead what orthodox economists claim that energy contributes 10% to GDP it's much higher closer to 100%. You get outside economics into accounting and as you chase the supply costs down you run into energy and scarce resources as the driver of cost.
Maybe 20 years ago I had the thought that ever never was enough supply of fossil fuels to lift the remaining 2/3rds of humanity out of poverty[1]. But there is enough solar and wind to give people a low energy middle class life. And the cost reduction since I think can do better than that.
[1] China I think burned half it's coal reserves in last 40 years. Modern China is basically built on coal. And much of the world doesn't have anything like that.
> China I think burned half it's coal reserves in last 40 years.
As a point of nomenclature isn't that always the case for any resource?
Given that "reserves" are drill tested known quantities that are tested, proven, modelled, and queued up for mining .. most reserves having been taken past "economic feasibility".
Hasn't the usual pattern in mining for some three thousand years since the oiriginal Rio Tinto Gold Mine been that reserves are mined and as they are exhausted, an exploration phase ramps up to prove inferred resources and raise them to reserve status?
eg: https://www.ga.gov.au/digital-publication/aimr2021/australia...
Everything society does is aimed at (locally) reducing entropy, and energy is the only way to do that.
there is a name for this "hypothesis" and other people have worked on the idea. it's called the "energy theory of value"
Core belief of Howard Scott's Technocracy Now movement,
> At the core of Scott's vision was "an energy theory of value". Since the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned "that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy", and that by using an energy metric instead of a monetary metric (energy certificates or 'energy accounting') a more efficient design of society could be made
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
If nothing else it's a fascinating lens to view modernity through.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen
I can see why 8-10 years looks like a wall in terms of how much total solar we want.
However panels age which costs ~1% of capacity per year even before they need to be replaced, and global electricity demand tends to increase 2+%/year. So the more solar you install the more you need to install every year just to keep providing the same percentage of total electricity.
On top of this lower prices mean you it's still worthwhile even if a larger percentage of output gets wasted. Similarly, as storage gets cheaper (inflation adjusted) there's going to be more demand to cheaply charge it thus raising the demand for panels.
In the 8 to 10 years panels will be even cheaper. Probably half of today. The price trajectory is still falling.
>Probably half of today.
A 410W solar panel at 29€? I really doubt that honestly. Cheaper than plywood.
This is not shade on the original comment. But I do find it funny when economists that extrapolate out to infinity.
Comely divorced from the real world materials and ecology.
Efficiency going up is one way to reduce instillation costs which grid scale solar really cares about.
470W + even cheaper inverters seems likely.
Thin-film solar panels will be much cheaper than that. They will be printed in huge quantities.
Economies of scale baby. Another 10x more in production another 30% less in price.
>Economies of scale baby.
That's what they said about regular electric grid power too - that it "soon" would be so cheap as to be unmetered. That was half a century ago and it didn't pan out...
The reasons for this are entirely political. Technology, left to its own devices, would have followed the usual maturity curve on fission power, which would be universal, ubiquitous, abundant, and cheap.
Solar power has neither the geopolitical problems nor the squishy 'environmentalist' ick factor of fission. There's no reason not to expect another halving or two of PPP dollar per Watt to follow.
In 2011 solar panel producers were in trouble because China was flooding the market with panels sold below cost, which prompted a new set of tariffs. Those panels were around $1/watt in 2022 dollars. Since then, price per watt has apparently dropped _85%_.
It's an industry that's been driving down prices at an absolutely bonkers rate the entire time it's existed, and any time a company falls behind on that they're immediately in very deep trouble. I think it's basically impossible to make predictions about what an industry like that will be in 8-10 years.
Why tesla charges 5x for their Powerwall? I know their software is excellent, but I haven’t seen prices like that anywhere.
Because there's value in a brand name, they are using more expensive batteries (or they were, I think just recently they started shipping LFP), and you're paying for the plug-and-play convenience.
Buying cells from CATL, adding a BMS, and putting all in a case is easy but still not trivial. Definitely not plug and play. You can absolutely get dirt cheap LFPs (like other people, I hang out on diysolarforum.com too), but it is not a competitor with the Powerwall unless you want something to tinker with or are simply too budget constrained to buy the brand name product.
I think OP mentioned battery rack (not cells) with BMS, not pure cells.
My guess: to throttle demand. Installers are generally in short supply and huge demand. So why not charge a premium?
> Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc.
I'm probably not the only one wondering: does ordering from these Chinese suppliers require reaching out to them over email? I looked at both websites, and while Seplos asks to write in, CATL doesn't even have battery listings or sales contact information.
I'd love to order LiFePo4 batteries to put in some old UPSes of mine.
you can order through Alibaba, but there are so many suppliers and not all are reputable, so it's a good idea to search around on some of the solar forums for recommendations.
Yeah I think if you want to order from CATL directly, your chances for a reply are better if your order is worth some billions :-)
EVE cells are very famous in the DIY scene, you can get them via Alibaba/Aliexpress, or if you're in Europe from nkon.nl, they have a very good reputation.
What's a good cheap invertor vendor from china these days?
We are looking at ordering a lot of these systems in Ukraine to deal with russian attacks on power grid
89$/kWh seems way too low. If I'm mistaken please point out where I could buy them cause I'll gladly buy some. On well known Chinese market places the price is 5x to 10x that (I live in Europe)
Can you share places the I can get 1kwh if batteries for 89/kw shipped? I am waiting for a 14kw diy build set at 122/kw, that's the best I could find on Alibaba
Well, here, France, LFP batteries now cost MUCH MORE than just three years ago (final customer price) and... ~1000€ per kWh, while just 3 years ago they was a bit less than 700€ per kWh, the battery alone (with BMS etc) but we also need an inverter witch as well is not much more expensive and I talk about self-assembled systems, here legal, but not legal in large slice of the EU, because retail price of a complete installed system by some p.v. companies are so high that there is no economical reason to install them.
My system is 5kWp/8kWh @11.500€ three years ago, it would be now a bit different (400V batteries instead of 48V and a hybrid inverter instead of a p.v. string inverter AC coupled with a battery inverter) @~ the same price due to a single inverter and slightly cheaper p.v. modules (@~100€ for a 415Wp). If done by third parties the cheapest proposal back than was ~30.000€. At this prices given current electricity prices and local grid stability it's a nonsense, it's even cheaper a diesel generator.
I know prices in China are FAR lowers, and I've read also on far lower Thailand prices, but compared to local cost of life I can't quantify how much.
Well with the DIY route that's not a problem - nkon.nl is shipping to France as well, I guess? So there you can get EVE 280 Ah cells for about 100 €/kWh: https://www.nkon.nl/fr/rechargeable/lifepo4/prismatisch/eve-...
Unfortunately DIY is limited to what is certified in France, Victron MultiPlus are certified all, Quattro so far are not, the sole battery from this shop allowed for a grid-connected system are the Pylontech. Still MUCH cheaper than what I've found from French shops anyway so a big thanks :-)
This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
How is this cheap? How much did you pay for the whole package?
