Comment on Solar power surpasses coal in EU for first time
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 week agoEV batteries are not ideal for grid energy storage due to:
Unnecessary features: High energy density is essential for vehicles but not for stationary grid storage. That feature doesn’t come for free, so why pay for it if you don’t need it. An industrial scale grid energy facility could be located outside the city where land is cheap. Who cares if the facility takes as much space as a paper mill or a mine site.
Cost efficiency: EV batteries are expensive per unit of capacity. Grid storage requires massive amounts of cheaper alternatives. Various industries need a lot of energy, so the storage demand is also massive. This means that a battery facility of functional size that uses normal NMC batteries is going to cost a fortune. Cheaper alternatives such LFP would make more sense.
Material scarcity: The rare materials used in EV batteries (like lithium) would be challenging to scale up for grid-level storage needs. Households are only a small slice of the pie, while factories and other types of industries take the rest, so we really need to use materials that are dirt cheap and easily available.
Current NMC and NCA batteries used in cars should be good enough for the energy needs of a single house, but the rest of society needs an industrial scale solution. There are several technologies that look promising, but they aren’t quite production ready just yet. I’m really looking forward to seeing how redox flow batteries develop in the future. There are also some interesting battery chemistries such as sodium-ion, oxygen, magnesium-ion, and lithium-sulfur.
Small counterpoint to yours; soon there will be only EVs it seems. So availability / features / suboptimal fit for purpose is all moot when you have the car that can act as a battery…
In Belgium a lot of cars are basically part of compensation from employers ; furthering the use of those for overnight storage would make plenty of sense and be an easy way to kickstart the initiative a low cost for the users and would put a positive twist on those compny cars.
China and Europe are probably going to be fully electric sooner than the rest of the world. Getting there is already quite a task for the entire production chain. Ramping it up will take decades, and I’m still not entirely sure we even have the resources for it.
Yeah it seems to pick up traction and accelerate as of late; more and more new cars are EVs, charging stations are blooming everywhere even in my backward ardennes… so at least for us there seems to be enough resources. Fuck the poors thought because cheap EVs are still not affordable enough but that’s not the point we’re discussing. And the rest of the world we’ll see. But if this is part of the solution it’s happening and it’s nice.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Most EVs this year will use LFP batteries because they are much cheaper. They also provide grid with a free resource, and EU likely has the critical mass to let consumers monetize service to grid. A big advantage of LFP is longer life, and so more consumer profit opportunity, and less investment required by grid.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I’ll take Germany as an example to see if the numbers make sense.
Annual electricity consumption in Germany is about 512 TWh/year, which means they use about 1.4 TWh every day. Let’s assume that all of it is produce by renewable means, and about 50% of the daily energy demand needs to be buffered in grid energy storage to balance the intermitent nature of renewable energy production. This means you would need about 701 GWh of storage capacity in total. If we assume that the each car has about 100 kWh of storage capacity, you would need about 7 million cars like that. The population of Germany is about 83 million, so roungly 1 car per 12 people should do the trick.
It’s nothing crazy like 20 cars per one person. on the contrary, it looks surprisingly doable, given that Germany already has abouto 49 million cars registered. However, producing millions of batteries using NMC or NCA technology is a bottle neck. LFP would be cheaper, but it still requires lithium. Meeting the demands of one country is entirely doable, but the rest of the world uses electricity too. Would there be enough lithium for all the LFP batteries we would need? Estimating that is very tricky due to the way mineral exploration works, but let’s not dive into that rabbit hole today.
Anyway, using the existing battery chemistries to take steps in this direction should be worth it because transportation and electricity production are major sources of CO2 emissions. I still don’t think these technologies are quite enough to meet the demand. We really need to develop some alternate energy storage solutions that don’t depend on relatively rare elements like lithium and cobalt. For example, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, oxygen would be great alternatives if we just figure out how to make viable batteries out of them.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Less because most electricity is consumed in daytime, or can be incentivized to with Summer solar.
US sells 1 car per 20 people every year. Not sure about Germany. But if same, 20% of car sales as EVs is potential to meet that in 3 years.
11m EVs sold in China 2024. Lithium prices not skyrocketing, and so production level could absorb more.
Sodium Ion batteries are in commercial production now. It does mean unlimited battery materials for humanity. Lithium is not particularly rare though. It is Nickel and Cobalt that are rare, and LFP doesn’t use those. Hydrogen is important to just have alternate use of both abundant renewables, and abundant batteries.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Totally forgot about hydrogen. Using that technology in cars has proven to be possible in Norway, so clearly that’s an option too. When energy production exceeds demand, it makes sense to dump that energy into hydrolysis, and later use that hydrogen when the opposite happens. You could use that with industrial scale solutions and cars as well, so that seems like viable strategy.