Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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There's going to be a bloodbath in that market in the next years. There are a lot of battery producers and most of them are not producing at full capacity. At the same time, manufacturing cost is dropping as well.

Some battery makers are producing batteries at a cost level of around 60$ per kwh. At that cost, the 16kwh battery would come out below 1000$ (not the same obviously as the product price). Sodium ion might push those prices even lower. Below 50$ soonish and eventually closer to the 10-20$ range in maybe 5-10 years. At that point we're talking a few hundred dollars for a decent size domestic battery. You still need packaging, inverters, etc. of course.

But the ROI at anything close to those price levels is going to be pretty rapid. And it wouldn't break the bank for households across the world. Add a few kw of solar on roofs, balconies, etc. It won't solve everyone's problems and certainly not in every season. But it can help reduce energy bills in a meaningful enough way. Even in winter.

Also worth pointing out: most of the US is south of Cornwall. The Canadian border runs roughly at 49 degrees latitude. Cornwall is the most southern point in the UK sits at 50 degrees. If it can work there, most of the US has no excuse. Also, the UK isn't exactly well known for their clear blue skies. Even people in Scotland much further north manage to get positive ROIs out of their solar setups.

I installed a 16.5kWp ground-mount array a month ago. I live in the US Northeast, in a mountainous location that means we get late sunrises and early sunsets. Nevertheless, based on my one month of data, it looks like we can generate all the power we need for our household on a sunny winter day, excluding electric vehicles. Even on overcast days, we can sometimes offset a significant portion of our usage. My locale does not have time-of-use rates, so there’s no point trying to do arbitrage for electricity prices. So right now I just have our battery configured for backup. My hope is that during the summer months I can reconfigure the system to use the battery to reduce grid reliance instead.

The expiring tax credits were what forced my hand. I’m the kind of person who likes to install things himself, and I probably would have gone that route for solar too, because the materials costs (sans battery) aren’t even half of the total cost.

Here in Europe, we got more than a month's worth of foggy, cloudy weather (something that looks like will keep being a thing), which is something I became painfully aware of as an owner of a solar setup.

No amount of battery banks can tide over such a long stretch.

By the way, let me ask you - considering your location, you must be getting a lot of snow, how do you deal with it, is it a problem? Panels are quite hard to reach on the roof.

Where in Europe? Between Spain and Denmark there is a lot of variance in temperature, sun and rain...

Talking about the weather "in Europe" is like talking about the shoe size a family of 10 wears.

I do indeed get a lot of snow. In January and February it snows roughly once every two days, although usually in small amounts.

Fortunately I have a ground mount. The bottom row is roughly at waist height. I can (and have been) sweeping the panels off with a large push broom. Because my array is so large, I can only reach the bottom half of the array. But this usually is enough. When the panel starts to generate power, it also tends to heat up; the snow on the top half then often slides off on its own.

I might invest in a longer broom. It is not uncommon for people here to own “snow rakes” to remove large snow loads from their roofs. These usually have a rubberized “rake” with a very long aluminum handle. Or the novelty of this might wear off and I’ll just let the panel do its own thing. It is pitched rather steeply (close to 45°) and based on my observations of my neighbors, panels tend to shed the snow on their own eventually.

Maybe you can even forward-bias your panel, and make it generate some heat off the battery power. (It may even glow a tiny bit.)

I've got a similarly sized ground-mount array, and I push the snow off with a triple-telescoping aluminum pole with a large squeegee on the end. An actual snow rake might be better, like the one you describe, but my setup gets it done. It takes some effort, but it's worth it to be able to collect the solar energy that would otherwise just reflect off the snow for days.

One thing to remember is as it becomes more widespread line costs will go up (assuming they are subsidized by kwh use, which they generally are) and no-sun power prices will increase as it's the only time when the grid needs power from non solar producers and they still need to cover cost incurred while they're not producing.

That will push the economics towards completely off grid systems as more people adopt solar, so if people are planning it for themselves they should probably consider that it will make sense to expand their set up in the future and that there might be a price crunch due to higher demand because of larger systems coupled with more people wanting to switch.

