The decreases in battery cost in this report are pretty spectacular, but it's missing comparisons to costs for traditional generation. As best as I can tell from https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... - the LCOE for gas generation is around $40/MWh. So this article's cost of $187/MWh for batteries is still a lot higher, but the battery cost has dropped 35% in one year so it could get there soon. What I'm still not sure about is if you need to include the LCOE of the original generation method in the cost of the battery system? In that case the total LCOE for say wind+battery would be ~$210.
$40/MWh is for combined cycle gas turbines that operate at high capacity factors. According to this BNEF report, gas peaking capacity is now threatened by battery replacement:
Electricity demand is subject to pronounced peaks and lows inter-day. Meeting the peaks has previously been the preserve of technologies such as open-cycle gas turbines and gas reciprocating engines, but these are now facing competition from batteries with anything from one to four hours of energy storage, according to the report.
The report itself doesn't give a $/MWh figure for these peakers. Lazard's 2017 report puts the lower end of CCGT generation at $42/MWh, close to the EIA number, but gas peaking starts at $156/MWh and goes as high as $210/MWh:
Note that they put gas reciprocating engines no higher than $106, so I don't think that batteries at this price threaten gas reciprocating engines yet. Mostly they threaten open cycle gas turbines.
Diesel reciprocating engines show a cost of at least $197/MWh and are also threatened by battery-backed renewables. Diesel generators have been heavily used to supply electricity for small remote villages, islands, and off-grid mining sites. For a few years now there has been a trend to reduce consumption of diesel at such sites by partially substituting generator output with renewable electricity. It's possible to make deeper cuts in diesel use with added battery storage, and the payback period is shorter than you might guess from looking at the local gas station's diesel price. Getting the fuel to certain locations can cost nearly as much as buying it in the first place.
This is the thing that gets missed is renuables are competing with peaking power which is more expensive than base load power. The way to think of baseload power is it's the lowest quality power source. If you contract for it you have to use it. And it's generated when other consumers don't need it. Which is why it's cheap.
Batteries are competing with very expensive grid stabilization technologies. Solar is selling into the peek daily power cycle.
If batteries are the enabler, couldn't you just over generate using a cheap base load tech, dumping excess to battery? Or are renewables plus batteries cheaper than base load tech plus batteries?
Yeah battery storage is a arbitrage business. Buy cheap sell high. Buy midnight wind from North Texas at three cents a kwh and resell it on a cloudy humid afternoon in Phoenix for thirty.
Currently fossil fuel and nuclear power is really cheap late at night. In the future it'll be less predictable but there is absolutely a business there.
> This is the thing that gets missed is renuables are competing with peaking power
The other thing that gets missed is that they aren't competing at all, because renewables are unreliable and non-dispatchable. So, more renewables means more peaking power other things being equal. What can directly compete with peaking power is battery storage (though pumped hydro is king there) and demand-response.
Renewable + storage are competing directly with peakers. The storage makes renewables dispatchable and if you look at the performance of the battery in Australia it appears to be much higher performance. The system dispatchs power in a fraction of the time a peaker plant can.
Wind and solar are baseload power. Very cheap, but don’t follow the demand curve. That’s a fairly direct replacement for coal and nuclear, it’s just peeking power in we need to deal with.
Because they are so cheap wasting some power output each day is simply not as big a deal. The balance point between extra wasted production, storage, and peaking power plants is not obvious or nessisarily stable as prices change.
Wind and solar are neither baseload nor peaking power sources. They are intermittent sources where you need other parts of the grid to smooth out the intermittent nature. Either via storage, via peakers or via additional baseload on top and something that consumes the excess that intermittent + baseload can produce.
Sun is totally out during the night. And wind is only as much a reliable baseload provider as it will provide during the worst days of the year, which in many locations can be a tiny fraction of their average load factor.
Many good points above, I just wanted to point out that there are lots of places like where I live, where peak electricity is nearly completely correlated with the sun shining (air conditioning). Not that this matters for places where it's not that way, just pointing that out.
The fact that wind and solar don’t produce steady state power is completely irrelevant.
What power companies care about is the difference between the cheap energy sources production and demand. Night time demand is often so much lower than peak demand that it takes less peaking power plants to cover solars night time deficit than coals daytime deficit.
PS: The difference between winds minimum expected output and average output is also smaller than most assume. Locations that get more wind at specific times of the day are common and let you tailor supply and demand. Unusually high winds end up wasted, but discarding 5% of output does little to change the relative costs.
Wind over large scales is less random than people assume even if the variation is large. California both needs more electricity in the summer and gets more wind energy in the summer. Further, peak solar and peak wind output occur at different times of the day which again is extremely useful.
If the actually observed output were lower than the expected output then those expectations require adjustments. And germany is about as large as california. It also includes offshore wind, which california does not even have.
Maybe your weather is more stable and does not generalize well.
I'm not sure if these numbers being quoted are good for analysis.
The "Nessie Curve" shows that power at 5:00pm is worth more, especially in sunny environments (like Hawaii). Solar energy is taking over those areas, but solar power begins to drop dramatically as the sun sets.
5:00pm to 8:00pm is still quite warm, so you need to turn on the gas turbines to provide electricity. But solar's efficiency has dropped dramatically, so you can't really rely upon solar power in those hours (well... you can... but at dramatically lowered efficiency).
I'm not sure any analysis is worthwhile unless it includes the time-of-day, as well as the number of hours that the batteries can load-shift power. 5:00pm to 8:00pm power is going to cost more in the future than 12:00pm power, simply due to this whole solar energy thing going on.
I just wanted to make clear that BNEF is talking about batteries threatening fossil peakers that produce expensive electricity, while OP was wondering how inexpensive CCGT generation could be threatened by batteries. CCGT and peakers are distinct and have different costs even when they both burn natural gas.
