Tesla's Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass (bloomberg.com)

Tesla is all set to cut the ribbon on a massive battery storage facility in the California desert -- the biggest of its kind on earth. It joins similarly huge facilities built by AES and Altagas, which are both set to launch around the same time. Combined, the plants constitute 15% of the battery storage installed globally last year. From a report: Tesla Motors 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. 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."

Comments

But they use lithium-ion

[fustakrakich]

This is a stationary setup. Weight and size shouldn't matter. They should use nickel-iron for longer durability, a hundred years or more.

So, wait...

[Penguinisto]

Good article, but...

"Critical Mass" indicates that there are more facilities coming online, or at least publicly planning to. No indication of that in TFA... in fact, the closest they got is this:

For now, gas peaker plants still win out on price for projects that aren’t constrained by space, emissions, or urgency, said Ron Nichols, President of SCE, the California utility responsible for most of the biggest battery storage contracts. 3 But that may change in the next five years, he said.

"...may change in the next five years..." is nowhere near actual activity that would indicate a "critical mass" in industry.

How about they call us when it actually gets in motion - regionally, if not nationally or globally.

Economics

[sjbe]

Without a new breakthrough technology in our pocket, batteries technology should be determined by the real use case. Lithium ion is a good technology when weight is very important, but a lousy technology when does not matter. Why use a bad technology when a pretty good on is on hand?

Several reasons, all economic.

1) Economies of scale. Producing two types of batteries is more expensive than producing the same number of a single type of battery.

2) Standardization. Picking the exact optimal battery type for every application instead of using a standard battery actually results in product fragmentation and added cost. It's actually cheaper in many cases to use a standardized product instead of an optimized one.

3) Excess capacity. If you already are producing a product it's often cheaper to make extras and use those than to build a whole new production system for another product for marginal efficiency gains.

Re:Economics

[AmiMoJo]

I imagine they are planning to recycle a lot of cells that have been used in cars and have maybe 80% capacity remaining after a million miles. As they come onto the market in quantity the price of energy storage will fall even more rapidly.

Re:Dead Ends

[religionofpeas]

You don't need to use the exact same packs for cars and fixed storage. I'm sure that a bunch of smart engineers can come up with a solution that shares a lot of the key technology, especially in the production of individual cells and small packs, but find two different ways of putting the different parts together to get optimized solutions for the two different applications. Also, compactness and weight are still useful properties for a fixed installation.