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Germany Finances Major Push Into Home Battery Storage For Solar
mdsolar writes with this bit of news from Green Tech Media "The German government has responded to the next big challenge in its energy transition – storing the output from the solar boom it has created — by doing exactly what it has successfully done to date: greasing the wheels of finance to bring down the cost of new technology. ... Now it is looking at bringing down the cost of the next piece in the puzzle of its energy transition — battery storage. ... KfW’s aim, according to Axel Nawrath, a member of the KfW Bankengruppe executive board, is to ensure that the output of wind and solar must be 'more decoupled' from the grid. ... This is seen as critical as the level of renewable penetration rises to around 40 per cent — a level expected in Germany within the next 10 years. ... According to Papenfuss, households participating in the scheme will spend between €20,000 and €28,000 on solar and storage, depending on the size of the system (the average size is expected to be around 7kW for the solar array and around 4kWh for the battery)."
Stuffing everyone's basements full of LiPo batteries is just a disaster waiting to happen.
imagine 4KWh of lead-acid batteries. that is going to be so much
better for the environment!
captcha: redneck (guilty)
Big goverment always fails. Like a family you cannot run up huge credit card bills and expect the kids to pay them off. Sure things might look okay now, but in 10 years when bubsiness (and JOBS) have moved to more market driven countries, the bills come due, and the solar panels and batteries all need to be replaced who is going to pay for it all? This is why big goverment is a bad idea.
!Ron Paul 2016!
The problem with government-created, artificial markets is that the second the government money stops, so does the artificial market.
Nobody would spend their own money on solar or wind energy, because anyone expecting a return on their investment knows that these are poor investments that are likely to lose money over time.
Government has no problem losing money because they can always just take more from you.
Someone is not thinking about the CO2 produced in the process of building and maintaining the wind turbines and solar panels. Now we can add more of that with batteries. What do you do with the batteries when they wear out. It might make more sense to make hot water during the day in the winter for heat at night. The per ton cost of abating CO2 this way is insanely high, assuming we need to get rid of CO2. Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.
Been saying we should have started doing this in the USA two decades ago when i worked home construction.
Every one of those subdivision mcmansion homes we have built should have come with a solar panel on the roof and 2 volt battery array.
We built MILLIONS of them. Hell the people buying 40k homes for 200k+ you could have even sold it to them as a 'feature' and not subsidize it at all.
Between that and all the big box stores having an array on the roof. We could be powering half the entire country by solar now. And it would have cost less than a month of one of our 'wars'.
But no. Because socialisim or something. Or no wait. Solar is for hippies. Or no wait.. It's expensive. Or no wait. Solar sucks. Or no wait whats the excuse of the day now?
We're dumb.
We will see how it works out. Currently industries are considering leaving Germany for parts elsewhere due to the unreliability of the electric grid. We may finally see Germany returned to an agrarian nation that was posited as a punishment for WWII.
In the meantime, it's unlikely you will find residential consumers willing to pay for such expensive solar and battery technology. And in the US, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and some wind power will still be the rule over the next century. So let's hope those industries make their way to the US and enjoy some of our natural resources and more reliable delivery system.
I agree with the general drive towards decoupling immediate production vs. use with better energy storage, but even with improved battery technology, everyone having batteries in their house is a particularly inefficient (and high-maintenance) way of doing it. Better approaches need quite large sinks for excess energy. For example, pumped-storage hydro is good for very large amounts. For medium-sized amounts, especially transient spikes, Denmark is experimenting with (PDF) dumping the excess production into district heating, since the heat reservoir handles fluctuations better than the grid does.
Better prediction and integration between sources can also help. For example, Denmark is largely managing its fluctuating wind energy these days not by literally storing it, but by predicting much of the variation, and offsetting discretionary production within the integrated Nordic energy market. What mostly happens is that on high-wind days, Sweden and Norway just reduce production at their hydro plants, and use the excess Danish wind power instead. In a sense the excess wind therefore gets stored as potential energy in the hydro reservoirs, but just by not producing the hydro in the first place, rather than pump-storage.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Unfortunately, that's been ineffective: costs for solar have come down no faster than they would have without German government intervention. Also at EU 20-28k, you can pay for decades of electricity usage, and that's not even taking into account maintenance. Waste of money.
