this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
142 points (100.0% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5186 readers
1178 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can someone explain to me how this is economical? (The article is pretty light on facts, and the few facts that it has are suspect anyway due to the article's technical mistakes, like measuring capacity in "megawatts".)
The maximum price of electricity (that I could find) in California is $0.66/kWh . That means, if you charge at night, or at some theoretical time when electricity is free, and then sell at that maximum price every day, your round-trip profit is $0.66 for each kWh of battery capacity. Lithium-ion batteries, if I'm being generous, last up to 2000 charge cycles. Let's say they don't lose any capacity during that time, either. That means your profit $1320 per kWh, for the whole life of the battery.
The cheapest grid-tie batteries I can find are about $3000 per kWh, so about twice as much as the total lifetime profit.
Is there something I'm missing?
Grid storage wouldn't be lithium ion, something like lithium phosphate would be better.
Step one, buy in bulk to get a price closer to $150/kwh
Step 2, use for much longer than 2000 cycles, lfp have much longer expected lifetimes, and since space/weight aren't a huger consideration, you can replace individual cells when they go bad.
Step 3, produce your own energy, if you have your own energy generation, you don't need to pay grid prices, and profit is much better.
Disclaimer, I am not an expert in this at all, but this is how I imagine it could make sense.
First of all grid scale batteries are 10x cheaper then you think they are at $300/kWh. Then they are competing with peaking gas power plants. those are inefficent, but can start up and shut down quickly. However the cost of those is at about $151–198/MWh. per kWh.. So you need 2000 charge cycles to break even. Batteries also last a lot longer then that up to 10,000 cycles under optimal conditions.
2000 cycles isn't the full lifespan, it's the lifespan to 80% capacity. At least that's how I've seen it rated.
Also I think the battery backup is more on the grid scale. California for instance has a couple dozen gwh of grid battery storage