That does not include the costs for inverters and other electrical system parts. I am not endorsing these vendors but I am happy with the result. My system paid for itself in less than 18 months. I have many years of experience buying from China in industry. I purchased batteries from Docan Power and BMS/battery housings from EEL Battery. My inverters are from EG4 and UL listed. You can see current pricing on their respective websites. I would say there is some learning curve for a complete novice. The diysolarforum.com is a good vendor neutral and honest resource for information.
> How is this cheap?
It's $900 + inverters for 10 kWh. A Tesla Powerwall 2 (14 kWh) is $10k (inverter included).
I doubt the inverters cost more than $1k.
> $89/kwh shipped/duty paid
Sorry what? Currently I'm happy to buy 5 kWh units for €1300.
This blog post is all over the place. The 2030 price projections are taken from extrapolations of Lithium battery costs, but he’s assuming Sodium chemistry batteries will take over and become ubiquitous at rock bottom prices. The first Sodium batteries barely became available within the past year.
He’s also treating batteries like the only component of the system. The associated charging, inverter, and physical structure components aren’t going to follow the same downward curve. Those are fixed costs on top of the battery itself.
Finally, there’s a lot of vague futurist writing mixed in, from congratulating himself on predicting in 2017 that EV trucks would be a thing some day to something about the blockchain for coordinating power grids:
> I think this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss).
This statement doesn’t even make sense when you read it. He defines “an [sic] ‘trustless’ system” as meaning a system that “just works” which suggests to me that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about but has been led to believe that blockchain is the future for everything.
Fun read, but I didn’t get much out of this article other than “prices are going down”
> This blog post is all over the place.
Which is sad. He has something useful to say, but destroys his credibility by not focusing. Here's the "poster wall" of the organization he claims to head.[1] "Disciplinary convergence through creative story telling". For a much better summary of the subject, see the cover story in this week's Economist.
OK, how cheap can batteries get, really?
Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment. Exxon has a lithium production unit, and they're expanding. New, large lithium mines under construction in Nevada, Sonora (Mexico), five new mines in Western Australia, Quebec, Zimbabwe... Plus, of course, recycling old batteries, a far more concentrated source than anything in the ground. Lithium supplies do not look like a problem. The prices do go wildly up and down because the price of raw lithium doesn't affect car sales much in the short term. That's normal behavior for minor commodities.
This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary. This is good, because of the fire risk. For fixed installations and low end car, lithium iron phosphate is cheap, not subject to thermal runaway, and in most of BYD and CATL products right now. (APS, please get with the program and start shipping small UPSs with LiPoFe batteries so those things last 10 years.)
Coming along next are solid state batteries. Huge hype, a few samples, and production cost problems.[3] Here's the manufacturing process at lab scale, at the Franuhofer Institute.[4] Works in the lab. Here it is at production test scale.[5] The IEEE consensus is that solid-state battery production technology is about 10 years behind existing lithium-ion production. With production in test everywhere from Shenzhen to Belgium to Maryland, progress is being made rapidly.
This is the kind of process that gets cheaper as it scales up.
Solid-state batteries are important because 10-minute charging is needed to increase consumer acceptance rates.
Between solar and battery technology, fossil fuels are going to be crushed. Soon.
[1] https://neonresearch.nl/poster-wall/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producer...
[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-cha...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M&
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZGuDaqZAE
> Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment.
...
> This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary.
If we're overproducing this doesn't follow. Lithium prices will rise back to the price of production. I'm not an expert but quickly glancing at the futures market and it looks to me like there is only a small rebound predicted ($13.30 -> $17.00/contract over a few years, highly illiquid market so take prices with a grain of salt) so the actual story might be "lithium production has become much cheaper".
It also doesn't really matter if you're trying to estimate "it will cost at most this" by looking at sodium ion batteries. I don't think the author really cares if the batteries are sodium or lithium based, just that they don't cost more than sodium based batteries would cost.
> This is good, because of the fire risk
One of the selling points for Sodium ion has pretty consistently been that they are non-flammable. Admittedly this is a function of the electrolyte they use and not a fundamental property of sodium vs lithium, so it might change in the future, but I don't believe it has/it is in anticipated to?
Agree on every point. Sodium is also so abundant it will likely not have the same price fluctuations as lithium.
For stationary battery like the use case describe for in house. I would assume sodium has a much better chance of winning over.
Chinese manufacturing seems insanely advanced based on link 5.
That's a nice production line. It's not unusual. Many of the steps shown, and some of the machinery, are the same as in regular lithium-ion battery manufacturing. Compare with the machinery in [2].
It's not the machinery that's advanced. It's the manufacturing chemistry. The real breakthrough here is that the ceramic is deposited as a slurry, and through a series of ovens and dehydrators, it becomes the solid electrolyte. There's no high-pressure sintering press step, as there is in the Fraunhofer lab making solid state battery samples. The process is roll to roll. If that works, the production cost comes way down and the process scales up well.
The next two or three years are going to be very interesting in batteries.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHZg5-uk1-k
I agree that applying anything to do with blockchain to electricity is dumb - these are already just regular markets, so an inverter/charger could already take price signals from the existing market and do whatever the homeowner wanted, with zero need for blockchain or central control at all. With smart meters (which are becoming more ubiquitous) it's already simple to incentivise using battery power in peak periods when the price is high...
But on inverter/chargers - they will absolutely will follow a downward trend. Maybe not as quickly as batteries but downward all the same. Wide-bandgap semiconductor FETs are getting cheaper and better all the time (higher current and voltage per device), and they allow for power topologies that are more efficient, so cooling gets easier, weight of heatsinks and the amount of material in those goes down, power per unit volume increases and unit mass will decrease, etc. Production volumes will also increase which should lead to economies of scale too.
I can get a 48V DC/230V AC, 8000VA Victron Multiplus 2 inverter/charger for $1.8K USD at the moment (I'm about to buy one for a system I'm DIYing from 31 kWh of AGM batteries I managed to get basically free from a test site of a company that closed down). I wouldn't be surprised if I could get the same capacity inverter/charger for something nearer to half the price by 2030, and a few percent more efficient to boot (this is 95% max efficiency but hopefully 97-98 will be more common by then).
You probably can get plenty of cheaper ones from China already but I want to be absolutely sure it'll meet Australian Standards since this will be grid tied for backup (but able to operate independently during outages), and since it's going under my house I want to know it's safe! Victron have a good track record, especially with a lot of use in maritime and caravan applications where you really don't want them catching on fire so that gives me confidence!
As someone who knows little about battery technology I was interested and trusted the author. But once I read the part about blockchain PoW vs PoS it seemed so off base that it threw the entire article into doubt...
Sure, it'd be great if all the little bumps in the road were already hammered out, but that we all know that's not how massive scale production works.
The two biggest numbers you need to look at in that article are lfp at 200 wh per kilogram and sodium ion at 160 w per kilogram.
Keep in mind that I believe neither lfp or sodium ion needs extensive amounts of cooling like Cobalt nickel batteries and their runaway fire problems. So their pack density is actually better and simpler.
