[thesis]

Texas has these free electricity nights. Anyone know of a battery system that can fill the batteries at night (from the grid) and use them during the day? And then recharge at night again. Due to location solar isn’t an option but still interested in batteries due to free nights.

[bboygravity]

Tesla power wall?

No batteries I know of will make economical sense though. Batteries are expensive, wear down and/or require maintenance. After x years / cycles your batteries will be dead and will need to be replaced.

Storing your "free" energy in a battery will end up costing more than just buying the energy when you need it.

Expensive energy storage is a big part of the reason why "green" energy countries like Germany have some of the highest energy prices in the world. And also some of the highest CO2 emissions per kWh in the EU (they need coal and gas powered plants as backups for when there's no wind and solar, because batteries don't make economical sense).

[ziga]

I agree about home batteries being too expensive, hopefully prices will come down with scale.

But the part about battery degradation is not true. Tesla Powerwall has a 10 year warranty[1] with 70% capacity retention. This means that Tesla has data showing that the battery will have higher capacity than 70% after those years. That's a lot of cycles and a lot of renewable energy that the battery will provide in its lifetime.

[1] https://energylibrary.tesla.com/docs/Public/EnergyStorage/Po...

[guerby]

LFP cells prices for direct sale to consumer are about 70 EUR/kWh right now. With 5000 cycles that's 1.4 EUR cent per kWh cycled out of the battery, so it fully makes economical sense in all electricity markets.

Fully integrated consumer battery prices haven't (yet) followed the decline in cell price, probably because there's lot of demand for this kind of product.

[geysersam]

> "green" energy countries like Germany

Not sure why you consider them to be "green" given the facts you brought up. Germany has never been particularly green energy wise. It's a big population and lots of heavy industry with relatively little energy resources like hydro.

The are building solar and wind quickly now. Maybe that's why you got the impression that they are "green".

[ZeroGravitas]

This is a bit like the joke about economists seeing money on the ground and not picking it up because if it was there someone would have already taken it, but:

Note how ridiculously fast the battery rollout in Texas and California has been recently.

If you've not got some local regulation that stops early adoptors from being left high and dry when the market changes, then you're in head to head competition for that cheap nighttime energy with big corporations building out grid scale batteries.

[baking]

You would have to be able to store a significant portion of your daily usage to make it worthwhile and that's before you even consider the price of the batteries.

[standeven]

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is available in more and more EVs and will allow for this.

[te_chris]

There’s loads. Search for home battery storage. You don’t need Tesla.