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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)."
Personally I prefer my home steam generator. It uses 100% renewable, carbon-cycle, eco-friendly biofuel (wood) to generate steam that drives a turbine generator. I can get about 3kW out of my setup.
That's only a few car batteries.
However the problem still exists the second you scale up.
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
If it was easy to store electricity efficiently, we wouldn't need all this "always-on" peak demand power generation. We'd just store everything generated at night already and then release it the next day.
Fact is, as soon as you get into storing electricity, you're into massive efficiency drops.
Generalizing is always wrong. No government has 100% failure rate at anything. That said, a subsidy aimed at reducing the technological debt is very helpful in introducing new technology and competition.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Efficiency matters a lot when you're in the burn-fuel-for-power model, because you can always just burn the fuel tomorrow if you need to have the power tomorrow instead of today. For wind and solar power, the power is available when it's available, and you can either consume it, store it, or waste it. Ideally you'd have a proper smart grid (not the kind that's being marketed, which is just a power meter with WiFi) so that you could have things like fridges and freezers run their compressors during supply spikes and leave washing machines and so on programmed to run whenever there is surplus power. In the absence of being able to trigger demand when you have supply, storing it inefficiently is probably better than wasting it.
That said, the majority of my electricity consumption when there is no solar power available is lighting. It would be great to have a DC main with a relatively small battery that could power LED lights overnight. It would probably also let me charge electronic devices more efficiently than going via DC.
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Personally I prefer my home steam generator. It uses 100% renewable, carbon-cycle, eco-friendly biofuel (wood) to generate steam that drives a turbine generator. I can get about 3kW out of my setup.
Home-built or off-the-shelf? Link to plans or manufacturer or re-seller, please ;-)
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
Perhaps this would be a use case for nickel-iron batteries? They have an extremely long life; the reason they fell out of use is because of low energy density and poor charge retention. But energy density matters much less in your crawl space than it does in your tablet or your car, and for this use, being able to hold a charge for only a few days would be fine.
"The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite."
A central power system is also a single point of failure, distributed power generation is the way forward once they've got power storage sorted and cheap. The grid can be used as a back up system
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
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
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.
yeah, it is not like coal, oil, nukes, hydro, trains, planes, space crafts, cars/roads, electrification, telephony, etc ever got a hand out from a gov, esp. the American federal or state govs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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".
Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.
Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.
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.
yeah, it is not like coal, oil, nukes, hydro, trains, planes, space crafts, cars/roads, electrification, telephony, etc ever got a hand out from a gov, esp. the American federal or state govs.
You forgot natural gas, the US government funded the development of fracking, I just read about cotton, where the government developed anti-wrinkle technology that reputedly saved the industry from new synthetic competitors around 1950.
Also, didn't we give the financial industry a couple of bucks the other day? Health care? Every defense-related industry?
Energy lost in transmission is about 7%, not 50%.
A pun isn't good unless it's bad.
Lead Acid Batteries in fact are green, as long as you don't dump those in the nature, these types of batteries can be perfectly recylced!
imagine 4KWh of lead-acid batteries. that is going to be so much
better for the environment!
The lead in lead-acid batteries is completely recycled. That's already done with car batteries, so it's nothing new. Sulfuric acid is also recycled.
This is the CO2 return of invest of a windturbine. Solar panel is around 10 - 15 Months or so.
Not holding a charge mean wasting energy at the end. It is like drilling a giant hole into a hydroelectric dam at the end.
Anyway, the other question is: What's the carbon footprint of these batteries including the whole life cycle on a sufficient long period of time to not bias the result?
Achille Talon
Hop!
I keep a very clean and organized garage and I'd have trouble storing another lawn mower or installing another water heater/washer/clothesdryer.
I keep a very disorganized garage. You could probably put an entire substation in it and I would never notice (until I needed a big cable or something and went at it with a hack saw).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They specifically state they are targeting lead-acid and lithium-ion.
Which is a different kind of disaster waiting to happen. Lead batteries provide about 40Wh of storage capacity per kg of lead. Germany has 40m households, and their average electricity consumption is 10 kWh per household per day. Which means that if, statistically, every household wanted to be able store one day of electricity consumption (which, arguably, isn't enough if you go 100% wind/solar, but anyway), you'd need 10 million tons of lead -- about one annual world production of lead, roughly as much as is contained in all car batteries worldwide combined.
