US grid-battery costs dropped 70% over 3 years

Not yet, but if power production becomes more volatile (more wind/solar and ???) without associated demand response, how quickly you can charge and discharge starts impacting your duty cycle (“inventory turns per hour”).

"On December 14, the Loy Yang coal power plant — one of the largest in Australia — suddenly went offline. In an instant, the grid shed 560 MW of electricity, enough to power 170,000 homes. 600 miles away, the Hornsdale Power Reserve battery system, as the Tesla system is officially known, kicked in within 140 milliseconds. It reacted so quickly, in fact, that the local grid operator was unable to measure the response time accurately. "

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/12/27/tesla-grid-storage-batt...

I thought people were mounting these out in the garage.

For me that would be an 80° delta between the highest summer highs and the lowest winter low. The delta in places like Wyoming would be a lot more.

I have the impression that Tesla tweaks the chemistry depending on the application. The cells used for power wall and grid storage might be slightly different to take advantage of those differences.

While weight/volume isn't important itself, reducing the weight/volume per kWh will also tend to reduce the cost per kWh since you're using less materials.

There are storage solutions that go further in taking advantage of the points you mention, such as flow batteries, but in that case I think it can be expensive to get high power output. The article mentions that price per kW is also important. With batteries you automatically get more watts the more watt-hours you add, which is useful in many cases.

That said, the sad truth is they may abandon it in favor of doing utility storage solutions :(. I'd really love to do a solar + power wall setup for my own home.

If you don't go through tesla, you might be able to get a powerwall supplier to install it for an off grid solution. However, I hear powerwalls are in short supply (and for good reason, they are the cheapest storage solution on the market).

In the post WW2 era the world has seen next to zero sustained deflation in any major economies, including in Japan (the supposed capital example of deflation for the past quarter century).

As always with the world being overwhelmingly ruled by Keynesian economics, inflation is the destroyer of worlds, not deflation. While economists hold up the false bogeyman of deflation, inflation is actively and persistently destroying economic value, from the US to Europe to Asia. If I were a conspiracy theory type, I'd have to believe they were using the deflation scarecrow on purpose to distract from the way their Keynesian model inevitably destroys everything it touches.

All you have to do is ask an economist, fearing their great fake bogeyman of deflation, for several prominent examples of deflation in the Venezuela or Zimbabwe outcome model of inflationary destruction. Watch as they panic and run for cover. Given how much they all supposedly fear deflation, you'd think there are dozens of recent prominent examples of deflation damaging economies as inflation has harmed the US since ~1970, or how inflation has rocked countries like Argentina.

Take Japan as the long held up example of the great modern economist fear re deflation. They all think Japan has been suffering from persistent deflation for roughly 25 years give or take. Why are consumer prices in Japan so high after decades of persistent deflation? Why is real estate still so expensive in all of their major cities? It's because they didn't actually suffer decades of persistent deflation, other than some modest stagnation-caused pricing pressure from weak consumer demand.

What Japan has actually suffered from is the opposite: they spent their brains out on infrastructure to exceptionally mediocre returns, mis-allocating capital they loaded up on debt to an epic degree, the cost and allocation of which robbed their economy of free capital to invest toward growth, leading to a heat death stagnation. Modern economists, being witch doctors as they are, then proceeded to confuse all of that with ... deflation, because the alternative is to admit that their Keynesian model failed spectacularly in Japan (and it's still failing). In reality Japan massively inflated via very large rounds of deficit spending, debased the Yen aggressively and it all failed. To this day, the modern economics profession refuses to acknowledge the failure of their model in Japan, instead proclaiming that somehow Japan failed to spend enough, they needed to inflate even more aggressively (and say goodbye to the Japanese standard of living accordingly, as that approach has wiped out 1/3 of their standard of living in just the past decade).

Next up, modern economists proclaim the US is suffering from deflation, as the US spends its brains out, leading to increasing stagnation of growth (already underway the past decade plus) as more and more free capital is allocated to servicing giant debt costs and is locked up in low yield trash debt, depriving the economy of the capital it needs to grow. Their cure: spend more, inflate more, debase the USD more. The end result: Japan.

Deflation in a game economy is a sure way to ruin things for everyone. Soon every new character is running around with the third-best hat on, and the fourth best sword. With such a compressed distance between typical and exceptional, everyone becomes muted. What's there to hope for? Why do I even bother to try, when good enough takes no effort at all?

There were several points where my decision to play a game came down to my read of the game economy. If they had no coherent solution to the deflation problem, thanks but no thanks.

I don't know how directly these motivators translate to the real world, but people are people and I can see things getting pretty bad.

This is from mid 2018, but you can see that model s/x batteries were hitting about 90% capacity after 250,000km which is verrryy roughly 700-800 charge cycles. https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/04/scree...

Grid storage batteries are going to be charged and discharged at more reasonable rates than cars. Tesla's superchargers run at 50-250kW and discharging is going to be above 1MW at times, which is not kind to batteries.

I think you can expect quality grid storage setups to last 2000-3000 cycles at this time depending on their environment.

Keep in mind that these cycle lifetimes are to 80% life, so if you're willing to go down to 50% capacity you can expect longer lifetimes, probably closing in on 15-20 years of use.