OT: Tesla's California Battery Storage

[Caecilius]

I saw this article about Tesla and others spending billions on making batteries for grid storage:

"Tesla Motors Inc. is making a huge bet that millions of small batteries can be strung together to help kick fossil fuels off the grid. The idea is a powerful one?one that?s been used to help justify the company?s $5 billion factory near Reno, Nev.?but batteries have so far only appeared in a handful of true, grid-scale pilot projects.

That changes this week.

Three massive battery storage plants?built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.?are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to

15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.

Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that?s just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. ?It?s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at,? he said. ?Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.?

It seems they're using Lithium Ion batteries, which seems a strange choice to me as presumably the energy density is not a big issue for something that will be stationary.

I know there are a few knowledgable people in this group, so I wondered what the views are: is it something that's now worthwhile, or is it just a PR stunt or something?

[newshound]

I wouldn't dismiss it lightly, Tesla cars seem pretty impressive and who would have thought SpaceX would have got into the commercial launch business so quickly.

There's some interesting stuff about the impact of storage in these blogs

but that may not be exactly the right link (there are four parts).

If I understand correctly, storage is a good thing, but the more you try to meet demand with renewables (rather than, say, nuclear) then the more installed capacity you need. So there is a high capital cost. Also, you don't necessarily "win" on carbon because there is always a carbon cost even with green technology. You can, in theory, play all sorts of clever tunes, for example if you have lots of solar or wind capacity to spare (so that you can meet demand when there's not much sun or wind) then you could use un-needed capacity to make hydrogen or, more usefully, hydrocarbons. This is an alternative form of storage to batteries or pumped storage. The useful thing about hydrocarbons of course is that you can use them for planes, for cars, or (very efficiently) to make electricity from existing CCGT technology.

But it all comes at a cost. IIRC nuclear is still the winner for low carbon, if you do the sums completely.

[harry]

help justify

eries have so

of hard to

Using lithium I can't imagine how they'd be economically viable.

[mcp]

They have experience with that technology. In a few years, they will have a glut of "part worn" batteries which have 80% of their original capacity.

[Chris Hogg]

'Massive' is a relative term. 'massive' compared to batteries used in electric cars, I'm sure, but no mention of capacity in GWh as far as I could see on a very quick skim through.

[dennis]

Nissan are doing a home battery that uses used leaf batteries.

I just hope they know how to safely store all the waste from the continued reprocessing of these batteries.

[Vir Campestris]

"AES has completed installation and is doing final testing of a 30 megawatt/120 megawatt hour plant that?s even bigger than Tesla?s 20 MW/80 MWh."

"Tesla?s ambition to single-handedly deliver 15 gigawatt hours of battery storage a year by the 2020s"

Andy

[newshound]

The new Prius Li-ion battery is 4.4 kWh. So that corresponds to about

3.4 million of them. Obviously, that's a lot of batteries but presumably the price will come down at that scale.

I could see that American houses might have that many installed by the late 2020s, if the incentives are right. That volume of production a year implies centralised facilites rather than the "Tesla Wall" approach though. I wonder what sort of facility size would be optimal. Would you attach them to the transmission grid or the distribution grid (to use the UK terms).

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes.

[Brian Gaff]

Well if Mr Trump gets his way, cheap oil and coal will price it off the market.

Brian

[tim...]

the same 15 gigaWatts each year

or an incremental 15GW each year?

tim

[tim...]

logically perhaps

financially viable, not a chance

tim

[The Natural Philosopher]

One can but hope.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think he means an incremental 15Gwh of storage built every year.

But its all pixie dust anyway.

15GWh is less than a kilogram of Uranium in a breeder reactor. Cost about $500 at most.

Even if that's used once every day, its still only $180,000 a year.

Now a typical lithium battery is around £2/Wh, so 15Gwh is around...£30bn... or maybe $50bn +-

You can buy several nuclear reactors and fuel for life for that...

[Dave Liquorice]

Donno if the US has similar wholesale market to the UK but if you only sell when power is in short supply (which it often is in California) and the price somewhere near the stratosphere I expect they can be made to appear economic.

The figures quoted in this thread of 30 MW / 120 MWHrs or 20 MW / 80 MWHrs are tiddly little sources that have a runtime of just 4 hours...

The delivery of 15 GWHrs / year in some hand wavy period in 3 (nearer

4) years time would keep the UK running for 20 minutes... meaning that in 70 to 80 years there'll be enough built to power the UK for a day. Then you need to charge it...

[John Rumm]

That's enough capacity to meet our peak demand for nearly 20 mins.

So at that rate of expansion, we could have a days worth of storage by this time next century... (assuming we keep at current levels of consumption and don't move any significant proportion of transport or heating energy requirement over to electric of course)

[newshound]

That would put a new Prius battery at £9k. I bet it's not, and there should be real economies of scale with manufacturing at the proposed level.

Suppose you can make a 5 kWh battery for £1k. Then you give households a discount of say £100 a year on their bill for making such a battery available (or tolerating occasional disconnections). With those numbers, "powerwalls" are as attractive as solar panels, for anyone with a bit of spare cash. Now, whether that makes any economic sense to a distribution company, I have no idea. But it is no different to the current green nonsense with wind and solar.

Me, I'd live next door to a nuclear power plant, or have a ton of high active waste under my garden, no problem. With a heat pump sitting on top of it.

But it all depends on how scared the neighbours are.

[tim...]

(assuming you mean, not that much) I bet it is

Do you really think that HMG would subsidise leccy cars to the tune of 5-10K so that the battery manufacturers can run an 800% mark up?

a noble prize for you

tim

[Davey]

Maybe his love of coal will rejuvenate the Steam Car market!

[dennis]

There is no way lithium batteries are that expensive, unless you are buying dewalt power packs.

10p/Whr is probably too much.