Batteries need to shape up, though. Huge battery installations should become cheap and ubiquitous; so far they are neither.
A number of interesting chemistries exist that would suit well the needs of stationary batteries, which can be heavy and bulky, but need to be cheap and safe. As usual, more time and money are needed :)
The quickest way to force/ assist adaptation of new tech is to stop complaining about it, start buying it when/if possible, watch how demand drives innovation for the years to come - yet be happy to have gotten in at a certain point which helps both yourselves and everyone.
Solar panels for one have come a very long way in the last decade. The same will apply to batteries. How retired EV packs can be reused for home storage is but one field of opportunity I feel is exciting.
In the uk I’m currently not allowed to buy a cheap old nissan leaf car with a worn old 22kwh battery pack (that’s basically useless for transport now, something like 30 mile range in perfect conditions) and connect it to supply my house.
I can buy electricity from the grid at 5p/kwh between 12pm and 5am and if i was allowed to charge that car and then draw my daily 10kwh of house usage from it instead of paying 20p/kwh during the day. I’d be happy to give some percentage to the grid but it’s just not allowed by most DNO’s here right now.
Wallbox.com has a £10k bi durectional wallbox (quantum) that can be deployed in a few very select areas in the UK currently.
My best option right now is a couple of £2.5k battery packs from givenergy but my supplier won’t switch me to the ev tarrif without proof i own an EV. Also the givenergy route is the same price as the old leaf but for half the capacity.
What kind of inverter could you use to connect an old traction battery to supply your house? (I have a Leaf and solar backed by a 4.5kWh battery so... for the future I suppose)
How cool, I didn't know that was possible. So CHAdeMO lets EVs discharge as well as charge? I assumed you were talking about a hack. So why can't that particular inverter be connected to your home? I have _two_ separate solar inverters connected to mine already!
It’s in use in Japan as i understand it but in the UK the DNOs currently don’t have appropriate controls in place for when the power goes out as i understand it. I believe people with solar and batteries on their property have no power when there’s a power cut - their inverter turns off for safety of the DNO operatives if mains power goes out.
Im not that clued up on this. Tent with a big pinch of salt…!
Oh I see! Right, yes, that applies to my two inverters, which have an "off grid" mode which I don't use for this reason.
The electrician who wired in the system offered to add in an isolator to cut the house off from the mains. That way I could use the "off grid" mode, but it'd have to be something pretty bad for me to want to use it & reconfigure the inverters too.
Note that if batteries stayed at their current level of development forever, wind and solar would still be the best choice to build out at large scales today.
It is unlikely that they wont progress dramatically, but even in that extreme case there's no need or reason to wait.
This is sadly wishful thinking. The unreliability of solar and wind plus the state of modern batteries means that nuclear and coal are still better choices for large scale baseload generation.
One factor people don't consider is reliability of power. Since solar and wind are unreliable (example, German wind power saw -25% generation last year due to weather, and ended up increasing coal by as much as 40 to 50% to make up for it plus meet new demand) you end up needing to produce significantly more to have a guarantee of baseload.
For every bit of ultra-reliable, ultra-safe, tiny-footprint nuclear you build out, you need ~4X the amount of less reliable and giant foot print solar or wind.
Ultra-reliable nuclear power, like in France where a couple of reactors had to be shut down due to safety issues detected?
Yes, wind and solar are limited in their available capacity by the weather. The trick to get reliable power generation nonetheless are wide range networks (mitigates weather influences), storage solutions and storable renewables like bio-gas.
For the gap, gas powered plans are the key. Even in the worst case, they are way more environment friendly than coal, only emit a fraction of the CO2 at the same output. But beyond that, they can be quickly switched in output, they are the ideal counterpart to wind and solar. That is the weakness of coal and especially nuclear power plants.
Also, one can afford a lot of overproduction capacity for the cost of a new nuclear power plant.
Gas is not for baseload generation, it's for peaker power. The idea of using gas for baseload is extremely cost prohibitive, you'll be paying double price for your power.
You have it totally backwards: the reliability of coal and especially nuclear to produce a constant output is the strength! That's called baseload generation, the ability to produce large amounts of power reliably, rain or shine, night or day, windy or still for a set low cost.
