Guest post by David Middleton
So-called renewable energy sources face many economic and thermodynamic hurdles; all of which are routinely ignored by the government officials who spend our tax dollars. One of the biggest hurdles is storage. The only way wind and solar could ever reliably provide base-load is through the deployment of economically sustainable storage systems. Battery packs are one of the favored “solutions.” Li-ion battery prices have “plunged”since 2010 from $1,000/kWh to just over $200/kWh. Bloomberg New Energy Finance is ecstatic about this.
Words fail me. Well, maybe not totally fail me. We currently pay about 10¢ per kWh for electricity. Our electric utility can afford to sell us electricity for 10¢/kWh largely due to the fact that natural gas-fired power plants generate electricity for about 6¢/kWh. The Energy Information Agency forecasts that solar PV power plants entering service in 2022 will be able to generate electricity for 8.5¢/kWh. This would make solar PV competitive with natural gas… Right? Nooooo. Natural gas combined cycle has an average capacity factor of 87%. Solar PV’s average capacity factor is 25%. So, you would have to deploy at least 3 MW of solar PV to offset 1 MW of natural gas. Then you would have to deploy a storage system to deliver electricity when “the Sun don’t shine.” At $200/kWh, solar PV with storage would run about $58/kWh to fully offset natural gas at $0.06/kWh…
Of course, the battery pack is rechargeable. However, even if the battery back survived 1,500 discharge cycles at full capacity, the lifetime storage cost would still be $0.13/kWh… A total cost of about $0.22/kWh. Since heat degrades Li-ion battery life, they aren’t likely to maintain full capacity very long in places where solar PV works best (deserts), particularly with the newly discovered Photovoltaic Heat Island (PVHI) effect.
BNEF’s celebration of $200/kWh battery packs was so ridiculous, that the editors of Real Clear Energy lampooned it.
It’s All About the Battery
By Editors
October 12, 2016
The general public (defined as those who don’t read energy news because they think electricity lives somewhere inside their apartment wall) doesn’t know it yet, and probably never will, but batteries are one hot (no pun intended, Samsung) topic.
It should be no secret by now (even to the notoriously sluggish general public) that Samsung has been forced to completely kill its entire Galaxy 7 cell phone line because the built-in lithium-ion batteries kept exploding.
[…]
The wind and solar energy industries, for example, are essentially in a kind of holding mode until a battery is developed that can store their energy to be used in the fallow periods when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Until then they kind of limp along letting natural gas fill in for them at night, during storms and when they’re just feeling to weak to get to work.
The electric car industry is also waiting for better batteries. The problem with range (the number of miles one can drive without recharging) has hinged on the fact that EV car batteries are very heavy to begin with and putting in an even bigger battery to get greater range sort of defeats the environment-saving purpose.
None of this seems to phase Bloomberg’s notoriously aggressively environmentalist New Energy Finance think tank. (BNEF generates studies and articles which then get top billing in Bloomberg’s news publications.) BNEF is in a Hosana! Hosana! mood today because they’ve noticed that lithium-ion costs are going down.
[…]
Cheap li-ion batteries will spawn more electric cars which will spawn more self-driving cars which will be paired with more Uber type softwares which will take us to….the green ideal, the self-driving taxi.
Taxis, geddit? Emphatically not individually-owned cars. The family car is just so inefficient and wasteful and space-hogging and just plain selfish.
Don’t worry: A self-driving taxi will never deposit you in a shipping container instead of at your home.
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Dave, not too sure what this number should be ?
“run about &58/kWh to fully offset natural gas at $0.06/kWh…”
Typo. Fixed.
..My post took so long because I am still on moderation…sorry….LOL
Seems like he’s getting confused with the difference between energy production in kWh and “installed capacity” in MW ( a power term ). Whatever it was supposed to mean, actually explaining what he was doing to get there would help see where he went wrong.
I don’t see any sense in a figure like $58/kWh
Fine, so who was suggesting we should pile up batteries in the sun out in the desert. I think the usual term for that kind of thing is : straw man.
Well if they have said the production cost will be 8.5 ¢/kWh, that is what it will be, capacity factor is part of that calculation, unless you want to read their report and point out where they “forgotten” to take this into account.
So is that how you get to ” a figure like $58/kWh” ??
This kind of partisan bashing, is getting as tiring that warmists BS about “dirty” coal.
This is a blog.
That means people post wrong things.
The readers do the peer review. all good right? let the readers sort out the truth.. many eyes wins
good job on your review
But notice this……
With journals it is rare to find retractions.
with blogs, posts are never ever retracted. even IF readers go to all the effort to do the peer review.
that’s odd.
That means the incurious will simply read posts, not the comments,
they will spread the bad information, via twitter, FB.. and in some cases Drudge
the marketplace of ideas is thus corrupted by the intellectual equivalent of a bad rolex knockoff.
long ago I though blogs had an opportunity to revolutionize science publication.
hmm. that was silly of me
[“…with blogs, posts are never ever retracted.” Really? I suggest you do your homework before shooting your mouth off Mosher – Anthony]
Legitimate blogs allow posters like Mosher to continually beclown themselves just so everyone can see it for themselves.
@Greg,
LCOE does not include storage or back-up.
The projected LCOE for solar PV plants entering service in 2022 is about 8.5 ¢/kWh. The cost for the storage is $200/kWh. In order to generate as much electricity as 1 MW of natural gas, you would need 3.48 MW of solar PV. You would have to store 2.48 MW worth of solar generation. At $200/kWh, this works out to about $58/kWh.
The cost would come down with each discharge cycle. I explained this in the next-to-last paragraph.
Regarding, putting the batteries in the desert… If that’s where the solar array is, the battery packs are probably nearby.
Strawman, no. Hyperbole, yes.
Blog posts can and should be retracted or Updated/Corrected. The author has to be convinced that they are wrong. I agree that many blogs don’t do this, but many people refuse to admit when they are in error.
