The age of solar + storage is here. It’s the least expensive option to add power to the grid today, and prices are still dropping while efficiencies are increasing.
This. And battery chemistries are advancing rapidly to utilize more readily available minerals. For cars, yes, you need advanced stuff that is small and powerful. But for home and grid use, batteries can afford to be big and heavy.
Big heavy batteries for my home would be fine. I want big heavy batteries for my house, but they are still so expensive right now. The Anker batteries seems like one of the best deals around to do a home battery system right now, but I get about 2kWh/$. When I bought my IONIQ6 I got about 2kWh/$, and it came with the rest of a car!
I really don't understand the economics of home batteries right now.
They get much cheaper when you look things that are modular, and not all tied up in a pretty package.. These batteries have been very popular this year [0]. But then you have to buy a charger/inverter, that maybe works with your solar, and is then certified to work with your power company, etc.
And cables, and a rack to hold them, and a tool to crimp those big huge cables, etc.
For professional installers, they can install these pretty easily, or install the more 'integrated' systems with a much, much larger margin for faster..
1. Economies of scale. The market for an EV is going to be much higher than a whole house battery solution. And most of these solutions are relying on a network of independent contractors to sell and service these batteries. Unlike dealerships, they also aren't buying them at scale.
2. Financing. Most likely you are driving a EV financed by a bank. They've got the process so streamlined you can know within minutes if your 4-wheeled battery bank is coming home with you or not. Trying to get a house battery financed is such a convoluted mess. If it was advertised like a dealership, "Come down to Big Al's Battery Barn. We'll set you up with a 10kWh bank with 0% financing!", I imagine these things would fly off the shelf. Leading back to 1.
Sodium-sulfur batteries have traditionally operated at 300-350 C, which limits their acceptability and increases operating costs. Are you imagining lower temperature versions becoming available?
Private home and business solar is big business in South Africa these days. As unreliable as solar is, its more predictable than our national grid, and increasingly cheap. There are also a few options to roll a house solar conversion into your mortgage, which makes it a lot more feasible for middle class people and up.
I'm considering adding solar to my existing inverter/battery setup.
> I'm considering adding solar to my existing inverter/battery setup.
I had to read this several times before I understood... The grid is so unstable that batteries were installed even before any PV panels. We western people have the luxury of reasoning the other way around.
What impact is this having on the lower class? Is grid power getting cheaper or more plentiful because of this? Or is it getting more expensive for them due to economies of scale?
I'm by no means implying that you're do anything wrong btw, I'm genuinely curious how this is affecting things. In the US I've wondered what the impact would be but it's too early to tell.
No it is a good question. Does private solar aid the lower class? Well "lower class" in South Africa means real poverty. So they certainly can't get solar themselves. As to whether higher income households going off-grid helps - its tricky I think.
On the one hand, private solar does lessen the burden on the grid. We currently have had a good few weeks without load shedding, one major contributing factor of which (acknowledged by Eskom themselves) has been a combination of good weather and off-grid solar households. But on the other hand, Eskom is increasingly deprived of the rates to pay for the large capital investments needed to upgrade the grid. Eskom has continually hiked those rates (which means more people are incentivized to go solar - it is a vicious cycle perhaps).
Our government is finally moving forward with a policy of allowing private enterprise to contribute to the grid. I think this will definitely help. But realistically, I think South Africa will have to deal with load shedding for a good few years.
I'm of two minds about this: OT1H, I participate in Kiva and would for sure accept a microloan for any solar, but OTOH it may be that folks who use Kiva (both the supply and demand sides) may think of it as just business or farming loans, and thus may not be on-board with infrastructure upgrades. So a hypothetical infra.kiva.com that targets any kind of infrastructure management goals (solar, batteries, sand batteries, water purification, ...) could draw the two interested parties together
All of this is, of course, setting aside the colossal failure of the local government or markets to provide such things, but if I hold my breath on that to be fixed, I'll pass out
I only heard this from a south African, so consider this hearsay, but prices of energy from private providers is not only cheaper, but the energy is actually available and not subjected to constant blackouts. Problem is, the governments since Mandela have used the state energy provider as a cash cow and are actively hampering any kind of modernization and/or private alternatives.
