Readers of this blog know that Elon Musk, our contemporary analog to Steve Jobs of the Imac and Itunes years, is huge on solar energy.
Musk intends to build a giant battery manufacturing facility, which will crank out ever cheaper battery storage for electric autos, and eventually, for home and businesses, that will be part of his company, Solar City’s, increasing competitive play against the traditional utilities. (dozens of other companies are competing, and winning, in the same space as Solar City)
This is a wave that scares the utility industry a whole lot more than rising seas, fouling air and water, and increasingly freakish storms.
Therefore, let’s run with it.
Yet Musk’s so-called gigafactory may soon become an existential threat to the 100-year-old utility business model. The facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power. Already, a second company led by Musk, SolarCity Corp. (SCTY), is packaging solar panels and batteries to power California homes and companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)
“The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose” comes from systems that include storage, said Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colorado-based energy consultant. “That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide.”
At a private shindig in little town called New York City last week, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive and Chairman Elon Musk (Lyndon’s cousin and also the CEO, Chief Product Architect, and Chairman of Tesla Motors) made a few casual but potentially world-changing announcements, as is practically a habit with Elon.
Most notably, they stated that SolarCity would be including battery backup systems with every single one of its rooftop solar power systems within 5-10 years. Many of those, but not necessarily all of them, would come from Tesla’s planned gigafactory.
Even with the battery backups, Lyndon and Elon contend that a SolarCity installation will cost less than the price of electricity from the grid!
For Tesla Motors, the leap from a mobile EV battery to a stationary battery package for businesses is a logical move, now that its production costs are on track. Tesla co-founder JB Straubel explains:
The economics and scale that Tesla has achieved in the automotive market now make stationary energy storage more cost effective and reliable than it has ever been in the past. We expect this market to grow very rapidly now that we have crossed this economic threshold.
To start with, the new batteries will be used to smooth the consequences of irregular demand through the day by absorbing electricity during troughs and regurgitating it during peaks. If that pans out, it will eliminate the need for gas-powered “peaker” stations which fire up quickly when needed, but are expensive to run. It would also allow non-peaker stations to operate more efficiently. Alevo reckons that if a grid as big as America’s Western interconnection (which supplies the west of the United States and Canada) were to use 18GW-worth of its batteries the grid could save $12 billion a year. Though the company has no North American contract yet, it does have an agreement to deploy its batteries in Guangdong, China.
Smoothing the operation of existing grids, however, may be only the beginning. In the longer run, optimists believe, batteries like these, or some equivalent technology, are the key to dealing with the problem not just of irregular demand, but of irregular supply. As the unit cost of solar and wind energy drops ever closer to that of power from fossil fuels, the fact that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine becomes more and more irksome. It is not just the great power-gap that is night which matters. As the chart below shows, even during the day—and even in deserts—the amount of sunlight can vary from minute to minute. And the wind, of course, is equally fickle.
Cheap grid-scale storage would overcome these irregularities. Renewables could then compete on cost alone.
I hope it works. Things would be different in ways we can’t imagine. At last we’d be entering the XXI century.
Batteries the size of a mobile phone but able to power a car for 500 miles would revolutionize transportation for a start.
or even, car batteries the size of, a car battery.
or even, car batteries the size of……….Omno’s brain!
That would be truly amazing and revolutionary, since you could fit several dozen in a thimble.
Ha ha!
Amory Lovins, of the RMI, which is a group dedicated to keeping renewables within the framework of free enterprise, calls home battery storage of PV panels a “mortal threat” and “unregulated”.
Elon Musk. of Tesla and Solar City, which are groups dedicated to the same mission as the RMI, positioned “undistributed” home solar battery storage the other day (What were the exact terms he used – I can’t remember?) as something cool, daring, and liberating.
Both of these fellows are stealing our public energy sector away from the commons and into an eternal profit-making venture. Trying to make everyone keep paying for renewables as if we had to keep paying for fuel.
And the only reason these vultures are laying the groundwork to take our electrical power utilities out of the semi-public sphere and completely into the private sphere…. is because nobody talks about the huge benefits of keeping utilities as profit-sharing public assets. Well, nobody but me and a few folks here at CC, it seems.
Yes, let’s “run with that” a bit.