As far as batteries in the desert, the solution is clear. Just keep them inside with A/C? 🙂
Is someone suggesting that adding more solar or wind capacity can make up for the low capacity factor? Unless I’m missing something, the low capacity factor for solar and wind is due to the fact that when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun not shining they aren’t generating electricity. So simply installing more capacity doesn’t fix this. You just have more capacity down at the same time and that has to be filled by something else.
Hi Greg, and hi Steven Mosher –
I enjoy reading your comments, a fact which is particularly relevant to Steven. You see, Steven, this is a blog, and while the articles are mostly very interesting, the ultimate value is in the comments. If a blog article doesn’t stand up to scrutiny – and it does happen even on WUWT – then you can be sure that commenters will be there to point out the flaws. So, one of the major differences between a blog and a journal is the existence of comments. If a journal article is flawed – and it does happen even with peer-review – then the only sensible course is withdrawal. But if a blog article is flawed then the best course may be to leave it up, because otherwise the value in the comments is lost. And by the way, what distinguishes a good blog like WUWT from a crap blog like John Cook’s is that you can comment here.
Now, about the cost of renewable energy: Greg, you challenged David Middleton on his costings, in particular his “$58/kWh”. You claim that the real figure is approaching “8.5c/kWh”. Wow, that’s an impressive difference. But David’s figure explicitly incorporated the 8.5c, and the extra cost was for storage. So unless I have badly misunderstood, his figure is really about storage, your EIA figure is not, so your criticism is misdirected. Which is a shame, because if you had addressed the storage cost directly, you could quite easily have shown that David’s figure was, on all the known data (battery life, etc), far too high. Maybe you could put up some better figures?
If you were to do that, we could all get a better picture of the cost-competitiveness (or non-cost-competitiveness) of renewables. Mind you, I think we all know roughly what it looks like, because of electricity costs in Germany and Denmark. The experiment that I would really like to see, in order to settle the argument, is for all energy mandates, subsidies and penalties to be removed, so that we can see all the energy sources compete on a level playing field. The remarkable feature of such an experiment is that it would have a negative net cost – all electricity users would have access to the lowest-cost power, and for most users that would deliver a cost reduction.
So, Greg and Steven, my final request is: please will you support the experiment. If you are in fact right, this would be a wonderful way to prove it.
Thanks Mike, Well said.
Steven Mosher October 19, 2016 at 9:53 am
With journals it is rare to find retractions.
*****
LOL! The BEST study you worked on was published in a pay-for-play, start up, Indian website which is under criminal investigation. They cashed Mueller’s check, what makes you think they would ever be interested in a retraction.
Visit http://retractionwatch.com to see how corrupt and unethical the soft (non) sciences really are
@Charles Hall,
Adding capacity with storage would compensate for capacity factor.
@Mike Jonas,
In defense of Greg and Professor Mosher, my sarcastic nature does occasionally confuse some readers.
Charles. I believe they are talking about adding wind in different places. Not just more towers in the same place.
The hope is that the wind is always blowing, somewhere.
Of course this ignores the trouble with transmitting electricity long distances.
Mosher’s right. They are treating $200/kWh as a rate and it’s not. You pay $200 for the kWh of storage. And then it can store and release 200kWh if energy many times.
Well that “plunge” would be better described as a “launch” into orbit.
I can walk into a retail store right now (except, I’m at work) and get 1.3 KWh for about $100 plus California’s punitive sales tax (9% where the battery is sold).
So nyet on the plunge.
G
You can get *Lithium Ion* batteries for $100 dollars? Please supply store name and part numbers so I can order that.
Just paid $1600 for a 100W LiFePO4 battery for a camper. I did check prices.
Down considerably from the Tesla thing, which was even more ridiculous. Titans still come out on top, i think.
Why doesn’t wind (in the chart) carry a storage burden, like solar?
I only did the math for solar. The top panel of the chart is my calculations.
Demand is down, supply is up… therefore the suppliers are shedding inventory.
+1 for supply
+1 for demand
May be a typo:
“At $200/kWh, solar PV with storage would run about &58/kWh ”
A ‘$’ instead of the ampersand.
Fixed.
A few questions are in order.
1) What is the variance in cost estimates for combined cycle gas plants vs. utility scale solar. This matters when citing industry averages in a napkin math exercise like this.
2) Why not compare peak demand period value vs. baseload instead of the all or nothing approach?
3) Do utilities ignore fuel price risk when performing 25 and 50 year projections?
4) Does anyone else recognize the risk of using cost averages for immature industries like renewables?
1) The EIA LCOE report includes a variance range in tables 2 and A2.
2a) Because there are no objective numbers for “peak demand value.”
2b) Because the goal of the Gorebots is to replace coal & gas with wind & solar.
3) I doubt it. Utilities have access to the same price forecasts that coal & gas producers do.
4) There is no risk in using average costs. Cherry-picking low cost examples would entail risk. Ignoring costs entails even more risk.
The market prices peak demand periods in unregulated markets. Factoring risk from fuel price swings in long term projections equates to a cost factor. Low bidder processes are hardly defined as “cherry picking” in the real world.
You can’t build an economic model based on unexpected swings in demand and prices. Average price and demand forecasts are, by definition, averages of highs and lows.
You’re not a subject expert here.
I’m just a geologist who minored in math and likes to play with Excel and PowerPoint. When we drill a well, we have to base the economics on oil & gas price forecasts. We can’t base it on assumptions of unexpected price swings.
Actually you can build economic models that take into account unexpected swings in demands and prices. They are just usually wrong. Read Taleb if you want to understand why.
This is why you need a free market – so that firms can live and die and show whether some mechanism works or doesn’t work (e.g. using solar at peak hours to make a profit might be a useful mechanism, but it’s unproven).
Having the government interfere by subsidies means there’s no A/B testing and no way to find out you are going to go bust, until your economy goes bust on $0.40c/hour electricity. Then you fail big instead of failing small.
Peter
Or you become too big to fail, in which it is your competitors who will be forced out of business.
Well the average of the high and the low is seldom the average of the whole set or function if it is a function, so if people are defining that as the average price or demand forecast, then the term is being misused.