Absolutely, the government has been pushed for a few years now to allow for public enterprise to contribute to the grid. Our president recently announced that they are going to go ahead with this. I hope this is true.
One aspect to consider is that poor people might consume little enough that they're actually less dependent on the grid than large McMansions with lots of appliances.
I lived for 3 years with 1040 watts of solar, traveling around the US in a motorhome. I really did not even feel like I was compromising on anything to save power, I had a tower PC, I watched movies with television + stereo system, etc. 1 kW of solar is tiny by residential solar standards. It's not hard to go solarpunk and live off of just solar, once you let go of large homes.
The poor are also likely to be less dismissive of power that has intermittency issues. This is especially the case if the grid itself has reliability problems.
Anecdote (but interesting): Channel 5's recent coverage of homeless populations living in the Las Vegas tunnels highlighted that they have electricity in there! A single cracked panel (salved from the trash!) provides more than enough juice to charge phones and even power TVs.
I am really impressed at how California has scaled up its use of batteries. I remember 5-6 years ago coding on Electricity Maps and seeing almost no storage (link: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO)
Financially it's kind of a no brainer at this point. Myself and a bunch of family members are customers of SDGE and the lowest price anyone is paying is now $0.50/kWh and the highest is $0.91/kWh.
The household paying the latter just installed 15kW of solar panels and a battery bank to cut their costs to the $16/mo hookup fee and it's not even the height of summer yet. It's almost to the point where their backup propane generator is cheaper to run than pay for utility power! The solar/battery installation will pay for itself in under five years assuming no price increases (hah!).
Everyone is building it at every level of the producer/consumer curve.
Maybe it's that I'm not in as sunny an area, but all of the (battery + panels) numbers I've seen tell me I'll see a break-even in 15 years, vs in ~5 if I just have panels.
They did the installation themselves so the only labor they paid for was roofers to reshingle the roof first. I think that significantly changes the calculus.
There was a US tax program last year that cut 30% of costs off of renewable energy projects. I took advantage of it - it brought the project from "will never pay for itself" to "pays for itself in ~3-5 years" due to the way the financing worked out with the tax credit.
I'm in a very sunny area and my break-even based on last estimate was 16 years, because the local electric monopoly charges a huge monthly fee from solar owners even if you consume nothing.
I'd probably be better off disconnecting from the grid fully, but that's riskier in a climate that still has serious winters and would need more planning than I have spare cycles for, and would have more up-front costs.
Ca state destroyed its energy companies by creating cartels through PGE etc. PGE is unreliable, expensive and has such poor quality of service. (Not to mention immense harm they bring to environment by regularly causing forest fires). It is a poorly managed company that works only because of its collusion with Ca state.
I have installed 21 solar panels and I have a propane powered generator. My intention is to eventually move to batteries as well so I can be as independent of PgE as possible.
Does not matter because all of them are essentially run by California's Public Utilities Commission. Everything that these companies can do differently is ultimately decided by corrupt and incompetent people in PUC. All this leads to terrible decisions.
In a world where companies have to keep consumers happy we get better and better products each year. You want meat without killing animals ? You get that too.
In a world where companies have to only make government employees happy you get outcomes that make government employees happy and consumers being treated as shit.
Doesn't California pay way more for energy than other states? Not sure it makes sense to look at what they're doing and call it the future. It would be nice if it were free but the cost is something like double neighboring states.
Exactly. In San Diego the peak electricity price is $0.75/kWH, the highest in the continental USA. There is literally a functional nuclear reactor sitting idle a few miles north at San Onofre, and NIMBYs oppose nearly everything all new construction and upzoning.
California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.
A nuclear plant will earn money based on wholesale prices, not retail prices, and certainly not one-time peak retail prices. Wholesale prices are much lower. Note that for much of the day it's around $0.04/kWh. Batteries will reduce the evening peak.
One party rule is almost never a good thing over the long run as politicians tend to become more self-serving and corrupt the longer they don't have to worry about being held accountable to voters. Instead they worry more about being accountable to their party leaders and funders who try to maintain the status-quo. Not sure the duopoly we have in the USA is preferable compared to say a robust democracy with smaller parties forming coalitions.
Take 30-60 minutes and read up on ranked choice voting, if you aren't familiar. I talk to a lot of people about it and the idea that we can vote any other way seems foreign to most.