Hawaii doesn't generate electricity from natural gas but it does consume a lot of petroleum-fueled electricity:
More recently, the Hawaiian Public Utilities Commission has approved 247 megawatts of new solar capacity backed by nearly a gigawatt-hour of battery storage:
"The price for each of these contracts was between eight and ten cents per kilowatt-hour. This is cheaper than both gas peaker plants and HEI’s current cost of fossil fuel generation, much of which is petroleum-based, which the company put at around 15 cents per kilowatt-hour."
Note that these prices are only $80-$100 per MWh, because most of the solar electricity is consumed immediately and doesn't need to be stored in a battery.
> I'm not sure any analysis is worthwhile unless it includes the time-of-day, as well as the number of hours that the batteries can load-shift power. 5:00pm to 8:00pm power is going to cost more in the future than 12:00pm power, simply due to this whole solar energy thing going on.
A big part of the problem talking about these things is that people conflate photo-voltaic with solar thermal (CSP).
What you're talking about when you say 'solar' is just the first one.
Solar thermal plants provide power into the night.
Arguments that it's just solar + storage are perhaps valid, but a) it's still solar, and b) nuclear MSR's aren't called 'nuclear + storage' (ditto anything else using latent heat in fluids, flywheels, etc).
It does seem that Solar Thermal plants are better for the expected future of energy demand. I wasn't thinking of them for some reason.
But yes, people need to be mostly aware about the time-cost of energy. Even if Solar Thermal is less efficient than photo-voltaic cells, the fact of the matter is that 5:00pm to 9:00pm power is the REAL problem that people need to focus on. That's when America uses most of its electricity right now, and is likely the main driver of peaker plants at the moment.
People ignore CSP all the time. I estimate that by 2050, when most of the grid electrical capacity is coming from MS storage with operating delta_K's around 1000+, they'll learn.
I think one thing that needs to be considered is for HVAC you can time shift your demand via thermal lag. So for air-conditioning you can pre-cool the house during the day and just let the temperature rise during the evening.
Would people live with that? They would if doing that saved them $250/month.
A friend in Arizona mentioned having solar panels and setting the thermostat to 65 degrees between 10am and 5pm. And off after that. Later at night they open the windows and close them in the morning.
They're just using the thermal mass of the house to time shift energy.
The feasibility of this is completely determined by the insulation and albedo of the house. Working around the thermal inertia of the house is tricky, blasting the AC hard at night is only effective if your house is moderately well insulated or good at not absorbing heat (reflective roof, wall insulation, reflective blinds etc, and by reflective I don't mean tinfoil, I mean like white or bright colored, basically no black or dark). Building elements are remarkably bad at storing heat/coolth since their sensible heat capacity is quite low. There are ways to enhance this effect though by getting building elements that are doped with phase change materials.
Of course the insulation part of the equation is a double-edged sword. You want insulation, but you always want air circulation at a rate conducive to low CO2 levels. Maybe a compromise using something like Sheetrock with extra paraffin, and the whole thing painted Anti-flash white, with air exchange passed through heat exchangers underground.
Even a crappy insulated house has some thermal lag. Which is what you are playing with.
I think people get confused because a low carbon grid is going to have a different pricing structure than the current one where 'base load' power is cheap at night. The reverse will be true. Power in the evening is going to be spensive. With the cheapest power at noon.
The solution is to time shift demand. A lot of demand can be time shifted. HVAC can be time shifted using thermal lag and storage. You don't really need batteries for that.
Solar is most effective at 12-13pm due to panel orientation and noon insolation. At 5pm it's sonething like 50-60% of noon insolation during the summer (best case scenario).
Note that diesel generators have the counter intuitive property of using more fuel at 50% of max load than at 80% of max load. Most other power generations have some variation of this where operating a 80-90% of max power is where they are more fuel efficient. Thus even for conventional generation battery backup on the grid has the potential to save money.
In diesel engines the power generated is directly controlled by the amount of fuel delivered - if you want more power, inject more fuel. Unlike most spark ignition engines, there is no throttle valve, you control the stroke of the diesel pump (or the time the injectors stay open in common rail engines). So it is completely wrong to say that they use more fuel at 50% load than at 80%.
I am sure it is per unit. Means you are better off to run it at high load and battery the excess power, then shut the whole thing off for a bit, vs run it at 50% all the time.
If you have two engines you could be running at 40% each, or shut one down and run the other at 80%, it will be more efficient to do the latter (unless you have to be able to start the idle one quickly and that's not possible if it's at 0%, so then you run one at 75% and the other at 5%).
LCOE includes all the costs, including the power to charge the batteries (assumed to be 60% of wholesale power price, since you can charge whenever it's cheapest in the daily cycle.)
I may be wrong in the interpretation, but LCOE would seem to apply only to the actual capacity, and not the grid‘s entire throughput.
Yet batteries would only be needed for a fraction of the installed power, to adjust for fluctuations in supply and demand. Most power would never see the battery in such a grid.
And, of course, batteries are only one of multiple strategies to get supply and demand to equalize. Smart consumers is probably the most underdeveloped now, from cars that would charging (and possibly even discharge into the grid if your schedule allows), washing machines picking the best times when possible, or cooling and heating working with their respective reservoirs.
I'm curious how they come up with that, actually. Aren't batteries at ~100/KWh at the moment? I would have expected a MWh to be closer to $100k. If I'm not mistaken, 1000 cycles at that rate would get you close to $100/MWh.
Obviously I am misunderstanding something in these calculations.
I assume that one difference is that a facility for LiIon batteries costs more than just LiIon battery cells; and the land, the transformers, the site security, and general maintenance of all the above are non-trivial compared to cell costs?
Yup. Capital cost, operation and maintenance, and charging costs are all added up, financed over the operating period, and turned into a cost to meet an investment IRR of 12%. The table in page 11 of the pdf I linked above breaks it all down.
I think you're reading it as Annual Recurring Revenue rather than Internal Rate of Return. For IRR I think 12% is pretty normal, and depending on how good your project management is it could easily turn into 0%. But I'm not an accountant so I might be misunderstanding.
