Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWhy electricity Energy Storage is About to Get Big – and Cheap
Storage of electricity in large quantities is reaching an inflection point, poised to give a big boost to renewables, to disrupt business models across the electrical industry, and to tap into a market that will eventually top many of tens of billions of dollars per year, and trillions of dollars cumulatively over the coming decades.
The Energy Storage Virtuous Cycle
Ive been writing about exponential decline in the price of energy storage since I was researching The Infinite Resource. Recently, though, I delivered a talk to the executives of a large energy company, the preparation of which forced me to crystallize my thinking on recent developments in the energy storage market.
Energy storage is hitting an inflection point sooner than I expected, going from being a novelty, to being suddenly economically extremely sensible. That, in turn, is kicking off a virtuous cycle of new markets opening, new scale, further declining costs, and additional markets opening.
To elaborate: Three things are happening which feed off of each other.
1 The Price of Energy Storage Technology is Plummeting. Indeed, while high compared to grid electricity, the price of energy storage has been plummeting for twenty years. And it looks likely to continue.
2 Cheaper Storage is on the Verge of Massively Expanding the Market. Battery storage and next-generation compressed air are right on the edge of the prices where it becomes profitable to arbitrage shifting electricity prices filling up batteries with cheap power (from night time sources, abundant wind or solar, or other), and using that stored energy rather than peak priced electricity from natural gas peakers.This arbitrage can happen at either the grid edge (the home or business) or as part of the grid itself. Either way, it taps into a market of potentially 100s of thousands of MWh in the US alone.
3 A Larger Market Drives Down the Cost of Energy Storage. Batteries and other storage technologies have learning curves. Increased production leads to lower prices. Expanding the scale of the storage industry pushes forward on these curves, dropping the price. Which in turn taps into yet larger markets.
Much, much more with a lot of data and graphs.
http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-big-and-cheap/
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and the last objection falls....
Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)Thanks for the information!
NBachers
(17,146 posts)enough
(13,262 posts)potential environmental costs of producing all this vastly expanded and less expensive energy storage capacity. I don't know anything about it, and would be curious to know how this factors in, if at all.
zeemike
(18,998 posts)Generating electricity from coal or oil is very inefficient...and on top of that there are great losses in transmitting it over power lines.
If energy can be generated at the point of use and stored the savings would be tremendous.
jeff47
(26,549 posts)Lead-acid batteries would require the mining of more lead (Car batteries are actually pretty clean now, because the vast majority of the lead in new batteries is recycled from old batteries. Diverting that lead means we'll have to mine more). But other chemistries are going to require other mined minerals, which are either cleaner or dirtier.
Compressed air would require building large, strong, presumably steel tanks.
Thermal storage is going to depend on what material you're using to store the energy. Molten salt isn't dirty to produce, if the energy to melt it is clean.
And so on. And there will probably be a big "dirty" period where the storage technology is built out, followed by a "cleaner" period where old equipment is reused/recycled.
Then we'd have to balance the environmental costs of the storage versus the environmental costs of not storing.
It's not going to be an easy evaluation.
bvar22
(39,909 posts)10 (3/4 TON) of batteries along the keel that needed constant attention.
Lead is extremely toxic, as is Sulfuric Acid, and Lithium, aside from cost, is also toxic.
We later moved to a cabin in the Woods, and decided that e won't be bringing anything that toxic into our environment of our home, drinking water, and food sources.
The2ndWheel
(7,947 posts)We don't like limits.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Thank you, Ichingcarpenter.
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)mountain grammy
(26,655 posts)it may be the only thing that could save the future.
brush
(53,876 posts)storage system. One thing I seem to have missed in that story the battery is compact and can be installed in a garage or other area. It makes no noise and is maintenance-free and can be charged at night when electricity rates are low to sell back into the grid when rates are high at a slight profit (enough to pay for the monthly bill for the battery installation).
But this seems to be a "circular reasoning" kind of cycle for three reasons that I see:
1. You're charging the battery with energy from the grid then selling it back into the grid that's getting a $12-15 profit a month but it's not generating energy it's getting it from the grid.
2. If your power company is hostile to home energy storage systems, which in some states they are, you likely won't be able to sell the energy back to them to pay your battery installation monthly bill ($15 a month over ten years, and that's only if you get it the 50% rebate from your energy company).
3. Once it's installed and paid off does one want to do this "charge at night-sell at peak" thing everyday for forever? I mean the article doesn't go into the Tesla home system ever becoming independent from the grid by being hooked up to it's own power generation source be it solar or wind or both that would power your home for free and have the capability to sell back excess energy to a non-hostile energy company.
That would seem to be the ultimate goal (instead of the "charge at night-sell at peak" thing) of having one of these $13,000 batteries installed in a home but that's not discussed.
And thanks so much by the way for the info on the new, more efficient batteries and the compressed air storage system (I had never heard of that).
FogerRox
(13,211 posts)Some projects are closed loop hydro.
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)which the author didn't consider.
NYC_SKP
(68,644 posts)Haven't read the article so it may become apparent.
All my work is related to the industry, infrastructure, emerging technologies, workforce, etc, etc., and I know that storage is the key to deploying renewables and, in fact, getting off fossil fuels altogether (over time).
I'm also a follower of digital fabrication, but I've never put the two together.
Please expand!
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)The world's first 3D-printed, battery powered rocket engine destined for space
http://www.democraticunderground.com/122837929
that this 3d industry is growing exponentially which one day may supply for the consumer the devices this article mentions which he could print for himself
Could 3D Printing Utterly Change Solar Panel Technology?
http://www.energydigital.com/greentech/3793/Could-3D-Printing-Utterly-Change-Solar-Panel-Technology