It won't instantly change the world, but it will allow people to vote their true conscience vs. strategic voting, and allows smaller parties a chance at real power.
> The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.
Seattle voted the two progressives on city council out (and Sawant retired) some time ago, homelessness has gone nowhere but worse since then. Like clockwork, we're adding another ~1000 street homeless/year.
As it turns out, the opposite-of-progressives don't have a solution for it either. Which isn't surprising, since they've held most of the council seats and the mayor's office for decades, it's just that now they don't have a progressive boogieman to blame for their failures. Meanwhile, Broadway and Pike and Denny and Pine look worse than they ever have, and so do the streets surrounding them.
It's almost like homelessness is an emergent property of a housing shortage.
What is the current composition of the city council? Are any of the members actually conservative, or just not-progressive? Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?
The council shifted hard-right last election, and Bruce Harrell (former council chairman and career politician who has blamed everyone but himself for the city's failures in years past) has a full slate supporting him.
The slate's politics seems to be pro-out-of-state-business/landlord/police, anti-density, anti-pedestrian, anti-homeless NIMBYism. Politically positioned as the common-sense solution to the insane progressive politics that have been ruining the city.
The metrics aren't exactly on their side. SPD continues to be an incredible combination of overpaid, unaccountable, incapable of hiring, useless, and actively dangerous to the public, the homeless numbers keep growing, rents and cost of living are rising, and the council is doing everything it can to stonewall the state's efforts to solving the housing crisis in the city.
> Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?
It might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of highly paid people moving into an area which didn't build enough housing units to support them, thus displacing tens of thousands of people out of the margins and onto the street.
It probably didn't have as much to do with (a loud) minority of progressives that were on the council as we've been told.
I've only got a child's grasp of free market economics (and of musical chairs), but this seems to be the most predictable outcome of that sort of thing. When the number of people in an area exceeds the number of beds, some of those people will eventually be sleeping in tents.
The idea that the homeless are residents who have now been displaced is a misnomer, especially in Seattle. Seattle has abundant housing and welfare choices and very loose enforcement of any laws. Up north you can get a govt provided tiny home with high speed internet, if one were to choose to leave the streets.
Seattle has five-year waiting lists[1] for low-income housing, and practically no housing options for someone who is actually broke and homeless, even if they don't have an addiction.
It has some shelters, but shelters aren't housing. A shelter is a place you can (sometimes) sleep, it's not a place you can live in. And it doesn't have 9,000 empty shelter beds, to house all the street homeless, either.
You know where has abundant housing? NYC. A city with 10 times the population, but half the street homeless. Because the rest are housed. (A foreign concept to this city.)
It is in New York, and NYC doesn't look like shit thanks to it.
But sure, I guess you like seeing thousands of street homeless all day, every day.[1] Because that's what you'd get, even if they were all sheltered (which Seattle won't do, either).
P.S. It damn well is the public's responsibility when public policies create the housing crisis.
[1] Which certainly put you in opposition to the expressed preferences of this entire city.
Please name someone who is remotely close to Ronald Reagan's politics and who is in charge in California. The left is in charge. They have a supermajority.
Nixon loved big government -- two of the federal programs most despised -- the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and Title which guaranteed equal educational opportunities for women. Nixon increased Social Security Benefits, proposed making more people eligible for welfare, and offered a plan for universal health care. Nixon's Detente sought to scale back or arms race with the Soviets. Nixon was quite liberal by current standards.
Most of California’s electrical costs are due to transmission and distribution, and I believe a lot of those costs stem from reducing power-related wildfire risks.
Last time I checked, 11 states received the majority of their electricity from renewable sources, and 10/11 had cheaper rates than the national average, with California being the exception.
PG&E (California's electric utility) books over $2 billion a year in profit - the equivalent of a $110 charge per month on every California household's bill at their 12.5% profit margin. Despite that, they claim insolvency and fight payouts to fire-injured taxpayers
I wonder how much of the costs are due to "negawatts", investment in energy efficiency. Do that enough and you layer large capital costs on the system that the utility can charge for.
Texas could be a good example that is ramping up more battery usage without having massive energy prices. Granted the energy system in Texas needs other changes (feb 2021 winter storm for instance!) but it could end up being a good template in the long run.