Oh certainly, but that is kind of my point. The $/KWh seems way too low if that is installed cost. But the levelized cost of energy at the end actually seems pretty reasonable.
That means I don't understand where the $/KWh of installed capacity comes from.
The history of battery tech has been a very steady drum beat of small, slow improvements in battery capacity of a few percent per year, slowly working in the opposite direction of inflation.
The bad news of that 'law' is that you're not going to get a device with 2x battery time next year. The last time I remember Apple pulling off a 2x it was due to a 30% larger battery with 30% higher power density (itself a combination of smaller packaging and better power density) with OS improvements to reduce average power draw.
The good news is that eventually there will be a battery that stores 2x as much charge for the same price. So if storage batteries can be profit neutral now, in 5 years you could be looking at a 25% reduction in material costs. And if you can improve labor and installation overhead you might be looking at a profit margin you can sell.
The comparison to Apple seems pretty unhelpful? Utility-scale batteries are a very different market than batteries in electronics, even if they use some of the same technology.
If you can add capacity by making batteries bigger or heavier without increasing cost, that would be fine for storage batteries.
Because these conversations happen all the time, have been happening for at least twenty years, will continue to happen for at least the next twenty, and somehow always feature the same whataboutism responses.
It's my preemptive retaliatory strike to bring up a high profile case of someone looking in the press like they pulled of a 2x improvement in 4 years and really they did no such thing at all.
The cited numbers in the linked article directly contradict this. Your intuition is about battery "capacity", but the number that matters here is battery cost, which is not the same thing. And batteries are getting rapidly cheaper as production scales past the hand-held devices against which your intuition was calibrated and into the realm of vehicle power and grid buffering.
If you read the article what happened is a policy change in China that’s causing a glut in batteries. Costs are down because supply went up, not a breakthrough in manufacturing.
Costs are down because margins are down. That’s not sustainable. It’s a one time thing or even a temporary one. It’ll be walked back, or we’ll see a plateau in costs until the trend lines line up.
The Chinese policy change referred to affected solar modules, not batteries:
"Although the LCOE of solar PV has fallen 18% in the last year, the great majority of that decline happened in the third quarter of 2018, when a shift in Chinese policy caused there to be a huge global supply glut of modules, rather than over the most recent months."
A friend of mine (CEO of Enerpoly) recently got his PhD in this space and have made a breakthrough in the battery space (extreme life cycle extension). His most recent prototype can reach less than 40euro / kWh. The space certainly is exciting and will be fun to watch over the next few years!
Glad to see that sort of stuff is coming along. I was thinking there must be something more cost effective than LiIon when you don't need to worry about the weight.
NiMH takes up more space than LiIon but costs less for the same amount of energy storage capacity. Toyota uses them in their hybrid cars primarily for cost reasons.
In Japan the technology that is installed is sodium-sulfur [1]
It operates at 350 celcius, is full of dangerous chemicals and require a certain size to be interesting, but under these conditions, it seems to beat other techs
It‘s most fascinating when you realize that wind & solar will, very soon after being competitive with new coal and gas, become cheaper even than existing fossil fuel plants.
That’s because renewables are almost entirely front-loaded: upkeeps is somewhat neglible in comparison to construction. For fossile fuels, the fuel itself is a dominating cost.
Meaning: in some countries, we are on the brisk of an inflection point, after which growth of clean tech will be limited only by our ability to increase production. I saw a graph, which I can unfortunately not find now, predicting 2021 for some European countries and some regions in the US. There isn’t much speculation in a time frame of only two years.
The capital costs still need to be paid off. But the industry has a strong interest in scaling up and reducing costs. And optimisation is probably easier when you are building and installing thousands of individual units rather than a few complex monoliths.
> ...growth of clean tech will be limited only by our ability to increase production.
Production is not the problem. Growth of green tech has been (and will be) limited by the ability to store and use output on-demand. Germany is already causing problems in the European electricity grid through overproduction of wind energy. Meanwhile, their base load is covered by coal and imports of nuclear energy. It would require a massive amount of battery storage to even out:
As solar is growing globally something like 30% p.a., one could argue that we have already been limited by the ability to increase production. Just for comparison, Apple has never had a 100% y.o.y increase of iPhone over two full production years, and that was a consumer device with explosive growth. I would not expect that it could be feasible to have similar growth numbers in energy infrastructure than iPhone.
Just make sure we don't make same mistakes again, ending with a lot of non-recyclable non-reusable obsolete batteries no one cares about and wants 50 years later.
The last thing we need is a dumpster full of toxic waste... all in name of green and "renewable" energy generation!
But isn't our current power infrastructure just pumping the toxic waste into the air (pseudo) invisibly?
For example, the reason we have smog laws is because we can see the results. I suspect if burning gasoline pumped low-level radioactivity into the air invisibly (like coal does), then smog laws wouldn't have taken off years ago.
The “exclusion zone” around the radioactive waste is either a few dozen feet to the surface of the water pool, or less than a feet of a container wall.
Both the spent fuel and the cells are totally recyclable (where recyclable means transforming them into some amount of inert nontoxic stuff and some amount of useful stuff.) I would bet that recycling spent fuel rods is more expensive than recycling spent chemical batteries.
Also, the spent batteries, while toxic, don't require 24x7 armed security. Also the spent fuel recycling process potentially increases the need to secure the resultant materials, depending on what you're doing.
Agreed, that's why I'm more interested and excited about carbon-carbon batteries. Li-ion is the ugly wart on the face of green renewable technologies, we are just tolerating it for now because we don't have anything better yet. I hope it doesn't stay there
Have given this a fair amount of thought and it comes down to a few things:
Cycle lifetime of lead is good as long as you don't deep-discharge it, but then if you don't deep-discharge it you need a lot more material.
Eventually the lead is going to degrade and then you need a battery changeout, or you need the wherewithal to refurbish the plates and the paste. No one goes to the trouble.
Lead-acid doesn't tolerate the cold as much as lithium does.
