Power companies going the way of the landline by 2030?

[DanKegel]

Again you are not getting it. They are talking about Lithium batteries that DO NOT EXIST. It is fantasy. But for giggles let's say there is a Lithium battery that has 15,000 cycles

Nobody said there was. Let's stick to what's actually on the market.
http://bosch-solar-storage.com/the-b...thium-battery/ is a system that's currently on the market, and claims 7000 cycles.
A 4.4 kwh system goes for AUS$17700 or USD$13700, or $2 per cycle. (http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2271620)
(I think that includes the cost of the inverter.)
And with the 30% federal tax credit, that's $1.40 per cycle.
$1.40 for 4kwh... well, that's not going to be economical in normal service,
but if it prevents a huge demand charge, I suppose it might be worth it for
some people. Let's say it cuts your peak demand by 4KW; that's a savings
of something like $1.40/day under APS's Combined Advantage tariff.
Hey, presto, it's right on the cusp of breakeven. I'd love to hear what
the real figures are -- mine were just crazy estimates.

So it seems like storage systems are indeed on the verge of making sense for PV in some places.

Not sure why this is such an emotional topic for some people.

[Sunking]

Those links you gave all cite a paper by Weissbach from 2013, which uses solar data from Germany and concludes than in Germany, the EROI for PV is 3.8-4.0 for poly-Si without battery storage, and 2.3 with some amount of battery buffering (see table 2). The author also notes that in southern Europe the EROI is about 1.7 times higher because Germany is a cloudy place.

2.3 is nothing to write home about, but last I checked it was still greater than 1.

Again you are not getting it. They are talking about Lithium batteries that DO NOT EXIST. It is fantasy. But for giggles let's say there is a Lithium battery that has 15,000 cycles and a calendar life of 45 years. It would be a Economic Disaster even with a EROI of 4. You would get more energy and losse less money buy just burning dollar bills.

But a commercial solar system is not what we are talking about. The commercial model is to charge batteries fully during the peak sun hour, and send excess power from the panels to the grid to be utilized. Then when the sun fades dump all the power in the batteries to the grid to be utilized during peak demand. Repeat cycle next day.

That is not how a residential system operates, nor do residential users use make believe lithium batteries of the future. Not do residential off grid users utilize all the power that the system can generate. Over the life time you would be lucky to use just 40%. The rest is never used or utilized and lost forever.

Now what you can conclude from the articles and studies Solar with or without batteries is not doable and an economic disaster. An EROI of less than 7 and you would never make one penny or what is really important NO ROI. Wind and hydro are the only two renewables that can generate an ROI of 1 or greater. EROI is meaningless without ROI.

So as a business or investor which deal do you take?

Deal #1. Invest $1000 today in Mr Green Jeans Energy and ten years later they give you back give you back $500.

Deal #2 Invest $1000 toady in the Utility, they pay you 7% quarterly interest, and in 10 years if you want can cash out at $3000

I know Ian will take deal #1 every time because he is smart business man. I am stupid and take deal #2.

[inetdog]

http://bosch-solar-storage.com/the-b...thium-battery/ claims 7000 cycles.

Renowned independent institutes have calculated that the lithium-ion batteries used in the system last 7000 charge and discharge cycles. In plain text:

I would say that a large part of the difference between your and Sunking's acceptance criteria hinges on the difference between calculated and tested.

http://www.neces.com/assets/Microgrids-p154vFINAL1.pdf claims 8000 cycles.
Here the squiggles in the DC impedance line on the graph in Figure 1 lead me to believe that it represents actual test measurements for 100% DOD cycling of an individual cell.
If they are in fact using the 1C rate for both charge and discharge, that test could actually be done in only 833 days.
But as Sunking notes, there is a big difference between high discharge rate cylindrical cells and the larger prismatic cells commonly used.
However, A123 seems to indicate that their large battery banks are composed of just such cylindrical cells.

[DanKegel]

Please enlighten me and show me one. There is no such thing as a 6000 cycle Lithium battery today or even on the drawing boards.

http://bosch-solar-storage.com/the-b...thium-battery/ claims 7000 cycles.

http://www.neces.com/assets/Microgrids-p154vFINAL1.pdf claims 8000 cycles.

[pleppik]

Hey Pleppik,

What would be your solution for utilities to satisfy solar customers while also providing fair prices to everyone else?

So I take one evening to go to a concert and this thread I started explodes. Serves me right I guess.

ANYway, IMHO this is the real fundamental question. Even if you think that the EROI of PV+batteries is less than 1 today, the technology will probably exist in the not too distant future to make some sort of PV plus storage option a viable competitor to the grid. Since we probably don't want people abandoning the grid in large numbers, this is something that needs to be addressed.

