"Home Batteries" Power Houses For a Week

tjansen writes "Panasonic has announced plans to create 'home batteries.' They are lithium-ion batteries large enough to power a house for a week, making energy sources such as solar and wind power more feasible. Also, you can buy energy when it is cheapest, and don't need to worry about power outages anymore."

Comments

Boom.

[ScrewMaster]

I don't trust lithium-ion technology enough to want something with that much capacity in my basement. Wouldn't want my house to look like this

I have a thousand watt-hour battery that runs my sump pum during a power failure, but it's lead-acid. They've been around for a loooong time and are pretty damn stable (even so, this one is in a concrete-walled sump room.) Lithium-ions have a ways to go before they can be considered as trustworthy, and their higher energy density just makes them that much more dangerous during a catastrophic failure. Yet another reason why I'd never buy a hybrid vehicle. The idea of sitting atop a massive lithium-ion battery pack makes me far more nervous than I've ever been about a tank of gasoline.

Re:Boom.

[Mortaegus]

The idea really isn't to backup your power during an outage. The idea is to store power collected with on-site measures such as solar/wind and use the battery during times when these local power measure's aren't supplying enough. Another point would be to purchase power from the electric company when demand is low, and store for use when demand is high. Power companies could signal that demand is too high and the load is about cause problems, and people could switch to their reserves, in order to prevent damage to the grid. (Such as happens frequently when everybody runs their air coolers in the summer). I think that this would be a good measure to prevent the problems that cause blackouts, but I don't think it should, in all cases, be the consumer putting forth the effort to fix things. (At least in the US they need fixing). The power companies should put a few of these in the ground, and THEY can activate them when the need is there, rather than asking customers to handle it for them. Else they can damn well charge us a lot less than 60 cents per kilowatt hour. (Newark).

Re:Boom.

[Sir_Lewk]

On the other hand, very many households have massive oil or propane tanks in their basements. Gasoline just doesn't happen to be all that great for heating your house.

Battery maintenance

[x_hexdump_x]

Large UPS are common for data centers. But they are expensive and time consuming to maintain. In a data center the cost and time are justified. But for a home I would question the value.

Wrong technology

[Mprx]

The only advantage of lithium batteries is high energy density, which is irrelevant for a static installation. For powering something as long lasting as a house it would be better to use something more robust. Nickel-iron batteries have low energy density but are very robust. I wouldn't want a house battery I'd have to replace every few years.

Re:Tense

[ScrewMaster]

This is just hype. I for one will not be buying the $150k batteries that need special zoning permissions and need to be replaced every 3 years.

Cost is around $50K a year? That wouldn't make economical sense for anyone. Is there anyone here who shells out $50k a year to their electric company? Didn't think so.

Well, if the things had a decent service life (15-20 years, say) and could be installed as part of the purchase price of a new home, and provided sufficient economic benefits to be worth the investment, I could see it happening. Maybe. But a pack with a 3-5 year lifetime is not going to cut the mustard. As I mentioned above, I have a 105AH Hawker AGM lead-acid gas-recombinant battery that runs my sump pump. Supposedly rated for 15 years service life, and banks of these things are used in load-leveling applications in large buildings. I once figured out how many of them it would take to run my house for a week, and frankly it was too many. So you'd need something more energy-dense for a whole-house application, but that's still a lot of energy to be packing away in an uncontrolled environment like a home.