> In Texas, many batteries today are actually increasing carbon-dioxide emissions, according to one analysis. That’s because operators focus on maximizing revenue and sometimes charge with coal or gas power.
Sounds like they're still using using environmental externalities to subsidize their costs.
Regardless, the results are the same. Batteries are the future.
People are leaving California because it's too expensive. It's nice to internalize externalities. But if the result is that people leave then it's not really solving the problem. You've just shifted the emissions to Texas. Same for manufacturing that goes to China.
This assumes the losses to emigration are higher than the efficiency improvements. I suspect that's not how it works out in practice, but I don't have the data to support this.
It's also reasonable to assume internalizing externalities can drive efficiency improvements everywhere. Would batteries by as efficient and available for installation in TX if CA hadn't subsidized them for a decade prior?
Other states can free-ride off of some of these innovations. But we also have to put up with the ways in which California regulations regarding fuel efficiency or whatever else hurt our markets. It's not clear that California's subsidies outweigh these effects.
Without data, we're firmly restricted to the realm of hypotheticals, but even there I'm struggling to comprehend how this would work. Can you provide an example of such an effect?
California said they want no ICE vehicle sales by 2035 or something. They're also restricting ICE 18 wheelers. This has a huge impact on the viability of manufacturing these products for nationwide purchase. My guess is the goals will not be met. California may even have a backlash. But in the meantime markets will have been collateral damage.
People leaving California is a good thing both for California and the places they go.
There’s a massive housing crisis in CA. Getting people out of it reduces demand which is the only solution if you persistently cannot or will not solve supply.
The Texas energy grid is actually greening rapidly. Although everyone deploying solar in Texas should also deploy a local battery. If you don’t you can’t run your solar when the grid is down.
The greatness of the Texas energy market is the fact that the grid goes down all the time. So deploy solar and a battery so you don’t die in the winter cold and the summer heat.
Most of the cost of energy is the fossil fuels themselves, or taxation to discourage use. The cost of photovoltaic power seems to be governed by a scaling law, that has held for several decades now. [1] It is now cheaper than fossil fuels in sunny regions for electricity generation, without subsidy or other incentive. Even cautious estimates of further improvement, produce rather pleasing scenarios a few decades out.
One needs to specify if this means "cheaper than a new construction fossil fuel plant" or "cheaper than operating an existing fossil fuel plant". Whether a CO2 tax is involved should also be specified. Things will really take off when existing plants can no longer compete (particularly in places like the US where overall demand is growing slowly, if at all). Of course, this will depress the price of the fuel (natural gas is in the doldrums in the US) which will delay things.
The LCOE of solar is lower than the LCOE of fossil fuels. That includes setup costs. But it also of course wins without it for both sources because you don’t need to buy the fuel. It’s not yet there if you’re also looking at the broader cycle that includes operating battery storage. The LCOE of battery and hydrogen fuel tech then depends on the price of the energy. So it’s very difficult to define. But it is getting there.
The important point is that if one already has fossil fuel plants, you have to compare the marginal cost of operating those plants vs. the full cost (including capital cost) of replacing them with renewables (CO2 costs included if any). Otherwise, they'll just keep operating the fossil fuel plants. Eventually the fossil fuel plants will age out and be replaced in an apples-to-apples comparison, but that could take decades.
Not quite. LCOE is useful building out capacity but it varies tremendously based on land availability / suitability and the feasibility of getting it into the transmission system. So these things have huge error bars. These are also about cost of producing the energy. What we need to think about is also the demand for energy. Solar is infinitely cheaper (that is, negative prices) at the ideal times. But then it’s gone entirely at others.
Gas is very good for those consistent other times. Batteries are not. Batteries are better for the excess demand during those off times. they offset the backup peaker gas plants as mentioned in the article.
All of which to say the batteries can eat away at the margins of gas plants, but it is incrementally less cost effective to replace each one.
If you operate in an environment where you can supply renewables outside of solar time in quantities high enough to not need the gas, the gas plants will become a lot less useful. Hydro power is the king here. If you don’t have that gas is still probably pretty important.
It might get to the point where a lot of these gas plants are less profitable because they expected to be more relevant and will not be able to justify their fixed costs. But shutting down those plants is probably more expensive to society than just subsidizing them to stay open.
