
Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake - okket
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2017/08/03/falling-lithium-ion-battery-prices-to-drive-rapid-storage-uptake/
======
ChuckMcM
I wonder how much of this is simply the Gigafactory coming online at full
production + others trying to keep their factories running.

If you look at Tesla's plan to be making 10,000 model 3's a week, with a
nominal 90 kWh battery in each that is 900 MWh a week of capacity or 46 GWh
capacity a year. But it is all tied up in cars of course[1].

The power companies have been screwing around with rate plans to keep grid-
tied solar from being as economic as it could be and so I do see a lot of
people such as myself moving to a whole house storage system at some point.

[1] I fully expect a TV show to have a scene where they need more power and
the 'genius' hero looks out the window and sees a row of electric cars
charging and "hacks the system to feed the car's energy into the power grid
for the extra energy needed to save the day" along with the gratuitous cars
exploding as they are being drained too quickly but reaching the minimum level
of power at just the right time to save the world.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
Utilities are actually planning on using parked electric cars for storage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-
grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid)

~~~
gwbas1c
Hell no!

As soon as someone departs for a long trip and the battery isn't charged,
there will be a huge class action lawsuit.

The lemon law attorneys will also have a field day!

This is a really dumb idea.

~~~
ldp01
I'm ignorant as to existing implementations but the system I heard of to solve
this is:

Your car or charger module has electricity spot prices available to it and you
can select a strategy for it to automatically follow.

E.g.

* Rapid charge (charge battery, ignore price)

* Economise (charge battery at low price)

* Make money (charge/discharge according to price to profit from the difference)

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comicjk
Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because
their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest
metal element).

Now, it seems the development effort devoted to lithium-ion has paid off so
well that they are the best OVERALL battery solution. The single-minded effort
we put into cell phones and cars is so strong that it now reaches all the way
to homes and the grid.

To me, this suggests that all sorts of cool technologies might be possible if
we as a society could concentrate on making them work.

~~~
wongarsu
In the last three decades battery technology was mostly about powering small,
lightweight gadgets. Now that there's massive amounts of money to be made with
car batteries and grid-level storage, I certainly expect some great battery
technologies that focus on that in the next decade or two.

That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough
lithium: nobody is going to power the world on lithium, it's just the cheapest
method _right now_ because of the massive amounts of research money already
dumped into it, and great economies of scale. Other technologies will catch up
as their use-cases become more valuable.

~~~
keenerd
> That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having
> enough lithium

Who is afraid of that? Take a look at this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust)

Lithium is #33, estimated at 20 ppm of the crust. We presently mine 64000 tons
per year. It is more common than lead, which is #37 and only 14 ppm. Yet we
mine 4.8 million tons of lead per year. Now examine boron. #41, 10 ppm and 9.4
million tons per year. Are these unsustainable? Are we on the verge of peak
boron and peak lead? Probably not. We have twice as much lithium so we
probably aren't going to run out of lithium even if demand increases by a
hundred-fold.

I am not a geologist, so maybe much of this lithium is more inaccessible than
I'm assuming. But everyone who says we are going to run out of lithium have
been only looking at the known deposits and are ignoring the possibility that
more mines will open to meet demand.

~~~
wavegeek
Lithium has gone up in price about six fold in the last 15 years and is
currently about 4 times as expensive as lead per metric tonne.

I suggest that something is wrong with your assessment.

~~~
jhall1468
Why is there anything wrong with his assessment. Availability affects price,
sure, but demand does equally so. Pretty sure lithium has higher demand than
lead.

~~~
neltnerb
Lithium is a lot harder to produce than lead. That's certainly most of the
price difference, regardless of abundance in the crust.

But statements like this should really be talking about the "economically
extractable ore", and it needs to include economic thresholds. There's a price
curve there, and I suspect that for lithium it is a steep one because of how
complicated its manufacturing is relative to lead.

I don't know if we're near the limit though. I don't really buy it personally,
I'm much more worried about rare earths.

~~~
hwillis
Production of lithium from hard rock isn't very different from lead, and
lithium production from brine is far easier.