Molten Batteries
I was surprised to learn that the concept behind molten batteries originated in Germany with the V1. MIT and Dr Sadoway have a battery system that is supposed to be available 2014. If it was invented in Germany and has since been used for ICBMs and ordinance. Seems odd that it has taken almost 70 years to come full circle.
China will do what they did with solar, which is acquire western tech, and then subsidize and dump on Germany.
If Germany really wants to do this right, they will block ALL energy storage from China. Heck, the fact that they manipulate their money against the Euro and USD should be more than enough of a subsidy to trigger this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Where would you put this set of battery cells? I'm guessing it's not going to be something the size of a car battery... probably won't be able to store it in the basement in case it floods or the attic due to weight. So do German's have a extra space in their garage for something that may take up the floor space of a water heater or furnace?
I keep a very clean and organized garage and I'd have trouble storing another lawn mower or installing another water heater/washer/clothesdryer.
Solar has a good chance of being a very large industry in the future. Germany continues to advance, giving themselves an opportunity to be the world leaders in the industry -- the place where the skills, infrastructure, funding, supporting know-how (legal, financial, etc.) are all concentrated, like Silicon Valley for IT.
Meanwhile the "conservatives" in the US continue to obstruct progress here for political reasons, as part of their universal anti-liberal crusade. By loudly denying any idea that at any point was associated with liberals (including climate change and alternative energy), they will somehow change the facts and make conservatives "right".
In order to really be useful, Germany would have to store at least gigawatt-hours of power. This huge solar peak they have during the daytime needs to be distributed at least into the evening hours, and ideally into the morning of the following day.
Distributed solar makes sense, at least partically because the loss of efficiency due to zillions of small power generation points more-or-less balances out with the gain in efficiency because the power is consumed near where it is generated, thus eliminating transmission losses.
Distributed power storage makes a good bit less sense. Charging and discharging batteries is - depending on the situation - somewhere between 60% and 80% efficient, dropping as the batteries age. The batteries will have to be replaced every few years, which further decreases the efficiency. Gigawatt-hours of batteries - we are talking - rough estimate - around 20,000 tons of batteries per GWh. That a lot of nasty chemical, not to mention manufacturing and recycling costs.
Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full, and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
First: you make a debt by dumping some CO2 into the atmosphere to build the initial solar panels (and batteries).
Any future solar and battery creation will not add to the CO2-to-atmosphere debt, since the energy
is now from a carbon-free source.
Second: If hina wants to help germany go green and be MOER independent from oil and gas producing countries
by manufacturing cheap solar modules and batteries, then this is a good thing.
Same logic applies to point two: Once the system has been installed country wide and the source being free (sun),
the future manufacturing and replacement will be cheaper since the source is unlimited and the devices were cheap
(made in china). In the second iteration, that is in 10-20 years when the cheap (chinese) solar modules and batteries will need
replacement, the chinese will not be able to compete, because in the mean time the energy used in china to produce
solar moduels and batteries is gas/coal/oil and these will keep rising and getting moer expensive.
Meanwhile in germany, after the initial investment ... everything is just going to get cheaper by the day : )
This is the CO2 return of invest of a windturbine. Solar panel is around 10 - 15 Months or so.
This assumes that there is surplus electric power, which is undesirable, because that is some fossil fuel that could have not been burned, and could have been saved for another day.
