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.
The house off the grid is built on
industrial infrastructure.
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.
The isn't even close to being true. The majority of dwellings worldwide lack what you would call basic utilities and are constructed using local materials, many of which are recycled.
Perhaps you meant the West?
Even then, it's not true. Solar panels, batteries, modern insulation, etc ... these create a ton of pollution during manufacture. Not to mention drilling wells and installing septic tanks as opposed to hooking up to public utilities.
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.
A solar panel installer told me that if I add a battery backup to my installation, then at least it'll still charge the batteries during a power outage.
Another group of people who are protected are firefighters. In a typical residential installation the power meter also serves as the service disconnect. Response protocols include pulling the meter before many other life saving and property preserving operations. Live equipment and conductors operating from a second source downstream of the meter are a serious hazard to fire fighting personnel.
Solar panels are a particular hazard because the sun doesn't have a disconnect, many firefighting operations involve working on the roof, and fire burns upward. A collapsed roof may bring a tangle of live electrical parts down into the building and create a hazard that persists long after the fire has been suppressed.
In addition, miscellaneous loads applied to a grid can bring it down. In the Northeast US, much of the infrastructure is old and therefore less robustly engineered than elsewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1547
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ul1741+pdf
...if you wanted to power your house from a battery-fed inverter you'd have to install an automatic transfer switch, just like if you had a back-up generator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_switch
http://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/connecting-a-gene...
What is the difference between Battery backup and a wind turbine/solar? Somehow you are allowed to have solar and pump back to the grid, but not battery, geee wonder why that is.
Surely there is some safe way of preventing this?
If I were an electrical worked I'd treat a power line like it was live regardless of whether there is a power outage or not.
I can't find any references for your stated claim about Connecticut, however it seems deeply illogical given that a generator (which surely aren't banned), solar panels, wind, etc, all have the potential of feeding energy back to the grid in an outage. Which is why there are regulations and home inspections and all of that, to ensure that the appropriate safeties and switches are in place. Simply banning one of many possible mechanisms of generating power would be very short sighted.
Many regions that offer feed-in time-of-day tariffs are rightly trying to figure out how to accommodate battery systems, where some users are trying to game the system by charging a big battery array during low cost hours, and then "selling" it back to the grid during peak hours (at inflated, subsidized prices).
EDIT: As a reply to msandford, given that I can't reply lower -- the reason they have this limit is that the tariff price paid to home solar/wind generators is way above the bulk, "wholesale" price of power. It was created as an incentive to encourage green energy. So when you feed back their own power to them, it does them no favor given that now they're paying 2x+ what they would pay on the normal power market for power, and simply undermines the entire incentive program.
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.
You can't get any energy out of a battery until you put energy in ... alas more in than out per the laws of thermodynamics.
People Like to Make Up Abbreviations That Take More Explanation Than Just Spelling it Out Would.
SMH.
You can double-click almost any abbreviation (or any other word) and get a definition.
Except for the geography which prevents that from happening and is why that area has giant salt flats:
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
- $/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.
My ideal setup for this would be something like 20 kW * 7 days. That would fill my basement pretty easily.
Even 30 is pretty damn high. For someone living off grid with a purpose built/renovated structure ~5kwh a day gives you quite a lot to work with.
So based on 5 kW average, your electric bill is… 3650 kWh/mo? That's about 4x the U.S. national average for a household (903 kWh/mo).
Is this correct, or is 5 kW an overestimation?
Now that also provides some additional redundancy so it's not like the other 50% is entirely useless.
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.)
Wow, that's really short, especially with such a shallow discharge pattern.
http://www.mpoweruk.com/images/dod.gif
According to that chart (which is an approximation of course) 1400 cycles corresponds to about a 40% depth of discharge. Which isn't terribly shallow.
The other variable is the discharge rate, and the higher it is relative to battery capacity the worse the efficiency and also the propensity to fail early. A lot of times doubling the pack size can extend the pack life by more than two because the increased efficiency (the internal resistance is lower) reduces the depth of discharge by more than half.
http://batteryuniversity.com/_img/content/crate1.jpg
Of course it feels totally ridiculous to only use 20% of the nameplate capacity of the system, and much worse than using 40% which you can sort-of rationalize as "half" but if it decreases your dollars per joule, it might be worth it.
EDIT:
I should also mention that if you're constantly charging and discharging and you don't mind a little energy loss you should look at nickel-iron batteries. They're not terribly efficient nor are they cheap in absolute terms but they're basically bulletproof.
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 :)
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
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.