“As the unit cost of solar and wind energy drops ever closer to that of power from fossil fuels, the fact that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine becomes more and more irksome. It is not just the great power-gap that is night which matters. As the chart below shows, even during the day—and even in deserts—the amount of sunlight can vary from minute to minute. And the wind, of course, is equally fickle”.
I’m not sure it’s fair to call Lovins a “vulture” in the same category as Musk. I would like to think that Lovins understands that we can’t just put a “battery in every basement” and destroy the existing generation an distribution system overnight. We need to proceed with some haste on renewables because of AGW, but I simply do not trust those who are planning to get rich from it (and also want to send tens of thousands of humans to colonize Mars and make $$$$ off that as well).
The idea of using lithium-ion car batteries to power a solar home installation is more than a little silly. First, lithium is way rarer than lead, and it’s doubtful that we have enough to replace all the world’s cars with EVs. To waste even more of it on solar home installations would be self-defeating.
No matter how efficient Elon Musk’s manufacturing process is, there is no getting away from the fact that lithium is expensive, and will get more expensive if demand surges.
And one might question why you would need lithium-ion batteries for a solar-powered home. The chief advantage of lithium based batteries is that they are more energy dense than just about anything else, which makes them perfect for cell phones, computers, EVs and other appliances where size and weight matter. But in a solar home installation, what difference does it make if your batteries are bulky and heavy?
There is nothing really wrong with lead-acid batteries, other than that you may have to do maintenance (ie check the acid levels periodically) to assure maximum life expectancy. It should be remembers that lithium-ion batteries only have about a five-year shelf life before they need to be recycled.
A big reason why people who currently have installed solar panels seldom use battery backup is because they are lured into “using the grid as a battery” thanks to feed-in tariffs. If this option was cut off, it would be much easier to see if solar can stand on its own two feet.
I’m going to have to eat crow. I decided to look up lead production, and I see that there is a problem there too. Demand for lead is high, due to battery production, and it is running out too. Traditionally it’s been fairly cheap since it’s a waste product from copper mining, but there is no getting away from the fact that the supply is limited even with recycling.
Trying to produce enough batteries to back up a solar/wind world is not going to be easy. It’s only easy when the number of installations is small. Right now less than 1% of the world’s homes are run on solar power, and most of those do not have battery backup. Think of how many batteries would be needed to back up just what we’ve got now, and multiply that by 100.
If demand keeps increasing, maybe alchemists in the future will be looking to turn gold into lead.
Don’t forget the recent Crock post on the huge “molten” batteries that some “entrepreneurs” are hoping to put in everyone’s basement—-a lot of lithium in each one (and a huge fourth of July sparkler should they ignite).
If Musk sticks to lithium, expect failure.
Maybe he could deliver fluorine and get superefficient Li-F power cells… /sarc
Even with the most promising tech, I think utilities would balk at buying 18GW(-hr?) of batteries. Something much cheaper or low tech is called for, which I why
I’ve been keeping an eye on Isentropic UK, but their progress has been slow.
I’ve heard of plans in Germany to use the molten pools in aluminum smelters as “storage” and there was talk some years back of them using excess wind to produce hydrogen.
Batteries have their place when quick response is needed but are still much to expensive for large-scale utility storage.
Solar plus storage is really taking off in rural and remote Australia:
“Rapidly falling costs in solar and battery storage technology, coupled with an increasing familiarity with the technology is driving these solutions into the mainstream in remote areas of Australia.”
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/solar-plus-storage-becoming-new-normal-rural-remote-australia-59236
and a new efficiency record for PV’s by an ARENA-funded solar research team at the University of New South Wales. “The team achieved 40.1 per cent efficiency in outdoor testing in Sydney in late October, using a solar ‘Power Cube’ system made up of commercially available solar cells, but with innovative efficiency improvements.”
http://www.sciencealert.com/australian-researchers-have-converted-sunlight-into-electricity-with-more-than-40-efficiency
“Everyone is aware of the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries, but the materials used to make these batteries are expensive. Mosso explained that there is a fundamental cost advantage to using abundant and cheap materials like iron and chromium in a flow battery, but there are also well-known side reactions which have limited its potential in the past. EnerVault’s technology development has focused on mitigating and reversing those side reactions typically associated with iron and chromium flow battery technologies to the point where Mosso believes that, “by 2016 EnerVault will be putting one-megawatt systems out into the field, by 2017 they will be multi-megawatt, four- to six-hour systems.”