So it’s complicated. The energy and battery side of the inflation reduction act has been HUGE though. Society doesn’t really get how much of an important investment the Biden admin has done here
Current nuclear fission reactors can safely and reliably supply all our electricity needs. France rapidly built out their nuclear fleet in response to the 1973 oil crisis, achieving more than 70% of their electricity generation within 20 years. If the political will is there, it can be done.
The problem is that Western elites are corrupt and incompetent. They foolishly outsourced their manufacturing to a rival nation, which is now the rising superpower. Germany shut down its nuclear reactors and spent hundreds of billions on solar, while their manufacturing sector implodes from high electricity prices.
Corporate elites are increasingly extractive as exemplified by rising wealth gap, housing / healthcare / education costs, enshittification of internet platforms, etc. Any narrative which justifies price increases is gleefully propagated by the media hegemons. Climate change is used to markup prices on everything so consumers can feel self-righteous paying through the nose. Yet none of this will make a difference. China, India, and Africa will continue burning the cheapest fuels available to support their development.
Last I checked, the going rate is roughly 3.5 Billion for 3 MJ. Cost coming down quickly though! Only a couple dozen orders of magnitude to go and it’ll blow solar out of the water!
I hear it is 2x to 3x that much depending on time of day in Santa Clara. Also, people built solar when there were different rules. The new rules make it much less advantageous.
That's right, batteries! They enable us to capitalize on energy price fluctuations.
You can of course charge them however you like, but I have a feeling Santa Clara's purported 3x price fluctuations are not due entirely to natural gas.
No. If you get the time of use plan in Santa Clara it's 4 cents more on-peak vs. off-peak [1]. The situation with PG&E's rates is completely asinine and is a political failure more than anything else.
You’re probably hearing that from people who are in Santa Clara but somehow served by PG&E rather than Silicon Valley Power (the municipal utility). Maybe they are right on the city boundary, or they live in some other city in Santa Clara County (SVP only serves the city of Santa Clara). PG&E off-peak rates for Silicon Valley are 40-60 cents/kWh.
My time-of-use rate plan for PG&E (EV2-A) drops to its cheapest price at 12am–I'm guessing that's the cause of the spike. I start my car charging at 12:05am. I wish they offered an even more dynamic rate plan.
Dynamic tariffs (aka real-time or wholesale plans) are becoming more common in the UK an EU. These are usually priced by 30-min periods and announced 24h in advance. More modern utilities will offer apps that control when your car is charged (in exchange for cheaper rates). But I agree, optimizing this is fun too. I'm building support for configuring Tesla Powerwall systems based on dynamic tariffs.
If you have the option, the best time to charge your car would be during the day when there is abundant solar.
In the long run, it makes sense to consume power when renewables can supply it, instead of having to store it in a battery and use it later.
In the short term however, renewables can't scale up in demand, so you're actually likely to require that the load is served from dispatchable power, which is probably either gas, hydro, or battery.
I don't think there's really any good time to charge it then. If solar was ever underutilized, I would assume there would be no gas in the mix at that point in time, but there is no such time.
On gridstatus, you can see how much renewable power is being curtailed (purposefully lowering output below what could be produced): https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
Its... several GW in the middle of the day recently. So, this suggests charging EVs during this time would actually allow for better utilization of available renewables.
Another metric you can look at is if the grid scale batteries are currently charging or not. If they are charging, this suggests there is excess capacity available (or at least inexpensive capacity). The hours when grid batteries are charging are probably also good hours to charge EVs.
In the UK we have at least one company buying and selling electricity in 30 minute window rates. These windows are published 8 hours ahead based on predicted generation.
With a battery and minimal software, you can buy low, sell high, keep enough for yourself, factor in EV charging, solar generation, etc etc.
Battery pays for itself in 5 years, and with enough takers, the grid gets superb smoothing, delaying the need for central infra upgrades.
By which I meant to say: this is what we should be incentivising. Government could lend, get the upfront price down to 10% of what it is now, and share the return to get their investment plus interest back within 15y.
Homeowner still benefits from reduced bills, and the grid gains massive distribution diversification. Win win.
Does anyone know how to find good solar contractors? Every time I seem to search for professionals I find a bunch of blogs about superficial details about solar installations instead of someone to actually install a system.
