So, where does lithium come from? It comes from the Earth, of course, but it doesn't require strip mining or blowing the tops off mountains like other resources do...most often, lithium is found in briny underground ponds. The liquid is pumped out and left to dry in the sun.
Mining is mining. There isn't a "green" form. Tearing holes in the earth is not the worst ecological damage or the great health risk. The big problem is the water...and it will run downhill from the Andes and wherever else Lithium is mined and into the Ocean.
The house off the grid is built on industrial infrastructure.
The house off the grid is built on
industrial infrastructure.
So what? It's a matter of degree.
I helped my parents build their off-the-grid house. It's solar-powered, but uses batteries for backup storage. It collects and filters rainwater, recycles and purifies its own sewage, and is made mostly of recycled materials (in the style of what's called an "Earthship," but with a more traditional, house-like form factor).
Did industrial infrastructure come into play? Of course. We used cars and trucks to get stuff there to build with. We used machines and materials produced in the modern world. What difference could that possibly make? The house is still much less ecologically destructive than the vast majority of dwellings worldwide, both in terms of ongoing damage and initial construction.
It's possible to create buildings today which get all their electricity from the sun; which require no industrial infrastructure at all for sewage, heat, or clean water; and which cost much, much less than earlier housing models. That's an amazing improvement.
All tech's based to some degree on tech which came before.
Also many municipalities don't allow battery 'grid-tie' with the option of 'off the grid' living. For example, Connecticut has laws which don't allow houses to have batteries that would allow a house to be self sustaining and have a connection to the grid. This is because if you have batteries which cause a back flow during a power outage to the power station, an electrical worker could get shocked down the road.
The fact that lithium batteries aren't the greenest combined with the fact that you can't even live 'off the grid' in a grid tied system is a big uphill for these batteries.
You can get energy out of a lithium battery several times, which puts it well ahead of tearing holes in the earth to mine coal.
No, it's not permanently "off the grid" as it depends utterly on the whole industrial infrastructure, but it not continually tied to the grid like a power line running to a coal-fired power station.
I wish sites would add automatic abbr tags to think like FWIW or, in this case, TANSTAAFL so those no in the know can easily mouse over and see what the hell you are saying.
- loss of capacity over the lifetime of the battery (or beyond!)
- safety
It is easy to beat on
- power density
- weight
- maintenance
- mechanical stability (especially for fluid based cells)
- installation cost (lead/acid requires a sealed enclosure venting to the outside to get rid of free oxygen and hydrogen)
The same batteries that work well for automotive applications will not do that well when you're building a storage cell for a house.
Lithium-ion does not have a whole lot of edge over lead-acid deep cycle gel cells when it comes to stationary applications.
The biggest issue with Lead-acid is that if you don't water them (if you use fluid based cells rather than gel based cells) that sulfur bridges can grow between the plates causing a cell to be shorted out. Gel based cells don't have that problem and are common in deep discharge setups.
It looks like Elon wants to ramp up production in the new Gigafactory right away, and create home batteries from the excess capacity. A Gigafactory running at full capacity should bring the cost of lithium ion batteries way down. Electric cars haven't hit the mainstream yet, so he has to do something with the excess capacity, and this looks pretty straightforward.
So even if he sells these batteries at the break even point, he'll still get much closer to an economically viable Model 3, because the battery is such an expensive part in an electric car and this will bring the price of batteries down.
(I'm not sure if my reasoning makes sense though, because the Gigafactory isn't anywhere near finished yet, and according to wikipedia it won't hit full capacity until 2020.)
Home batteries have arguably fewer cycle times than a battery in a Tesla. By selling these, Tesla is essentially selling beta models to figure out kinks in the factory, in the batteries, etc, before putting them into their mainstream vehicles that have to suffer huge temperature gradients, lots of recharge cycles, etc.
If I recall correctly, battery production is currently a bottleneck for Tesla production and one of the major reasons why there is a waiting period of a few months after ordering. So I'm not sure to what extent he depends on home batteries to find a use for excess capacity, even if Model 3 isn't available yet.
What will be even more interesting is when he builds 10x the capacity of the Gigafactory, which he said he expects to happen in the future. At that point batteries should be completely commoditized and sold only slightly above raw material cost (which is great news for EVs).
I have home back-up power based on an inverter charging a lead-acid battery (located in a sheltered area outside the home), which costs about $100/kWh. Usage is about 1-2 hours discharge per day. No matter how well serviced, I've found these batteries don't last beyond four years. Hence I'd pay even $400/kWh for a well-engineered deep-cycle battery that is safe, maintenance-free, and will last at least 10 years. Excluding balance of system, even.