G
@Peter Sable,
In the oil & gas industry, we try not to be wrong… Yet, prices often disregard our models… Kind of like global temperatures and climate models… 😉
2) Peak values are difficult to predict and have only a small impact on the overall price paid for energy. Further, peak prices are suppressed by the use of quick-ramp, simple cycle combustion turbines.
3) Anyone relying on a 25 to 50 year fuel price risk assessment is an idiot. Go back to 1991 or 1966 and look at the risk assessments for the price of natural gas and coal. Utilities use those assessments to fill in the blanks because the regulators want to see them.
4) What else will you use? Something dreamed up in someone’s head to support or deny the use of renewables? Please refer to answer 3).
Grid scale storage works particularly well for frequency response – handling the extra load and keeping frequency on track – when solar or wind is (predictably) ramping up and down… it also responds better than spinning reserve in grid outages like the SA one.
UK’s National Grid just tendered for 200MW of storage for frequency response in its first substantial investment in this.
(UK storage is at 3.2 GW, 450Mw building, plus this 200MW). That’s a good start on this -shows it is off and running)
However you would be wrong to suggest that storage is the only solution to wind or solar being unavailable…
(Even leaving aside that wind peaks in winter, solar in summer somewhere like UK, so they complement each other). UK uses demand management and DTU – which pays companies a premium to move electricity use to when there’s an excess of renewables on the grid -e.g. mid day summer UK weekends.
don’t forget pumped storage also – UK has some and will expand it a few GW.
There are substantial storage plans for SA – which would certainly have helped avert grid shut down and/or helped with black start…
Good for you. Maybe y’all can catch up with Germany & Denmark.
Note however Germans use a lot less electricity than people in the US… and may well own a share in renewable production.
I’d use a lot less electricity if the price quadrupled.
Griff:
This has to rank as the most stupid comment on this blog. Tell me, Griff, if your food costs were three times the US would you just eat as much or less? Would you not be a little p*ssed off that your food bills were rising so much?
Then again, I have seen you trot this ‘observation’ of yours before – and you have been taken to task over it by many commenters. But you don’t learn. Are you the Forrest Gump of the blog?
The richer Germans “may well own a share in renewable production”, that leaves the poor and apartment dwellers holding the bag for those sky high costs so the rich can feel green.
The term heat or eat comes to mind.
Griff, don’t you dare to try to sell the energiewende to us.
To put it short: “Strom wird erneut teurer, die Netzkosten explodieren geradezu, doch Deutschlands CO2-Ausstoß wächst trotzdem weiter. Experten von McKinsey sehen den Beginn einer neuen Phase in der Energiewende. ” – Die Welt
If you didn’t read German, it is time to start now.
Griff on October 19, 2016 at 8:25 am
Note however Germans use a lot less electricity than people in the US… and may well own a share in renewable production.
__________________________________
Especially households disconnected from electricity supply use less.
2014 in Austria 27000 households without electricity.
For germany see http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-920288.html
__________________________________
Until ~2000 there was no point in talking about electricity. Now there’s Griffs.
Thanks, David. Let’s all take a deep breath and use the data.
Population density (#/km2) – Spain – 92, Germany – 230, Denmark – 131, USA – 33
Coupled with the severe weather in the US (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, extreme temperatures) mostly not prevalent in Europe, the high population density and fewer environmental challenges means transmission and distribution costs should be much lower in Europe than in the USA.
So what’s the excuse for electricity pricing which is 2.5 to 3.4 times that of the USA? Impotent and futile government policies intended to ‘save the planet’, but (in)effectively starving the green stuff of our one and only genosphere of the life giving molecule they and we cannot live without.
Robert,
‘Coupled with the severe weather in the US (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, extreme temperatures) mostly not prevalent in Europe, the high population density and fewer environmental challenges’ –
DUE to high population density and Europes geography a large amount of population lives at sea levels 800 m /2400 feet/ and above: hard winters, ice and snow.
Some 5 years before airplanes couldn’t takeoff from Frankfurt airport, the tires simply frozen on the asphalt. Salt and ethanol used up in the first 2 months of winter.
In Alaska it is 37¢/kWh in the interior. We have to burn oil to generate electricity. Needless to say, people keep the use of electricity to a minimum. We burn wood to stay warm.
Australian Politicians are promising to move as rapidly as possible to catch up with Denmark, that is, the SA disaster is just the start. Unfortunately, unlike Denmark, we will not be able to import from lower cost neighbors.
It’s only the poor that will suffer.
@David — Stop giving them facts, it only confuses them!! Hahaha.
“Grid scale storage works particularly well for frequency response”
Yes. That would be the inertia of the large synchronous machines. Or pumped water; or other mechanical storage. In SA the wind farm owners got to opt out of supplying a share of these “frequency response assets” in order to make wind appear cheaper than it actually is.
Griff I am so glad that you are able to demand that the wind blows when the sun isn’t shining, nice trick. Pump Storage is just a battery, you have to put energy in to get energy out.
Sorry, but I though that is what batteries do (this post is about Li-ion batteries).
Like, store energy from a time of plenty to be used when (in this case) wind and/or solar no longer provide.
Obviously the more storage then the longer that interval can be serviced.
And no one is saying that any energy system should rely only on wind and solar.
In my view nuclear need to be in there as well.
Toneb, if you include nuclear, them there is no need for solar or wind !!
ToneB: No matter how big your storage you have to use power to charge it up – power that cannot be used other than at a later time. So your excess generation has to be as much as current use in order to give a similar time period of discharge.
Earlier this month the cost of purchasing wind power in South Australa was zero.
Marcus,
some people NEED to do certain, albeit harmful, things to feel good about themselves; even if the feel good is just for a short while..
Over-eaters.
Too much smoke.
Too much drink.
That thing where they choke themselves unconscious.
Sex with people they don’t know,
Rationalizing present reality to reflect ones’ accepted & mistaken beliefs (AKA Griffing)
Paying for indulgences (even if with other peoples resources).
etc, etc…
Haven’t the UK government just announced funding for the building of “Nice Clean” Diesel generators to fire up when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine so that we don’t have blackouts during the coming winters
Just about everything Griff writes in his comment is utter nonsense. He cannot see the stupidity of his totally illogical thinking .