Ask your neighbors with solar who they used and if hey liked working with them, and also get a lot of estimates from lots of local contractors. You will see all kinds of system proposals when you do this. Go with the contractor that you like dealing with who has a good system proposal. A good sign for me was when someone was willing to make changes; eg, use micro inverters vs optimizers for my complex roof geometry.
You can't figure out who's good online, interview the local companies. Locals will also get you through the permitting and code compliance process too.
Also, don't overlook the "services" category of CL (e.g. https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/bbb?query=solar%20instal... it still carries the same "call a rando" risk as does hiring any contractor, but it can be easier than filtering out the higher budget Yelp businesses. Sometimes they list in the for-sale category, too as CL is wont to do
There is a company[0] here in rural Virginia buying up huge swaths of land (100-500+ acres) and filling them up with solar panels. From an energy perspective, it's wonderful. On the other hand, it is quite literally changing the views of our precious Blue Ridge Mountains from hills and mountains with seas of green pasture to rows of solar panels as far as the eye can see.
I had a friend who actually moved when a 100+ acre solar farm was built just upstream, and maintained by heavy regular spraying of herbicides.
Solar is great, but IMO we should be somehow encouraging rooftop solar (which, yes, is more expensive!) in order to reduce pressure on wilderness and agriculture.
Before someone jumps in with the efficient market hypothesis, fundamentally the problem is that wilderness services aren't easily priced correctly, but solar has suddenly made chopping down wilderness (more) easily monetizable.
I think parking lots are the ideal place for large scale solar. They have already destroyed the local environment, and anything shading black asphalt will be an improvement for local temperature.
Other plusses are that they are close to electric demand (business, homes, and EVs), and people prefer to park in shade.
The downside is there's no existing structure to install the panels, so that's more steel used to mount the panels.
> I think parking lots are the ideal place for large scale solar.
There are numerous examples of that around where we live, in the foothills of the mountains north of Phoenix, where there are also lots of recent modern construction projects. One nice installation at a school a few minutes away has the panels on structures providing shade, all over blacktop, as you thought of.
This is quite upsetting, and yet not at all a surprise. We're taking the same damaging approach to power that we always have, but now with solar.
In addition to the sibling comments, another better approach is to blend solar with farming, to grow shade-loving crops and reduce evaporation. They'll still use pesticides, no doubt, but not more than ordinary farming.
The problem is that agriculture is limited in hilly uplands (which are ecologically the most important places to avoid deforesting) because you don't want a tractor to tip over. However those places can now be cleared for solar.
>That wilderness isn’t going to be there anyway if we don’t address climate change as fast as we can.
By the same token, fixing climate change won't matter if we don't have any wilderness services left.
Either crisis will be catastrophic, and we need to fix both. I sometimes worry that we focus too much on just GHG climate change, to the exclusion of other issues like biodiversity, water, soil, etc.
We have the same discussion here where I live with wind turbines, but if that's what it takes to bridge the gap to fusion, I think we can live with it for a generation.
Migratory birds might disagree. I'm strongly against industrialisation of wild landscapes - every wind turbine requires ground infrastructure and service roads, I'm surprised that some people are okay with that but strongly oppose nuclear with it's ridiculously small environmental footprint.
In exchange for medium to long term poverty in fossil fuel dependent regions. Good for those that want to buy up cheap land and property, not so good for the people in those regions.
At some level people are just going to have to accept negative changes in order to move away from carbon.
We have the same issue around me with people chaining themselves to bulldozers and pushing for animal sanctuary designations just so they can avoid having to see windmills on the horizon.
I won't believe this is a problem at all until seeing actual photos. I've seen people on here complaining how light pollution is 'ruining our beautiful skies' because stars aren't as clear inside a massive city.
I am about to get battery backup and solar installed in an already electrified house. Seems like the best thing I can currently do to reduce my carbon footprint. However, I can't help wonder if I should be worried about the finite resources used to create the batteries and the impact of the waste created when the batteries reach their end of life. Is this a sustainable model for energy storage?
However, you're doing the right thing. It's important to not let the great become the enemy of the good. Yes, there is work to be done to make batteries zero impact. But no matter what's happening in the world of batteries it is nothing compared to the extraordinary destructive force of coal, oil, and gas globally.
The rare metals in your battery will be recovered at a rate of 95% and used in a new battery that will probably store more energy with the same amount of metals. Batteries seem pretty sustainable.
