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Comment by rthomas6 | Hacker News Reader

I wish it were standard practice to have some kind of house battery (what Tesla calls "Powerwall") for new construction homes. They could smooth out peak usage in this exact way, in addition to making individual homes more resilient to occasional power outages.

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So you want to make one of the most unaffordable assets a person can buy even more unaffordable by mandating a big extra investment to prop up underinvested infrastructure?

Perhaps for building blocks (if US ever densifies away from single family homes) would make sense.

Its a drop in the bucket relatively speaking, more like insulation in terms of upfront cost to provide a benefit and reduce long term costs.

It's... really not if you tried to actually build it.

The building materials aren't what's causing housing to be unaffordable. It's single family zoning and land speculation. The best thing to do to lower housing costs is to drastically reduce single family zoning (some cities have like 90% land area zoned for detached single family houses only!) to allow for infill development of SFHs into denser housing, and to implement an unimproved land value tax to discourage profiteering on land.

Sure, but slapping a 20-30.000$ on top doesn't help at all.

IMO this isn't the direction we're going. I'd bet that in 20 years, there will be some form of grid-scale specific battery that is 2-3x cheaper than lithium iron (per joule), but with much worse energy density. Many of the batteries of this type are unsuitable for home installation (because they get more efficient with scale). Some of the potential options for this are things like iron sulfur batteries which require pretty high temps, or some designs for batteries that basically involve physical pumps to pump liquid anodes and cathodes around.

> some designs for batteries that basically involve physical pumps to pump liquid anodes and cathodes around

Yeah in addition to flow batteries there are also grid scale thermal batteries, though these are targeted more towards long duration energy storage: run electricity through a large carbon block in a shipping container form factor to heat it up, then use infrared photovoltaics to convert back to electricity when desired.

I'd be interested in learning more about this carbon block battery that you're describing.

I'm also curious how it compares in cost effectiveness to this battery that's based on sand.

https://tambaynews.blogspot.com/2022/07/worlds-first-commerc...

Antora is one example: https://antoraenergy.com/

In addition to a few hundred mil in funding, they have support from NREL/DoE, eg https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2024/how-nrel-helps-start... I also was at a conference recently that had some cool feasibility studies done by people at NREL about using TPV for LDTES with Antora product specs used for boundary conditions, but I don’t think that’s published yet.

I’ve also seen FourthPower mentioned a few times but I don’t know much about them or how feasible their tech actually is.

https://gofourth.com/our-technology/

Energy storage is not my area of expertise (but very much adjacent to it).

It might happen! There's a fair bit of active research into repurposing batteries from cars into such a purpose or similar.

This both extends the usefulness of the manufactured good (the battery) while also hopefully lowering the upfront costs of new electric cars.

This is the ideal. I think a happy medium -- which some companies are already working on -- is adding batteries to appliances. This allows them to charge when electricity is cheaper or provided locally (i.e. solar) and act as a buffer for outages.

I think I'd prefer having new large-ish developments (20+ homes?) install a single house-sized building filled with batteries so individual homeowners don't have to sacrifice space or deal with maintenance, replacement, insurance, etc.

What if Your Town Doubled as a Private Power Grid? Around the country, developers are building microgrids — energy-resilient communities that act as their own energy source.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/realestate/microgrid-sola...

> ...

> The couple liked that each house came with a three-kilowatt rooftop solar system, which would reduce their carbon footprint and cut their utility bill by a third. But as they toured the 31-home community, they discovered that they were looking at North Carolina’s first residential “microgrid” development.

> A microgrid is a network of buildings that essentially acts as a miniature power grid. It can operate outside of the larger municipal electrical system by ensuring backup power for the entire development, which can be produced by a solar array system and stored in a battery.

> ...

> At Heron’s Nest, the 62-kilowatt solar system and 255-kilowatt-hour battery are maintained by the local utility, Brunswick Electric Membership Corporation. Homeowners get a monthly energy credit on their utility bills by signing an interconnection agreement with the utility, which controls their hot-water heaters and thermostats when there’s high power demand. If the local power grid is stressed and the utility believes a power outage is necessary, residents here will be able to keep their lights on.

It depends on the situation. That approach doesn’t seem great for rural areas where outages are most likely.

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