So the 200 watt hour per kilogram basically equates to a 300 to 400 mile and possibly a 500 mile range car depending on efficiencies.
160 watt hour per kilogram sodium ion is the 200 to 300 and possibly 400 car
When you think about it that way consider the implications for electrifying all consumer transportation. The sodium ion density means that the city car that would serve possibly 4 to 5 billion people in the world is a solve technology, borrowing proper scaling.
The lfp density implies probably another billion to 2 billion people that need slightly better range, assuming good infrastructure for recharging.
Now the road maps for lfp and sodium ion. Both are going to probably increase by at least 20% in the next 2 or 3 years. Maybe 5 years tops.
If they can figure out sulfur chemistry versions of lithium sulfur and sodium sulfur then you may be able to double or triple densities in the next 10 to 15 years.
This is all very very revolutionary stuff.
> The associated charging, inverter, and physical structure components aren't going to follow the same downward curve.
I agree not the same downward curve, but it also has been on the downward curve, although different. Learning rate is rather a common phenomenon.
Estimating the learning curve of solar PV balance–of–system (2018) estimates 11% learning rate for BOS compared to 20% learning rate for module.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.06.016
Narrow boundary analysis can be useful but problematic. The additional components is a great example.
Remember a large part of your electrical bill is paying for the grid, not just the energy it transports.
I would love a 5-20kwh battery backup in my home, I even have a place for it. But when I called my local solar/battery installer they said that it was illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home. I live in Minnesota.
They even told me the power from a hypothetical solar rig is sold to the grid utility, not stored, and they give a discount on future winter rates as payment. This seems like a lousy deal.
I have a 3.5 kWh battery backup in my apartment, since December 2022. Which is proving to be immensely helpful right now. I’m living in Kyiv, Ukraine and we have <10 hours of electricity daily these weeks, because lots of power stations are destroyed by Russians, and nuclear power stations are undergoing repairs and fuel recharge.
Aside from it benefiting energy companies, is there any justification for such a law?
In South Africa we’ve had load shedding on and off since 2008. It’s becoming pretty standard for middle class homes to have inverters with batteries and optionally solar.
It does create an issue though that when a load shedding window ends, a whole lot of batteries start charging all at once (especially during non-daylight hours).
Also due to load shedding, I don’t get full use of my batteries. Ideally I would like my batteries to pretty much fully discharge over night with energy from my solar during the day, however, because load shedding is somewhat irregular here, I have it set to not go too low so it has enough energy to tide me over.
Utilities get a local monopoly and guaranteed tariffs in exchange for the considerable investment in building out the supply grid and generating capacity, and the obligation to maintain it.
If individuals are allowed to opt-out, that changes the financial promises made to the utilities. Of course this was mostly done at a time before it was economically feasible for anyone to go off-grid with solar and batteries.
I quite honestly prefer this arrangement. I have zero desire to own and be responsible for the maintenance and safety of tens of thousands of dollars worth of on-premises solar/battery/electrical transfer switch gear. I'm quite happy to pay the local utility to run a cable to my electrical panel and have them be responsible for everything outside the walls of my house.
Or perhaps someday the utility will give you a battery:
Vermont utility proposes to install battery storage in most homes https://environmentamerica.org/updates/vermont-utility-propo...
Locally in Western Australia we're having discussion between residents, council and state power about distributed small shipping container sized batteries, one per 200 homes.
There's a lot of solar power here in the state and a good argument for locally "shared" batteries in terms of maintainance, fire safety, etc.
Not much to say on that ATM, back of envelope looks good, there's a report in the works.
I agree it would be much more efficient on the whole if the grid manages energy storage in bulk.
Unfortunately over here we have a monopoly awarded state owned power producer which has a history of incompetence and corruption.
Maybe at some point our grid can be trusted to be reliable, but in the meantime everyone is either installing their own batteries or having no electricity for hours at a time. Tragic, but what else can you do.
They said it's illegal to install a grid-charged battery backup.
How is that opting out of the grid?
Are you sure you're answering the question that was asked?
> Also due to load shedding, I don’t get full use of my batteries.
But your batteries will last much much longer at the lower cycle depth
If it's any consolation your battery will at least last longer than one which is always doing full cycles.
If the battery is only ever charged from solar and I uncharge it to the lowest safe level in the evenings, it lets me get the best possible return on my capital expense. How long it lasts doesn’t matter in this regard.
But in terms of using it for UPS purposes, it lasting longer would mean I won’t need to expend capital again as soon.
So I guess it depends on what you want out the battery.
I did some math when I bought the battery and it seemed it would probably pay itself back before needing to be replaced, but it was questionable at our energy prices.
I bought the system mostly for UPS reasons though, especially as I work from home and on a personal note, sitting in the dark several evenings a week or being unable to make coffee when you want, sucks.
I'm sure benefitting energy companies is the real reason... but if everyone had a battery backup and they all started charging at the same time, I suppose it could make it harder to reboot the system after an outage.
I am pretty sure it's a fire safety thing.
> illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home.
I don't know but I am guessing the objections is with the "in home" not the battery backup.
Perhaps you could circumvent the regulatory inconvenience by getting your "battery" in the form of a Ford F150 Lightning pickup truck. It can power your home during grid outages, and of course can be charged from solar and/or the grid. One vendor is here: https://www.sunrun.com/ev-charging/ford-f150-lightning
Ouch, starting price $57k (98 kwh battery) and around $70k for the recommended model with 131 kwh. It's a rather large vehicle with poor "gas mileage" of about two miles per kwh. A normal sized electric car gets around 2x that, giving higher grid bills or needing bigger solar arrays (thus, more real estate). Idk if the Ford uses LFP batteries these days.
Certainly most of us who think of buying electric vehicles would want to actually drive them around.
Keep in mind, they also might be lying.
This is totally reasonable. I can't find any confirmation of this anywhere.
Is a grid-charged battery backup different than a UPS? I guarantee there's UPSs in use in Minnesota.
I asked and they said "yeah it's the same and yeah it's still illegal."
The difference is what side of the electrical box your equipment is on.
Because grid use (transport) costs 2-3x more than the power itself.
Now imagine you produce 95% yourself. Instead of typical 15kw installation you only need 500w for when sun doesn’t shine. Thats a reduction of 30x! Far cheaper inverters, thinner lines, etc. Unfortunately no one in the supply chain has wants this because thats lost profit.
There’s been some pretty big deals from Ecoflow (I don’t own any of their products nor affiliated). The Delta Ultra was on sale at Home Depot for $2800 before tax, 6 kWh battery, 7kWH continuous supply, with 21kWH peak wattage. Everything is built in including inverter. You can install their smart panel (probably requires a permit) and it’ll switch between grid and battery for you. I’ll be surprised these are illegal in your town but there’s but some crazy local laws.
As someone who is interested in getting some kind of back up battery at some point, ty for making a recommendation. But could you clarify what you mean by the kWH unit you used on 7 and 21? Seems like those should just be kW, a unit of power rather than kWh, a unit of energy.
