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Tesla's Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass (bloomberg.com) 201

Tesla is all set to cut the ribbon on a massive battery storage facility in the California desert -- the biggest of its kind on earth. It joins similarly huge facilities built by AES and Altagas, which are both set to launch around the same time. Combined, the plants constitute 15% of the battery storage installed globally last year. From a report: Tesla Motors is making a huge bet that millions of small batteries can be strung together to help kick fossil fuels off the grid. The idea is a powerful one -- one that's been used to help justify the company's $5 billion factory near Reno, Nev. -- but batteries have so far only appeared in a handful of true, grid-scale pilot projects. That changes this week. Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that's just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. "It's sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at," he said. "Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it."
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Tesla's Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass

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  • by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @11:47AM (#53774755) Journal

    This is a stationary setup. Weight and size shouldn't matter. They should use nickel-iron for longer durability, a hundred years or more.

    • Not to mention safety. I'd hate to be the nearest Fire Department to that place...

      • Why? We like to watch earth shattering kabooms.

      • by wbr1 ( 2538558 )

        Not to mention safety. I'd hate to be the nearest Fire Department to that place...

        Have you ever seen video of a refinery going up? Or a propane storage facility?

        You should look sometimes. This is little more dangerous than those. In face with other fuels, things like gas and liquid fuels are transported by pipeline, truck and rail. All have had accidents near populated residential areas.

        Any sufficiently dense energy storage can be dangerous if it somehow releases that energy quickly. I would rather that be at a stationary facility that is isolated and perhaps less manned than tru

        • Batteries can be divided into sections with firewalls in between.
          • by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
            Indeed they can. My post was an argument for battery storage, even without protection mechanisms like firewalls - as opposed to other storage mediums.
            • I wasn't disagreeing, just adding another point. In a lot of cases, it's easier to divide up batteries in safe chunks than something like a refinery, which needs a lot of interconnected structures with plenty of energy flowing in between them.
          • Batteries can be divided into sections with firewalls in between.

            This is what makes a battery a battery. If it's not compartmentalized, it's a cell. A battery of cells is a battery.
            Your average AA/LR6 "battery" is more accurately referred to as a "cell".

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @12:11PM (#53774963)

      Don't forget that lithium ion batteries are about 85% efficient round-trip power where is nickel iron batteries are something more like 70%. That's double the energy loss in addition to requiring nearly 10 times the weight and volume. Nickel-iron batteries also need maintenance, that's cheaper than replacement, but it adds up over time.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Sodium sulphur is used elsewhere. It used to require high temperatures but now runs at more manageable levels. There are some deployed in Hawaii, Japan and Europe.

    • by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @01:59PM (#53775895)
      Durability gets in the way of incremental improvement, though. Given that the technology keeps improving fairly rapidly, it's probably worth the effort to strip the lithium from the batteries in a few years time, and build better ones.
    • This is designed to lower the price of batteries for vehicles. And with current Tesla chem , it is supposed to last many times more than normal.
    • Size and weight do matter. As well as the cost to maintain the batteries, self-discharge rate, charge rate, discharge rate and efficiency.

      There really is a reason Nickel-Iron batteries are niche products and it isn't because smart people in the field don't know about them.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, what really matters is economics, and what happens a century out from now is so thoroughly discounted by the time value of money that no businesses seriously consider it.

      So I expect the biggest thing is the economies of scale of the Li-ion cell manufacture and Teslas expertise and ability to supply the components of the system. If you run the numbers and the net present value works out better for Li-ion then Li-ion it is, even if you have to replace it in ten years -- by which time the batteries will

    • This is a stationary setup. Weight and size shouldn't matter.

      Even in stationary setups size and weight matters - because these directly affect any number of design details of the building.

      • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        It can matter but most of the time it does not matter. For example in the UK most houses have suspended floors at ground level without basements which provides a space for a large amount of batteries without impacting the normal living space. My gut feeling is that even with lead acid batteries I could run my house for a couple of days if I filled that space up. Nickel-Iron would be much more sensible though.