But the big enchirito is the fact that lithium batteries at 100% max capacity are great for cars. After they wear down to 75% max capacity they're no longer suitable (you want a pack with 20 miles' range?) and junk. At that point they're ideal for grid-tie because there's literally not much other use for them.
Lead acid requires purpose-building, which I believe would be cost-competitive, but also require a substantial raise for what many consider to be a has-been technology.
My company was designing a product that was solar powered with a battery to keep it running at night. We originally were designing in lead acid batteries and the size of the battery needed for that kind of service was too large. De-rate because you're cycling daily and suddenly you need 3X the battery. De-rate again for environmental conditions and add another 2X.
We punted and switched to a lithium iron phosphate battery. Because we could get away with a 2.5 amp-hr lion battery vs a 12 amp-hr lead acid. It's cheaper and we don't have to worry about a workman trying to lug 15-20lbs up a ladder.
This is a great point - there's going to be a lot of used lithium car batteries available x years after electric cars go big, and I don't know of any better use for them than grid storage. So it seems like those will be priced at their value for grid storage. Which means that once there's a sufficient supply, they will almost inevitably become a major force in grid storage.
For the size of installation needed for power grid applications, Lead-acid batteries require regular health checks, explosion proof storage, ventilation, etc. They also don't last forever. Most utilities expect 30-40 years of life out of capital investments.
If adding more is not a concern, then I'd go for redox flow batteries - much cheaper, less toxic, some unique advantages (such as capacity is only limited by the size of your tank)
Mostly because lead isn't as cheap as you'd think. The battery chemistries cited most often for grid storage applications are manganese-based, which is cheaper. And even cobalt (the limiting resource for most current personal electronics) isn't much more expensive than lead.
Is it better to try to build city-wide battery storage or per house storage? Not knowing the economy of scale of these things, it seems like it would be more affordable to build the smaller per house units like the one Tesla builds. After all, it is the homes that primarily need power at night. Big commercial buildings close at night, and need much less power. Or am I just really naive on the subject?
I would expect city-wide storage to be cheaper. The electricity I use on a day-to-day basis changes (ex: Dishwasher, Cooking, Laundry). Average it out across a neighborhood, or city, and things become far more consistent.
A typical electric dryer is 3000 Watts. If you do 2-hours of laundry one night, you'll need 6kWhr storage JUST for drying (not even laundry) !! You might typically need 15 kW of storage per day, but you'll need 20kW or maybe even 30kW of storage to be comfortable and cover all possible use cases.
A city can take advantage of this in several ways. City-scale can allocate the average 15kW-hrs of storage needed for a typical night, and then maybe 2.5kW-hrs of "non-typical" storage that's shared between the whole neighborhood. Across 100-households, this +2.5kWhr "excess" can be allocated to ~40 households... and each of those 40 households can go +6kW-hrs above typical (ie: decide to do laundry that night).
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Some things will scale better on a per-house level. Air conditioning is almost certainly better per-house, because its somethings the whole neighborhood needs at the same time. But there are better technologies out there than Li-Ion batteries, such as Ice-Bear's thermal energy storage. (https://www.ice-energy.com/)
Store 50F water during the night inside of a highly insulated tank. Blow cold-air (from the 50F tank) to cool the house during the day. Modern insulation can keep a tank of water cold for many, many days, and water is about as cheap of a "energy storage" mechanism as you can get.
This "demand-shift" technology is best served by a smart-grid: if the city can provide a floating-cost of electricity, and also inform appliances that the cost of electricity is changing... then those appliances (ie: Air Conditioners) can turn on when the price of electricity is cheapest.
I agree with your analysis, but I'm going to take the opposite view because of one factor that you didn't consider: power outages. People want to have some standby storage at their house anyway, and once they have it they may as well use it to keep rates down.
(I think the real answer is somewhere in the middle, but disagreeing is more fun)
Nobody outside of datacenters and emergency services cares for power outages if they are sufficiently rare.
An outage-ridden grid propped up with uncoordinated batteries is a recipe for staying outage-ridden forever because everybody will charge at the same time.
I was talking with someone who runs a large wind power company. I'd assumed that the best place for storage was close to the consumers, but what I'd missed is that the grid itself is often the limiting factor. If you put batteries near the consumer and charge them when wind is cheap, you need twice the grid capacity. If you put batteries close to or inside the wind turbines, you can charge them when you've excess wind, and discharge when wind is lower, but you can get by with a lot less grid capacity because you don't need to tranmit the generation peaks over it.
I'm certainly no expert but I think tiers of battery storage will be necessary. Some collocated with generation sites, some at distribution sites in cities, and probably local batteries in commercial real estate and neighborhoods if not households.
There are both local and global shifts in demand. If it were the case that only local storage options existed the system would be extremely inefficient during abnormally high peak demand that was localized to one area. Think of a heat spell in Central Valley of California. Storage would need to move from tiny batteries scattered throughout The Bay Area to be routed to the Central Valley to power AC units. It would be more efficient if there were larger local storage sites in Sacramento and Fresno.
On the other hand if we only had huge storage sites that are collocated with generation sites then as an individual you might be able to game the market through arbitrage with one big highly efficient battery. Take in power at night when its cheap and sell it when it's expensive during the day. Of course everyone will catch on to this and want a battery of their own. This depends on battery efficiency, but if you can get near the efficiency of the battery at the generation site then you can undercut their profit margin. You could at the very least use the local battery when possible to power your own home/business to save some money on your power bill.
batteries help with supply and demand, more transmission lines also help to get power to places that need it. To fully utilize small batteries need smart meters and smart grid. your Tesla could be used to run the dishwasher at 6 pm peak usage and get recharged at 2m when there is abundant hydropower.
Australia uses Tesla large scale battery system to infill gaps like the time between when demand spikes and a generator comes online. very profitable.
supply - makes sense to have large batteries to store excess energy produced for power (I like the combo of wind turbines and flywheels allowing more uniform power to be distributed)
demand - makes sense for every house to have its own battery to arbitrage on the price difference with real-time pricing. putting a floating price on consumption will hopefully lead to a more efficient market and less coal.