Hard rock lithium is most commonly extracted in the form of spodumene which is
about 6-7%[1] (8% when totally pure) lithium oxide. Rich lead ore may have
3-8% lead content. Obviously comparing the two is difficult since lead is
about 20x denser, but they're on the same order of magnitude. As a ratio of
rock in to metal out by volume there is probably a bit more lithium, but by
mass lead ore is probably 2-3x more concentrated.

For both lead and spodumene, the ore is crushed, separated by density, ground,
counditioned (treated with acid to remove organics/slime), froth float
separated, cleaned, filtered and dried[2]. That gives you metal that is ready
to be reduced in a furnace (or electrolytically or chemically, for lithium).
Both processes use the exact same machinery and chemicals (sulfuric and
hydroflouric acid, and NaOH). Both processes are almost identical except that
the lithium is collected at the low-density end and lead is collected at the
high-density end.

Brine production is much easier and involves a well, a pump, a bulldozer and a
bunch of sodium carbonate (water softener)[3]. It is _significantly_ cheaper
than any other metal production method, as well as low-energy, low-waste and
low-impact. The only downside is there is a lot of water loss to evaporation.
It's a relatively small amount of water, especially compared to a farm of the
same size, but brine mines exist exclusively in places without much water to
start with (otherwise the brine would have washed into the ocean already).
It's a tradeoff.

Regardless, the difficulty in producing lithium is most certainly _not_ most
of the price difference. First, annual global lithium production is ~36,000
tonnes vs 5 million tonnes for lead, a 140x difference. Lithium's lower
density could account for a 2-3x price per tonne difference, but it is vastly
more likely that economies of scale are the culprit.

Not only that, but the current lithium price surge is entirely due to market
contraction. It takes 2-3 years to build a mine, and longer to decide to build
one. Tesla _wrecked_ the battery market in less than two years, becoming the
largest battery consumer. There simply hasn't been time to open new mines yet.
The prices will drop as soon as they catch up.

Finally, the majority of lead is produced by recycling. That 5 million tonnes
mined each year is less than 50% of all lead. The recycling industry obviously
drops the price of lead immensely, and lithium will take advantage of
recycling too, when and if it ever needs to.

>But statements like this should really be talking about the "economically
extractable ore"

There is no such thing, really. Not even for oil. The content of the ground is
not mapped that well. As soon as people go looking for lithium, the reserves
will skyrocket just like they did with oil. Trust the crustal content more
than the global reserves. Lithium is so cheap and ubiquitous that nobody has
gone looking for it since the 50s- Seriously, that's the last time the USGS
did a survey of US lithium supplies.

>I'm much more worried about rare earths.

Don't be. They're only used in hybrid cars (neodymium) and even then they
aren't needed. You don't need magnets to make a motor, just steel and copper.
The other green use for rare earths (tellurium) is in thin-film solar panels,
which make up 5% of all solar panel production. Rare earth elements aren't
even the first choice for these technologies, and a contraction in supply will
push them out of favor entirely. Seriously, the only reason we use thin-film
solar is because it's _cheap_ , even though it's less efficient. If it's not
cheap, then we won't use it at all. Good riddance.

[1]:
[http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Lithium+Ores](http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Lithium+Ores)

[2]: [https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/froth-flotation-
spodume...](https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/froth-flotation-spodumene-
processing-lithium-extraction#roughing_and_cleaning) [3]:
[https://www.thebalance.com/lithium-
production-2340123](https://www.thebalance.com/lithium-production-2340123)

~~~
neltnerb
Thanks for the fantastic post!

My rare earth worries are based on this DOE report:

[https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/news/documents/criti...](https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/news/documents/criticalmaterialsstrategy.pdf)

It actually calls out dysprosium as the biggest problem, with neodymium,
terbium, europium, yttrium, and indium as the next biggest worries.

This is fairly old though, I read it back in 2010. I've read about a number of
breakthroughs on higher strength-to-weight magnetic materials and I'm sure
solar has responded to this report accordingly as well. It's comforting to
know that things seem to have worked out seven years later!

I think a lot of the stress in 2010 was because China was limiting exports and
it became clear that the USA was at a strategic disadvantage because of
vulnerability to Chinese actions. Glad that Obama took it so seriously by
supporting funding to develop those new technologies.

------
nabla9
$200/kWh by 2019.

Assuming that households consume between 30 kWh and 15 kWh electricity daily
on average and you want to have storage capacity for 1/3 of daily electricity
consumption to get wind or solar energy work, you need 10-5 kWh per household.
That's $2000 - $1000 per household. If that battery lasts 10 years, its $200 -
$100 per year.

It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that
happen? (recycling is not reuse)

