OT: Tesla's California Battery Storage

That's LifePo4 not li-ion

and thats still 50p/Wh

So £10bn appx.

Still enough for a decent nuke.

You can buy, retail, 9Ahr 3.6v batteries for ~£3.50. That's about 30 Whrs for £3.50 so Why as much as £9k? How much extra is there in the battery pack to justify the much larger than 800% markup?

Thank you! And of course I was talking about prices in five or ten years time, assuming Tesla and others go into *serious* mass production of something much bigger than phone or drill batteries.

I should imagine that would make quite a "pop" should it suffer an internal short or other calamity. I do hope they've done the sums for the explosive potential of such a battery bank.

Tim

the possibility to accept 365 times 10 years charge ups

tim

You could mail order additional ones for some Lidl power tools. IIRC, £28 including postage.

Well, 35p/Wh in fact. So £5.3bn for 15 GWh capacity. So surely it is going to be significantly cheaper in a few years time with suitable mass production?

When it is charged up, it gives you about 9 hours at the Dinorwic output of 1650 MW. That cost £425m at 1974 prices, presumably a few billion at todays prices.

According to Wikipedia there is another 50 MW scheme scheduled to open in 2018 with a capacity of 500 MWh at a cost of £120m. That's 24p per watt-hour. In other words, not all that far off the current battery price. Now, that scheme should last half a century, much longer than the batteries will. But it will also have manning and maintenance costs.

I don't think it is quite so simple to rule out a combination of batteries with intermittent renewables.

Obviously, the more we rely on renewables, the higher the capital cost of the system (both for generating and storage plant).

Of course nukes could be much cheaper too, if we managed to get international agreements on designs and licensing.

Because the new Prius battery is 4.4 kWh, or about £500 at your battery price. I was suggesting £1k.

They seem to be talking about 44 to 66 kWh for the Tesla Model 3 batteries.

Oh indeed! I suspect that instrumentation plus mechanical and electrical protection would contribute significantly to the costs. You could put them in a hole in the ground, of course.

Windmills aren't. Oil gas and coal aren't. Why should batteries be?

Lithium costs what it costs to extract.

Intermittent renewables are *already* considerably more expensive than nukes. Adding batteries will and can only make them MORE expensive

The phrase that comes to mind is 'pissing good money after bad'

Or ignore some of what we already have d

I'm pretty sure the Stanley Steamer didn't run on coal!

Thanks. I missed that. I did say 'a quick skim'.

So the AES installation will supply 30MW for 4 hours, Tesla 20MW also for 4 hours, average about 25MW say for 4 hours. Assuming a UK average consumption of about 35GW, we'd need in the order of 1400 of those plants to keep the lights on for 4 hours (35000/25) at times of no sun, no wind and slack tide, or 8400 for 24 hours. Doable I suppose, at a price; one in every village, perhaps. At a production rate of

Of course, you'd have to significantly upgrade the power distribution network to cope with both the normal electricity demand and the extra required for recharging the flat batteries.

I think windmills are probably getting cheaper. Fossils are "mature technology", yet cost improvements are still being found (fracking). This type of battery, OTOH, is relatively new technology, and so far manufacturing has concentrated on phone and drill sizes.

True, but I still suspect a lot of the cost is assembling them reliably. And I don't believe we are going to run out of lithium.

I know that, but we are currently paying for a fair amount of solar in the UK, the Germans for even more.

It's stupid technology for the UK although it makes more sense for Las Vegas.

For once Google and Wikipedia are not very helpful: lots of steam vehicles described, without mention of the fuel. I think the very earliest ones did use coal. There were certainly solid fuel trucks during WW2.

This surely has to be a joke though?

Kerosene

That is just making redundant cells in the pack. Its why they use lots of small cells in a series + parallel arrangement. If one cell fails you just get less capacity and the mug driving the car doesn't notice. With power station sized batteries they will be swapping them out on a routine basis after a bit.

I suspect the charging would go CRAZY.

Why?

You think wrpong.

Windmills have stick at about £1m/MW or £3m offshore since 2008.

Fossils are "mature

Jesus H. Fracking is not a cost improvement. Its way more expensive.

Its because conventional oil is running out that we have to frack and that's why oil cots are GOING UP.

Try doing some sums and some research.

Well we should just stop paying for it.

The Germans can do what they like, now we don't have to pay for it.

It makes f*ck all sense there either.