My first thought was WHAT?
how much are you paid to shill griff?
If you are using all of this storage just for frequency control, you are leaving money on the table in its ability to store energy. Flywheels are considered jut as capable in frequency ancillary services.
You have also wandered into one of my pet peeves. 200 MW in terms of energy storage is meaningless. Will it deliver that 200 MW for 10 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day? Energy storage needs to be discussed in terms of , shall I say it, ENERGY, not power. Megawatt-HOURs not megawatts. That 200 MW may be a good frequency response device but we have many options for that service, the big kahuna is the storage of hours to days worth of energy to keep a grid relying on renewables from descending into third world performance.
“There are substantial storage plans for SA – which would certainly have helped avert grid shut down and/or helped with black start…”.
============================================================
I assume “SA” refers to South Australia where windmills caused the complete shutdown of the electricity system for days in some locations, a disaster that is now heading to the courts and “storage” refers to pumped hydro.
Don’t be ridiculous, Australia is notoriously flat and S A is the flattest state which hardly rises 600m above sea level in the hot dry north:
http://www.ga.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0013/12640/GA11759.gif
Pumped storage?? But in other news havent we recently been told that reservoirs are nasty co2 releasers also?
“Grid scale storage works particularly well for frequency response”
Bollox.
If batteries followed the same sort of price/performance curve as semiconductor devices have, that would be something to celebrate. As the Samsung Galaxy 7 demonstrates, current products still suck.
Semiconductors are unique. Most everything else is cost of materials driven.
I was wondering what a building that stored grid scale level of batteries would look like.
First off, you couldn’t keep them all in one room. If you did that, a single fire would take out the entire facility. So you will have to keep small groups in separate rooms that are rated to contain any battery fire that starts inside them.
The fire safety and cooling systems would make the IBM big blue facility look like a heating room
Any chance all that extra fire safety equipment would add to the installed cost of this “backup” system?
The biggest cost reduction for semi-conductors comes from reducing the minimum geometry sizes of the devices. The amount of increase in the size of say a typical semiconductor “chip” is a very small fraction of the Moore’s Law scaling. Circuit design innovations account for a part of the advance, but sheer size reduction accounts for most of the orders of magnitude reduction.
When I last worked on actual silicon chip design, I was working with a one micron process, and had the task of moving those designs to a 800 nm process. But these were analog designs; not digital, and for many analog designs size matters, in that if you reduce the size you may get worse performance (1/f noise for example). So while I was working at 1.0 microns, others doing digital were working with a 500 nm process and that was NOT state of the art. Analog designs often end up needing sizeable capacitors (linear) as well as accurate resistors. Digital designs tend to not use any of those, and capacitor linearity is of little interest.
But leading edge digital designs today are at around 14 nm minimum feature size. so 50 to 70 times smaller than what I last designed with.
None of that size reduction is of much interest to say solar cell devices, where sheer acreage is what you need.
G
Cheap is good, But:
The fire extinguisher is “free” because it won’t do a thing against battery fires.
True, but irrelevant to the irony.
But it will put out the things your battery fire ignites.
With they work against gas and petrol explosions?
(sarc)
gas and petrol don’t spontaneously combust.
Once I had to extinguish the fire on a burning forklifts battery. The rubber isolation around a copper cable connection dropped molten unto the plastic lid of a battery grid cell melting it through.
After that with the platform lifter I brought the forklifter outside the hall parking it on the street inside the firms boundary. That was Saturday.
Monday the boss asked why is that thing parked in the rain over the weekend.
When I showed him near that thing, with a dose of the battery acid smell in the nose he went ‘OK, better outside the hall’.
_____________________________________
EVERY kind of battery is prone to burn when such capacities are transmitted.
When you compare a battery cost to electrical generation costs it is apples and oranges. Batteries are energy storage, not energy generation. You can use a rechargeable battery hundreds (if not thousands) of times, but each time you must also spend the energy generation costs to charge the battery.
Tesla may have a short term cost reduction due to their efficiencies, but they are planning to consume battery raw materials at an enormous rate. For instance, lithium hydroxide has increased by a factor of three since 2013.
The battery has a cost ($). It can discharge x kWh. So, it has a cost per kWh ($/kWh).
It’s no more “apples & oranges” than discussing name plate capacity (MW) and output (MWh) and the costs thereof.
See the next-to-last paragraph of the post for a brief discussion of the effects of discharge cycles on the lifetime cost.
If one cycle of a battery is 1 kWh, then 1000 cycles is 1000 kWh. Most of the cost of a battery is the battery itself, not the cost to charge it. The cost of the battery doesn’t change if you cycle it one time or a thousand times.
Batteries are rated at their single cycle capacity.
Batteries are portable power. You charge them, then you can remove them from the energy grid. Most other power sources (from hydroelectric to coal power to solar) are installed. It’s apples & oranges.
My criticism has to do with this statement — “Words fail me. Well, maybe not totally fail me. We currently pay about 10¢ per kWh for electricity. Our electric utility can afford to sell us electricity for 10¢/kWh largely due to the fact that natural gas-fired power plants generate electricity for about 6¢/kWh. … ” The price of a battery has nothing to do with the cost of electricity.
It’s like comparing the value of corn grown in one year on an acre of land to the cost of the actual land. (I can’t believe an acre of land costs $10,000 — the value of corn grown on an acre is only $500. That land is not worth it.)
“It’s like comparing the value of corn grown in one year on an acre of land to the cost of the actual land. (I can’t believe an acre of land costs $10,000 — the value of corn grown on an acre is only $500. That land is not worth it.)”
Well that’s true. But can YOU make a business case for spending $10K, to return $500 per year? At that rate it would take 20 years to break even, assuming your seed, fuel, maintenance, tax, and employees costs are zero.
Even that’s not a full analogy. IF you could only grow 25 crops of corn on the land before you had to pay for the disposal of the land and buy more land. You bet it will impact your costs too.