~~~
merpnderp
That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can
easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day
usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want
massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce
their useful lifespan.

~~~
EngineerBetter
Wow - that's a crazy amount of energy. As a Brit who's never been the south of
the US, is that figure really true? 100kWh is about 300 miles in a Tesla, or
boiling a kettle constantly for about 30 hours.

If that's really accurate, then I'm staggered at how much energy folks must be
using to keep cool, and makes my efforts at saving energy seem paltry in
comparison.

~~~
OtterCoder
Remember, the south of the US is in the subtropics, roughly level with the
north of Africa. Imagine living in Egypt and not running the AC constantly.

~~~
curun1r
I spent much of last year in Southeast Asia within ten degrees of the equator
and rarely had A/C. It wasn't a problem for me, though my computer was often
unhappy.

I went to Egypt as a teenager and remember the temperature in Sharm el Sheikh
cracking 50C. We would literally sprint from the A/C in the hotel across the
beach to the water because the sand was too hot to walk.

Equivalent latitude doesn't mean equivalent climate. As an example, which of
these cities is further north, Buffalo, NY, USA or Cannes, France? Hint: it's
the one known for topless sunbathing, not the one known for sub-zero outdoor
football games.

~~~
OtterCoder
According to WolframAlpha, the hottest temp on record in Cairo is 118°F, while
Phoenix, AZ has hit 123°F. Even the average high is 5°F higher in Phoenix.

------
fenwick67
> By 2025, the world’s base of cumulative installed storage capacity will
> reach 52 GW, IHS Markit says, up from around 4 GW today. Last year, 1.3 GW
> of grid-connected storage was deployed globally, and this rate is poised to
> accelerate to 4.7 GW a year by 2020, and 8.8 GW annually by 2025.

GW is not a unity of energy storage capacity. It's a unit of power.

~~~
epistasis
GW is, however, a characteristic of an energy storage system, and just a valid
and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _GW is, however, a characteristic of an energy storage system, and just a
> valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores._

Wrong.

The watt is a measure of power, not of stored energy. These are different
physical notions. So, yes, you could say that some storage facility can output
up to so many GW, but that's actually a measure of how much energy _per
second_ can exit the system when it's being used.

The proper unit for measuring an amount of energy that's stored in the system
is the Wh (or its multiple the GWh), which has the same dimension as the
joule, which is the standard unit of energy.

GW is like how many liters of water per second can exit the storage tank when
it's being emptied. GWh is like how many liters of water total are stored in
the full tank. And yes, both are important when designing a battery system.
But saying _" GW is [...] a valid and important measurement as the amount of
energy it stores"_ would fail you high school physics.

GWh is static energy (or simply - energy). GW is energy moving from point A to
point B, which is power.

Here's a brief introduction to the basic meaning of these terms:

[https://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/02/power-vs-energy-
explana...](https://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/02/power-vs-energy-explanation/)

~~~
fiter
GW is a very important characteristic of an energy storage system, especially
as a ratio of GWh. A technology could store 100TWh, but if it can only release
1kW, I'm not interested.

The comment you replied to said "just a valid and important measurement _as_
the amount of energy it stores". The comment didn't say power was the same
thing as energy, it says that the power is as important as the energy. I don't
think this would fail high school physics.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Let me quote that thing for you again. Parse is again, more slowly this time,
and see for yourself:

> _GW is [...] a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it
> stores_

There's no way to sugarcoat it. This is like saying km/h is a measurement of
distance.

~~~
JshWright
Once you fix the obvious typo there, it says "GW is [...] _as_ valid and
important measurement as the amount of energy it stores"

Which is entirely true... Both the overall capacity, and the rate at which it
can deliver power are critical metrics for an energy storage system.

------
mavhc
I paid $354/kWh last month for 24kWh of batteries (inc 20% tax), and I got a
free car that goes around it

~~~
dangoor
What kind of electric car costs $8500? Used Leaf?

~~~
wlesieutre
I heard from a friend that the Leaf's battery pack had a major redesign of the
cooling system in recent models, that might have driven down the value of used
older versions with worse anticipated battery wear.

