Giant batteries are transforming the way the U.S. uses electricity

What is striking about this is that usable Sodium Ion is just entering the market in volume. It should:

- push any and all electric-battery platforms under ICE equivalents by substantial margins, possibly 30-50% price reductions. Tools, Cars, Trucks, etc

- that will enable lithium chemistries to get cheaper, because they don't need to be used where their density isn't needed.

Sodium-Sulfur, which hopefully becomes viable in 5 years (might be dependent on commercial graphene so....), offers even more potential.

I had to read this several times before I understood... The grid is so unstable that batteries were installed even before any PV panels. We western people have the luxury of reasoning the other way around.

I'm by no means implying that you're do anything wrong btw, I'm genuinely curious how this is affecting things. In the US I've wondered what the impact would be but it's too early to tell.

The household paying the latter just installed 15kW of solar panels and a battery bank to cut their costs to the $16/mo hookup fee and it's not even the height of summer yet. It's almost to the point where their backup propane generator is cheaper to run than pay for utility power! The solar/battery installation will pay for itself in under five years assuming no price increases (hah!).

Everyone is building it at every level of the producer/consumer curve.

I have installed 21 solar panels and I have a propane powered generator. My intention is to eventually move to batteries as well so I can be as independent of PgE as possible.

California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.

Last time I checked, 11 states received the majority of their electricity from renewable sources, and 10/11 had cheaper rates than the national average, with California being the exception.

Other parts of California pay pretty normal rates.

Homeowner still benefits from reduced bills, and the grid gains massive distribution diversification. Win win.

You can't figure out who's good online, interview the local companies. Locals will also get you through the permitting and code compliance process too.

Solar is great, but IMO we should be somehow encouraging rooftop solar (which, yes, is more expensive!) in order to reduce pressure on wilderness and agriculture.

Before someone jumps in with the efficient market hypothesis, fundamentally the problem is that wilderness services aren't easily priced correctly, but solar has suddenly made chopping down wilderness (more) easily monetizable.

We have the same issue around me with people chaining themselves to bulldozers and pushing for animal sanctuary designations just so they can avoid having to see windmills on the horizon.

However, you're doing the right thing. It's important to not let the great become the enemy of the good. Yes, there is work to be done to make batteries zero impact. But no matter what's happening in the world of batteries it is nothing compared to the extraordinary destructive force of coal, oil, and gas globally.

https://acespace.org/blog/2024/01/12/top-10-oil-and-gas-indu...

https://www.miningreview.com/coal/the-top-10-coal-mines-of-t...

This is a very odd belief to have when it comes to batteries, because we are nowhere close to even discovering how much, say, lithium we have easily available, and more deposits are discovered all the time these days. Nobody bothered to identify them in the past, so we are looking now.

Also, batteries will be far more recycled than, say, your furniture or all the other things in the house. They are expecting >90% recovery of the materials, and in the 10-20 years of use, battery technology advances so much that when they get remade into more batteries, that 90% recovery will store even more electricity than the 100% of materials did the first time.

While I'm glad people are having these concerns, in general, they should be concerns about all aspects of consumed goods, not just the goods that are already doing the most to reduce environmental impact.

Grid scale batteries are treated as alternate supplies of energy, but yes, they are storage, and cannot indefinitely run at a constant output.

That's the confusion. Directly comparing them is not useful, except when describing a finite time span.

Gigajoules doesn't really help clarify the confusion, because it doesn't change that they're not directly comparable.

It's talking about the ability to supply power to the grid, not how long it can supply that power. It's arguable how useful a measure that is but they're certainly using it correctly. IMO they're also talking about it in a reasonable way- capacity and power are pretty closely related for batteries, and the ability to pick up demand is critical to handling instability.

Watts are SI, hours are used all over metric countries. I don't see how watt hours aren't metric?

The problem with used EV batteries is that they've started to degrade, and they degrade in chaotic ways, so you can't offer a predictable product made from old cells. Some cells may have shorts internally, others may have evaporated some electrolyte, or the electrodes may have degraded. Right now, lithium recovery is quite primitive from used cells. I've tried to reuse used batteries myself for storage, and the unpredictable wear made me give up.

Also, EV batteries, which are optimized for power density, may not be the best choice for home storage, where you want the ability to deep cycle to buffer power usage as the NYT article describes. The NMC cells common in EV's don't like to sit at above 90% state of charge (this cutoff is arbitrary, but > 90% results in fast breakdown), and they don't like to go below 20%, so you have a useful range of 70% of the capacity. You can over-provision by 30% or you can use lithium-iron-phosphate cells, which are less power dense, but much more tolerant of deep cycling.

I set my home up like this a long time ago. I use 100% of my solar and export nothing to the CA grid due to batteries. It's not cost effective to do this given the cost of storage when I set this up, but it's really neat to someone of my nerdy predisposition. My goals originally were to have solar based backup power, because I lose power quite a lot despite living in silicon valley, and it's worked great for that too.

And just wait until you hear about chocolate.

(The truth is the cost probably needs to rise to handle humane labor conditions, but supply shock is also an issue.)