Texas has these free electricity nights. Anyone know of a battery system that can fill the batteries at night (from the grid) and use them during the day? And then recharge at night again. Due to location solar isn’t an option but still interested in batteries due to free nights.
No batteries I know of will make economical sense though. Batteries are expensive, wear down and/or require maintenance. After x years / cycles your batteries will be dead and will need to be replaced.
Storing your "free" energy in a battery will end up costing more than just buying the energy when you need it.
Expensive energy storage is a big part of the reason why "green" energy countries like Germany have some of the highest energy prices in the world. And also some of the highest CO2 emissions per kWh in the EU (they need coal and gas powered plants as backups for when there's no wind and solar, because batteries don't make economical sense).
I agree about home batteries being too expensive, hopefully prices will come down with scale.
But the part about battery degradation is not true. Tesla Powerwall has a 10 year warranty[1] with 70% capacity retention. This means that Tesla has data showing that the battery will have higher capacity than 70% after those years. That's a lot of cycles and a lot of renewable energy that the battery will provide in its lifetime.
There's a reason why Tesla picks 10 years (8 years for car batteries) as a warranty period. Ask yourself: why 8 years and not 10 for cars? Why 10 years and not 15 or 20 years for home batteries? It's not arbitrary.
Battery degradation is not linear. It's not like: 10 years = 70%, 20 years = 40%. It's probably closer to 20 years = 20 % capacity left. The decay becomes exponential-like after a relatively linear period of roughly 10 years.
The Tesla warranty will fall under "first life" in the image in the link above.
So batteries (even Tesla Powerwalls) do degrade and do degrade to the point where you need to replace them a bunch of times during lifetime of a house.
Tesla and other car makers set their warranties at the mandatory minimums. Why would they offer more when they don't have to and consumers find them long enough and/or other car makers aren't competing on warranty length? That doesn't tell you anything about battery longevity.
Edit: Does my MacBook Pro die after 1 year when it's applecare warranty is over?
The mandatory minimums? Got a source of the mandatory minimum for cars (US and/or EU) as well as power walls?
The fact that other car makers aren't competing on warranty length seems to me to prove my point, but you seem to think it doesn't? What I mean is: if battery degradation for cars isn't that bad after 8 years, then why are other brands not offering significantly longer warranties to compete with the Tesla one?
Not sure about the competition argument anyway, since Tesla didn't have any competition initially and arguably still doesn't have real competition (depending on what features of the car you value most).
Edit: Does my MacBook Pro die after 1 year when it's applecare warranty is over? --> Pretty close yes IMO. My personal experience is that my laptop and phone battery capacities degrade very fast after 1 year and need to be replace after about 2 years, 3 years if you really really push it and are OK with constantly charging.
RE: MacBook Pro dying close to a year right after it's warranty it over --> well now you're just trolling. My iPhone 15 pro battery still maintains 100% battery health a year after its manufacturing date. It obviously won't need replacing in 1-2 more years even if I "really really push it and are OK with constantly charging". I used an iPhone XS until last year after it was about 5 years old, 5x longer than your supposed device-dead date. I don't think this is unusual.
LFP cells prices for direct sale to consumer are about 70 EUR/kWh right now. With 5000 cycles that's 1.4 EUR cent per kWh cycled out of the battery, so it fully makes economical sense in all electricity markets.
Fully integrated consumer battery prices haven't (yet) followed the decline in cell price, probably because there's lot of demand for this kind of product.
The real number is likely still significantly higher than 0,12 EUR / kWh due to battery capacity (and charge discharge efficiency) going down due to wear over time.
It does look like when the price of integrated storage products goes down more, it could become interesting for countries who have had very expensive energy policies (Denmark, Germany, Netherlands etc).
Your computation is off: it's 0.014 EUR/kWh, ten time less and far below kWh market prices about everyhere in the world.
As for cycling the industry standard is give the number of cycles to 80% capacity remaining so the battery is far from dead at 5000 cycles. The simple division I used is conservative.
No, it's not. From the link I posted (in Dutch unfortunately, I'll translate the relevant bit):
Small integrated battery:
3.5 kWh
Starting at about € 2.100,-
You yourself indicated in your post that integrated batteries (as in: the ones with battery management, that you can actually use to store energy in as opposed to a bunch of lose cells) are more expensive. They are more expensive indeed. I did the calculation. They boil down to 0,12 EUR / kWh in the example above.
The price of cells is not directly relevant, since you can't actually buy cells and just throw them at your house to magically start charging/discharging when you desire.
Well I bought cells a few years ago and use them with the necessary components, and those don't multiply the system price by ten.
BTW because I'm lazy to expand my system I just ordered 14 kWh of fully packaged LFP battery (box, BMS, cells, breaker) for $1800, $130/kWh, $0.026/kWh cycled.
Not sure why you consider them to be "green" given the facts you brought up. Germany has never been particularly green energy wise. It's a big population and lots of heavy industry with relatively little energy resources like hydro.
The are building solar and wind quickly now. Maybe that's why you got the impression that they are "green".