~~~
mavhc
Yeah, that's why I got the 2014 version. Turns out it also had the 6.6kW
charger, even though it wasn't advertised as such, that was nice. You'd think
the Nissan dealer would know something about the cars they were selling.

------
derefr
Hah, I misinterpreted "storage" here, and thought this was going to be about
Li-ion cells getting cheap enough to replace the capacitors in the Power Loss
Protection circuits in hard drives/SSDs/NVMe boards.

Which doesn't make sense, after giving it a second's thought—batteries wear
out after just a few years, while capacitors (very nearly) don't, so it'd put
a hard lifetime on drives. (Though, for server use-cases with constant
workloads, they have hard lifetimes _anyway_...)

But it's an interesting question! If—rather than UPSes as specialized
enterprise-level hardware—we instead had Li-ion cells on computer motherboards
(picture a big brother to the CR-2032 CMOS battery) that kept the disks alive
for up to, say, 30 minutes after power loss—could we architect our storage
subsystems differently?

(Sorry if that's a complete tangent from the topic at hand, but I'm not sure
where I'd post this otherwise!)

~~~
wongarsu
Keeping the disks alive is certainly doable. At a rough estimate of 10W per
drive, even storage servers would only need very moderate batteries. But what
would you gain by that?

More interesting (in my eyes) would be to power down spinning disks and
processors, but keep caches and ram alive. Then once power is restored, you
could basically supply power and continue where you left off, without any
reboots etc.

Then again, power loss should be fairly infrequent, and you have to architect
against connection cuts or physical disruptions anyway.

~~~
StillBored
Congratulations, you just invented the ACPI S3 power state. Also known as
standby or suspend to ram. I've been pretty happy with it since ~1998 when I
started returning hardware that didn't support it properly. Although these
days even linux on a laptop tends to work properly with S3 and S4 (hibernate,
or suspend to disk). That said the concept was also part of the earlier APM
standard which was a lot more hit/miss.

Anyway, its great, I used it today to ride out a nearly hour long power outage
with a couple of fairly trivial UPSs connected to my NAS, desktop, etc. The
desktop was already in standby because that is its default state after being
idle for 30 mins. But the NAS went into that mode when the UPS indicated 70%
battery life.

The problem of course is that UPSs/etc have miserable power conversion
efficiencies when supplying just a couple watts of power, like 10-30%
efficiency, so they tend to have max run-times less than 2 hours even when
completely unloaded.

More on point, for servers, if your server is lightly loaded, or loaded for
only parts of the day, using WOL to wake it and going into standby after a few
minutes can save a fair amount of power. With SSDs, the resume times are
generally less than a second unless you have bad cards/drivers that take
forever to reinit.

------
baybal2
>IHS Markit expects li-ion battery prices to fall below $200/kWh by 2019

In that article they claim the digit of $200, while you can buy an assembled
1kw/h battery pack in China in retail quantities for around $120 today.

~~~
epistasis
Is that NCA or NMC?

Typically grid storage batteries are rated to 10+ years or ~5000 cycles or
something on that order of magnitude.

One way to get your cells to last that long is to lessen the discharge depth;
that may account for some of the price difference.

~~~
baybal2
Most likely consumer grade LiCo with carbon anode. LiFePo modules are twice as
expensive, demand for them certainly exceeds supply

------
burntrelish1273
Any medium-to-large commercial campus with time-of-use-billing and large
electrical bills may likely benefit from building a 500 kWhr - 3MWhr li-ion
battery bank, 480VAC inverter, transfer and switchgear to buy electricity off-
peak to use at-peak. The costs for lightly-used inverters and LFP module packs
make it compelling to evaluate. For example, Jehu Garcia (@jag35) is involved
in a 1 MWhr bank for a manufacturing customer in SoCal that looks really P&L
sensible.