Oops, you’re totally right. That was a typo, it’s 7 kW continuous and 21 kW peak
You might as well just buy an electric vehicle with V2L or V2H functionality, and then add a generator outlet to your electric panel.
The added benefit is that well, it's a battery strapped to a car. So if you have an extended power outage, you simply drive your car to a charger elsewhere and come back with a full charge. I'm sure Minnesota wouldn't be stupid enough to outlaw EV charging.
There have been weather events and suchlike where it has been impossible to charge an EV, though gas was still available.
And I've been in weather events where I had electricity at home and yet all the gas stations around didn't have electricity to run their pumps.
You charge the EV before the weather event. Not during.
Then when the weather event comes, you still get electricity at home supplied by your car. If the weather event is localized, drive your car to a place with electricity and charge it there and drive back. It's the best.
My concern would be draining the fuel reserves in a vehicle to power my home reduces my mobility. It seems like mixing objectives and in an emergency, I want to keep my super spare backup if I needed to flee.
So you're worried about a weather emergency that takes out your power, followed a few days later by a second emergency that requires you to evacuate a long distance?
I don't think I'd do very much to prepare for that scenario.
I think it's more about the long tail of situations that I'm not really able to imagine, or feasible emergencies but ones where my assumptions aren't valid. So not about a specific situation, more on principle that I want to keep my "get the heck out of dodge" energy store separate from my "hunker down" energy store.
I admit it's less efficient to have 2 energy stores, but given we're already discussing potentially life threatening situations, I'm not really looking to optimize for anything except having as many resources as feasible on hand.
> I'm not really looking to optimize for anything except having as many resources as feasible on hand.
Money is limited, so sharing resources between situations lets you be prepared for more situations.
Agreed, there are tradeoffs. But from a principled perspective I recognize the risk in having to choose between escape and home power. Adverse events often stack in unexpected ways at the worst time.
I get your point, but let's assume that you had separate resources for escape and home power, and then you needed home power for an extended period. Wouldn't you like to have the option to be able to use your escape resources to power your home?
I think so, but the tail risk impact is still worrisome. Guess it also depends where you live - I’m in a fair weather state, so powering my home is not a survival issue for the most part.
If I lived in eg Texas, I’d maybe have a BEV that could power my home and a separate vehicle for long range travel. Bit of a luxury.
It can be the same emergency. It doesn't have to be a second one.
You might plan on riding out a storm, thinking utilities might be out a day or two max. Day 5, still no utilities, no known date for resumption of services, and supplies are running extremely low. How do you get out?
In the best case: Just deal with it proactively. Watch supplies, try to stay informed. You mitigate what you can to stretch things out (making French toast in a skillet outside on the BBQ grill in the aftermath of a winter storm may be the best way to use available energy and feed people a tasty meal, even if it does seem absurd). Plan to leave before things become unmanageable, and adjust that plan as things change, and be willing to resolutely execute that plan before things go from bad to worse.
If you forecast that your supplies will be very slim on day 5, and you haven't left for greener pastures by day 3 or 4, then the the worst case is already unfolding. GTFO before the worst-case ever happens.
But in that worst case: One can call on someone else for help. This is one of those situations where it's time to cash in some favors, and/or where it pays off to always be friendly and helpful with to the neighbors even if they really seem like a bunch of assholes. (The time to start being friendly with the neighbors is right now, by the way.)
(My own backup plan only keeps me rolling both semi-comfortably and independently for about 24 or 48 hours without power in the winter, so I'm leaving after the first night or ASAP. I don't have the complications and niceties offered by something like an F-150 Lightning, but finite resources remain finite no matter their form.)
You're either not going to have much meaningful backup power or you're not going to have much usable range if your plan is based on consuming the energy on your car while holed up and also using that energy to potentially drive a couple hundred miles. That's my real point here.
Do you have a destination in mind within a couple hundred miles? I hope you're not setting up to get stranded on the highway.
I think I'd be sorting weather events into two buckets: "I can get somewhere that wasn't hit hard with 50-100 miles of range" or "I need to travel a distance measured in states and refueling will be needed". So the difference between "full battery" and "half battery" is pretty tiny, and I can do plenty of house-powering.
When I think of evacuating a long distance, I think of something like a hurricane where you should be getting out of the way before it hits. If you're in the aftermath of a storm, you don't need to go more than 100 but less than 300 miles.
Waco is a bit over 100 miles from me and would be a potential destination for me in an emergency. It'll probably be massively slammed though if all of DFW needs to evacuate for some reason. Austin is then over 200mi.
Oklahoma City is a bit over 200 miles if I needed to go to the city the next state over. Shreveport is just under 200mi.
If something is making me leave DFW then 50mi isn't going to get me anywhere. That's not even going across the metro area.
What event do you have in mind that very badly affects your location but not those cities, and you don't realize driving there is a good idea until a day or two after the event?
The 2021 Texas ice storm and related power outages would have been one where driving to Oklahoma City or Shreveport would have been a place to go to. That also would have significantly reduced that theoretical 230ish mile range of a Lightning or similar EV.
Lake Dallas dam breaking after major flooding in the Trinity River would cause quite a bit of destruction in DFW and potentially make things pretty unlivable around here and force a lot of people out of here and into the surrounding areas. Also an event that wouldn't necessarily be seen days ahead of time.
I grew up in South Houston, so I had a number of times of hurricanes coming through and not necessarily destroying my house but making the surrounding areas pretty unlivable for days to weeks. Maybe it gets cleaned up enough in a couple of days, maybe it doesn't.
It depends on what "meaningful backup power" is.
If I had an EV that I could use to run house-sized stuff with, and the power were off for an indefinite time due to a storm or something, then I'd like to think that I'd use that EV just as sparingly as I would my little Jackery device and portable solar panel (that I can coax at most about 80W from on a perfectly-sunny day).
I can use my rig to [sparingly] run some lights, a small fan, and to keep portable electronics going -- with hardwired Internet if that is something that is useful/extant for information or to pass the time with.
But I'm not going to use it to run the fridge, the home theater, the thirsty desktop PC, or using the laundry machines or the HVAC. I'm also not cooking with it.
I have a portable heater that will keep me warm, and enough fuel to do this for a day or two. I know how to keep the water running to keep pipes from breaking. I don't need the fridge: When the power goes off, I can unload the important stuff into my Orca cooler along with the last contents of the self-refilling ice bin in the freezer and it'll stay fine for days. If it's stupid-cold outside, the frozen stuff that I'd like to try to keep can go outside in a tote. I have a propane grill for quick outdoor cooking with plenty of fuel, and a butane burner for indoor cooking that also has a reasonable amount of fuel for making coffee or frying some eggs or whatever.
I've tested these methods off-grid. They work.
While I do enjoy the wonders of modern electrification rather immensely, and TBH I'd find myself struggling to get through a day without some small aspects of it, I don't need a ton of it to feel reasonably comfortable for a limited time.