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/12/07/energy-storage-growth-trillion-dollar-market/
“Solar is so disruptive, really, to a very venerable, long-term industry, that it is going to cause some challenges,”
“In the US, we see some utilities embracing it and owning it and others pushing it back as hard as they can, and everything in between. Some utilities see solar as this existential threat, others view it as a tremendous opportunity.”
But having worked closely with utilities in the US, such as Hawaii’s Heco in the US, Nahi is keen to stress that there is still a key place for the utility in the future energy picture.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/enphase-says-solar-storage-market-infinite-ahead-of-oz-battery-pilot-14863
“lithium-ion batteries, but the materials used to make these batteries are expensive. ”
They are heavy, too. The Tesla S battery is around 1200 pounds. Imagine what that does for the ‘mileage’, plus all the extra cost of making the chassis so robust.
There isn’t enough lithium to convert an entire transportation sector. So add the cost of a recycling system.
Hence the beauty of electric roads. Something else we never hear enough about. The geeks at Stanford say it is ready to work right now.
Unless there is some mysterious reason why copper/aluminum wiring and inductor coils, with zero moving parts and buried under roadways, would not have a a very long lifespan indeed, electric roads sure seem like a good way to save car owners trillions of dollars in battery costs over the long run.
There’s a reason we “don’t hear enough” about electric roads. At this point in time, it is not really a workable concept economically, although it IS far “smarter” than Solar Roadway and CWET. There are some pilot projects in Korea and Sweden, but don’t hold your breath waiting for it to be “coming to a street near you”. It would allow batteries only 1/3 the size of the Tesla battery (or ~400 pounds, which is the weight of 60+ gallons of gas), and that IS an improvement but not necessarily an answer.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163171-worlds-first-road-powered-electric-vehicle-network-switches-on-in-south-korea
Right now, the greatest benefit seems to be to the scientists and researchers who are sucking up grant money and “dining out” on the concept. Watch for the venture capitalists and crowd-sourcers to arrive soon. Maybe there’ll be some penny stocks appearing for the pump-and-dumpers too. Watch Forbes and Bloomberg and the “green energy” cheerleaders for clues. It’s a great country!
Well, the Korean project still needs big batteries because only a small part of the road is electrified. But when all the roads are turned into slot car tracks, we wouldn’t need batteries at all. I’ll bet a teeny generator run off a teeny engine running on, say, biofuels would suffice for emergencies.
Somehow I think that economics is not the issue. Fitting a large public commons project into a conversation that is all about profit-making in the private sector is the problem.
But, of course, I have never read an analysis of the economics. I don’t think anyone has, because it hasn’t been done. I keep trying to find a blog/web site that talks about stuff like this – how might we actually go about, in the most intelligent and cost-effective way, constructing a new public renewables energy future. As far as I can tell, such a blog or conversation doesn’t even exist.
Which I am sure makes the Koch brothers very happy. No, instead we have thousands of blogs spitting out billions of words on two basic topics:
1) arguing about facts with morons and liars
2) discussing the economic ramifications of renewable energy in all sorts of scenarios except for the benefits of public financing, planning, construction, and deployment of new renewable energy systems.
And this is a conversion we must be having, even if one is not sanguine that such a concept is politically viable here. It certainly won’t be viable until we start talking about it more.. But it will become politically viable when more and more people realize how much money they can keep in their pockets instead of paying for fossil fuels, or paying through their noses to for-profit renewable energy companies for electricity that has zero fuel costs.
You have fallen in love with “electric roads” the way others have fallen in love with Solar Roadway. You need to study up more than a bit on the physics, engineering, and economics involved. We are never going to be able to “turn all the roads into slot car tracks”. Period.
It is just more bright-sidedness, wishful thinking, and denial of reality to think electric roads are going to be more than a small part of the solution.
You say “Somehow I think that economics is not the issue. Fitting a large public commons project into a conversation that is all about profit-making in the private sector is the problem”. Are you aware that those two sentences contradict each other?
BTW, there are a few other things you should factor in. The price of gasoline is now under $2.40 a gallon in Northern VA and still dropping. The price of crude oil is still dropping. This is creating some major problems in the “economics” of energy around the world. The Repugnants are up to their old tricks, and rolling back the EPA regulations re: coal emissions is high on their priority list—-that is their contribution to “public financing etc of renewable energy systems”