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Comment by hasoleju | Hacker News Reader

> “I think over the next thirty years every home will have a battery. I don’t know if every home will have solar—some have too much shade, or the wrong roof. But batteries are going to become an appliance, just like a dishwasher or a television.”

From quick googling I learnt that the current home battery lifetime is 5-15 years. Replacing a battery in every home every 5 to 15 years seems like a big unnecessary hustle.

Wouldn't it be better to install all the batteries in one place, maintain them properly there and rent them out to individual home owners in the neighborhood?

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I wouldn't focus too much on current battery specs. Any sort of mass-rollout is going to take long enough that battery tech may be very different when it happens. There's a lot going on with improvements to existing tech as well as new chemistries and designs.

I generally think the same was as you do, but for solar installs. While I think it's great that people choose to add solar to their homes, I think society shouldn't be subsidizing it until we've done more to cover commercial rooftops and other, more maintainable installation sites.

Where I live, the council/county, mail out to residents about group purchases of solar/batteries. Probably a way of helping without necessarily subsidising.

Much longer lasting and more easily recyclable batteries do exist, iron nickel batteries for example, which are extremely robust, last for decades, and can be melted down and rebuilt when they do fail. But of course have the downside of costing a lot more for the same amount of energy storage because nickel is pretty expensive.

I wouldn't bet on them being that common of a battery in the future, but if I wanted a battery that would last me the rest of my life and I had the money to put down for it, I would probably put my money on an iron nickel battery.

Tesla Powerwall is probably the most commercially successful home battery. It comes with a warranty guaranteeing 70% capacity after 10 years, which is not to say it has a 10 year lifetime. It's still early to determine its actual lifetime, but the battery technology is also rapidly improving due to the EV transition.

If every home has big battery, the local fire department is gonna go crazy. Those things are a nightmare to deal with.

In the US, the national electrical code (NEC) has been updated to mandate an externally available power shutoff at all new construction (or extensive renovation) regardless if solar is present or not.

This is not the source document, but a summary and it includes the relevant passage: https://kbelectricpa.com/emergency-disconnect-requirements-f...

Turns out probably not, because the grid infrastructure is quite expensive.

It makes sense only if the house also have solar panels (that don't need grid cost for in-house use). Without solar panels (or other generators), regardless of where battery locates, they need to pay grid cost someday. Though there are other benefits: backup for interruption, utilize parked vehicle by V2X

It reduces peak amperage requirements which has a big impact since cable heating is proportional to the square of the current.

Ah reduce peak grid usage is reasonable, though it's not applied to how grid cost charged for house here now.

You would lose one of the main benefits : be unaffected when the grid goes down.

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