What rare metals are in LFP batteries? Lithium? We have a lithium glut.
It should be noted that if an electric vehicle has 70 KWh of batteries in it, then electrifying the 283 million motor vehicles in the US would need 20 TWh of batteries. This is considerably more than would be needed to convert the US grid to 100% renewables (assuming proper use of non-battery storage technologies as well for longer term storage). The implication here is that if BEVs win, then a renewable grid is not a big additional step.
Do you worry about the finite materials you use when you get a plastic container, or buy a car, or appliances, or stone countertops?
This is a very odd belief to have when it comes to batteries, because we are nowhere close to even discovering how much, say, lithium we have easily available, and more deposits are discovered all the time these days. Nobody bothered to identify them in the past, so we are looking now.
Also, batteries will be far more recycled than, say, your furniture or all the other things in the house. They are expecting >90% recovery of the materials, and in the 10-20 years of use, battery technology advances so much that when they get remade into more batteries, that 90% recovery will store even more electricity than the 100% of materials did the first time.
While I'm glad people are having these concerns, in general, they should be concerns about all aspects of consumed goods, not just the goods that are already doing the most to reduce environmental impact.
Sodium batteries are on the verge of commercialization, they're better in almost every way but energy density, making them ideal for energy storage imo. My hope is that this and other steps like this will make battery storage sustainable.
I'd be interested in seeing an estimate of the battery costs to the grid, and also next winter's data. but if battery costs and material requirements are reasonable, and this deployment is not the result of an overinvestment in renewables, this is probably the first significant example of renewables getting a reasonable deployment plan.
Batteries are generally better for short term storage, aka daily usage. Pumped hydro is generally better for long term storage. We need both, but we can generally efficiently get to 70-90% carbon-free electricity without long term storage so we haven't need much long term storage yet.
> Pumped hydro is generally better for long term storage
Up to a point. Very long term storage is another thing again.
This twitter/X post has a very nice animated graphic of the predicted evolution of storage technologies over time (from 2020 to 2030), plotted against two attributes: duration of discharge, and # of cycles per year.
Li-ion batteries and hydrogen are expanding the areas where they would dominate; pumped hydro is shrinking. Compressed air is getting squeezed out (no pun intended).
PHES consumes surprisingly little water, even in a desert. It's an order of magnitude less than evaporated by a thermal power plant of the same energy throughput.
Of all the non-metric units in use today, watt-hours has to be the worst. It causes so much confusion. A Pulitzer Prize winning institution reporting on our climate and energy crisis can’t get it right:
“Over the past three years, battery storage capacity on the nation’s grids has grown tenfold, to 16,000 megawatts.”
For batteries you need two measures at minimum: power (what you can get out when the battery is fully?/half?/?? charged) and energy. But there's more because a battery's power output might not be stable, and it might not be linear with remaining charge.
Don't stop reading there! The next three words are "on the nation's grids" (at least in the first occurrence of the phrase). When dealing with grids, capacity always refers to power measurements.
The journalists did not mess up anything, they are actually using the correct units used by people who run grids, build grid assets, plan grids, etc. The only people who are confused are those who don't know about grids, but know a few things about electricity in other contexts.
No, you're actually reading it wrong. Its a unit of power, not energy. You can follow the link on that line and see the EIA also using watts.
It's talking about the ability to supply power to the grid, not how long it can supply that power. It's arguable how useful a measure that is but they're certainly using it correctly. IMO they're also talking about it in a reasonable way- capacity and power are pretty closely related for batteries, and the ability to pick up demand is critical to handling instability.
Watt-hours are inconsistent with the relatively standard meter-kilogram-second system. The joule is a watt-second and fits with MKS, but nobody is using that term for grid energy -- because hours are generally easier to work with.
I have, however, seen fellow laypeople regularly confuse power with energy (describing kW when they mean kWh and vis-a-versa) as OP thought the quote did. I'm not sure if sticking to kW and kJ would actually fix that.
The MW measurement for batteries is an important metric. The maximum power draw is important. If you only report one measurement it should likely be storage capacity (energy), but power is a close second.