This is why nuclear is the best to pair with unreliable solar/wind technologies. Not only is nuclear DRAMATICALLY more friendly than literally burning oil like you suggest, it also provides a completely stable baseload for your industry. The idea that someone would suggest using oil over nuclear is insane. Are we trying to save the planet or not? There is nothing environmental about gas! It's a non-renewable resource that is likely already "post-peak" and will experience increasing scarcity and dramatic price increases over the next century.
Needing peaker power ontop of baseload, such as gas plants, is a different aspect of power generation. You wouldn't want to use gas as base, and you can't rely on solar/wind as base. As Germany in the real world evidenced: coal is the backstop for base there.
And when you consider how many batteries one needs for all the extra generation one is using because of their weird dislike of the greatest and greenest power generation technology there is, one should consider the ecological and environmental impact. Nuclear build outs are tiny and use a fuel whose energy density is several orders of magnitude above everything else. Solar takes up a huge amount of space and takes a lot of materials that are messy to mine for that nuclear doesn't. Consistent generation > battery storage every time.
No, an unreliable old plant with severe safety concerns was shut down not very recently. Currently 16 French nuclear plants are not operating due to maintenance. About 4 of those went offline very recently (as in November or December) because severe issues were detected which needed to be addressed at once.
How are the people who want to build modern energy plants the luddites? If anything it's the people who insist to keep ancient technology on life support that had failed all its promises by the late 1970s who are luddites.
There's always an ideal solution that would be best in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this is the world where two nuked cities and a handful of nuclear accidents was enough to turn people against nuclear power. It doesn't matter that this position is based on ignorance. Turning people back in favor is a generational project. We don't have a generation left to do that. We need solutions that can be implemented at scale now.
> The unreliability of solar and wind plus the state of modern batteries means that nuclear and coal are still better choices for large scale baseload generation.
I'm not convinced that's true. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are pretty good, and as far as I can tell they're expensive outside of China for artificial reasons. (Chinese manufacturers have a deal with the owners of the LFP patents something like: if you don't enforce your patents in China, we won't export our batteries outside of China. The last major patent expires in April I believe, so maybe the situation will change then.) If you could reliably buy LFP batteries in the U.S. for under $100 a kwh, I would expect that to change the economics of grid storage quite a bit. Maybe coal would still be cheaper, but coal has some pretty significant externalities.
It might be possible to do nuclear more cheaply than we've done it in the past, and if so that would be great, but so far it's fairly expensive and we still don't have a good political solution for the problem of what to do with the waste. I'm generally in favor of more nuclear being built, but renewables are a viable alternative if grid storage is cheap enough and/or our power grid is capable of moving power around over long distances efficiently. (There was a story a couple months ago[1] that Chile is planning to export solar power to China via an undersea cable. If they pull it off it would mean China wouldn't need to buffer 12 hours of energy to get through the night because they literally have solar installations on opposite sides of the Earth.)
Few appreciate the “brick wall” facing variability in green energy: if the battery depletes, power flow stops.
Batteries cost the same to cover whatever multiple of standard deviation prepared for. “Hundred year calm/clouds” need be prepared for - there’s no discount on installing that battery backup, very costly for a rare event (still often enough to need coverage).
When the batteries deplete, system halts until nature decides to provide enough again. FF reserves can tide over, nuclear will glow on; green varies by hour where outages can last weeks.
I run my office on solar every summer. Battery depletion is a very real, common, and costly issue.
Once you're preparing for events that rare, you have to first prepare for more common events, like failures in the power transmission infrastructure (the latest widespread one in my country, for instance, was only 11 years ago). And a lot of the preparation for these more common events (for instance, backup generators) would also help with these more rare events.
Batteries have shaped up, actually! Retail costs are about $300/kWh for at least 7000 cycles, which is only $4.2/kWh (plus inverter/BMS, plus electrician costs, plus sales markup, etc.).
There has been a 10x decline in lithium ion battery costs in just 10 years, which is shocking. Check out this slide from Ramez Naam, of which batteries are only one component of the massive ongoing transition:
Lithium ion batteries are getting deployed in large GW and GWh sizes all over, and in smaller sizes too. Worldwide production capacity is expected to grow by 10x every five years.
I think other stationary battery chemistries will catch up for "longer-term" storage, where the charge rate is lower and the capital cost is lower, and they can't cycle as fast. My favorite are the iron air batteries, which are rumored to be as low as $20/kWh, but with a power/energy ratio of only 1%.