The electricity is going to have losses, in converting to proper voltage for the battery. The battery itself has charging losses. Then, there will be more losses, when the battery's electricity is converted back to a standard voltage. Batteries cost a significant amount of money. If you are going to go through the time and money to store electricity in a battery, why not stick it into a car?
hey mate, no hard feelings about this reply but;
when you say something is a fact on the internet but you are only potentially right in some unstated hypothetical reality as opposed to RL then you just contribute to confusion and misinformation, which is becoming a really major porblem ;)
ok. my gripe; yes, if all materials are retained they should all be reusable. the issue is that this does not happen, and although lead acid are one of the most easily recycled battery, and certainly common, less than 40% of the material is recovered. this is a matter of energy economics (of the cost of reextracting the materials vs making and transporting a new one) and so lead acid batteries are only potentially green, but are not so in RL.
you would think agriculture was green too right, but major major countries presently use over 2kJ of oil per kJ of food produced. even the most efficient country in the world, agriculturally, australia only gets a slight return from the sun with about 0.9kJ of oil per kJ of food produced. sad isnt it.
and then there is peak phosphorus, etc etc.
have a nice day mate.
I own a house in Germany, unlike most readers here. To be clear, the money from the KfW is a loan, not a subsidy. The subsidy, if there is one, is that most KfW loans are interest free for the first 10 years.
The irritating thing to this home owner is that there seems to be no end to home improvements that our German government would like for me to implement. Be it tripple-paned windows, foam insulation, solar heating, solar power, and now batteries. And my house is barely 20 years old. I'm not against somebody who wants to put all these things into their home, but for this home owner, none of these things make any economic sense - even with a zero interest loan. This home owner has decided to do exactly nothing. And that in and of itself saves the environment a lot of waste.
Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full, and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.
Yeah, potential energy storage (pumping water uphill with excess energy and later letting it fall to recover the energy) is quite practical even if it isn't glamorous. It's been quietly used in the US for years - e.g., the Taum Sauk pumped storage unit in Missouri. (Whose dam failed several years ago after a limiter switch failed to cut off the pumps when the reservoir filled. Several lives were lost in the resulting flood.)
You had me worried for a moment - I misread billion as million.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'll take my socialism in the form of corporate welfare for the oil companies, than you very much.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Great success. God forbid.
I see unwelcome trends.
Those who advocate taking energy storage down to the building or subscriber level are living in a dream. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful dream! But this €20,000 unit cost will not magically come into existence. Those who envision lithium or (eventually it comes down to) lead acid batteries to the point where their effect is even detectable at grid scales are proposing an environmental nightmare in the manufacture and mass deployment of such things. Which thankfully will not come to pass because the investment capital is not there.
I go with solutions that are massive, central, run by the same people who (reliably) supply your electricity, and do not rely on evil large multipliers of objects constructed from rare earth elements or poisonous heavy metals.
I'm talking about something simple and inherently non-toxic, stored kinetic energy and rotation of heavy balanced cylinders in a near-vacuum. I vote fewer that are really big rather than many. Hoover Dam tech. Despite Beacon's bankruptcy in 2011 there are players who hope to salvage the concept using gimbals for stabilization.
I like the idea of kinetic energy storage solutions because if they were massive, centrally located and well constructed, the components would be mechanical parts that might have a smaller replacement cost than an equivalent amount of battery technology, whose chemical composition changes with age. It also fits well with my assertion that we should convert our long haul energy corridors (and generation facilities along those corridors) to native HVDC for a true inter-connected continental (and ultimately global) grid.
___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
If you hold any significant positions in incumbent utilities now is the time to think about selling before its too late. They will fight, kick, scream, but in the end the lifespan left on their business model as it currently stands is now severely limited.
The German people deserve credit for what they get right. For some reason the Germans have always seemed able to unite and take on massive projects more quickly than other nations. And I suspect their technology will be first rate in this new adventure.
Now imagine how easily most of the US can do the same. We are drowning in sunlight over a great portion of our nation. The potential of states like Florida and Texas to gather sunlight is remarkable. Most days we wish we had a little less solar light here. And we have plenty of wind and tidal energy as well. But unlike Germany we are a people at war with ourselves and our institutions and we simply can not push forward at all compared to Germany. Common resources such as wind, solar and tide seem to be shunned while things that cripple common resources are highly sought after here.