And I don't have any answers, I just know there's unanswered questions. But a few things seem more-or-less self evident to me:

1. No matter how cheap it becomes to go off-grid, there will still be a need and demand for grid power.
2. The more people go off-grid, the more expensive the grid becomes for everyone else.
3. There is a price you can pay for exported power which will make staying on-grid more attractive than going off-grid (even if batteries are almost free).
4. The more expensive grid power becomes, the more you can afford to pay for power exported from PV producers to induce them to stay on-grid.

This is an interesting list, since it suggests that there is a way to keep the savings for going off-grid below the cost of batteries (you just have to pay enough for exported power and not penalize people for staying on-grid with solar), and that doing so is going to be a net benefit to everyone, both PV and non-PV customers.

Successfully navigating this change will probably require power companies to think of themselves as power exchanges with millions of buyers and sellers, rather than power sellers will millions of buyers. But I don't think it's intractable.

[pleppik]

Easy to find if you want to.

Germany Solar PV is so far the highest at 3.5 which is way below the minimum 7. Common Logic ought to tell you if Solar PV Active is at best 3.7, and once you throw in th eefficiency of batteries and those energy inputs drop EROI to less than 1. It is just a well documented fact the Greenies do not want anyone to know about.

Reference 1
IEEE
Stanford University which wil lead you to many studies that will also say batteries are a looser.

.....

Go look for yourselves but you are not going to find much telling you what you wish was true. No scientific reviewed material support an EROI even coming close to 1.

Those links you gave all cite a paper by Weissbach from 2013, which uses solar data from Germany and concludes than in Germany, the EROI for PV is 3.8-4.0 for poly-Si without battery storage, and 2.3 with some amount of battery buffering (see table 2). The author also notes that in southern Europe the EROI is about 1.7 times higher because Germany is a cloudy place.

2.3 is nothing to write home about, but last I checked it was still greater than 1.

--- Moderator approved at 1824 PDT 10 April

[inetdog]

So how many cycles are there possible in 5 years?

Depends on whether you are using them for solar, or other 24 hour time cycle application or for charging and discharging the battery several times per day.
In the sense you are looking at (common sense for RE), less than 2000.

But even if the results of accelerated cycling are acceptable, it would be hard to get more than maybe 10 cycles per day in testing using a 1C rate. And the published figures are probably not for a 1C rate application.
Even then a 6000 cycle test of a brand new battery design will take close to two years.

[Sunking]

You seem to be misreading the paper. They say straight off that current lithium ion batteries have about a 6,000 cycle lifetime

Please enlighten me and show me one. There is no such thing as a 6000 cycle Lithium battery today or even on the drawing boards. They are making things up which do not exist and likely will never exist. Lithium battery shelf life depending on chemistry is 2 to 8 years. The highest cycle life claimed is with LiFePo4 batteries of 2000 in which none have ever seen 2000 cycle yet because a LFP battery has a shelf life of 5 years at best with what is out on the market today. High output lithium cells are on the order of 500 cycles in which would be needed for utility scale batteries. If such batteries existed you would see EV as mainstream vehicles. So how many cycles are there possible in 5 years?

What they are using to base conclusions with does not exist. Look in CA classified adds. Hundreds of used Tesla roadsters for sale. All need new batteries. Look at the trouble Nissan Leaf is having with batteries. No such battery exist.

[DanKegel]

All their opinions are based on a lithium battery that does not exist. No such thing as a lithium battery that has 10K to 20K cycles to 80% DOD.

You seem to be misreading the paper. They say straight off that current lithium ion batteries have about a 6,000 cycle lifetime, and that

an increase of cycle life to 10,000–18,000 (2–20 times present values) is required for pairing with wind ...

to increase EROI of the wind - storage combination above that of wind alone.

But solar's easier; even with current batteries, they say

All storage technologies paired with solar photovoltaic (PV) generation yield EROI ratios that are greater than curtailment

i.e. when there's too much solar power for the grid, batteries can usefully store it to deliver to the grid later... presumably in a few hours.

I'm not sure why you think an EROI of 8 is useless.

[Sunking]

I think the figure of merit for batteries alone is ESOI, not EROI.
According to http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/artic.../ee/c3ee41973h
Li-ion batteries have an ESOI of 32, and compressed air storage has an ESOI of 797..

You are misinterpreting the data presented. First and foremost they are basing an opinion on technology that does not exist yet which is what I keep trying to tell you, but some reason do not want to hear. The model is not telling ESOI or EROI of a lithium battery is 32. All their opinions are based on a lithium battery that does not exist. No such thing as a lithium battery that has 10K to 20K cycles to 80% DOD. There is no such thing as a 40 to 75 year battery.

What the article is discussing is Solar and Wind do not produce power when there is demand, thus it has to be shut off or what they call curtailment. Solar EROI is so poor it is not even discussed and focused on Wind power using TX as the model because TX is the largest RE energy producer in the world. So large you can add up all other states production and they still come in second place. However most of the possible Wind Energy is just turned off because there is no demand for it or put another way any place to send it too. So they turn it off aka curtailment as a code word.