"battery storage capacity on the nation’s grids has grown tenfold, to 16,000 megawatts"
"California now has 10,000 megawatts of battery capacity on the grid"
After reading all of the comments below, i only find tangential reference to the fact that MW (or any kind of Watts) is not a measure of capacity. Even the tangential comment, that MWh is not MKS, doesn't highlight that the article never mentions MWh, everything is described in terms of MW, which is obviously power, not energy.
It seems even the referenced state reports make the same error:
As an actual lefty (not a woke-nut (or a wing-nut)) I'm not a fan of Gov Gavin. But the article wasn't really political, whereas the overwhelming majority of comments here are.
It doesn't shine a favorable light on the HN community in terms of being technically focused...
There are companies attempting to recycle them into new batteries, such as Redwood Materials, but from what I know, recycled lithium is more expensive than fresh lithium today.
The problem with used EV batteries is that they've started to degrade, and they degrade in chaotic ways, so you can't offer a predictable product made from old cells. Some cells may have shorts internally, others may have evaporated some electrolyte, or the electrodes may have degraded. Right now, lithium recovery is quite primitive from used cells. I've tried to reuse used batteries myself for storage, and the unpredictable wear made me give up.
Also, EV batteries, which are optimized for power density, may not be the best choice for home storage, where you want the ability to deep cycle to buffer power usage as the NYT article describes. The NMC cells common in EV's don't like to sit at above 90% state of charge (this cutoff is arbitrary, but > 90% results in fast breakdown), and they don't like to go below 20%, so you have a useful range of 70% of the capacity. You can over-provision by 30% or you can use lithium-iron-phosphate cells, which are less power dense, but much more tolerant of deep cycling.
I set my home up like this a long time ago. I use 100% of my solar and export nothing to the CA grid due to batteries. It's not cost effective to do this given the cost of storage when I set this up, but it's really neat to someone of my nerdy predisposition. My goals originally were to have solar based backup power, because I lose power quite a lot despite living in silicon valley, and it's worked great for that too.
Yeah making it way more expensive and causing inflation. Yesterday my local grocery had a $29 bag of coffee on clearance... regular $39. If this continues it will transform politics as well.
the covid-era money printing is one of the biggest causes of today's inflation (but granted there are a few more). This is like high-school level econ here.
Agreed, it was a choice between a depression or inflation so we printed. It is also driven by industry consolidation leading to price gouging as there is no longer effective market competition.
Agreed, though there was a perfect target sitting right in the middle.
Not that I am blaming anyone, I think it was handled pretty well. It seems to me that people fail to realize it's only an easily balanced equation when looking at it historically and a shit show looking forward.
A significant amount of the covid stimulus going to grift and fraud was always the inevitable outcome for that administration. They explicitly removed any auditing provisions from the bill before it passed.
The phrase should be read as "oversimplified Econ". If it were just about the money supply, increasing interest rates, which reduces money supply by suppressing loans, as well as the end to the money handouts during the shutdown, would have been enough to take care of it. But there's also market concentration which has allowed big players to raise prices a lot more than their costs have been raised, increasing their profits.
Good coffee is 20$/lb. That was largely true before covid and "inflation". Most actual premium stuff has not increased in price much, as compared to the """premium""" lines of household brands which HAVE increased in price
Hank Green runs https://good.store/collections/all-coffee which is specialty/premium sourced coffee, with ethical business management where the coffee growers get to own and be involved with more of the process.
It's not bad coffee like Folgers. Sure, r/coffee connoisseurs that only buy $20 beans, $500 grinders, and $500 espresso machines won't drink the Costco stuff, but for the average coffee enjoyer they're decent quality. I doubt they're subsidized since you'll also find $5 pounds at Trader Joe's.
"The researchers found that between 1980 and 2020, growing regions were more prone to experiencing too-cold temperatures. “The current climate, however, is characterised by too-hot conditions in every region,” they found, adding that “the vast majority of coffee regions never experience too-cold growing season temperatures”.
Article claims that between 2021 and 2023 (a span of 3 years)
these regions experienced "Too-hot conditions", prior it was too cold.
Ideal regions have climate similar to Hawaii, where it fluctuates between 16 and 28 degrees celsius, all year round.
Assuming I take the articles seriously:
Using your last 3 data points to make sweeping projections, when they counter the previous year's data doesn't seem like very good science.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240507100100/https://www.nytim...