It's called picking winners and losers. Perhaps otherwise the next winners might happen in other countries first. Is capitalism the best path to making that choice?
I think they bet on new, more efficient, cleaner technologies that will replace lead-acid sooner or later (eg. liquid metal batteries) but something has to start this process of development. So yes - lead batteries might be dirty right now but overall process will cut a lot more of impact of coal in the future. Clearly they are far ahead of everyone else in this regard. Renewable energy devices prices are dropping similiarly to computer prices not so long ago. I wonder when (not if) they'll be able to push prices below coal.
Do not want or need free energy my friend.
Here's a basic rule in life: If you can question "We should have done this buy why didn't we?" it's because the Rothchilds said no. Plain and simple.
Especially if the energy used to make a PV Solar Cell is still -less- than the amount it's expected to produce, over its lifetime, PV solar energy might not be the best choice of sustainable energy to invest in.
(Batteries for -local- storage of electrical energy might be good, eg, as anything that disconnects one's home or office from mains power is a problem almost anywhere.)
In a post-Fukishima world, the EC - if not [also] Germany - should be investing in Energy from Thorium (eg, developing improvements of its proven technology from the 1950's, which even Germany has successfully trialed in the 1960's or the 1980's, I understand).
For many of the reasons (ie, features), cf Prof Dr Eduardo Greaves' [36-min.] talk "Thorium as Nuclear Fuel in Molten Salt Reactors" (on YouTube.com). (The impatient can search TED.com for Sorensen's 10-min talk & view at least its last 5 min's.)
R&D should run in parallel with Education & Debate, in the hopes that the Public will soon "get" that there are several types of reactor, some (eg, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors = LFTRs) being much -safer- than Fukushima's reactors proved to be.
We should all understand the differences between even Canada's (long ago) improved CanDo reactors (still in the same "safety class" as Fukushima's, I understand) -and- LFTRs, which are expected to be not only "walk-away safe" but also cheaper to build & run.
After people come to understand the significant differences & inherent advantages in the design of LFTRs (and their safety levels are verified in ways that give all peoples confidence to embrace them, even near their back yards), we'll be able to make another great stride in our energy technology that can enable us to:
1. reduce CO2 emissions, & also turn back Climate Change that appears to be caused by it
2. enable any & all nations to build & use LFTR-technology - instead of current Plutonium-producing reactors, that we limit today
3. reduce the amount & cost of spent-fuel storage, eg, by consuming that fuel & getting energy from what was once waste
4. reduce or even eliminate "oil wars"
5. enabling us to -stop- "fracking" for Shale Oil &/or Coal-Seam Gas (CSG), which destroys water & land resources
6. reduce internal conflicts within nations (eg, legal battles & protests over "fracking")
7. redirect our minds to innovative & exploratory projects, in Science, Medicine, Space, Community Development, etc.
I see only win-win's from Energy from Thorium... are there any risks or disadvantages?
Let the debate continue, eg, in you comments & replies.
Or the other bullshit excuses.
I disagree with solar panels, and Bill Clinton's subsidizing mortgages for single family homes. The average person can't tell between good house construction, and poor house construction. So, homebuilders build big, shoddy houses, that impress the average person, which he can afford, thanks to federally subsidized mortgages.
Instead, smaller, well insulated condos in the city, would have been a more energy efficient way to go. Maybe throw in some light rail. No more damn lawns to worry about.
if they had decided to support the electric car. But German car makers are behind the competition in that field, so they made sure the government they elected keeps pushing the combustion engine. Why should anyone install stationary batteries in their homes? It's not like we have blackouts all the time. They should work on keeping it that way by investing in infrastructure, instead of relying on home owners.
Boing Inc. has lots of batteries from their replacements of Dreamliner batteries. I'm sure they could have a "fire" sale!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!