In this very limited use (which is not dissimilar to car-camping inside of a house), a suitable EV can probably cope for a few days without substantially reducing its immediately-useful range. It'a a small drop in a large bucket of battery power.
It can probably also keep the fridge running, and run a furnace that burns dinosaurs: If the regular F150 Lightning has a 98kWh battery, and one draws an average of 500W from that battery (which is a rather hefty average if living lightly post-disaster), then one uses ~12% of its capacity (or about 28 miles of its 230 mile range) per 24-hour day.
Over two days (48 hours), that's only 56 miles spent of 230 possible miles.
What kind of disaster can you imagine where "losing" that 56 miles of range would be of any consequence -- where 56 miles means the difference between "Oh, we got this. Everything is fine." and "ZOMG if only we could drive a little further! But we can't! We're RUINED!!!"
I can't think of any that have happened around here in my own lifetime,
I've actually been through multiple evacuations before, and practically every mile of energy in our vehicles counted. One time one of our cars literally ran out gas rolling into the first gas station with fuel after leaving with a full tank. When major storms are coming my cars stay topped off and don't get touched except for very purposeful reasons.
And given the fact it might be harder to find a working and available charger while leaving in an emergency I wouldn't want to rely on finding one along the way to wherever I'm going.
I'm confused.
If you're part of an organized evacuation, you're doing this before the storm -- correct?
And if that's the case, then: It doesn't matter how long an EV will or will not run the stuff inside of your home, because you won't be there.
When did I say organized? And evacuations can happen before and after an emergency. Evacuating just means leaving the unsafe place for a safe space, it doesn't define the order of things. I've evacuated before and after major storms depending on the circumstances at the time.
Leaving a burning building is still evacuating the burning building. Evacuating a burning building doesn't mean it's an orderly thing before the fire starts.
Might want to check with a diff installer. Lots of solar installers in MN advertise battery backups. In fact a new law signed recently (and goes into effect in the next couple months) adds tax incentives for battery backups in homes.
>it was illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home
So it would be legal if it were only charged by your house's solar panel? That doesn't sound like a big problem to me.
> If we start with 2410 GWh in 2023 and grow with 59% per year that gives us 61.917 GWh in 2030. That would mean almost exactly 8 doublings in 2030.
There's an order of magnitude error here. That's an increase of about 26x. 8 doublings would require an increase of 256x.
Now, anyone can make a simple math error. But, like, it should be totally obvious to anyone that 7 years of 60% annual growth can't possibly be anywhere near 8 years of 100% annual growth? Or if not anyone, then at least for someone like the author who spends the first page of the article bragging about their credentials in reasoning about exponential growth.
Edit: and this isn't just nitpicking, this faulty result is then used as the basis of the cost reduction estimates.
I think the unit is off. Starting from 2410 GWh & a compound increase of 59% per year gives us: 61,915 GWh (2410 * 1.59^7) which is about 61.915 TWh. So perhaps the author meant 61.915 TWh instead of GWh.
No way is this in anyway close to 8 doublings though. That would take 12 years or by 2035. (1.59^12 = 261x)
I think it's rather that they're using the dot as a thousand separator, not as a decimal separator.
As a layperson, the first thing the title made me think of is "How safe can they get?" Let RESCI be the Risk of Explosion/Surge/Combustion/Inhalation. Here are some measures that are interesting to me that I can't really approximate when evaluating products:
- Incremental RESCI when buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors
- Incremental RESCI when drawing from the product population that shouldn't have passed QA
- Incremental RESCI when buying on AliExpress or random sites
- Incremental RESCI when dropping, hitting with a hammer, leaving in the sun, subjecting to a power surge
- Incremental RESCI from living in a dense neighborhood where dense people are buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors on AliExpress, occasionally dropping or hitting with a hammer, etc.
In the West, we have about a buck's worth of experience with residential electric service. By many measures, it's still much more dangerous than it should be.
With a lot of new chemistry the risk of fire is greatly reduced. It seems to be an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer, energy density is also lower because of this but it is a reasonable trade off. Also tend to have much greater life time charge cycles. Potential to go tens of thousands of cycles rather than just a thousand or so.
> an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer
The iron battery you are thinking of is a lithium battery. It is not the lithium that is a fire risk; lithium ion batteries do not contain metallic lithium. In an LFP battery the phosphate-oxide bond is much more stable and not subject to thermal runaway compared with e.g. cobalt-oxide.
That sounds much better than the dribble I was spouting. Thanks!
There's also someone building a factory to make iron-air batteries for grid storage. They're way cheaper than lithium or even sodium, with one of the most common materials on the planet, but only about 50% efficient. They're too heavy for vehicles, and have lower power output so aren't much good as peakers, but if you want four days of grid backup like we'd need with a 100% wind/solar grid, they're great.
https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
I really appreciate folks who include their reasoning with their argument as it makes it possible to evaluate their conclusions through external sources. So hats off here.
One of the things that helped solar take off in California (besides subsidies) was being 'grid tied' relieved you have having to manage all the battery technology. Initially this led to some effective rate plans (trading watts for watts) but once the power companies realized the lack of profit on selling power was affecting their ability both maintain infrastructure AND pay off their monetary judgements levied by courts for blowing up towns and burning down forests they managed to get the CPUC to switch to a model that turns home owners with Solar into sharecroppers for the power company[1]. On the plus side this is rekindling the interest in being 100% "off grid" as that removes the power company leverage and puts pricing control back into the market/consumer's hands.
What I find interesting is that now I am starting to hear rumbles about how the power company wants to use consumer and commercial building "whole building" power systems as back up for the grid in peak power consumption emergencies that would mandate being tied to the grid even if you didn't "need" to be. I have been writing diligently to representatives that I refuse to let the CPUC tell me what I have to sell power back to the power companies to sustain the grid in emergencies and reserve the right to charge what ever the market will bear. It's a bit Texan in its dysfunctionalness but my goal is to encourage zero carbon emission home power grids faster, and driving the existing power companies out of business will assist in that endeavor.
Batteries are a huge part of that and if the author is correct that we can get to $1/kWh batteries by 2030 I feel like I will live to see it which makes me happy.
[1] Am I bitter? What make you say that :-)
I'd rather hear a projection from an engineer/scientist/operations person in the industry. This kinda reads like it's written by an armchair expert who thinks about batteries a lot, but doesn't have much to do with building that future being described.
Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.
It does seem to be written by someone who's very far above the ground — even managing to throw the blockchain in there at the end.
But the point they're making is reasonable. Just because the author isn't deeply technical doesn't mean they can't fit an exponential and extrapolate correctly.
Exponential growth always has to stop somewhere, but that's not in and of itself a reason to think this year is the year that it will. The napkin math about sodium and battery cost is at least reasonable, it's worth considering seriously rather than handwaving the author away as not an engineer.
Fair. I guess I have an issue with technology projections that assume the technology will follow some fit, because it always has. Every bit of progress is made with tons of risky work and breakthroughs, and none of it is guaranteed like you would think it is just by looking at a fit.
> they can't fit an exponential and extrapolate correctly.
