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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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]
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 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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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'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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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!)
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?
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“…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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised to find out it's aussie slang; I always thought it was slang local to South Africa :-/
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.
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.
Unlike microinverters that are notoriously unreliable, DC optimizers so far have excellent long-term reliability.
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.
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.
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]
So yeah, there are businesses that'll do it.
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.
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.
Better to DIY or at least do really good market research first.
This channel on youtube is an excellent resource and explains everything for anyone one who is a DIYer.
https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse
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.
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.
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.
This article blurs the lines between the cells and battery system, too.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most solar charge controllers allow a certain amount of PV overprovisioning.
[1] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I5kzJIeV4Ds/VFSHUX3374I/AAAAAAAAA...
Not really a thing in Toronto.
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.
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.
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.
https://geizhals.de/?cat=bmseswresp&sort=t&hloc=at&hloc=de&v...
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
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'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.
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.
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...
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.
It'd be great to replace it with an LFP battery.
Will Prowse on youtube I think has some videos comparing and contrasting the different units for this purpose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
A 410W solar panel at 29€? I really doubt that honestly. Cheaper than plywood.
Comely divorced from the real world materials and ecology.
470W + even cheaper inverters seems likely.
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...
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.
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.
Sorry what? Currently I'm happy to buy 5 kWh units for €1300.
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.
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.
[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
...
> 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?
For stationary battery like the use case describe for in house. I would assume sodium has a much better chance of winning over.
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!
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
Remember a large part of your electrical bill is paying for the grid, not just the energy it transports.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vermont utility proposes to install battery storage in most homes https://environmentamerica.org/updates/vermont-utility-propo...
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.
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.
But your batteries will last much much longer at the lower cycle depth
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.
Certainly most of us who think of buying electric vehicles would want to actually drive them around.
The difference is what side of the electrical box your equipment is on.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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?
Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 understand 12 volts, but why not a 12 volt Li battery? I don't know.
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
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240618645137/en/Gre...
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40878252
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.
Nice to see blog
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
The price jump from $150 to $250 was in 2017.
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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
What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?
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.
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.
For context, the global electricity consumption in 2019 was around 23 TWh [1].
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
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!
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.
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
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.
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/...
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/...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.