What would be the advantage of these LiPo batteries over traditional lead-based batteries? In car's, I understand weight (and volume) are really important, but for stationary usage these seem way more expensive / Wh stored?
I think this is a very important question. In raw $/Wh lead acid wins hands down, so it might be due to other characteristics such as number of cycles that can be run, and peak load characteristics?
Pros: Higher energy density, so you don't need much room for the batteries. They don't emit hydrogen when being charged like lead-acid does, so you don't need safety ventilation.
Cons: Not as conveniently recyclable as lead-acid (there's existing infrastructure for this is already in place).
The site isn't coming up for me (neither is google cache) but I'm wondering it they went with LiFePo4 batteries - they have a gentler failure mode than some of the other lithium chemistries.
Cars need tremendously high drain for brief periods to start the engine, especially under adverse conditions like winter when oil starts out being cold and less viscous. They also generally don't deep drain the battery. The ability to be optimized for those constraints plus their simplicity and low cost is why they still own that market. This is not my field, but I'm not aware of any battery chemistry that could conceivably compete with them, and because of their lead we'd like an alternative if there was one.
I'm also curious about their lifetime. My laptop batteries are pretty weak after three or four years. It's much easier to justify $thousands as a one-time purchase than $thousands/year. For many of its applications, this is going to have to beat a generator. Which, come to think of it, probably means that if they're pitching this as a way off the grid it is precisely because it won't be even remotely competitive with a generator.
The 'living off the grid' angle is a red herring. The main application of this would be solving the peak load problem, ie smoothing out the load on power stations throughout the day. It is not clear to me how a LiPo batter is better suited for this than other battery types though, especially since weight is not a concern for a stationary battery in your home.
I wonder if this even needs to be something in the home. Wouldn't it also make sense to install these things, in bulk, in a place where they could service several homes? Say, at the block level. If it is part of power distribution infrastructure as opposed to a consumer product, then that simplifies some of the safety and maintenance issues; concerns like weight or volume are even less important if they are housed in a dedicated structure.
Isn't part of the problem that production costs for batteries are so high? I suspect this is Tesla staking claim in a market that will grow as the price of large rechargeable batteries drops. And that price drop will in large part be due to Tesla.
Can someone explain to me why being able to build off the electrical grid is worth all this effort since you're still going to need running water, sewage, bins collecting, broadband and a number of other things?
I don't have water or sewage at my house. I have a well and septic system. I also have a propane generator but it's only for power outages, that happen more frequently when you live in the country. I do have a private company collect my garbage.
I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.
Water and sewage -- Most people in rural america and even in semi-suburban america already use their own wells and septic systems for water and sewage. Likewise with trash, many people drop their trash off at the dump/recycling center themselves.
Broadband, yep, no DIY solution there but various forms of wireless internet are available that make it quite feasible to have a completely unwired home if not disconnected.
Well. Broadband is available wirelessly either via cell, wifi, or satellite, so there's not a requirement for a physical connection. Water and sewer have localized options with wells and septic, but they are also extremely inexpensive to build and maintain and have a relatively small environmental impact.
Electricity, on the other hand, has no viable localized option today. It's also the only one of these that has a significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself and has a significant impact to the environment.
Local power storage means that grid can balance the load between peak and non-peak times. Also, local power storage means that wind/solar now has a solution for time where power output is reduced.
Having a battery that can power a home for a week is huge, if it's affordable. This could significantly reduce power generation costs.
I've always been wondering why there have never been affordable local power storage solutions on the market.
I'd love to have a battery like this to store excess power from solar panels. Returning power to the grid is a waste in both efficiency and money (you just make the power company richer).
Unless you live in Germany (where there are laws forcing power companies to buy excess energy back against peak price), a battery should be the way to go.
- How do battery charge/store/discharge efficiencies compare to transmission losses?
- How do capital investments to support returning power to the grid compare to the cost of batteries?
One thing I'm fairly confident of is that just having batteries (without solar panels) to do peak-flattening temporal "arbitrage" can't make economic sense. If it did, power companies would do it themselves and keep the profit.
>Unless you live in Germany (where there are laws forcing power companies to buy excess energy back against peak price), a battery should be the way to go.
You can get power companies in the US to buy your excess energy. The co-op that supplies my power will set up a meter if you have your own power source. If your total usage is less than what you created they will buy the power from you (not the best rate).