Anyone fitting an exponential isn't extrapolating correctly pretty much by definition. As you note:
> Exponential growth always has to stop somewhere, but that's not in and of itself a reason to think this year is the year that it will.
This is a god of the gaps argument. There's no reason it should stop this year, there's also no reason it shouldn't. Fitting the curve is only useful if you're actually presenting an argument as to why for the relevant interval it should continue.
There's plenty of reasons it shouldn't end this year. Go look at the battery sizes that we need to switch halfway to electric cars and to stabilize the electrical grid.
Looking at what happens if growth continues until we get into that range is quite reasonable.
>Fitting the curve is only useful if you're actually presenting an argument as to why for the relevant interval it should continue.
Which he actually does by looking at sodium batteries.
> projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability
Reminds me of a projection I read back in the early 1960s (I think). The author charted the rise in speed of human beings over ten or twenty thousand years, where that speed had increased when horses were tamed, clipper ships were built, steam trains invented, automobiles, airplanes, and then rockets. (Assuming this was just after Gagarin, that got "us" to 5 miles per second.)
He pointed out that the acceleration was (ahem) accelerating, with thousands of years between humans running and horses being domesticated, vs. about sixty years between the Wright brothers and Gagarin. Extrapolating, it was clear we would exceed the speed of light (using a warp drive or something) by the year 2000.
Of course the current record speed was set in 1968 at about seven miles per second, and not even equaled since 1972. So much for extrapolation.
He claims the expert estimates have been wrong every year (too conservative).
To the extent that have been expert estimates out there, they do have been consistently wrong. The same happens to solar and wind generation.
But well, I haven't seen any that don't have a conflict of interest into claiming fossil fuels will continue to be required. And that's a large part of the problem: you just won't find uninterested experts publishing estimates.
Well the other issue though is that people looking for predictions want conservative predictions because they're investing. Over-estimate and you lose money, under-estimate and you leave money on the table but don't trade away future possible gains.
Hum... People investing in renewables and batteries do not use predictions. Those have at most some 3 years of building time, usually a few months.
People investing in fossil fuel plants need predictions, and despite they wanting to see conservative numbers, that bias means complete doom for them. They need the opposite bias if they want to survive.
Things get a lot more complex once you start to look at components industries. But then, it's not clear they use predictions for anything.
And sometimes an exponential is staring you in your face and you just don't realize it. This has happened before. Early computer scientist did not imagine anything like you and I take for granted and put in our pockets without thinking about it every day. That's only a generation or so ago. Two if you are half my age (50).
IMHO, the theme of this century is making cheap, sustainable energy so ridiculously abundant that we'll be wondering what the hell we were doing before and how we managed without it. There are so many technological breakthroughs converging on making that happen that IMHO this is just going to happen. It's a question of when, not if. The timelines are uncertain, but not really. The author of this article is extrapolating a few trends over a time scale that is rather short. He could be wrong. Even by a factor 5. And it would still happen on a reasonable timeline. And I don't think he's going to be that far of the mark. 2030-2035 it will be RIP ice engines and fossil fuels. You'd be out of your mind to use anything else than dirt cheap electrons stored in dirt cheap batteries. At 50$ per kwh, it's a no brainer. At 5$/kwh, you'd have to be bat shit crazy to use anything else. That's 'only' a 10x improvement.
Assuming all innovation grinds to a halt in 2024 and that no technical progress will happen beyond 2024 seems like the naive point of view when there's so much happening that is well funded and seemingly on track to get some kind of results. The opposite view on this is of course that progress is a foregone conclusion. Some things will taper off and other things we haven't even thought off might pick up the slack. Between now and 2030, you can make a few educated guesses though. Which is what this author is doing.
Anyway, cheap, clean energy is transformative. Most of the major challenges right now are directly or indirectly bottle necked on energy. Making energy cheaper matters. 2x is nice. 10x is nicer. 100x is what we might actually see in a few decades. Anything in between would be transformative. Anything beyond that is hard to imagine but yet not unlikely. We might actually nail fusion at some point. Who knows? It might even become cheap to do it.
But we have a nice fusion plant that we orbit around beaming down orders of magnitude more energy than we actually need. We're learning how to harvest it using solar panels; a trick plants and trees have of course mastered ages ago. This article is about leveraging batteries for storage. The two things combined are a thing of beauty.
The point about sodium ion is that there are no exotic/scarce materials in there. The materials are cheap. And we're not going to run out of them. How many twh. of battery could we need. Tens, hunders, thousands? We only use about 25pwh per year worth of electricity right now. That number is going to go up of course. What would you do with 25000 twh of battery? Annual production is about to cross the 1twh/year. And most of these batteries last a few decades. 25pwh of charged batteries is a lot of power. And yet we might have that sitting around in a few decades.
I have 4 x 230Ah LiFePo4 cells in a 12 volt setup to power my solar powered blog during the night. It also runs my computer setup at 90W for many hours using an inverter.
People should really understand how cheap these cells have become and how feasible it is to setup your own battery storage system.
I’m now on a variable (next-day / day-ahead) dynamic electricity tariff that changes by the hour. On some days there are multiple hours where I get Paid to use electricity, it’s crazy that we have such an abundance of wind and solar.
It’s such fun to play with the Tiber API + Python and using those cheap hours to charge my battery a bit, while leaving room for solar.
He projects (at current growth and experience rates) that battery cells will reach $8/kWh by 2030. Wow!
But with several math errors, which make him off by a decade. He multiplies by 1.59 annually and gets a 25X increase in total battery in seven years. That actually takes eight years, but whatever. Then he says that's eight doublings, but eight doublings is a 256X increase. That would take nine years at 100% annually (first year to go from 1 to 2, then 2^8=256). But we only have a 59% annual increase so getting to 256X takes about 13 years.
He also seems to be off by one in the cost reduction. At 25% per doubling it takes nine doublings to get to 10% of the current price. So add another year or two to get to $8.
It's still interesting that we could get to $8/kWh by 2040 or so, especially since it seems physically plausible that sodium batteries could get that cheap, and that we could build several days of grid storage using them. And by 2030 we still get a cost drop of almost two-thirds, down to $28/kWh if we accept his claim of $80/kWh in 2023.
> He multiplies by 1.59 annually and gets a 25X increase in total battery in seven years. That actually takes eight years, but whatever.
(1.59)^7 = 25.69
But yeah, not eight doublings. I guess we'll have to wait another four years then :).
The cost of 50AH Li-Ion batteries is getting close to the point where they may start to compete with Lead acid for gas powered cars.
Lithium batteries still have limitations with charging at low temperatures. OEMs can design systems that will warm the battery up to a temperature where it can be charged after the car is started, but it’s not nearly as simple as dropping a lead-acid battery in.
It isn't that simple today, but it can be.
Integrate the new-fangled battery (of whatever specific chemistry), the BMS, and the heater into a box with just two posts on top (just like lead acid batteries have had for over a century). It can be designed to take care of itself.