And private households only consume 1/3rd or so of all the electricity produced in Germany (businesses and industry consume the other two 3rds).
AFAICT from this, the whole thing is a total non-starter. It will never scale up to any significant number of homes. A few percent of the households (mostly rich home owners) may do it, collect Government support and feel good about saving the environment. The overall effects will be inconsequential -- so much so that the whole project wasn't worth starting in the first place.
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.
The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite.
No, the point of a central power system is economy of scale. But, unlike coal or nukes, solar PV doesn't really benefit from economy of scale. Most batteries don't benefit much either. By decentralizing they avoid the transmission losses, and avoid some of the capital expenses of the grid. But there is a BIG drawback to decentralized power generation and storage: it will be harder to tax.
Not holding a charge mean wasting energy at the end. It is like drilling a giant hole into a hydroelectric dam at the end.
NiFe batteries self discharge at a rate of 20-30% per month. If they're fully charged, during the day, they'll lose under 0.5% of their charge by the time you start charging them again, which seems a pretty adequate loss - you'll lose more than that in the charging and discharging of pretty much any battery type. Remember, we're talking about very short-term energy storage here.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It makes sense for gov. to help new industries get started, but I do not like how they do it. far better ways to do so.
BUT, the financial industry is the one that burns me. We should NOT have bailed them out. Instead, we should have allowed them to crash and then picked up the pieces and re-built many new banks or better yet, credit unions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"What I'm waiting for is swapping the prices of day and night electricity prices. In the summer "peak" demand has shifted to night time by now."
Until this happens, storing solar generated energy is just dumb. At the moment my panels help me in 2 ways:
-it lowers my electricity demand for a year by about 50%.
-it saves about 10% on the price per kWh since I send energy to the grid at peak rates (0.22 EUR/kWh) and almost exclusively use offpeak (0.20 EUR/kWh)
I have absolutely nothing to gain by storing electricity right now.
I know that tiny tech india (http://www.tinytechindia.com) sells steam power plants specifically for home power generation. Now, they are shipping from India, so if you don't live nearby the shipping costs will run into the hundreds of dollars. HOWEVER, they sell them so cheap that even with the exorbitant shipping, it's cheaper than buying a locally made steam plant, as most modern made "Classical style" steam plants are usually intended for either large scale industrial use (READ: Expensive) or as boutique steam motors for old-time steamboat and steam car hobbyists. (READ: Even more expensive!)
The Tiny Tech plants are very simple and basic and ugly as sin, but they work VERY well. (I know of a guy that bought one for use as a steamboat engine, and after just a few modifications to allow for reversing the motor action he had a really nicely working, if ugly, motor.)
Alternately, with just a bit of metal fabrication you can build your own steam engine out of an old refrigerator compressor or a large AC compressor (basically the same thing) I've even seen guys re-work air compressors like the kind you can buy at Harbor Freight into working steam engines for various uses.
The tech is old, and requires some good old-fashioned metal-working and machining skills, not to mention patience and a willingness to learn a whole new set of terminology, but it is still a very viable way to generate power for all sorts of uses.
I'll take my socialism in the form of corporate welfare for the oil companies, than you very much.
why would you use lipo in stationary regularly loaded device where neither weight or size are of any meaningful consequence?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite.
No, it never was. It was a matter of scaling. A coal plant e.g. yielding 10MW simply makes no sense.
Decentralized power generation would be more efficient, but also more expensive. That is why it was not done so far.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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>
Nothing, until there's many so people dumping power into the grid that buying it from you at the fixed market rates becomes economically unsustainable. That's what is happening in Germany right now; utilities are complaining at having to buy this power and having no place to send it (we in NL have been buying it on the cheap, not that the consumer will notice this on their bill, but still). Since the utilities also have to run regular power plants for peak loads, their costs have soared. Electricity in Germany is expensive these days.
Unless they come up with a viable storage option, either in the home or in the neighbourhood, I expect the price of the power you sell back to the grid to drop sharply in the coming years.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The batteries will last for more than a year, will be phased in over time, and will be fully recyclable.
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.