They will even give you money back for installing solar cells [1].
Not anymore. The price you get from your power company has been consistently lowered over the last years, now you only get about half of what you pay the power company for the electricity you use.
I'd love to have a self-contained electrical system for my house. I'd preferentially wire my home with a DC grid alongside the AC, but there's no standard. Do I run 120v, 240v, 5v, 12v? Which interface do I use? Barrel connectors, USB, cigarette lighter? If we have a large-scale movement to household DC, we'd have these things hammered out without me rewiring every appliance.
If these obstacles were overcome, almost everything in my house could run on DC. Most stuff either converts to DC internally, or doesn't care.
Sure, Musk makes it sound sexy, but do we really need to use Lithium in a stationary application? I'd probably be happier with a battery that weighs twice as much but costs half as much. Those might not be the exact tradeoffs, but that's the general idea.
However, I don't know much about the details of battery technology, so I could be completely wrong. If traditional technologies such as lead-acid were up to the task, then someone would have already made a big business out of using them. Does that make sense?
The question is: Will it be new battery just for homes or will it be a recycled/repurposed battery from 'old' Teslas?
It think it will be the later one. Elon is just thinking ahead. There is nothing really new in this story. Everything is just made up. It is quite accepted within the industry, that when the car battery has a capacity of less than 70% to 80% it needs to be replaced. But what should the car company, in this case Tesla, should do with battery? Of course, it will be re-packaged and as such repurposed for other use. What other use case is there? The other use case is Solar, especially as his friend runs a Solar company. What in incident.
Have Tesla solved any of the problems that have prevented people from selling large storage batteries in the past?
A big issue is that you don't get that many charge cycles, especially with lithium-based batteries. So, filling up the battery with solar power during the day, then running your house from the battery in the evening, will soon fall to pieces if the battery doesn't last a decent number of years.
Right now, if there's a storm or what have you you can lose your heat, your power, your water - everything. Its a bit like the mainfraime/terminal days - everything is centralized, and represent single points of failure for the citizens it serves.
But with energy you create yourself, and things like water recycling or indoor farms, we could go fairly far in self-sustaining units. And instead of the grid, there could be local community sharing so if your power/water goes out you can pull from a local grid. It doesn't need to be in every home, but something more distributed means more resiliency in the system overall, and thats handy in a lot of scenarios.
All that's a ways away though - but making the energy storage better / cheaper is an important step.
But I'm curious of the environmental factors in battery production / lifetime / recycling, can anyone comment on the impact these batteries represent?
In addition to doing things like storing any excess solar power you might have, it could also be used to charge up at night on off-peak rates ("Economy 7" in the UK) and release during the day to reduce your peak rate electricity consumption - whether it would be financially worthwhile to do so would depend on a number of factors.
When will homes be built with sensible electricity distribution? So often they put the breaker panel in the basement. I want a small utility room or closet where I can install inverters or this battery. I want to be able to run 220V to my stove, laundry, garage (car charging), battery storage, and AC relatively easily - none of these is in the basement (except the laundry in some home I've lived in). Also, if a basement floods, how is one supposed to go down there to access the panel without risk? And it's darkest down there too. It just seems to be the stupidest place to put it. What's up with that?
Seems like just yesterday [1] I was saying they could do this if they wanted to. :-)
The first challenge is to make the operational cost of a solar + battery system less than the cost of buying your power straight from the grid. The second is to include capital costs in that calculation and still come out at break even or ahead.
It will be interesting to see the market reaction to this regarding the value of electricity generation companies.
Governments that lean too heavily on taxes or state run monopolies for energy generation should also be concerned. There are places that tax generation from sources like the wind (for example, Nova Scotia), so I wouldn't be surprised if we see solar tax appear.
I disagree that the long term storage stationary storage is extraordinary, at least from the individual home standpoint, it does have great utility application (for windfarms/hydro/etc) and likely would help some businesses offset day time surcharges by charging storage at night.
Still for home use, I would prefer a large lithium pack to be outside my home.
The Model S 85kW battery pack is estimated to cost $12,000 and is estimated to last 10+ years.
The SolarCity Battery field-test uses 10kW Tesla batteries and is leased for $1,500 upfront and $15 per month. So, if the batteries degrade, it's Tesla/SolarCities responsibility to fix or replace them.
The Gigafactory will likely reduce costs significantly.