And if it's cheap enough to produce and sell, and offers good enough performance over its normal usable lifespan, then it doesn't need a diagnostic interface for sorting out issues any more than a lead acid car battery does today.
I looked at it and couldn’t find any that offered enough cranking amps. I’m not sure how easy it would be to design a lifepo4 battery for the application.
Lithium batteries are more than capable of starting cars, and at a fraction of the size (just look up "car starters" and the like on Amazon - those are usually a tiny lithium battery that you pull 50c from). The thing is they are usually much pricier for an equivalent size battery and have problems in the cold that make them unsuitable in some climates.
There are some out there. The one that comes to mind is Dakota Lithium. They have a few options with 1000 CCA.
Most (not all) EVs still have a 12 volt lead-acid battery: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a38537243/electric-car....
I understand 12 volts, but why not a 12 volt Li battery? I don't know.
“The cost of gasoline is coming down to the point where gasoline-powered lanterns may become the lighting of choice for carriages”.
The environment be damned: Regarding price / energy density, yes. They even have weight / energy density advantage.
But Lithium batteries can't be recycled. Saying "We are almost there" and "The future looks bright about it" is "moving fast and breaking things" again
Recovering lithium from batteries is not cost effective compared with mining new lithium. However, battery recycling is possible and still worth doing, because it recovers more valuable metals such as cobalt or copper.
And before recycling, reusing! This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
"Green Li-ion Marks the Opening of its First Commercial-Scale Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Plant in Oklahoma"
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240618645137/en/Gre...
I was wrong for posting what really means "technically not possible"
The real barrier for recycling waste is sustainability. This is the reason why e.g. TETRABRIK is considered recyclable, but it is actually not (I am posting about this parallel because it has been completely understood for several years)
Anything can be recycled if we are pedantic. But will it actually stop generating waste? (or will they be silently exported ignored?) Will subsidies be sustainable? (not it even asking if it can be profitable) In reality, the "recyclable" brand is for the most part greenwashing.
Now, the business ad about a venture capital bussiness you posted is nothing new. Last year there were 5 such touted recycling plants in Latin America, already. One of them is located in Costa Rica. Costa Rica doesn't have a Lithium battery waste issue. There, the electric cars are very few (and people who got them already want out), there are no electricity storage facilities. I am guessing here that they will import a ton (hundreds of tons) of waste from "Somewhere else"
I am including an article on battery recycling that is easy to read. It is only 40 pages long.
https://archive.ph/wip/XB8hw
And, for more downvotes: Lithium batteries are as recyclable as a TETRAPAK: still generating waste, most of the time all of it ends up as waste.
I thought they could be recycled but at the moment it’s cheaper to mine. Is that not true?
Lead Acid batteries must get replaced every few years.
An equivalent LiIon battery would not need to be replaced so quickly.
So at some crossover point the environmental cost of X * recyclable Lead acid batteries is higher than LiIon batteries.
Absolutely. Lead acid will be replaced with another chemistry. My concern is only about the environment. I developed the post some more
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40878252
They can be recycled, its just currently more expensive than the post-product
They can absolutely be recycled, lol.
I have been predicting over the last year that with many US and European manufacture suddenly giving up on ev growth rate and feed in tariff for solar not getting a good price. The next big thing is going to be home batteries. Looking at what Tesla is charging for powerwall and the actual materials cost which are still dropping people will start trying to get in on these margins.
> stormy electricity grid
For me (living in Europe), stable 220V 50Gz from any wall socket is one of the traits of civilization, like potable water tap and flush toilets. "Stormy grid" is something from a rural village lifestyle, with a water well and a cold basement to keep winter food supply. Is it really that huge problem in parts of US?
There were a couple of large scale very long outages in Texas due to very bad weather in the last few years that made the news even on this side of the Atlantic.
I think this underestimates the benefits of focus and serendipity and new materials. There’s a non zero chance that grid scale fixed batteries get made from things like sand or liquid metal or (insert cheap thing you can heat here).
Claims of 10 euros/kwh, months of energy storage:
https://thenextweb.com/news/startup-sand-battery-funding-pol...
How big a battery can you make when it’s made from sand?
The trick with grid is that because you’re building at scale, you can give the benefits to many in one shot and you can build it out of town. Think Australia’s original big battery from Tesla in 90 days vs. messing with installing lots of little ones in houses, with all the maintenance, education and dangers that brings.
Current prices are kinda nutty and are largely determined by the size of your buy. Retail prices for home batteries (a few kWhs) are roughly $1000/kWh. A Model 3 gets you about $700/kWh (with two free motors and an ipad). A Tesla megapack is $290/kWh, but you have to spend $1000000 to get that price. Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh.
Long-term it seems pretty reasonable that retail prices should be a small multiple of the factory price (which keeps decreasing), so I think $1000 for a 20kWh battery is totally reasonable.
At $1k for 20kw/h, I'd be very tempted to massively over-panel the roof and front/back yard on pergolas, install 200kwh of battery and never deal with pg&e again
Exactly. This is what Tony Seba is talking about for 10 years already! He talked about this in his 2014 book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation.
what's pg&e?
Utility company somewhere in the US.
They are the utility company that covers most of California. They recently raised rates and customers are unhappy. They are a for-profit and their lack of spending on maintenance has caused a number of fires which has killed people, leading them to be unpopular, among other reasons.
They killed people thru giant fires exacerbated by climate change then get sued and pay billions of dollars in restitution and then raise the rates for the regular folks.
A source of very expensive electricity in California.
USD 1,000 per kw/h seems very high to me.
A couple of years ago here in South Africa I paid about ZAR 30,000 (USD 1,650) as a consumer for a 5kw/h battery, and I just checked online now, I can apparently get a similar battery for half that:
https://www.ecohub.co.za/shop/solar-power/lithium-batteries/...
In the UK you can buy a battery at £160/kWh, complete with BMS and thermal management: https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage/...
For less than £130/kWh if you're willing to build it yourself, you can get a slightly less capable setup: https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage/...
>Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh.
Where I live there is a warehouse where you can withdraw new MANYI Lifepo4 cells at around 97€/kwh (a single cell) after contacting the seller on Alibaba, so I'm guessing Telsa is getting them at 80 or even less.
At $6343 [1] for 13.5kwh [2], seems closer to $500/kwh? The federal rebate does help substantially, but most folks should qualify. This # is closer to $400/kwh if you buy with solar, and $300 if you're buying a few instead of just one.
Re: car batteries, the difference between the rear-wheel drive and long range is about 20kwh (60kwh vs 80kwh), for $8K. That's $400/kwh and doesn't even include all the other trim differences like having dual motors instead of single.
So, it looks like reality is closer to $300-$400/kwh, depending. Not close to your ideal of $50/kwh, but still much better than $1000/kwh.
1) https://www.tesla.com/energy/design/overview 2) https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/Energy/Powerwall/Power...
This is asking the wrong question. The question is what is the cost per kWh of electricity delivered from that battery, which is not the cost per kWh of capacity installed (though it is related).
