Tesla strikes another mammoth energy storage deal in California | Hacker News Reader

Tesla strikes another mammoth energy storage deal in California

arstechnica.com

77 pointsjonbaer30 comments

Is lithium ion batteries the best choice for large scale energy storage? Has this been real world tested or are these few deals going to decide the trend?

Just few years ago, storage was considered a big problem and batteries were considered not so viable. What changed? Density and reliability?

The Gigafactory happened. https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-stunning-numbers-behind-succ...

From an engineering perspective other solutions may be superior for grid-scale stationary storage but li-ion batteries have been benefiting from economies of scale due to mobile computing and EVs.

One thing I don't see as much talk about but lithium ion batteries have both very low self-discharge and exceptional charge/discharge rates.

Also go out on a limb and say one of the reasons you didn't see grid battery storage till now was issues with the inverters. Inverters have gotten really performant, reliable, and cheap. Probably enough to do cycle level(ms) grid stabilization.

It's no longer expensive. And it has benefits.

>A report by McKinsey and Co presented at the recent Australian Energy Week conference claims that Tesla's 100 MW / 129 MWh battery has now reduced grid service costs by 90%, taking over a 55% share of state's Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS).

[0] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/south-australias-grid-servi...

>But the levelized costs of renewables, distributed energy resources (DER) and battery storage “have fallen precipitously" RMI notes. Combined into "clean energy portfolios," these resources can "provide the same services as power plants, often at net cost savings.”

[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/end-of-the-gas-rush-renewab...

>Solar-plus-storage projects could be competitive without any federal tax incentives in California by 2020, Paul Denholm, senior energy analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), told Utility Dive. Denholm added that the time is not far off when these project pairings will be competitive with gas-fired peaking plants in other locations such as the Southwest.

>"Solar-plus-storage could be competitive in a sizeable fraction of the United States, but it is hard to say exactly when, mostly because of fluctuations in the cost of natural gas," Denholm said.

[2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/competitive-solar-plus-stor...

I'm trying to think of how to make money on this. It seems like both industries (storage and solar) are going to be highly competitive even if they're the future. There's no natural monopoly. The most straightforward bet would be to short oil stocks or maybe petrol stations, since electrification will lead to their downfall as system effects work in reverse. Or maybe the key is to find industries with natural monopolies held back by electricity costs.

Grid service storage is different to generation though. It would make more sense to short anyone selling grid scale flywheels since that's the market they're going to eat.

Pity. I was rooting for flywheels to have a place at the table.

Short coal and natural gas generators, and their equipment manufacturers.

Maybe too late on this trend. A short on GE last year would have turned out well.

There’s still time to short energy firms who own coal and natural gas generation fleets.

Not only have prices drastically dropped in the past few years, but they are expected to drop another few X in the next few years.

https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/electric-vehicle-battery-cost...

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...

I think we'll reach $50/kWh well before 2025. That's also around the same time we should have a global production of about 800GWh-1TWh per year (bulk of that from Chinese factories), or about 20x the current production.

Assuming an average battery size of 50kWh for an EV by then, even that capacity should only be enough for around -15-20 million EVs a year, or about 20-25% of the annual car sales. I may be a little optimistic here on battery size. It's possible many EVs will be super-cheap with 30kWh batteries, but we'll also see many more buses and trucks with 300+ kWh batteries. We'll need to go from 1TWh to 2 and 3TWh pretty quickly especially if we are to use batteries for utilities, too.

Around the same time we should begin to see car makers start using the much safer solid state batteries in their EVs. These will be more expensive (probably not more than what Li-Ion batteries cost right now) and they will start shipping in $50,000+ EVs at first, but they will eventually trickle down just as Li-Ion batteries have and will.

What I want to know is why do smartphone manufacturers think it's okay to sell $800 phones with 3,000 mAh batteries about four years after shipping them for the first time on the market. They did exactly the same thing with storage. They kept 16GB as default for a few years in their flagships, to the point where it cost them 4x less/GB than it did when they first launched with a 16GB drive.

Who says they are not https://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_204428.html

Because unlike storage, the energy density of a battery only increases very slowly if at all. So it becomes not a trade in price, but a trade in size.