    • The main application for these batteries is in vehicles. They can also be used in a stationary setup - but only after they have been pulled from a vehicle because they only hold 80% of their original charge. In another decade there will be a large number of such batteries being made available. At that point we should see some interesting stationary setups become reality. If the giga-factory can produce more cells then Tesla can use we might see it sooner but, I wouldn't count on it.
  • So, wait... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @11:49AM (#53774773) Journal

    Good article, but...

    "Critical Mass" indicates that there are more facilities coming online, or at least publicly planning to. No indication of that in TFA... in fact, the closest they got is this:

    For now, gas peaker plants still win out on price for projects that aren’t constrained by space, emissions, or urgency, said Ron Nichols, President of SCE, the California utility responsible for most of the biggest battery storage contracts. 3 But that may change in the next five years, he said.

    "...may change in the next five years..." is nowhere near actual activity that would indicate a "critical mass" in industry.

    How about they call us when it actually gets in motion - regionally, if not nationally or globally.

    • Re:So, wait... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by David_Hart ( 1184661 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @12:51PM (#53775317)

      Good article, but...

      "Critical Mass" indicates that there are more facilities coming online, or at least publicly planning to. No indication of that in TFA... in fact, the closest they got is this:

      For now, gas peaker plants still win out on price for projects that aren’t constrained by space, emissions, or urgency, said Ron Nichols, President of SCE, the California utility responsible for most of the biggest battery storage contracts. 3 But that may change in the next five years, he said.

      "...may change in the next five years..." is nowhere near actual activity that would indicate a "critical mass" in industry.

      How about they call us when it actually gets in motion - regionally, if not nationally or globally.

      Well, my definition is that "Critical Mass" means enough market share and sales for a company/product to have consumer acceptance and brand recognition. Plus, there is a component where it has been scaled to the point where manufacturing costs have been optimized. Given that the plants have just gone online and the products have yet to reach the market at any level of market share and that there hasn't been enough time to optimize the manufacturing process, I think that its a bit premature to be talking about "Critical Mass".

      Perhaps a better phrase would be "Critical Capacity". There is finally have enough manufacturing capacity to meet Tesla's needs so that they can start rolling out their home/corporate products and the more affordable versions of their cars.

  • by colin_faber ( 1083673 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @12:01PM (#53774887)
    I can get my hands on non-counterfeit 18650 and A123's!!
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      It would be nice to be able to buy 18650's directly from Tesla so we know for sure they're not fake ones.

  • by Jodka ( 520060 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @01:18PM (#53775539)

    Highly variable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar in combination with energy storage using batteries to balance out variations in both load and supply might well be the wave of the future. However, it seems unlikely that these Tesla battery packs, optimized as they are for use in automobiles and thus designed to meet standards for compactness, weight, and collision safety, are also optimal for grid energy storage, which has different requirements. Assembling grid-scale energy storage from individual cells is probably a technological dead-end and will be supplanted by flow batteries. [wikipedia.org]

     

    • Re:Dead Ends (Score:5, Insightful)

      by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @02:08PM (#53775971)
      You don't need to use the exact same packs for cars and fixed storage. I'm sure that a bunch of smart engineers can come up with a solution that shares a lot of the key technology, especially in the production of individual cells and small packs, but find two different ways of putting the different parts together to get optimized solutions for the two different applications. Also, compactness and weight are still useful properties for a fixed installation.
    • I thought the general idea was to use the technology, not necessarily to use identical specs. There are better overall battery designs out there, but the point here is to use the same basic battery system to gain some economies of scale. In other words, Tesla is looking beyond simple optimization of storage capacity. They want to build enough batteries to bring down overall production costs for both cars and for other storage systems.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I don't think so. Or not entirely. I think there are two kinds of batteries that are economically viable for this. One is, as you said, optimized for this application, and will come later. The other is used car batteries. They are not good enough for a car anymore at 60-70% or so remaining capacity, but can still take a _lot_ of charges before they become non-viable in stationary installations like this one, typically many more then the viable lifetime in a car. True, they may have new batteries in there at

  • Battery storage reaching critical mass? I hope they are not talking about nuclear batteries...

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