Field-replaceable laptop batteries are engineered as a consumable, and runtime, weight and charging speed are given priority over long life. Laptops with integrated batteries make a somewhat different tradeoff, but still assume that battery replacement will be a maintenance expense for some users. In both cases, the expected average lifetime of the laptop itself is also a factor, which I'd guess would be about 5 years, max.
Packs for laptops make different tradeoffs vs packs for a car, or home power storage. From memory, based on some back of envelope calculations, tesla trades 15-20% of nominial capacity of the cells in their auto packs for >=4x or greater durability. Packs for home energy storage would probably make similar tradeoffs, and might get more life with less aggressive charging rates.
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.
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.
This is usually less than the efficiency drop involved in a round trip through a battery. It's not as big a factor as you think.
One commonly suggested (and substantially cheaper) option is to just set things up so you don't have local battery storage and just redirect all excess power back to the utility company.
The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for.
But beyond that, as power requirements in appliances / computers / electronic gadgets continues to decrease, and efficiency and capacity of alternative energy solutions continues to increase, there will likely come a time (in the not-too-distant-future) when there will [at least in theory] no longer be a need for utility companies.
In fact, from varied sources online I've gotten the impression that many countries (besides US) have substantially reduced power requirements per household where even today it's feasible (for those with sufficient roof space) to move all of their power usage off grid, and rely strictly on power generated by solar.
That's not a problem, that's how the markets work. When electricity is abundant (i.e. sun is shining, wind is blowing), it's cheap; when it's in demand (in the evening, after the sun and wind stop but people want to cook and watch TV), it's expensive.
The problem with energy storage isn't just a home-problem, it's a network-wide issue. AFAIK, current batteries aren't really able to solve this issue, in the long-term (i.e. considering the lifetime and replacement of the battery).
Not if your region was forced to subscribe to a feed-in-tarriff subsidy scheme for solar. Around here, there was a time when solar generated power earned 10x the value of the same amount of energy purchased from the grid. That multiplier has fallen thankfully, but is still greater than one.
Right now, some locations have laws and/or regulation that force grid companies to buy solar-generated electricity from home owners at fixed rates. This makes a lot of sense right now as a measure to encourage the adoption of solar, as a way to get off fossil fuels. In the long term, it might become a less useful measure, and we might want to allow market mechanisms for time-of-day-based pricing. This is already happening on the big players' market, where you see drops of the spot price of electricity at noon on sunny days. Extending these market mechanisms to individual homes makes sense, as long as home owners are empowered by technology to make use of it.
A large battery is an important piece of such empowering technology (combined with being able to set a smart policy for when to run off the battery, when to run off the grid, and when to feed back into the grid).
The grid will become less reliable over time as utilization increases, and in many cases we have fundamental limitations that make broad-scale robustness difficult to implement.
So fake it out. If I have a reliable local power source, I can easily take short outages without user impact.
Here in Scotland it's the other way round. Orkney is detached from the grid and trying to get itself connected, so it can better balance local renewable generation with the rest of the UK (and thence ultimately the European grid as a whole). Maybe they'll go to municipal batteries but the cost is still not attractive.
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.
They're trialling that right now in the UK: http://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2014-12-15/power-boost-as-big... http://www.edie.net/news/6/Smarter-Network-Storage-Energy-ba...
Because so far batteries have been improving in cost/Ah only very gradually? And generated grid power from fossil fuels has been historically cheap?
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.
Many populous U.S. states have net metering, New York and California inclusive.
In rural areas, wind powered battery storage was commonplace 100 years ago.
Perhaps if you bothered to do a little research....
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.
- What devices do you need to supply? Often this is the true governing factor although switching regulators are very efficient and inexpensive up to a few amps. - How much current do you need to supply to a particular location (this depends on the power consumption of what you're running)? - What is the distance from the panel to the point of use? The longer the distance, the greater the voltage drop across a wire of a given size (and the higher the cost of larger wire).
As for connectors, there are only a couple of sensible answers. USB is fine for 5V/1A needs, but you're not going to want to run a bunch of 5V wiring separately from the higher-voltage wiring you're going to need anyway. The proper approach here is something like http://www.powerwerx.com/adapter-cables/usbbuddy-powerpole-1..., which will happily work in either a 12V or 24V nominal system. You can of course make other power supplies from all-in-one ICs like http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/RECOM-Power/R-78W90-05/?... and a small project box; larger currents and other voltages are available too, of course. These make good replacements for wall warts.
