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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."
This is a stationary setup. Weight and size shouldn't matter. They should use nickel-iron for longer durability, a hundred years or more.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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:
"...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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
Adiabatic compressed air energy moves the heat from compression into an insulated thermal mass chamber, and uses that to heat the expansion vessel. It recouperates that loss and has 70% total effective energy storage--higher is possible, up to 90%.
Batteries can store and discharge about 6-10 times the energy required to create them in their lifetimes. Adiabatic compressed air energy storage plants can cycle 240 times their energy cost. Batteries are pathetic technology at power grid scale and will never catch up to modern methods of grid-scale energy storage.
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What politicians normally do is submit a plan to an ethics review whereby their savings and investments are in a "blind trust" or equivalent. What this means is that they have no insight into where their money is invested ("blind"), and no control over the decisions that their trusted agent/broker makes regarding those investments, nor any communications with them apart from perfunctory statements or the like ("You currently have X dollars in your accounts" etc). This often involved selling off their existing assets to place them in that trust.
The problem with Trump is that he hasn't done this, and has shown absolutely no intention of doing so. He still knows where his money is invested, and still has control/influence over those investments. He claims that he doesn't, but it's grossly clear since his name is plastered all over it. What's more, it's his children that are now running the business, and if you think he couldn't quietly make his wishes known to them, you're deluding yourself. He therefore can easily take that information into account when he's making decisions, and directly benefit his own financial interests thereby.
To give an example, his travel/immigration ban covers several Middle Eastern countries, and cited terrorist attacks including 9/11 as cause. And yet, none of the countries the 9/11 hijackers came from are included in the ban. Why? Possibly because those countries happen to be ones that the Trump Organization does business in, since there's zero overlap between the banned country list and the list of countries in the Middle East where Trump's business has ties? Now, it's impossible to prove that was the reason why, but wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if we didn't have to even worry about that in the first place?
It sounds nice, but after 2 years, the capacity of the battery storage facility will be about 70% of what it is today and a couple of years later it will drop to 5%. Let's hope they built the facility with a user replaceable battery.
My 4 year old Tesla (car) battery is at 98% of new capacity, not 5%. Try again.
No. But I remember when the media and congressmen were saying that we would never see sub $2.00 gas again.
Oops. I guess increasing supply ruined that foolish prediction.
We do have a "glut". Good. Let's keep crude oil prices to screw Saudi Arabia. How about we drill here, have refineries buy at the reduced price (due to increased supply) and we place a use tax on the gas. Then we use the tax dollars to increase wind and solar production, energy storage (battery, flywheels, whatever).
End result is we don't send money to fanatics; we have blue-collar jobs; we fund solar and wind.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
Well, there's Wikipedia...
The cell's energy is equal to the voltage times the charge. Each gram of lithium represents Faraday's constant/6.941 or 13,901 coulombs. At 3 V, this gives 41.7 kJ per gram of lithium, or 11.6 kWh per kg. This is a bit more than the heat of combustion of gasoline, but does not consider the other materials that go into a lithium battery and that make lithium batteries many times heavier per unit of energy.
There's a paper from a DOE lab that suggests:
On a per-unit-mass basis, the Evm values for battery production are quite large, especially when compared to the overall VMA burden. Indeed, the incremental manufacturing energy rate is 13.3 MJ/kg of vehicle whereas the values are 91 MJ/kg of Li-ion battery and 105 MJ/kg of NiMH battery (Burnham et al., 2006).
91MJ/kg for Li-ion battery manufacture to store 0.0417MJ/kg as of 2006. With 6,000 full discharge cycles, that's 250MJ of energy storage in its lifetime, or 2.75 times the energy required to make the battery itself.
It's ten years later; energy cost of Li-ion manufacturer has fallen with newer manufacture technology. Recent reports suggest anywhere from 6 to 10 times energy stored than used to create the damned things. Pumped storage (raising water behind a turbine) is 210:1 and adiabatic compressed air is 240:1.
It gets a bit worse than that: once a battery is expended, you need to remove and dispose of it. That means disassembly and recovery of the lithium, the housing, etc., along with transportation fees for the extreme weight of the thing. Adiabatic CAES requires recertification or replacement of storage tanks, hoses, fittings, pumps, and the like. The latter is going to be easier to improve than the former, so future CAES will likely be more-efficient and require less maintenance, and plants will benefit from these improvements as they upgrade tanks and turbines; future batteries will be more-efficient, but not likely to as great a degree--definitely not without inventing a whole new type of battery.
The actual cost is higher, too. Imagine the cost per kWh to stabilize a grid when you have to have people constantly remanufacturing and recovering batteries, as well as monitoring the station to make sure the battery bank isn't showing signs of failure which could lead to explosion. Compare that to the cost of people remanufacturing what is essentially a large structure (those tanks aren't going to be trucked in and bolted down; they'll be built on-site from plates and seals) 1/24 as often, and monitoring temperature and pressure for lower-criticality events (a damaged battery may run away and explode immediately; an overpressurized tank should have enough safety overhead and valves to fail more-slowly or, preferably, non-critically). It's not all about energy.
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Batteries can store and discharge about 6-10 times the energy required to create them in their lifetimes.
That number seems very low. Got a source?
I was wondering too and did some searching. It looks like the number is realistic. What I found...
I hope I didn't screw up the math. If I did, please ridicule me and mod me down....
Modern EV batteries which are temperature controlled and charge limited have, so far, shown extremely low degradation over 100,000K EV miles.
The owner of this Volt, who is a member of a Facebook Volt owner group claims to still get the EPA rated 35 miles per charge from his Volt after 120K EV miles...
http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...
I personally own a Volt with 32K EV miles and still get the same EV range...
http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...
One charge in a Gen1 Volt is about 10.5 kWh. This means that over 100K EV miles, a Volt battery stores in the neighborhood of 29 MWh of energy.
1/10 of that would by 2.9 MWh
A quick search shows 828MJ per kWh of capacity to produce a lithium ion battery pack. This equates to 3.68 MWh to produce a 16kwh Chevy Volt battery pack.
https://www.quora.com/How-much...
Given that those Volt battery packs have shown little to no degradation so far, it's safe to say they have quite a bit more useful life to go, so they will probably make it close to 36 MWh of lifetime storage, but they will eventually succumb to the laws of physics though and start to degrade.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I often wonder why people think engineers are too stupid to see obvious engineering problems. I'd assume the Tesla engineers would reckon on capacity losses and simply size the installation large enough to deliver the required performance over the planned service lifetime. It's not like they don't understand battery technology.
Li-ion batteries are not nearly so bad as you paint them to be -- although obviously you can abuse them into early failure. Tests of electric cars shows battery aging to be less of a problem than anticipated. Tesla Roadsters retain over 80% of their range after 100,000 miles, for example, and data suggests the batteries in the Model S are aging even better on average -- almost negligible after 100,000 miles.
If you're extrapolating from your experience with your phone, phones probably represent the worst case. They often have barely adequate batteries so users deep-discharge them then top them off to 100%, every single day. That's the worst thing you can do to Li-ion batteries.
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