You have to charge the battery with electricity (which you could sell or have to buy), and then when you discharge it you are either offsetting electricity you would buy, or selling it. Throughout the process you're losing some of it (~8%), and the battery is degrading in capacity towards eventual replacement.
You also have black swan events - i.e. an early battery death due to manufacturing defects.
i.e. my rooftop solar array sells power at 7c / kWh. When I run the numbers on various offset scenarios, the cost per kWh delivered after all expenses and life time costs that I can find tends to be about 7 - 8 c / kWh. Which honestly makes perfect sense to me: the electricity company, at much more massive scale, can install and run batteries more cheaply then I can.
> Retail prices for home batteries (a few kWhs) are roughly $1000/kWh.
Do you mean the installed price? Including inverters and such? $1000/kWh is more than 4x what you can buy LFP batteries for off Amazon.
I thought a few years back already that owning a bigger house will be cheaper than ever due to the progress of cheap renewable energy, cheaper and cheaper heat pump technology and batteries.
Nice to see blog
Except we are not going to have cheap batteries and solar in the USA and never ever cheap EVs
Remember how tariffs were called "asinine" when the last administration did them?
Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price.
Oh semiconductors are going to double in price too in 2025, buy soon.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156249/us-biden-china-t...
Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price.
I agree that the tariffs are going to hurt adoption, but the US does have domestic battery and solar manufacturing. Tesla manufactures large quantities of lithium ion batteries in Nevada and Texas.
First Solar (3 manufacturing sites in Ohio): https://www.firstsolar.com/About-Us/Locations
Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing in Georgia: https://apnews.com/article/us-solar-panel-plant-hanwha-qcell...
Actually it's faster to link this report about existing and planned North American solar manufacturing:
https://media-01.imu.nl/storage/sinovoltaics.com/14240/sinov...
There's a lot of work in progress right now but also several operating plants.
Just a little math issue here, tariffs jumping from 25 percent to 100% isn’t doubling the price, and the tariff cost used for the percentage isn’t the final retail cost.
Let’s say I have a widget. I sell it for $10, and it cost me $1 for me to produce. There’s a 25 percent tariff, which is 25 cents. Now I sell the item for $10.25 to pay for the tariff.
If the tariff goes up to 100%, that now means that I need to raise the price of the product to $11 to pay for it.
> If we start with 2410 GWh in 2023 and grow with 59% per year that gives us 61.917 GWh in 2030. That would mean almost exactly 8 doublings in 2030.
For context, the global electricity consumption in 2019 was around 23 TWh [1].
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
23000 TWh, or 23 PWh according to your link
“…this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss).”
What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?
Once material costs fall far enough, other costs start to dominate. Design and permitting, sales and marketing, transport, finance and insurance, installation, support structures, safety systems, interconnections (wires), converters and so on. $11/kWh seems optimistic for 2030.
The mention of Blockchain threw me off but I generally agree with this analysis.
Worth remembering that even enthusiastic supporters of the energy transition have underestimated the historical trends in wind, solar and batteries.
It's just hard to comprehend the S-curve ramp.
A small note: I have a domestic p.v. system with small LFP storage and well... It's ~3 years old and now the same battery capacity (8kWh) cost a bit less the THE DOUBLE, witch is ~9000€ instead of a bit more than 5000€...
Industrial battery prices are lowered, in China, definitively not here in the EU, and at this rates the expensive small UPS for a home, that's are such capacity, because to being semi-autonomous a typical home need at least 80-100kWh to avoid too deep DoD and support heating in new all-electric and very well insulated homes. And I talk about mild climate where there is enough Sun in the winter to have not the autonomy but at least margin also in December, January and February. Oh, and I talk about self-assembled systems like mine witch is legal here, but not legal in every countries, because retail prices for a complete systems installed by them are FAR more expensive, about THREE time more, enough to make the investment so expensive to be a nonsense.
Tangential, whats the low energy distributed ledger tech he's talking about?
Probably he wasn't talking about a concrete solution, but Powerledger on the Ethereum chain or EWT token on Gnosis.
I think it would be cool if appliances started coming with batteries. You could give them times of day to charge, and to not use the outlet. And they could work in power outages.
this might not be the right thread to ask this question, but I have an older car and the battery inside went. In the past the battery was $50 to replace. Post-COVID, it runs for a whopping $250 at most automotive places... sometimes cheaper on sale.
So why not swap it out for a lithium battery (which still run around $50)? Are there any downsides beyond rewiring the connector types I'm not aware of?
*the battery type is 51R
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0013ZGZ9Q?context=searc...
The price jump from $150 to $250 was in 2017.
---
I have a hybrid car - it has both a traditional lead acid battery and a lithium ion battery. And while I also have a lithium ion jump starter battery, they have issues in many situations that make them ill-suited for a cranking starter battery.
https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/lithium-starting
Lowering cost per kWh is great, but if power demand increases at about the same rate or faster, then the impact is minimal.
Cost per bit of internet plans has also gone down a lot in the past decade, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing on account of all the new JavaScript, ads, and other website bloat.
Using less exotic materials is exciting, though! Regardless of whether the cost feels different.
What level of subsidy do we give to batteries?
Surely it depends on what country you live in. Battery subsidies are mostly local at least.
How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet? Oh well that’s for young people and future generations to care about!
Thanks for fleshing out my quickly written question. I didn’t really mean anything by it, just that I think it’s an important factor that’s overlooked in the linked article.
The most useful idea to think about here, for me, is not what the raw market of economics batteries might be. Rather, the societal good that there would be if the state stepped in and just made batteries infinitesimally cheap for everyone.
The state provides a lot of things that lubricate society: just as they send electricity to our homes, provide a central bank for the economy, schools for our children, and courts to mete out justice — so too could they potentially ensure every citizen has X number of 18650 cells (or future equivalent) available to them to use as they see fit.
> How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet?
I know this was rhetorical, but the standard method in the literature is Optimal Taxes on Fossil Fuel in General Equilibrium (2014).
https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA10217
Ladies and gents this is what standard-issue Silicon Valley style grift looks like (following in the footsteps of the great Kurzweil). Ignore basic physics, massage data so you can more credibly fit an exponential curve on it, and extrapolate a fantastic future for it.
All this to underpin the grand illusion of capitalism that exponential YoY growth is sustainable to justify insane VC valuations. Which is even more perverse when all this is done in the name of saving the planet.
We know that tech adoption follows an s-curve that is only exponential in the lower parts. No-one is claiming truly unbounded exponentials for these techs.
The thing is that they have been exponential so far. clean energy forecasts based on linear trends, not on doubling of installations or on halving of prices have been consistently too pessimistic.
We can expect this to continue for a short while longer, until inflection points are reached.
Having a lot of cheap electricity is also a trope in an anarcho-syndicalist utopian paradise for all the people.
Which basic physics did he ignore?
When you’re responding to an article with a large amount of data and sources provided, the burden is on you to show which data is incorrect or which assumptions are too rosy and how you quantitatively arrived at those conclusions.
I’d be with you if the author was just hand waving their way to this conclusion but they seem to have done their research and used real numbers.