The model is based on using batteries that do not exist to store that excess energy when there is no place for it to go and be stored to be used during peak demand times. Keep in mind al that wind energy is in the TX high plains hundreds of miles from where it is used in DFW. Commercial wind and solar is only feasible in very small geographic area located a considerable distance from population densities.

What it boils down to is wind is economically possible to supplement the grid in certain areas of the country if a battery existed to store the energy. Solar no matter where located or what battery exist is not feasible or usable. A solar panel in AZ has an EROI of 3 to 5. That same solar panel in TX is on the order of 2 to 4, in yankee country less than 1, in the Pacific Northwest is a joke of less than 1. You cannot apply an EROI for solar in AZ to the world. Solar and Wind are geographically limited and Wind has the largest area, solar is on a very small area where it can be used in places no one wants to live.

[SunEagle]

I'm going out on a limb here.....I firmly believe that energy transmission technology is going to be the long term energy technology solution. Energy storage is going to be disruptive short term, but energy transmission technology will change the energy industry around the world.

Your local power company is not going away....they will just have to tap into the unlimited energy source of the sun shining 24/7 somewhere on the earth. The light side will be constantly feeding the dark side....if you can transmit that power without loss around the globe.

Why build 50,000 nuclear power plants when you only need one and it is already in production.

Never going to happen even with low resistance super conducting transmission lines. There just isn't enough real estate in the world to build enough solar pv to run the entire planet from the "Sunny Side". Even locating the panels in space won't work due to the amount of "junk" flying around which would damage the panels.

Sure it would be nice to have RE as the only power source but physics are physics and the math doesn't equal out. Maybe if they get the solar panel efficiency above 50% they may have a chance to supply large populations with land based pv but without Nuclear or Fossil fuel burning generators relying on RE will put a lot of people in the dark where the sun isn't shining.

[DanKegel]

WHAT percentage of homes have the location or resources for solar? Few

What we have here is small group of converted types evangilizing solar shere it doesn't fit today nor by 2030

Depends on what you expect from it.
It's taking off in rural Africa, where people don't have many resources, because it solves a real need economically.
See http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...-solar-energy/

[DanKegel]

I am not saying there cannot be a battery out there with an EROI greater than 1 someday in the future, but today none exist or any on the drawing boards yet.

I think the figure of merit for batteries alone is ESOI, not EROI.
According to http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/artic.../ee/c3ee41973h
Li-ion batteries have an ESOI of 32, and compressed air storage has an ESOI of 797.

The same paper gives the EROI of wafer PV as 8, thin film PV as 13, and wind as ~85.

According to that paper, storage with currently available Li-ion batteries improves EROI for solar, but not yet for wind.

I have not yet read that paper carefully enough to see how it fares vs. the EROI paper I posted earlier, e.g. I don't know how many days of storage this paper assumes.

[Sunking]

Derrick: I bet you'd prefer plant operations to R & D huh ? I think we need both types.

Not at all JPM, I am all for R&D.

The issue with batteries is they are not energy sources or a source of fuel. Like hydrogen, batteries are carriers of energy. Water is another example as we can pump energy into water in the form of heat to make steam. So I think everyone can understand that.

But here is the catch. Just like Hydrogen it takes energy to make a battery, a lot of it. No battery known to man today can store and cycle more energy in its lifetime than it takes to make the battery from cradle to grave. Hydrogen is the worse at 5% efficiency meaning you have to pump in 20 units of energy to get 1 unit out. Not only does that mean the EROI is less than 1, it also means the price of the battery will be a multiple greater than 1 of the source fuel used to make it.

Once you know and understand that relationship. it is very easy to understand why using batteries is a very poor option to store energy. Currently today Pump Back Lakes and Compressed Air have the highest EROI but is still less than 1. It is just the simple law of physics you know all to well JPM.

I am not saying there cannot be a battery out there with an EROI greater than 1 someday in the future, but today none exist or any on the drawing boards yet. So back to the R&D we go. Personally I prefer my money to go into development of Fast Breeder Reactors and sources of energy. Finding a new source of energy is more important than finding a storage medium. Solar is not a good option as a source with EROI of 3 to 5. Wind is more promising with EROI of 8 but like solar very geographically restricted to where it can be used which are not near population where it can be used readily. Fast Breeder Reactor can be in your basement and supply several square miles of high density population and is the Core tool to be used in a Smart Grid. Works like Cell Towers. If one trips off-line the surrounding reactors pick up the slack.

[russ]

WHAT percentage of homes have the location or resources for solar? Few

What we have here is small group of converted types evangilizing solar shere it doesn't fit today nor by 2030