[+] [-] brudgers|11 years ago|reply
TANSTAAFL
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lithium+pond+photos&iax=1&ia=image...
Mining is mining. There isn't a "green" form. Tearing holes in the earth is not the worst ecological damage or the great health risk. The big problem is the water...and it will run downhill from the Andes and wherever else Lithium is mined and into the Ocean.
The house off the grid is built on industrial infrastructure.
[+] [-] tessierashpool|11 years ago|reply
I helped my parents build their off-the-grid house. It's solar-powered, but uses batteries for backup storage. It collects and filters rainwater, recycles and purifies its own sewage, and is made mostly of recycled materials (in the style of what's called an "Earthship," but with a more traditional, house-like form factor).
Did industrial infrastructure come into play? Of course. We used cars and trucks to get stuff there to build with. We used machines and materials produced in the modern world. What difference could that possibly make? The house is still much less ecologically destructive than the vast majority of dwellings worldwide, both in terms of ongoing damage and initial construction.
It's possible to create buildings today which get all their electricity from the sun; which require no industrial infrastructure at all for sewage, heat, or clean water; and which cost much, much less than earlier housing models. That's an amazing improvement.
All tech's based to some degree on tech which came before.
[+] [-] headShrinker|11 years ago|reply
The fact that lithium batteries aren't the greenest combined with the fact that you can't even live 'off the grid' in a grid tied system is a big uphill for these batteries.
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|11 years ago|reply
No, it's not permanently "off the grid" as it depends utterly on the whole industrial infrastructure, but it not continually tied to the grid like a power line running to a coal-fired power station.
[+] [-] lsaferite|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wooster|11 years ago|reply
Except for the geography which prevents that from happening and is why that area has giant salt flats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni
[+] [-] grecy|11 years ago|reply
The rumor is they're about to tear it up for a Lithium mine :(
[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/the-uyuni-salt-flats-to-chile-1
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
- $/Wh
- number of cycles
- ability to be recycled at eol
- loss of capacity over the lifetime of the battery (or beyond!)
- safety
It is easy to beat on
- power density
- weight
- maintenance
- mechanical stability (especially for fluid based cells)
- installation cost (lead/acid requires a sealed enclosure venting to the outside to get rid of free oxygen and hydrogen)
The same batteries that work well for automotive applications will not do that well when you're building a storage cell for a house.
Lithium-ion does not have a whole lot of edge over lead-acid deep cycle gel cells when it comes to stationary applications.
The biggest issue with Lead-acid is that if you don't water them (if you use fluid based cells rather than gel based cells) that sulfur bridges can grow between the plates causing a cell to be shorted out. Gel based cells don't have that problem and are common in deep discharge setups.
[+] [-] gizmo|11 years ago|reply
So even if he sells these batteries at the break even point, he'll still get much closer to an economically viable Model 3, because the battery is such an expensive part in an electric car and this will bring the price of batteries down.
(I'm not sure if my reasoning makes sense though, because the Gigafactory isn't anywhere near finished yet, and according to wikipedia it won't hit full capacity until 2020.)
[+] [-] bsilvereagle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skore|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aaronneyer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quarterwave|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
Wow, that's really short, especially with such a shallow discharge pattern.
[+] [-] it_luddite|11 years ago|reply
http://www.sbsbattery.com/products-services/by-product/batte...
no recommendation on the supplier, but funny thing, the power companies and telcos have already figured this out for reliable DC power :)
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PanMan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phreeza|11 years ago|reply
Here is an overview of estimated cost for various battery types, does not include LiPo however. http://www.batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/cost_of_power
[+] [-] chiph|11 years ago|reply
Pros: Higher energy density, so you don't need much room for the batteries. They don't emit hydrogen when being charged like lead-acid does, so you don't need safety ventilation.
Cons: Not as conveniently recyclable as lead-acid (there's existing infrastructure for this is already in place).
The site isn't coming up for me (neither is google cache) but I'm wondering it they went with LiFePo4 batteries - they have a gentler failure mode than some of the other lithium chemistries.
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phreeza|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex-g|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acadien|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Already__Taken|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnward|11 years ago|reply
I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.
[+] [-] oloboWd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deelowe|11 years ago|reply
Electricity, on the other hand, has no viable localized option today. It's also the only one of these that has a significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself and has a significant impact to the environment.
Local power storage means that grid can balance the load between peak and non-peak times. Also, local power storage means that wind/solar now has a solution for time where power output is reduced.