To carry it further, if someone had cheaper land out in the country that could grow 3 times the yield per crop as your expensive city land could, you’d expect that to drive your business case too.
Here’s another analogy for you. It’s like saying that the cost of a gasoline engine and its auxiliary needs are $200/kWh, whereas the cost of electricity is $0.085/kWh.
@lorcanbonda,
The cost per kWh for all power plants is a combination of the capital (land, construction, generating system, etc.) and operating expenses (fuel, maintenance, etc.). I was being a bit flippant with the “words fail me” bit. However, the cost of the battery system is just as much a factor in the cost as the generating system.
Well they aren’t making any more land, specially with sky rocketing sea level rise, so if you can find land for $10,000 you better grab it fast if it is in a place where you would want some land.
G
[quote]”However, the cost of the battery system is just as much a factor in the cost as the generating system.”[/quote] Yes, in the same way that the cost of your automobile engine is just as much a factor in your driving costs as the price of gas — but they are still different costs. Nobody would be upset that the cost of their engine is $10,000 even though it is much more than a $2 per gallon price for gas.
You can’t drive your car with coal or solar generated electricity unless you have a battery.
Why would you want to drive your car with coal or solar? We have hundreds of years of oil left.
Regardless, you can convert coal to liquid fuel cheaper than you can get electricity from the sun.
” You can use a rechargeable battery hundreds (if not thousands) of times, but each time you must also spend the energy generation costs to charge the battery.”
Hundred, yes. Thousands, not without reduced capacity. But in any event the batteries have a finite life, and this is a cost that should be capitalized. This raises the true cost of renewables. It is not apples to oranges–both systems have capitalized costs.
Li-ion batteries can last anywhere from 200 to 1,800 discharge cycles, with gradual degradation. Even at 1,800 cycles, with no degradation, the price only drops to $0.11/kWh. When you add that to the $0.09 2022 LCOE of PV, you still get a Euro-sized wholesale rate of $0.20/kWh.
Most batteries get 500-1000 cycles (and the final cycle is 80% of the initial). This will degrade faster in hotter climates, but some additives are fixing that. If I’m not mistaken, Tesla has been reporting 2,000 cycles per battery.
At $200/kWh and an LCOE of $0.9/kWh, 2,000 cycles gets you down to $0.19/kWh, wholesale.
“When you add that to the $0.09 2022 LCOE of PV, you still get a Euro-sized wholesale rate of $0.20/kWh.”
$.020 divided by the efficiency of the charge/discharge cycle, which is something substantially less than 1.
I’m sure they have. It’s called marketing.
Tesla is marketing, but they also have some of the best battery design talent out there. They have been reporting very high capacities and cycle life. 2000 cycles is not unbelievable and Tesla is probably achieving it.
These days, “capitalized costs” are referred to as “subsidies.”
The gummint forces you to capitalize some costs, and won’t let you expense those costs when they are incurred; and then they turn around and say they are “subsidizing” your business.
Two faced lying scoundrels is what they are.
G
I can get 600 miles per charge in my Subaru Impreza, and after 2000 charges, my battery is as good as when it was brand new.
Elon Musk has a lot of catching up to do.
g
Lorca, when tested sure you get 2000 cycles. In the real world that 2000 never are FULL capacity cycles – you load when you can, not when battery is sucked out.
George Smith:
(the WUWT won’t let me post a reply to that message):
you have gotten 2000 recharges out of your subaru batteries?
5 and a half years??!!
Don’t forget the Elon Musk had to drop the high capacity battery pack in its tesla because it was a fire hazard. The Greens were applauding this battery as the savior of solar and wind.
But I don’t think he’s given up on his massive battery-pack PowerWall. Just wait until the first one of those goes up in smoke!
And takes a house or two with it.
As far as I can see, they just tried to create a market that did not already exist. The sad fact is that lead-acid (eg car) batteries are much better for this, and much, much cheaper. If you do not care about space and weight, as you tend not to in a house, they seem an obvious choice instead of a massive fire-starter on your wall!
And it is right down the rabbit hole we go.
It has been shown over and over that wind and solar barely go net positive on the energy balance. That is to say that wind farms and solar arrays produce little more energy than what was used to fabricate/construct them.
Add in the energy costs associated with batteries, along with charge/discharge inefficiencies, and you are firmly in energy net negative territory.
Note to Griff:
That is energy net negative on an industrial grid scale.
Have a nice day powering an industrial society with an electric grid which consumes more energy resources than it produces.
That is not the case: both wind and solar rapidly produce more electricity than used through their whole lifecycle.
and also save more CO2 than through their life cycle too.
Wind breaks even in the CO2 reduction category. Solar loses big time.
?w=720
What, no references to articles that don’t support your point?
Terminology Griff. Whole life costing includes manufacture, running costs, maintenance, dismantling and destruction.
Germany has been unable to reduce its CO2 emissions these past 10 years despite it going hell for leather on wind and solar.
The German experience is the best evidence that so called renewables do not result in the meaningful reduction of CO2. they fail on their primary objective.
They simply put up energy costs and result in a less stable grid.
+1E16
That’s 10 Peta-plusses. Might be too difficult for Bloomberg.
I may have missed this along the thread but there are additional losses in transmission and transformers (both ways, to and from storage).
When I read the Bloomberg story I checked the prices of lithium ion batteries for my golf cart, and wow the SMARTBATTERY 36V 100AH was $4,499.99 now sells for $3,899.97.
Lord Above.
At first I thought Jim was missing a /sarc tag. So I looked, sure enough ~$4,000 Li+ golf cart batteries. About $600 – $800 for conventional deep draw “specialty” golf cart batteries.
At Wall Mart, 36V 100AH batteries (3 of 12V) will cost you maybe $100 each, or $300 total, tops. Perhaps a bit more for deep draw cycle units.
And this is the technology which is going to take over the world? Frightening!
But think of how much more acceleration you can get out of your golf cart when you replace your current batteries with the lighter Li+ batteries.