Germany is still very much captured by its coal lobby. The extent to which they are green is that they have a fairly vocal green party .. with 14% of the vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens
(This is incomprehensible to Anglosphere FPTP two-party systems)
The reason I wrote "green" is because, Germany actively hypes itself up as being very green and many people believe them because they have such a vast amount of solar and wind installed.
Germany's energy policy is one huge cognitive dissonance at best, gross mismanagement in the base case and a three-decade-long foreign intelligence job at worst.
This is a bit like the joke about economists seeing money on the ground and not picking it up because if it was there someone would have already taken it, but:
Note how ridiculously fast the battery rollout in Texas and California has been recently.
If you've not got some local regulation that stops early adoptors from being left high and dry when the market changes, then you're in head to head competition for that cheap nighttime energy with big corporations building out grid scale batteries.
You would have to be able to store a significant portion of your daily usage to make it worthwhile and that's before you even consider the price of the batteries.
It's a weird vibe going on in this post. A lot of people are cheering the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I wonder how many know that the Taliban has all biometric/financial data that the US left behind enabling them to round up anyone who ever helped the US.
Sell it back at night when there's already a surplus of electricity? This is exactly why they want EV's charging at night, because there's less demand.
In a lot of places, peak supply is during the day now. Overnight conditions are more about a lack of demand than a surplus of supply (although they're sort of equivalent), but really the most effective use would be charge while the sun shines, dump the battery onto the grid when you get home, and then charge slowly overnight after the end of peak. Assuming there's no downsides from cycling your battery and you and the system have perfect knowledge of your evening plans.
Depending on the renewables mix the grid settles on, selling some back during the night might make sense. Both solar (obviously) and wind (less obviously, at least to me) decrease during the night so we may find we need to supplement the generation with battery reserves during the night for demand peaks.
Nuclear and traditional dammed hydro prefer to be setup to provide extremely consistent power too so there's a gap in the power generation if we completely eliminate fossil fuels. Even if we don't completely eliminate them, peaker plants are extremely expensive to operate because their base costs and ideally low usage means their cost per megawatt is pretty high.
I there is a surplus of electricity at night, then why have batteries? There seems to be no problem at all with just spot market demand in that case!
I thought the issue was that solar panels are generating electricity during the day only. So as someone with solar, you want to sell during the day and buy at night. No?
My point is, rather than using batteries to store huge amounts of energy and lose much of it in the process, find efficiencies and use credits instead.
Typically the sell back time is in the evening, after solar production is done but before people go to bed. Also some in the early morning, albeit to a smaller degree.
Yes and assaulting someone is also illegal (whether with a weapon or not), reckless driving is also illegal (whether you are drunk or not), and violent hate crimes are illegal (whether you had discriminatory hate in your heart or not)
The existing criminal process can prosecute fraud after the fact; but there are potential FTC regulations which could make it either harder to commit it or easier to detect it, acting as a deterrent before fraud is done.
The really cool part about this is The Campaign Registry who manages 10dlc registrations... is now owned by Tata Communications. A company based in India.
> Q. Can I opt out of pre-approved offers based on NCTUE data?
> A. Yes. NCTUE provides information to companies that provide consumers with pre-approved offers of credit. If you would like to Opt-Out and exclude NCTUE information about you from being used in lists provided to companies that make pre-approved offers of credit (as provided in the Fair Credit Reporting Act), you may call us toll free at 1-888-327-4376.
> You may also submit your request via mail to NCTUE at the address below. Please include your name, address, Social Security number and date of birth in your request.
I wonder which is worse: not setting up a freeze and risk being the victim of identity theft, or setting up a freeze by submitting your info and risk having it stolen from NCTUE?
I really don’t remember. But I kept getting people creating different accounts that I wouldnt know about until it went to collections and dinged my credit. Took me a couple years to finally get it locked down. After 5ish police reports and ftc identity theft reports that all these energy/cell phone companies require for you to dispute.
It’s maddening that these companies give out service with wrong variations of my name and no ID but then want me to jump through hours of hoops to get it removed from collections.
Luckily I got it all resolved prior to rates shooting up so I was able to refi at all time low rates or this would have cost me a lot of money.
If we can be pretty confident it'll be 100 years, that's long enough for technology to progress a lot before we fiddle with it. Not sure what "soon" means in this case, but I suspect they don't mean "within a couple years".
Like there being infinite number of infinities that are ever larger, there's a seemingly infinite number of soons, each further away in time than the previous.
So I propose we invent something like aleph[1], but for soon. This way we can communicate clearly just how soon soon is.
Technological advancement doesn't happen Inna vacuum. To get good at things you have to try them. Getting good at the sort of technology required to build such a project requires trying such a project. It's not a matter of waiting 100 years, it's a matter of trial and error for 100 years.
This is true, but large engineering projects aren't a single technology. There are a lot of ways we'll improve relevant technologies without actually working on this directly. Presumably the fracking industry is improving our ability to model the subsurface, for example.
This also means other industries (such as fracking) would learn a lot from a massive Yellowstone geoengineering project, but other projects and smaller geothermal projects should make this one more feasible and predictable.
(This is how I feel about geoengineering in general: it's expensive and risky, but may end up being necessary, so let's practice on a smaller, safer scale before massive, dangerous projects become urgently needed.)