I wonder if we could end up in a situation where solar and wind power kills traditional generation but still isn't able to provide continuous power. That we might end up with intermittent power by accident.
I personally am seeing 2 distinct systems.
1. Outside the cities people will have their own storage and power generation.
2. Inside the cities power companies start renting out batteries when you contract with them. And they only provider the power with solar and the battery they provide stores it for the nights and sun less days.
This says that if you take ~~free~~ (see edit) energy, store it in batteries, and pull it back out later, you will have to pay $187/MWh.
Meanwhile natural gas turbines cost $40/MWh to generate power whenever, wherever. To say batteries are competing with gas in the US is very misleading. Reliable electricity is worth an incredible amount to customers.
Unfortunately natural gas is very high carbon and cannot continue in a carbon-constrained world.
In any case, it's obviously time to roll back tax incentives on wind and solar generating capacity alone. They worked perfectly, bringing prices of advanced tech down near market levels. Now let's incentivise deep decarbonization schemes that can handle seasonal intermittency and decarbonize the heating, industrial, and transportation sectors.
Edit: The $187/MWh number includes an extremely low battery charging cost of around $0.033/kWh (it's reasonably assumed that charging will occur during energy oversupplies, so it's nearly free).
You're incorrect on the cost of gas, you can not spin up any natural gas turbine "whenever, wherever" for $40/MWh. As another comment has stated, there are multiple kinds of turbines with different and more expensive costs than $40 ranging up to $200+/MWh. Behind the scenes, there is the task of actually getting the LNG to the turbine, which is a variable cost commodity and transportation is tricky. This fluctuation may be damaging to utilities, who would prefer stable prices over time to balance their books.
Compare these variables in the cost of natural gas electricity to the price stability of batteries+renewables over time, and you've neglected some of the main reasons batteries+renewables will become increasingly attractive over time, especially vs the much more expensive+dirty coal sources in the 2020's, and even to the cheaper but still dirty natural gas in the 2030's and 2040's.
Be careful with your errors and oversights. With the climate on the line for 1000's of years, we can not afford sloppy argumentation, even on HN comments. We need to accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of the energy sources so we can best navigate towards a healthy society and planet.
My comment was motivated by my desire for us to avoid oversights for the same reason you list. If everyone thinks that batteries are competing with natural gas on the whole, then they are being grossly, grossly misled. CCGTs are by far the most common "gas" out there, and they're getting built today, as we speak, and they are the ones that are the price I quoted.
You're right that wherever, whenever is an overstatement, but I disagree that it's overly sloppy in this context. A revised statement may be "CCGTs can be very flexibly sighted and can ramp up and down relatively quickly"
Stability of renewable cost may not be so solid when hurricanes come by and rip panels off roofs, or polar vortices ice up all your turbines. Even natural gas had pressure lows in the last polar vortex, my mom was asked via emergency alert to turn down her heat so the system pressure could keep up. Most of the heavily-armored nukes powered through, but one of them had ice in the intake and had to clear that out. Everything will see fairly unpredictable variability in the carbon-constrained future. Diversity is probably our safest bet.
The comment was referring to current markets, which is the topic of the OP article at hand. No fossil fuel generators pay for their carbon waste, they just dumps it out the stack. US (but not worldwide) coal pays a bit to scrub its waste of the supernasties, saving thousands of lives thanks to the clean air act. Wind/solar/battery recycling/disposal costs are also not currently factored into the market.
The only energy system that specifically puts a fraction of its revenue aside for the back-end that I'm aware of is nuclear via the decommissioning funds and the nuclear waste fund.
LCOE measures the all-in expense of producing a MWh of electricity from a new project, taking into account the costs of development, construction and equipment, financing, feedstock, operation and maintenance.
Is the power to charge the batteries not feedstock?
It actually is. See edit. Lazards latest has it charging for a nearly-free 3.3 cents/kWh (assumption is that it's charged when the sun is out and there's a glut of solar, which makes sense).
A comment on a different thread pointed out that 40/kwh is the price for combined cycle gas, not for peaker plants, which is what batteries are substitute for. And only a part of the renewable energy needs to be stored in batteries, not all of it.
Excellent point. What's the insurance policy for global warming look like?
I'd say the favor would be towards planet friendly, low-carbon energy. Biomass is renewable but high carbon while nuclear fission is low-carbon but not considered* renewable. Is nuclear fusion considered renewable? Renewability doesn't matter in itself. It's anything that's long-term sustainable given our current understanding of the world.
*though known resources will last at world-scale for at least 10s of thousands of years, and more likely billions of years.
Yeah, known resources are still very significant compared to our use profile.
And that means we have them for necessary uses.
Too much consumption is bad. We know that now.
Good news is we did bootstrap appropriate tech. No reason not to use it, and frankly the cost does not concern me. (Those externalities are simply huge)
What I see is another bootstrap effort. Lots of jobs, economic activity.
The massive externalities are two-fold though both good and bad. Whats the positive externalities worth compared to the negative, thats imo a better way to think about this.
Also does solar include externalities such as of decommission, price of extracting rare earth materials, externalities with regard to production and setting up?
My guess is that nuclear is going to win and that we are going to reduce the cost of creating the powerplants by reducing the bureaucracy around it because of the newer reactors safetymeasures (physics based).
Nuclear waste and plant decmissioning are actually all included in nuclear LCOE. This is quite unique. Nuclear plants all pay into a multi-billion dollar thing called the Nuclear Waste Fund and all have trust funds for decommissioning.
In fact, some have suggested that as decommissioning costs are coming in lower than expected, some utilities are factoring in access to those decom funds in their decisions to close plants early.
From all those cheap arguments the lobby has brought up here (and there are not many), this one is the absolutely worse.