Traditional golf cart batteries are lead acid. For a lot of good reasons, that technology has been well established. At least they are sealed lead acid batteries now. The cost of that Golf Cart battery will drop as the demand increase.
Money is how we keep score.
Three 12v 100ah deep cycle lead acid battery designed for golf carts about $500 using amazon prices.
I doubt the LiOH battery has 8 times the life span given equal number of charge/dischage cycles.
lorcanbonda sez: ” The cost of that Golf Cart battery will drop as the demand increase.”
Um, the first time I used a golf cart on a course was in the 1970s.
They are ubiquitous.
When do you think this cost drop will happen?
“forecasts that solar PV power plants entering service in 2022 will be able to generate electricity for 8.5¢/kWh. This would make solar PV competitive with natural gas… Right? Nooooo. Natural gas combined cycle has an average capacity factor of 87%. Solar PV’s average capacity factor is 25%. So, you would have to deploy at least 3 MW of solar PV to offset 1 MW of natural gas.”
Surely if it’s costing 8.5¢/kWh to generate electricity it’s irrelevant what the capacity factor is as far as whether it’s a competitive price? (I know it’d be generated much more intermittently)
I think some of the problem here is a unrealistic assumption of utility factor. I see this all the time with the economics of wind farms; people assume 30-40% of plate rating and the reality is 17%.
In Texas, wind farms routinely average 50%, occasionally exceeding 80%. The high plains of West Texas and the Llano Estacado are in the wind resource “sweet spot.”
Wind farms averaging 50+% capacity. Good to see them working under a good and proper load. Going forward, it well be interesting to see how the equipment holds up long term. We will see if the turbines last anything like their advertised life span.
Whenever I need a pick-me-up, I just Google abandoned wind farms, US, cheers me up every time.
@David Middleton – can you provide a cite? It seems to me ERCOT is only willing to grant around 13% capacity factor to non-coastal wind in Texas during peak demand – which is when it matters most. http://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/houston/ercot-to-have-tighter-power-supply-in-summer-21549417
The annual averages approach 40% in many cases and will routinely approach or exceed 50% during Q1, Q2 & Q4. Summer (Q3) is the only time when the capacity factor falls off.
David Middleton October 19, 2016 at 9:03 am
In Texas, wind farms routinely average 50%, occasionally exceeding 80%.
—-
50-80% of what?
What a completely meaningless statement.
50-80% of their name plate capacity. It’s not unusual for Texas wind farms to operate at >80% of name plate capacity in the September and October. They routinely exceed 50% in fall and spring. During the summer doldrums, output drops off to less than 20%. The annual average is often 35-45%.
LCOE does not include storage or back-up. The capacity factor is what necessitates storage. So, capacity factor is very relevant.
The lampooned article seems to be about car batteries, not about grid storage.
Details, details… The article was about cars, the graph was of Li-ion battery cost per kWh…
http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2015/08/what-is-the-best-type-of-battery-for-solar-storage/
David, Patrick B: I don’t think Texas wind farms have 50% capacity factor (hours of production/hours in the year). According to EIA data, average capacity factor in 2015 for texas wind was 33%. Some of the better locales may average over 40%.
ERCOT may assign a “capacity credit” to wind of 13% or so to wind to set a reasonable estimate of the amount of nameplate wind capacity ERCOT can count on at peak demand (e.g.4:00pm on a July day). Coal and nuclear plants are given 100%.
The transmission (over) build in Texas was to both to socialize the cost of wind and also raise that capacity credit from the previous 8.7%.
One final confounding term is load factor – when the wind blows, the turbine may produce at 90% of its rated output (eg 1.35 MW from a 1.5MW turbine, or 270MW from a 300MW wind farm), and then 12 hours later produce 10% of rated capacity. So both daily and seasonal intermittency is a problem.
Yes, and the reason the capacity factor for natural gas burners is not higher is because they are the sources that are throttled up and down to level out the low capacity factors of wind and solar. Without wind and solar, gas plants would have higher capacity factors.
Re: Mr. O’Connor (not (as far as I can tell) disagreeing with you, just to amplify.)
1. Note also the text following your quote: Then you would have to deploy a storage system …..
“Deploy a storage system” equates to saying, “invent something that doesn’t exist on this scale and for which there is no known, realistic, economical, solution even on the horizon.”
Sure. Someday. For now, funding solar (and wind) pipe dreams is a huge WASTE of the taxpayers’ hard earned money, a parasitical tumor, sucking (via high energy costs due to rate surcharges to create an artificial market for solar energy) the life out of the economy, leaving it anemic, i.e., killing jobs.
I wonder, for the billions spent stuffing cash into the pockets of the enviroprofiteers over the past decade ….. how many veterans could have received adequate, timely, medical/mental health care….. I wonder how many would be able to face the day instead of curling up and staying in bed…… how many ….. would still be alive.
2.
— LOL. “Wildly speculates” would be more accurate.
+10 (particularly about the veterans)
Janice – you are a log time poster, so I probably have nothing novel to tell you.
But if the politicians conjoint with the industrialists can convince us of “better living through science” and make billions while delivering NO social benefit, AND getting us to pledge allegiance to the idea or the party, then they make their money either way.
(from Real Clear (they are against truly cost effective) Energy quote):
Selfish??
That is a religious concept.
Sorry, Cult of AGW, I am NEVER joining your coven; no matter HOW loudly or whiningly you try to proselytize me.
GREAT exposé (once again), Mr. Middleton!
+10!
Considering how flammable lithium batteries can be and how lower cost often means lower quality, batteries may go the way of airbags and most of the other things in society—as in cheap and dangerous.
It all depends on the rate of failure and the size of probable losses. Insurance company actuaries are usually very, very good at figuring these things out, and then recommending appropriate underwriting costs (or recommending against underwriting altogether).
Insurance companies, not Federal regulations, are why elevators became quite safe.
ANSI 17.1, enforced at the state level, is why elevators are safe.
And who wrote ANSI 17.1? Hint, it wasn’t the government.