My partner works in the field and we once talked about this. I think the idea is that individual consumers’ and businesses’ batteries can serve the grid as needed. For example, if your car is fully charged and you don’t need it today, it can top up local needs.

So I think the writing isn’t on the wall yet for line price going up, although I’m of course talking of a) Belgium, and b) a future that could go wrong if utilities don’t fund smart metering.

That’s how it works for us here in Australia. We have 16Wh of solar and 40KWh of battery, and pay (and receive) wholesale rates for electricity. During the say electricity prices are very low or negative, and we run off the solar and charge the car then. In the evenings when demand is high electricity prices can spike, and our system will automatically sell to the grid then. Sometimes we may need to draw from the grid in the early morning to make up for that, but the price we pay then is insignificant compared to what we make selling the day before.

That sounds quite good, but you have a massive installation. Did it pay for itself by now?

An interesting possible is the grid becoming smaller. Neighborhood scale.

In many places from Central Europe and further north dealing with arctic cold spells and dunkelflautes are near impossible for a home solar and storage setup.

But you also don’t want to pay for a continental scale grid the remaining 51 weeks.

So in your neighborhood add some wind power and a good old trusty diesel/gas turbine running on carbon neutral fuel and keep the costs to a minimum.

This is addressed by crowdsourcing generation and storage to household batteries. Surplus energy is banked locally instead of being dumped on the grid. The utilities buy it back from homeowners at wholesale rate under demand response programs when they can't meet demand.

Many cities in north america you cant get occupancy without grid tied electricity, so every house incurs the coat of bas government policies on transmission. Its why i havent bothered with this yet. The optimal setup for here is natural gas generator, some battery and some solar given how stupid the fixed charges are here but you cant live in your house if you disconnect from the grid (even better would be for fuel cell manufacturers to offer something sized for a house so i can get hot water put of it as well and a silent unit)

I'm not so sure. There are a lot of large-scale applications that would gobble up battery supply if it hit a certain price point. Grid-scale storage and datacenters, for example.

If prices for residential gear falls too much, I expect the manufacturers would just stop making it and focus on the commercial options instead.

IMO, there's close to no bad usecase for batteries. In almost all their applications, they end up spreading out power consumption favoring cheap energy for expensive energy.

If a datacenter installs a solar array + a giant battery pack for their power, that's much better than them heavily relying on a natural gas plant to generate power when the lights are out.

Why does it have to be zero-sum?

Why not commercial demand creates the economies of scale that bring the residential stuff down in price with them?

The commercial options would fall further in price probably than consumer prices. If you buy in bulk, you do research to find the most cost effective options. That's a common pattern with many things. I don't see why batteries would be any different. If anything, I'd expect consumer batteries to have higher margins. Tesla batteries are a good example probably. At those prices, a Tesla car would be unobtanium. Obviously they charge a lot less for batteries that go in a car.

The reality is that many battery factories might be operating at 40-50% capacity only. Exact figures are hard to come by but there are lots of warnings about over production, surpluses, etc.. That spells a lot of trouble for some of the newer battery producers promising more efficient batteries. Because unless they price match, they price themselves out of the market almost immediately.

Majority of the world's battery manufacturing capacity is dominated by just a small handful of players:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electric_vehicle_batte...

Just 11 companies control 90+% of manufacturing capacity, I think they might need to adjust their ambitions in the face of demand, but I think most of them are too big to fail.

Companies like Schneider electric have systems for 25-50% the hyped brands but they don't provide batteries.

This is the company that owns APC so its not like theyre new or untested. They just don't bother with brand awareness

Its weird to read about Schneider Electric not bothering with brand awareness. They aren't a household brand, sure, but they are well up there with Siemens and the like in industrial/b2b sector and their marketing budget is allocated accordingly.

All they did was buy up everyone's else brand and put their brand over it. Modicon PLC's, Magnecraft relays, etc.

I suspect the traditional grid operators will fight this very very hard.

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