There is no group of people who want don't want nuclear but want coal. There is no nuclear vs. coal discussion out there outside the nuclear fans. Coal is going away. The only reason breaking the progress here in Germany is politics and just another lobby. Still there are new coal plants here that have not generated a single watt and go into decommission now. Others follow because we don't have the need for them and they are clogging the power lines for clean renewable power.
This is common knowledge where I come from. So please, stop repeating this very very stupid phrase.
Yes and it is but that has nothing to do with just coal, thats to do with no other real alternative to producing the amount of energy required by modern societies besides co2 emitting processes wether oil, coal, wind, gas or solar.
Looks like vaguely around $50 per MWh to capture the carbon coming out of a natural gas plant. That cost would shift the balance but it wouldn't push base loads onto renewables just yet.
I think the best reliable estimate I know of is 600$/ton of solid sequestered CO2. (That’s an operating plant.) olivine based methods could be a 1/3 of that. That puts the cost at 6$/gallon of consumer-grade fuel. I feel like if I ran a 1300 hp car for an hour, I’d use far more than 9 gallons. CCGT must be hella efficient.
That's capturing it from the air, isn't it? From what I understand that's a lot more expensive than sticking your equipment directly on the output of the power plant. Also natural gas specifically is quite carbon-light.
There could also be a network effect at play; electric cars have done a great deal to progress battery technology, and China, India, and much of Europe have made fossil-fuel cars illegal a few decades from now. Between that and other regulatory measures pushing for renewable energy, investors may be coming to the conclusion that gas is a sinking ship.
There is no such thing as "free" energy. The technology you use to capture the energy costs something. The cost of getting energy out of batteries has to be added to the cost of generating the energy that gets put into them in the first place to get a number that makes sense.
Yeah. That's included. It's 3.3 cents/kWh. Electricity prices go negative in some regions when it's really windy and sunny as people try to deal with having so much renewable generation, and they offload it to whoever can take it at pennies or less. So it kind of is free. This study included very cheap electricity on the assumption that the batteries would be filled during these peaks in renewable generation, which always coincide with cheap electricity prices on the auctions.
Capex for lithium batteries is on the order of $100/kWh (kilo- not mega-). Other battery technologies will not be much better. You are confusing amortized cycle costs for capex costs.
On this topic: Does anyone know why we haven't started to utilize electric cars as a mechanism for nighttime home energy?
It seems like having these batteries centralized is actually not the right solution, but instead that they should be at the edge, and connected to the home grid, such that they can be charged during the day, and decharged during the night to some maximum amount specified by the user.
A Tesla has 50kWh capacity and I typically use 6kWh at night - it seems like an obvious place we could leverage batteries already in existence to reduce the demand on central generation.
One of the main reason is concerns about degradation. Battery capacity and performance degrades as the number of discharge cycles increases. And EV users are particularly sensitive to that degradation (see issues with early Nissan leafs for example). And replacing an EV battery is currently really expensive (often exceeding the entire value of the used vehicle).
It does look like with good battery management, the lifespan can be considerably lengthened however. Particularly, if you cap the max charge to 80% and min charge to 20%. This, plus active cooling is probably how Tesla has managed to achieve such good battery longevity. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, EV owners get more comfortable with it.
Another thing to consider is that right now the 'peak' grid usage (when EV discharge would be most useful) usually occurs in the evening, probably when a lot of folks are still using their EV for commuting. So rolling out the infrastructure to do two way charging is probably not worth the cost because utilization might be pretty low. I.E. What % of EV drivers would have enough spare battery capacity to discharge a non-trivial amount right after their commute. Probably not many, at least not until we either see a big increase in EV capacity (which will probably happen as batteries get cheeper).
> What % of EV drivers would have enough spare battery capacity to discharge a non-trivial amount right after their commute.
It would probably still be pretty high. Total ranges are in the hundreds of miles, but the average commute is 16 miles, so most of the capacity would still be there when you get home.
The real question is going to be whether it's cost effective. If you do that and then have to replace the battery twice in ten years instead of once, is that actually more profitable than having one battery for your car that lasts ten years and another which is purpose built for grid storage and also lasts ten years? Basically a question of time value of money vs. whether being built for purpose is sufficiently more efficient.
The point I was trying to make was that 2 way charging infrastructure is not cheap[1]. And right now battery storage is really only cost competitive as a peak flex provider largely because you need to pay for the electricity that goes into the battery, i.e. a battery does not generate electricity, it merely allows for price arbitrage. So you would have to try and make your money back by only selling during a 2-3 hour window each day, and that window happens to coincide with prime commuting hours. So even if you weren't commuting during that time, ever, you would be making about ~$1 per day[2] and $365 per year. Assuming $5k in infrastructure costs you are looking at 13 year payback, and this ignores battery degradation entirely, among other things[3]
[1] Lets say $5000, which is pretty reasonable considering you would need a new charger, an inverter, and would probably have to modify your vehicle.
[2] You are arbitraging, so lets' say you but at $0.08/kwh and sell at $0.16/kwh. And in 2 hours you can discharge 10-15 kwh, which puts you in the $1 dollar per day range.
[3] Also assume the utility will pay you retail rates for you kwh.
> Lets say $5000, which is pretty reasonable considering you would need a new charger, an inverter, and would probably have to modify your vehicle.
That would presumably be a lot less if the cars start having that designed in. They're already using AC motors, so they already have inverters, the question becomes how feasible (and efficient) it is to have them produce mains power.
(The obvious step before they do that would be to add a "number of charge cycles" maximum to the battery warranty, if they don't have that already.)
> So you would have to try and make your money back by only selling during a 2-3 hour window each day, and that window happens to coincide with prime commuting hours.
This is also likely to change somewhat with the rise of solar. Right now the demand peak starts around 4PM, but the sun is generally still out then. If a significant fraction of generation capacity becomes solar then that means no lack of supply at that time and the real price surge happens as the sun sets, i.e. once most people are already home. So the number high demand hours decreases, but that moots the commuting issue. Meanwhile the remaining demand is even higher because not only do you have high demand, you have a reduction in supply due to the loss of solar capacity, which means the price differential to arbitrage may increase from what it currently is.