But you don't want to be wiring any of that in your house; instead, you want to use Anderson Powerpoles in a single-voltage (probably 24V or 48V) system. They are properly rated for DC use at these voltages and plenty of current (up to 350A if you need it, which you won't). They can be installed in blocks of 4 2-blade connectors in standard wall boxes, with neat, professional plates. They can be easily crimped onto appropriate-gauge wire by amateurs. They are code-compatible and safe, unlike the dangerous practice of using receptacles designed for 120VAC or some other existing local/regional standard. They provide a reliable connection and reliable disconnection, and if crimped properly they will not fray, crack, or loosen within a very large number of connect/disconnect cycles. The other low-voltage DC "standard" that is popular, the barrel-type "cigarette lighter" connector, provides only 7A at 12V, is bulky, and does not offer a reliable connection. While it is popular in automotive applications, more serious users of DC power -- the Powerpole is very popular among amateur radio enthusiasts -- avoid the barrel type connectors for these reasons.
The only real decision to make is whether to use 24V or 48V, which will depend primarily on the questions I noted above. Higher voltages are certainly possible, but watch out! Switches rated for higher DC voltages (especially at currents much more than 1 or 2A) are hard to find and expensive. Your standard "AC quiet switch" that you can buy for $2 at the local hardware store is rated for 125V AC ONLY. It is not safe to use with any DC system, although in practice it's probably acceptable for 12V systems at a hundred milliamps or so. For more practical applications, you will need to be sure that your equipment is equipped with proper switches, or no switches at all; you will also need to make sure that any hard-wired DC circuits (such as for lighting) are properly switched. Where you have flexibility in the voltage accepted by your equipment, you will need to trade off the higher cost of switches and other passive components at higher voltages against the higher cost (or voltage drop) associated with wiring at lower voltages. You will quickly learn to read spec sheets and rating stamps carefully when you work with DC.
The last thing I'll mention is that you may not really want to do this. At my location, there are often several months with extremely limited power; even the inverter's 25W base consumption dictates that it be on an hour a day or less if at all possible. For that reason, anything I have that needs smallish amounts of power continuously (such as a freezer, reading lamp, phone charger, etc.) gets DC. But in general, it's simply more convenient to use off-the-shelf devices. I can and do make my own power supplies, but I don't really want to go re-power my laser printer or table saw (which by the way has an AC-only induction motor in it). For higher-power devices, off-the-shelf is the way to go; it's much cheaper and the inverter's overhead is amortized over a lot of consumption anyway. If you have a larger system that can easily supply 100W or more on an indefinite basis, you probably don't need to bother much with DC; it'll be easier to just leave the inverter running all the time. A DC-powered well pump or freezer might be worthwhile, but I wouldn't go converting anything else. Most people are putting in enormous (to me) solar systems now; 10kW is common. With a system that large, you'll probably be fine even if it's overcast. For reference, I have 700 watts, and with endless stretches of 6-hour overcast days in winter, DC is the only way to fly. But your needs are likely to be very different indeed, especially if you have (as we're discussing here) adequate storage. The days of custom-wired 12VDC off-grid living are basically over unless your budget is extremely limited.
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?
Some day I want to look into the feasibility/advisability of a continuous automatic feed of distilled water to keep iron nickel batteries constantly topped off, and a hydrogen outgas capture mechanism (preferably passive) which takes that output of the iron nickel batteries and feeds it as the input into a hydrogen cell.
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.
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?
Sticking the panel in a closet doesn't work, because it generally violates codes twice, once for the fact that all the clothes/random junk in the closet blocks access to the panel, and a second time for the fact that even empty, most closets don't provide sufficient clearance all around the panel to meet code requirements.
If I were building a new house, I'd consider putting the panel on the main floor and just hanging a big painting to hide it (which still violates code, but it's pretty trivial to take down a painting).
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.
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.
Still for home use, I would prefer a large lithium pack to be outside my home.
They're about $20k each, and they only last about 4 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.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/13/8033691/why-teslas-battery...
Essential problem solved?
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1096801_tesla-model-s-ba...
It looks like you drank the tesla dealers coolaid:
http://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/tesla-model-s-85kw-ba...
Bad luck.
Any of the below projects, should they ever see the light of day (you'd think out of this many, at least one will make it eventually), stands a good chance of being quite superior for this application in just about every way:
http://www.eosenergystorage.com/technology-and-products/
http://www.ambri.com/technology/
http://www.ultrabattery.com/technology/
just look at this homemade battery in some audiophiles basement:
http://6moons.com/industryfeatures/roadtourlivingvoice/3.htm...
You'd have to let it charge up before going driving, but for home owners who don't drive much, that could be very cost effective.
Unless I'm missing some complication?
I recall Apple made some purchases or investments in these products.
House-sized UPS systems are a thing. An expensive thing, mind you, though I don't know how expensive.
1.) Whole house UPS 2.) A way to take advantage of significantly lower night time electric rates.