The big advantage of batteries over any other kind of storage is very quick reaction times allowing to greately improove stability of the greed.

As for the battery technology Sodium–sulfur batteries could be a in theory a better option for storage on industrial scale, but I guess Gigafactory makes lithium ion batteries sufficiently cheap and in sufficient quantities now.

It's pretty common for an "inferior" technology (at least in a certain niche) to win out when there's a monstrous industrial economy of scale behind it and the "superior" alternative isn't produced in much volume.

A very clear example is big complicated general purpose CPUs like Xeon and Ryzen. These chips have all kinds of subsystems and a lot of legacy cruft. A custom chip with a different custom tuned set of performance trade-offs could be better for virtually any well-defined application, but the cost of designing, optimizing, retooling, and producing such a chip would be vastly higher than just buying the off the shelf general purpose chips. Intel and AMD have already invested billions in producing these chips cheaply in enormous quantities.

Li-Ion batteries have endless applications from electronics and cars to grid power, so Li-Ion is going to get the R&D, industrial, and supply chain optimization. Alternatives with fewer niches will not.

For large scale energy storage, pumped hydro is much cheaper and has a much larger capacity, but they take years to build and are harder to get approved due to environmental concerns.

For example, the planned Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme in Australia: 2 GW, 350 GWh, US$2.8-3.3 billion. Will take 5 years to build.

Compared to Tesla's previous 'world biggest battery' in South Australia (the 'Hornsdale Power Reserve'): 100 MW, 129 MWh, US$74 million. Built in 4 months.

i.e. $9.43 versus $574 per kWh.

I don't know energy units at all so sorry if this is dumb. But is 2 GW the same as 20 * 100 MW? So $74mm * 20 = 1.48 billion which is less than 2.8 ? E.g. battery is cheaper?

The relevant unit is storage (kWh-- kilowatt hour), not power (MW-- megawatt).

Both are relevant, depending on the purpose.

Ah ok. So kWh is like the length of time of that amount of energy delivered. What's the 2 GW then, like max through put at a given moment in time? So the two examples water storage lasts a really long time but a smaller relative rate of discharge versus battery could discharge the amount stored a lot quicker?

kWh is for energy stored in this example, the "size of the tank". kWh is analogous to toe (tonne of oil equivalent) or gallons of gas. kW is for power, that is the flow of energy (energy/s), another non SI unit is horsepower. The SI unit for energy is Joule (J), the SI unit for power is J/s. 1 Watt is 1 Joule per second.

According to [1] the total price for the project will be up to 7e9 AUD or 5.1e9 USD, so the storage cost will be like 15 USD/kWh. Tesla promises that by 2020 they will have batteries costing bellow 100 USD/kWh. The difference is still big by the factor of 6, but at least it is no longer 2 orders of magnitude.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/21/snowy...

I presume that energy density also has a lot to do with it, as others have said. Other ways that we've tried, including hydrogen cars, just don't offer the same amount of energy density. Real volume constraints are also becoming an issue as we need more and more energy for devices. That coupled with improvements in safety and cost makes it worth it.

One issue is that they need to stay cooled and so there's an entire cooling apparatus which of course takes power.

https://electrek.co/2017/01/24/tesla-teardown-100-kwh-batter...

Which is minor compared to having to curtail renewables production.

Cooling can be done with ice-rods- which are created when energy is abundant and store surprisingly well in the long term. Even in the pre-Musk eras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l

A good episode from Planet Money(https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/15/620298266/epis...) which goes into the different options and whats the most viable option. Answer: you couldnt have guessed it.

Previous thread on China winning global race to control batteries https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16356343

'Tesla' is essentially panasonic partnership in battery manufacture

'Panasonic is the exclusive battery cell supplier for Tesla’s current production models, making them in Japan as well as at the $5 billion Gigafactory'.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panasonic-batteries/panas...

Musk is a little like Branson in his branded businesses with v major stakes owned by others. (in the case of Branson mostly Saudis)

I think Musk is like Branson in you give him money to do X he'll actually try and do it rather than come up with cunning plans to screw you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com