We (somewhat) have. I was part of a focus/design thinking group for VW working on this.
I think what’s mostly holding it back right now is the relative low prevalence of electric cars and that, as far as I can tell, we have not yet reached the point where renewable energy actually needs batteries. The scheme only makes sense when Wind & Solar actually exceeds demand for significant stretches of time.
After that, there are some issues: car manufacturers need to somehow find a scheme for them to make it worthwhile for them. Owners need to be compensated at least for whatever wear it inflicts on batteries.
They had simulations showing the scheduling would actually be somewhat easy. This was three or four years ago, and their algorithms were already almost perfect in predicting when you would need your car.
A couple come to mind. First is that it'll put additional shallow cycles on the batteries and it would have to include some logic so that it was still full by morning in case the owner wanted to take a long drive. Coming out to a partially charged car after an overnight charge would be bad. On top of that night as far as I know with our current system isn't exactly an expensive time to get electricity because the sun is down and most people are asleep in their homes not in businesses where a lot of peak use is. That will change as the amount of solar in our system increases but for now it's not really an issue.
I think the additional cycles is my personal biggest issue with the idea. Battery wear is already among my biggest worries with getting an electric car after years of dealing with the slow terrible decay of cellphone batteries.
Your comment reminded me of the little 10 MW nuclear reactors that Toshiba was developing. The idea was that you bury them around neighborhoods and they work for some decently long time. I wonder what happened to that idea? Is there any hope of small/safe/cheap nuclear power?
Tesla has the ability to orchestrate this, and has an ongoing trial program in Scandinavia. It’s only one way though (commanding the vehicle to charge or not); vehicle battery chemistry is not designed to discharge to the grid like the Powerwall/Powerpack products are.
Rang is a rather big deal in electric cars. You would need to be able to tell the car, I don’t need X range today before discharging it to the grid is a good idea. On top of that, discharge cycles reduce battery lifespan so you need to make a lot bore they are worth using.
The reverse was considered viable as nighttime energy was cheap and as long as you charged before X AM users would presumably not care.
Yeah a lot of people point at lithium as the scarce input. But Cobalt for common lion batteries is problematic because it's produced almost entirely as a by-product of copper and zinc (I think) mining. For the other metals used current production dwarfs the supply needed for batteries.
However there are lithium iron phosphate batteries.
Still, 1MWh is the average monthly consumption of a single household. That means that for a fixed cost of less than 200$ per family we could solve intermittency problems by building, probably one battery per village or city block.
It is cheaper than storing water to put pressure in the network.
I'll answer my own question: This is not a MWh of installed capacity, this is a MWh of discharge. That is, over the expected lifetime of a storage installation, consuming one MWh from such an installation would cost $187. Still much more expensive than alternatives (about 4x the cost of nuclear) but arriving in the realm of feasibility.
One argument that I often hear is that even if we go with batteries, they then need to be replaced every few years, and the electricity is mostly coming from non-renewable sources either way.
Germany has almost no hydro power compared to the 24% average in the EU. Biomass, PV and Wind Power alone produce 38% of the electricity in Germany. This percentage is growing by 3-4% a year. Combined with nuclear and other zero emission technologies it produces 45% of the electricity without emitting CO2. If Germany had hydro power it would already be at 69% but it wouldn't matter.
Despite this massive success the total CO2 emissions haven't changed. The electricity sector is obviously only responsible for around 24% of the total energy used in Germany. Therefore the renewable strategy only amounts to a 12% reduction.
One of the biggest problems that Germany suffers from is that the transportation sector still uses gasoline. Over the last 10 years people have started buying more cars and driving them for more miles. Less efficient diesel (which is taxed less than gasoline) cars also resulted in a minor increase in CO2 emissions. This completely negated the CO2 decreases thanks to renewable electricity.
If anything what holds back renewable energy is the total lack of mass market electric cars that can compete with ICEs and lack of charging infrastructure.
Battery technology is currently improving at such a high pace that we might never even need anything better than lithium ion batteries. Tesla has managed to reduce the cobalt content down from 14% to less than 3%. The yearly cost reductions even make cheap flow batteries which basically are just sulfuric acid with vanadium mixed in uncompetitive.
Less efficient diesel regarding CO2 emisions? One of the reasons diesel engines were pushed in EU was due to better CO2 emmisions by diesel engines compared to petrol engines.
> Combined with nuclear and other zero emission technologies it produces 45% of the electricity without emitting CO2.
Which is pretty embarrassing, given the huge investment made. By that same measure, France is at almost 90% (74% nuclear, 15% renewable). Without further nuclear developments, Germany will depend either on fossils or on massive technological breakthroughs in solving the fluctuations caused by wind energy.
Li-ion batteries are mostly useful to shift the load by a couple of hours, that is to be able to sell cheap to produce solar power in the evening when the demand is highest and therefore the gross price for electricity the highest.
So just a few hours worth of storage are actually really useful to integrate a significantly higher amount of renewables in the power mix.
I didn't realise just how useful that "shift load by a couple of hours" was until I got a battery installed at home. Before my PV + battery system was installed, I paid about $0.21 for each kW.hr consumed. After it was installed, the same power company offered to pay $0.11 for feed in.
So I looked around. There is another company that would charge $0.19 for power consumed, and $0.20 for feed-in, with a catch. The catch is encoded in a complex formula, but it boils down to "we hit you hard if consume power during the 4 hour peak hour period at _any_ time during the 90 day billing period".
My battery isn't big enough to supply an entire day or act as a back up during an extended power outage - but it can easily shift the 4 hours power usage this plan needs. Just doing that makes a big difference since we produce twice what we use. Who would have thought just having a 4 hour battery could drop your power bill by 1/3?
Even more impressively, the battery says on the box it is good for 6,000 cycles. But they are full cycles, and if I just use it for 4 hours I'll never use a full cycle. It could last over 20 years if I only draw on it 4 hours a day.