Ditto! Liquid metal (aka: molten salt) batteries are NOT about thermal storage, they are for storing electricity. You (the GP) are thinking of the molten salt systems used in concentrating solar-thermal power plants (aka: solar tower). Check dmbasso's link (above) for more info on liquid-metal battery tech.
Dr. Sadoway has been working with Khosla Ventures the last few years, commercializing this stuff. They expect to begin beta-test field trials with customers next spring, and hope to be in full production by the end of 2014. Khosla is also backing a compressed air solution that uses a sort of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression (solving an old bugbear of compressed air, the loss of energy to heat).
In short, there are robust, inexpensive storage solutions in the pipeline. (And not a moment too soon.) This will radically alter the "landscape" of renewable energy. When you can couple dirt-cheap solar PV with dirt-cheap storage, you have a recipe for rapid transition.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
It will be once all those electric cars get connected to the grid...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Yet another paragon of scientific insight. I've read more than enough of those denialist sites to understand the two basic strategies. First, find something stupid somebody said (today's example is Typhoon Haiyan), and act as if that debunks the whole theory. Meanwhile, back in reality, most climatologists are extremely vocal about the fact that no one weather event can be blamed on AGCC. The other approach is to cherry pick a few examples of noise defying an overall trend. It would only be suspicious if you couldn't find such examples. Any theory of something so complex that perfectly matched the data would be a fraud. Nowhere, of course, do the denialists offer a thorough statistical analysis of their own that refutes AGCC.
Most fuels are "100% renewable" on a small scale. It's when we use more of it than can practically be produced in the same amount of time, that it becomes non-renewable. Wood is no exception. If a non-trivial number of people did the same as you, the price of wood would spike, and there'd be no way to grow it quickly enough.
Methane (natural gas), biodiesel, and others follow the same pattern. If we don't use much of it, it's cheap and can be produced entirely by closed-loop "green" systems. When demand goes up, though, the production becomes unsustainable.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Germans are taking back their electricity grid, so of course the utilities are upset. There is pressure on local governments to re-nationalize the grids in whole cities, and some power stations. Why pay the power company's profit when you can just own it all yourself, optimize it for your own benefit?
In the short term it will be expensive, but in the long run it will be cheaper. It's good that Germans seem able to see beyond next month's wage packet.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What the heck? Are you sure about that? I'm one person, I use about 15 kWh a day on my own, and I'm a fanatic miser. I don't leave a single light on except the room I'm in at the moment. Practically all my lights are CFL or LED. I don't have an electric stove, clothes dryer, or water heater. Those are huge pigs; most people have all of those. I am a fanatic about not holding the refrigerator door open wide or cracked open for more seconds than absolutely required. My TV is tuned to take no more than 30W.
Sigh, so many miss conceptions.
When my windfarm produces more power than the grid demands, I either can (if I still have the capacity) pump water into my pumped storages, or I can disconnect a part of my windfarm from the grid, or I can use my smartgrid and load car batteries, or other batteries.
The cost of electric power is dynamic and depends on contract: during peak hours it might be unwise to start my washing machine as it will probably draw power that is expensive, but it might be quite cheap to load a car batterie at this point as the grid operator gives you a premium price for it, otherwise the power would be wasted. Yes capitalism rules, if the grid operator would not gift you the power for your car battery it would be likely much more expensive for him to get rid of the "extra power" e.g. he might need to sell it for a negative price at the spot market.
In germany e.g. grid operators are oblieged to pay the price for my wind power even if they can not feed it into the grid. That means if I generate 100MW, and they can only use 80MW I have to disconnect 20MW but they still pay for 100MW. So for the grid operator it is much better to sell the extra 20MW for a very low price to car owners then let it get wasted. Especially if the smart grid contract between the grid operators and the car owner allows the grid operator to tab into the cars power if needed.
Note: the car will not load and give power "randomly". If it is for the next 3 hours in charge mode, it will only be used for charging if there is a surplus, and wont be touched for draining (to prevent unnecessary drain/load cycles).
With the rest you are right, ofc over night power is cheaper. Nevertheless all those ideas to get batteries into the power grid have the main focus in helping to "stabelize" or fine tune the grid. The main focus is not to load them over night with cheap power ... that could be done since decades with a second power meter.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.