My power company just came out with a new rate plan that I jumped on: 8 cents for all but 5-9, which is 26 cents. It's pretty obvious the "duck curve" is slamming them pretty hard. I'm making it mostly work with creative home automation and timers on my car charger and water heater, but with just 6 kWh or so of batteries I could completely eliminate my peak power usage. I don't have any place to put solar panels on my property, so I'm looking forward to sodium batteries making this a viable way for me lower my electric bills.
Texas needs freshwater just like California does--aka not at all.
Both states have plenty of freshwater for their citizens. The citizens simply don't soak up that much water. Yes, even with lawns, swimming pools, and golf courses there is plenty of water for citizens.
What both states don't have is plenty of water for agribusinesses--they are pumping their aquifers dry. And desalinization with renewables has zero hope of ever being cost effective enough for agriculture.
> just 6 kWh or so of batteries I could completely eliminate my peak power usage
Out of curiosity I took a wild ass guess at what it would take for me.
I usually use about 7 kWh between 5-9pm, so lets say ~$2K for an even 10 kWh of LFP. Probably at least that much more to get a suitably capable 240V inverter and smart transfer switch. My low quality napkin math says at least 20 MWh to break even. I probably wouldn't make that bet. It would take a long time to go net positive and any kind of equipment failure would instantly tank the ROI. And that's also ignoring the time value of money altogether.
If the batteries were free, it would be a somewhat better deal, but still not a slam dunk.
Cutting even 50% off the cells won’t help much.
(Hmm. Maybe Na-ion will end up with a nice discharge curve so that one can actually parallel or, better, series-connect a bunch of batteries, use an external BMS without fancy per-cell connections, and get good results. Despite the number of vendors selling two-terminal LiFePO4 batteries with internal BMSes, they really don’t work well. Lead acid, for all its faults, works fine with dumb batteries.)
Sodium ion batteries won't change that equation any time soon.
But they can make whatever grid storage is installed (whether in homes, electric car, or grid scale), a lot cheaper.
Some limited amount of such storage + some smarts to control when heavy users are run & when batteries are (dis)charged, can go a long way. Just 'flattening the curve' is enough.
I've heard they have some tiff with Cloudflare or Firefox or I don't actually care, because I don't have this problem with any other site.
Their site is unreachable, by their choice*. Find some other service that doesn't discriminate against users of the most popular open-source web browser, please.
So why should we care? - make the case why posting archive.* is bad or post a working link yourself!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304405
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38025086
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361094
And this insightful comment about how to think about pack density (don't require nearly as much cooling and management systems as nickel-cobalt chemistries, and 160Wh/kg is good enough): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363603
Isn’t the issue with sodium batteries, the weight (relative to lithium).
This isn't really relevant, because the batteries being discussed are not "a lithium battery but with the lithium replaced by sodium".
It's a whole new battery chemistry.