I think the latter is definitely not true. We already are around 37% clean energy in the US already. In many states, the number is already over 50%. Especially with storage, we have a fairly easy path to getting most, or even the vast majority of our electricity from clean sources. (Including nuclear under “clean sources,” too, because while it isn’t intermittent, it also isn’t really dispatchable so it also benefits from storage.)
Outside of compressed air or springs there isn't currently a clean way of storing power. Batteries are the plastic trash bags of the future and the massive problems they're causing won't cause an uproar until we can see it from outer space, just like the trash island.
Recovering 95% of the economically valuable materials [0] used in batteries is pretty much a solved problem. Using plastics and other low value materials might ruin that number but there is no reason why governments can't mandate to build batteries that can be easily recycled.
Batteries are super eco-friendly when you're using them unless they start burning. Making batteries and disposing of batteries is when they're damaging the environment.
I hear that recycling li ion batteries requires a lot of pretty nasty chemicals, and wouldn't be surprised if the long tail on handling and cleanup of those plus the actual process is fairly resource intensive.
Oil is a pretty nasty chemical too, so I don't know what the balance is.
Besides just batteries, renewable energy circles in China are just now starting to grasp what it's going to take to transport and recycle the gadzillions of solar waste that's going to start rolling in around 2030. Some takes make it sound pretty dire. [1]
> Mary Hutzler, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington D.C., said that solar panels are manufactured using hazardous materials — including sulfuric acid and phosphine gas — making them difficult to recycle. They also contain toxic metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium, which can be harmful to humans and are likely to leak from electronic waste dumps into drinking water supplies.
Chromium is only in CIGS, which is 0% of the market, Cadmium is only in CdTe, which is a few percent of the market and only manufactured in the US by First Solar. Lead is just in the solder, which is the same issue as with all electronics. How does the use of chemicals purely as part of the manufacturing process make the panel more difficult to recycle, if the material is not in the finished product? IER is a Koch funded nonsense.
That particular quote as is makes no sense. I think the real statement is that solar panel RECYCLING requires sulfuric acid and phosphine gas. That would make more sense.
13.5 million cumulative tonnes of solar waste in China by 2050 is not FUD at all, that's a statement of success in solar deployment.
Are you suggesting that recycling this magnitude of solar waste will be trivial, both environmentally and economically? The 30 year lifetime plus massive deployments leads logically to a recycling challenge that isn't often discussed. I'm not an expert in the field so I can't say enough to suggest it will be trivial or challenging.
Gut feeling given those kinds of numbers is that it will be both challenging and expensive.
The quote about chemicals makes no sense because it's just promoting fear by association. Phosphine can be used for n-type doping of amorphous silicon layers during certain cell production processes. It never leaves the manufacturing site. It's not used or produced in any module recycling process. Hutzler is smearing solar technology because his institute aims to promote fossil fuels and fight "climate alarmism."
I think that the point about 13.5 million tons of solar waste in China by 2050 is fine by itself. That's still orders of magnitude less waste than would be produced by sourcing equivalent electricity from coal. For comparison, Georgia's Plant Bowen alone has 21 million tons of coal ash sitting in unlined pits and leaching into the water:
Reading the pie chart from the Sixth Tone article, it looks like about 3/4 of the solar waste material is aluminum, glass, and steel. Those all have efficient, long-established recycling processes. The polymer backsheets and encapsulants, silicon cells, and minor metals used in cell contacts and wiring (copper, silver) are more difficult to deal with because of their heterogeneous nature. The only valuable part of that ~3.375 million tons of heterogenous waste is the copper and silver content. Silicon is low-value and non-hazardous. The polymers need to be treated as plastic waste. Like most plastic waste, they can't be effectively recycled.
Well scaring people away from renewables is pretty counter-productive to the decarbonizing cause so that was not my intent. I happened upon that article when reading something else earlier today and thought it might be relevant.
Certainly coal is worse. We should just be careful to not replace one problem with another. Obviously in mass, coal will dominate. It's most a question of raw material availability or economics of recycling that matter for the vast expansion of energy harvesting we're talking about here.
I'm glad that you as a knowledgeable person in the topic are not concerned about any negative implications of vast renewable buildout for electricity, transport, heating, and industry.
There is one important material constraint before expanding solar PV technology to the multi-terawatt scale: silver. Right now silver-containing conductive pastes are the overwhelmingly popular choice for forming cell contacts. I expect copper contacts to replace silver pastes at some point. Plated copper has higher conductivity than printed silver paste and of course the raw metal is much cheaper, but it takes more effort to integrate plating into manufacturing flows. SunPower already uses copper metallization at gigawatt scale cell production levels, so I'm pretty confident that other manufacturers can follow when silver costs go up.
The one important possibly-constrained battery material is cobalt as a component of lithium-ion battery cathodes. But stationary storage batteries don't need to maximize energy density and therefore don't need to use the same cobalt-bearing cathodes as those in mobile electronics and electric vehicles. The key attribute of a stationary grid-storage battery is lifetime -- encompassing both calendar life and cycle life. Long-life batteries don't need cobalt if the energy density is negotiable.
FWIW you can see from my comment history that I have no qualms about the scalability or safety of nuclear power either. I think that deep decarbonization may require additional nuclear power. The cost trajectory for storage-backed renewables just looks more promising than the cost trajectory of new nuclear power right now. It appears that the least-cost decarbonization path will emphasize renewable/storage buildout until the marginal decarbonization cost rises high enough to justify more high-cost (but rock-steady) nuclear reactors.
It’s definitely an issue, and I’m interested in the recycling of solar panels in the same way that I’m interested in the recycling of all electronic and industrial products. For instance circular economy regulation which would require manufacturers to make allowances for recycling. I also personally would be wary of allowing Cadmium Telluride panels to be installed. But to be frank most of the objections you see are obviously being cultivated by the IER and similar organizations as a sort of talking point, not out of serious interest, that article and that quote is a prime example.