Having a battery that can power a home for a week is huge, if it's affordable. This could significantly reduce power generation costs.
[+] [-] LeonM|11 years ago|reply
I'd love to have a battery like this to store excess power from solar panels. Returning power to the grid is a waste in both efficiency and money (you just make the power company richer).
Unless you live in Germany (where there are laws forcing power companies to buy excess energy back against peak price), a battery should be the way to go.
[+] [-] repsilat|11 years ago|reply
- How do battery charge/store/discharge efficiencies compare to transmission losses?
- How do capital investments to support returning power to the grid compare to the cost of batteries?
One thing I'm fairly confident of is that just having batteries (without solar panels) to do peak-flattening temporal "arbitrage" can't make economic sense. If it did, power companies would do it themselves and keep the profit.
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
Because so far batteries have been improving in cost/Ah only very gradually? And generated grid power from fossil fuels has been historically cheap?
[+] [-] wil421|11 years ago|reply
You can get power companies in the US to buy your excess energy. The co-op that supplies my power will set up a meter if you have your own power source. If your total usage is less than what you created they will buy the power from you (not the best rate).
They will even give you money back for installing solar cells [1].
1. http://energy.gov/savings/cobb-emc-solar-rebate-program
[+] [-] skrause|11 years ago|reply
Not anymore. The price you get from your power company has been consistently lowered over the last years, now you only get about half of what you pay the power company for the electricity you use.
[+] [-] edent|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cplease|11 years ago|reply
Many populous U.S. states have net metering, New York and California inclusive.
[+] [-] Johnythree|11 years ago|reply
In rural areas, wind powered battery storage was commonplace 100 years ago.
Perhaps if you bothered to do a little research....
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|11 years ago|reply
If these obstacles were overcome, almost everything in my house could run on DC. Most stuff either converts to DC internally, or doesn't care.
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|11 years ago|reply
However, I don't know much about the details of battery technology, so I could be completely wrong. If traditional technologies such as lead-acid were up to the task, then someone would have already made a big business out of using them. Does that make sense?
[+] [-] PinguTS|11 years ago|reply
It think it will be the later one. Elon is just thinking ahead. There is nothing really new in this story. Everything is just made up. It is quite accepted within the industry, that when the car battery has a capacity of less than 70% to 80% it needs to be replaced. But what should the car company, in this case Tesla, should do with battery? Of course, it will be re-packaged and as such repurposed for other use. What other use case is there? The other use case is Solar, especially as his friend runs a Solar company. What in incident.
[+] [-] unwind|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joosters|11 years ago|reply
A big issue is that you don't get that many charge cycles, especially with lithium-based batteries. So, filling up the battery with solar power during the day, then running your house from the battery in the evening, will soon fall to pieces if the battery doesn't last a decent number of years.
[+] [-] meesterdude|11 years ago|reply
Right now, if there's a storm or what have you you can lose your heat, your power, your water - everything. Its a bit like the mainfraime/terminal days - everything is centralized, and represent single points of failure for the citizens it serves.
But with energy you create yourself, and things like water recycling or indoor farms, we could go fairly far in self-sustaining units. And instead of the grid, there could be local community sharing so if your power/water goes out you can pull from a local grid. It doesn't need to be in every home, but something more distributed means more resiliency in the system overall, and thats handy in a lot of scenarios.
All that's a ways away though - but making the energy storage better / cheaper is an important step.
But I'm curious of the environmental factors in battery production / lifetime / recycling, can anyone comment on the impact these batteries represent?
[+] [-] m-i-l|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
The first challenge is to make the operational cost of a solar + battery system less than the cost of buying your power straight from the grid. The second is to include capital costs in that calculation and still come out at break even or ahead.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055177
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
Governments that lean too heavily on taxes or state run monopolies for energy generation should also be concerned. There are places that tax generation from sources like the wind (for example, Nova Scotia), so I wouldn't be surprised if we see solar tax appear.
[+] [-] Shivetya|11 years ago|reply
Still for home use, I would prefer a large lithium pack to be outside my home.
[+] [-] Sir_Substance|11 years ago|reply
They're about $20k each, and they only last about 4 years.
[+] [-] dm2|11 years ago|reply
The SolarCity Battery field-test uses 10kW Tesla batteries and is leased for $1,500 upfront and $15 per month. So, if the batteries degrade, it's Tesla/SolarCities responsibility to fix or replace them.
The Gigafactory will likely reduce costs significantly.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/13/8033691/why-teslas-battery...
Essential problem solved?