Hint – It wasn’t the insurance industry either. ANSI was founded as a private organization by five engineering societies in 1916. It’s remit is to foster the development of consensus standards over a broad range of activities. It’s first standard was on pipe threads in 1917.
The insurance companies got into the act via the National Fire Protection Association, looking to minimize fire losses. The parent organization was the result of a series of meetings from 1895 to 1896 involving a number of underwriters.
Membership on standards writing committees is open to anyone with expertise in that area.
@MarkW
That’s not quite true. Until 1904, only insurance underwriters could be members of NFPA. In any event, you have to at least be a member of the organization that has responsible charge of the standard and usually nominated by someone on the appropriate committee to fill a vacancy.
I did some work for a major tool manufacturer based in the US. We were using a pack made with Canadian Li cells. They were awesome. Then we got the couple of batches made with cells from china. I Actually caught my desk on fire. The cells were like little fire bombs. I tossed a burning pack into the back yard of the plant, and it burned the dirt. The company disqualified the China suppliers.
Is there a secret government subsidy to be had in there? If this a true tech advance I would love to have more than a few minutes to close programs before it quits in a power outage.
Makes for a very interesting read thanks for sharing!
The good news is that this article overstates the battery prices : GM several weeks ago revealed that the batteries for its electric will cost $150 per kWhr, and almost at the same time, Tesla claimed $190. The difference was that Tesla’s figures included the cost of the battery pack, which includes a cooling system
( a metal container, coolant, a fan and a radiator and a pump, etc) . GM was just talking cell cost.
The major impact of these falling battery prices (Tesla claims its battery gigafactory can reduce costs by a third, or did awhile back. Uncertain if that still holds) is clearly the automotive business. Electric cars are intrinsically simpler, cheaper (except, in the past the battery part) and more reliable, with practically no maintenance for the drivetrain. I would take an electric car over a complicated, gazillion parts vehicle that is gas powered in an instant. Of course, our braindead Federal govt has done nothing to establish charging
standards, etc An 85 kWhr battery pack (which is the norm for the Tesla Model S) would cost $16,000, WAAAAYYYYY down from the original $40,000. A small compact car , under 2700 pounds, would likely have a driving range roughly 400 miles. Recharging such a battery pack to 80% nowadays takes, I believe 20 to 30 minutes. Henry Ford believed in electric cars so much that he pursuaded his friend Thomas Edison to attempt to invent a practical battery. Ford’s wife always drove an electric car.
But batteries won’t have such a major effect on grid power, although homeowners with solar roofs might go for them. The problem is that batteries can’t make power, they can only store power, and where is that power coming from? They are good at shifting power output from solar at day to nighttime, but
a weeks of cloudy weather would leave the solar system and its batteries high and dry. And when the sun comes back, how are all those batteries going to get recharged, while at the same time the solar produced power is needed on the grid? As you can see, these considerations mean that batteries cannot prevent
renewables from the need to be backed up by reliable power generators, which means a duplication of capacity – those back up plants cost a lot to keep up and ready to go – about the only thing that is saved
by not asking them for power is fuel, and fuel is often only a small percentage of the operational cost of running a backup power plant. . And with Moltex (along with other molten salt nuclear plant developers) promising power at a levelized cost of less than 2 cents per kWhr, simple economics will doom all other power generation technoliges. And molten salt reactors can operate as peak power producers as well as baseload producers.
Why do you believe that it is the responsibility of your neighbors to “establish charging”?
Molten salt nuclear power is an old technology. Way back in 1952 I had an opportunity to work as an engineer on just such a project.
Electric cars were deemed suitable for ladies because they didn’t require crank-starting. Ladies of a certain station could afford to hire drivers who would take care of this chore and also maintain their cars. Crank-starting one of these old cars was both strenuous and dangerous, and with the move to larger and higher compression engines was becoming increasingly difficult even for healthy young men.
The electric starter which came along around 1912 and became common by 1920 changed all that and removed any compelling reason to accept the limitations of pure electric cars.
BUT WHERE IS THE JOY???
I drove my 2016 GT350 down to Aiken today to have lunch with relatives and shop some in Columbia. Had a little range anxiety, so I popped into a Shell station and got 7 gallons. Took maybe 3 minutes.
According to the greens we should put Lithium Ion batteries in our utilities, homes and cars.
http://blog.ethernetzer0.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/1405-thumb.jpg
I have designed these batteries into several products. There is nothing that beats them on energy density and quick-charge ability, but I put temperature sensors, battery monitoring chips and smart chargers in them to keep them as safe as possible.
However it is still possible for a lithium ion cell that is not even connected to anything to self-destruct. The main danger is when they go below a certain temperature and then you try to charge them. Another danger is contamination in manufacture or damage by bending the cell after manufacture. These cells are not ready to used for utility scale backup by a long way.
I would bet (with little effort) you could find a picture of a gasoline powered car which looks like that. Gasoline is not exactly the safest material around.
Lorc: Many years ago when I worked in Bellevue, WA a colleague and I used to take a several-blocks walk at noon. As we were passing a music store, we saw a VW bus leaking gasoline on the pavement, and IT WAS AFIRE! We dashed into the store and alerted the owner who quickly moved his car and extinguished the flames. Don’t know how/when he fixed the leak. JB Weld, anyone?
The key re: lithium ion battery storage is not explosions of gas-powered vehicles versus lithium ion
(and remember, the LI battery has a serious disposal issue, too, where the gas in your fuel tank does not):
it is:
Energy Density — Electricity (here, talking Solar, only a tiny % of THAT production (and that goes for Wind, too), then you add on the density factor and — wo! Re: EROI, VERY STUPID INVESTMENT of tax/rate payers’ money)
http://www.exxonmobilperspectives.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Energy-Density-Comparison.png
(Source: http://www.science20.com/science_20/energy_density_why_gasoline_here_stay-91403 )
Gasoline is supposed to be combustible. It wouldn’t work very well as a fuel otherwise.
Janice, this entire question has arisen because people don’t care for the disposal of fossil fuel waste (carbon dioxide.)
JimB — there was a rash of videos a few years ago from people who set fires to their cars while pumping fuel (especially in the summer desert). Basically, the static electricity between the car and the pump is enough to ignite the fuel.
[url]http://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-fires-sparked-at-gas-pump/[/url] Gas station fire, static electricity
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyfROSM7h90[/url] Gas Station Fire Compilation
More than you ever wanted to know about utility scale energy storage … with numbers.
http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/energy/assets/pdfs/SUFG/publications/SUFG%20Energy%20Storage%20Report.pdf
Wow. Excellent report on the different kinds of energy storage. I notice that lead-acid batteries are a factor of 3 lower cost than lithium-ion, and pumped hydroelectric or compressed air storage are a factor of 10 lower. It makes one wonder why those are not in the headlines. Thanks for sharing.
Cool!
“At $200/kWh, solar PV with storage would run about $58/kWh to fully offset natural gas at $0.06/kWh…”
No.
The $58/kWh figure requires each battery to be fully charged once, then discharged, and tossed in a landfill. You acknowledge at the end of your post that this would not be the case, so I’m not sure why you even presented it as a potential outcome.
Because it was funny and the number of useful discharge cycles is not a well-defined quantity.
I was hoping to find a post that explained how you got the $58 figure. Apparently I wasn’t missing the math, but the joke. The sarcasm is really not obvious in the article and makes you look like kind of an idiot.
Your 13 cents number, even if a little uncertain, is the real important figure here. It shows that that with battery storage figured in, solar is roughly 3-4 times the cost of gas:
($200 / 1500recharges + 8.5cents) / 5.8cents = 3.76 times
Of course, some of the power is used directly and doesn’t get temporarily stored. But the storage isn’t 100% efficient either. So 3.5 is a good back of the napkin.
Unfortunately, all that was obscured by a lame attempt at humor.
In this discussion of the cost of using these batteries for the grid, the cost of the inverters has been left out. This would raise the cost per KW to $500 – $1200 for just the AC inverter. Being very optimistic the cost for 1 hour of backup on the grid would be $700/KWH.
Generally, grid storage is only needed for PV Solar and Wind power. They need inverters anyway, so I would assume that the battery stacks would reuse these inverters when feeding back to the grid. So other than some switching equipment, there would be no additional cost.
1) That would only be true if the battery stacks are co-located with the solar panels.
2) Solar panels have voltage levels in the 4K to 5K volt range. This has to be stepped down and current limited before you can use it to charge batteries.
3) Unless you step up the voltage coming out of the batteries back to that 4K to 5K range, you can’t use the same inverter.
For anyone thinking that improvements in battery technology will renewable energy consider another energy storage system. This system like batteries contains both a oxidizer and fuel in close proximity. Both have high energy density. And the higher the density the more effective.
This other technology is called explosives.
I studied battery technology in engineering school in the 70s. One of the batteries we looked at was the molten sodium/sulfur battery for electric cars. Plenty of energy, but the system was extremely dangerous in an accident. Any power storage source that contains the energy density of 10 gallons of gasoline and includes an intermingled oxidizer will be too dangerous to use.
Battery technology has come a long way since the 1970s. There is a reason why nobody is discussing molten sodium/sulfur outside of the defense department.
That being said — for lithium ion batteries, the flammability comes from the electrolytes, not the electrodes.
The point is as the energy density increases so does the danger. At some point if the battery shorts out it will explode instead of catching fire. There is no way around the limits, and we are very close to them with the lithium ion batteries.
I don’t disagree, but .. In 2010, Presidio, Texas built the world’s largest sodium–sulfur battery, which can provide 4 MW of power for up to eight hours when the city’s lone line to the Texas power grid goes down. Apparently, at a high cost . I could not find any data from its 6 years of operation.
Robert Westfall, that is incorrect. The danger does not increase proportionately with the energy density. Silicon anodes could replace graphite anodes in the near future with up to ten times the energy density and no additional danger.
The danger in lithium ion batteries is from the electrolyte. You can reduce the capacity of a lithium ion battery by a small amount while eliminating the highly flammable electrolytes.
Again — compare this to gasoline which is also a very dangerous material. There are ways to design an engine and gas tank to reduce that danger considerably. That doesn’t change the fact that gasoline is incredibly flammable.
lorcanbonda: … There are ways to design an engine and gas tank to reduce that danger considerably.
Robert Westfall here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/10/19/battery-pack-prices-plunge-down-to-200kwh/comment-page-1/#comment-2322411
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Also, re: a myth out there, only in the movies do gas powered vehicles nearly always explode on impact. In real life, they rarely do.
Janice Moore writes: “Also, re: a myth out there, only in the movies do gas powered vehicles nearly always explode on impact. In real life, they rarely do.” — in the movies, and in Ford Pintos.
But, I think you are agreeing with me. Gasoline is a very dangerous substance, but there are ways to design cars to minimize this danger — for instance, a rubber coated gas tank was a big help.
Curious George — yes, there are all sorts of government projects out there. There is no shortage of people with novel ideas to sell to government employees. IIRC, the solar plant in the west uses molten sodium sulfur to store the energy through the night. Government funding makes a lot of things possible that would otherwise not be practical.
Solar plants in the West that I know of use molten salt thermal storage for overnight operation – bird frying plants (“concentrated solar”) that use molten salts even for their daily operation – and they have to heat molten salts with natural gas when demand exceeds their storage capacity. Please link to a solar plant using batteries.
Curious George — I was referring to the same plant. I did not claim it was a battery (but you’re right — my fingers inadvertently typed “sodium sulfur” instead of “sodium”.)
“lorcanbonda October 19, 2016 at 1:43 pm”
Petrol isn’t that dangerous until air/petrol ratio is right, too much of either not much happens. Petrol tanks in cars are designed and placed very well and have to pass rigorous testing. It’s why we have millions of cars on the road in daily use carrying anything upwards of 45 litres of fuel. Rubber coatings won’t do much and really only work on the inside of the tank. Now, foam membranes inside the tank, like a sponge, are a better way of keeping the petrol in the tank under severe damage circumstances.