Lithium iron phosphate batteries : energy problems over?

Factual Questions
1

At this point, solar cell prices have gotten to the point where they are now cheaper than grid power from the utility company. All the major components for a solar system are now down to about $1.12 a watt in bulk (excludes only the attachment hardware to screw it to a roof or somewhere, and of course labor for installation). (sunelec.com is where I looked). I ran the numbers, and at $0.10/watt for grid power in Texas, you’d make the money back without subsidies in 7 years.

The problem, is storage. Right now, you can pump the extra solar power back into “the grid”, but this isn’t a sustainable solution. These low solar prices are probably here to stay, given that refined silicon boils down to sand + capital equipment + energy input.

Once everyone starts doing it, either by covering all their roofs or if the utilities companies start covering tracts of cheap desert with cheap photovoltaics, there won’t be anywhere for the energy to go. We need storage.

Also, grid power is cheap as it is, compared to paying for the equivalent usable energy in the form of gasoline or diesel.

Lead acid batteries are junk. They “work”, but they have pathetic service lives, and end up costing a fortune over time. Also, their energy/weight ratio is so poor that you cannot get reasonable electric vehicle range out of them.

So you need a chemistry based on lithium. It turns out, lithium is cheap. A little over $28/lb. However, I read that the problem is the cost of the standard 18650 cell for a standard Lithium-cobalt battery is about $2.50 from a reputable manufacturer in China, and about $1.80 of that is the cost of the cobalt.

Well, Lithium-iron phosphate batteries, as near as I can tell, don’t use any cobalt. It’s just lithium, iron, phosphate, some oxygen and plastic, and copper for the electrodes. There’s nanoscale detail to make it work, but that’s just a matter of inputing energy and capital equipment.

Supposedly, they are ideal in almost every other way. The longest lived ones can go 7000 cycles - that would be 20 years at one cycle per day. That’s what you need to store power in your house to use solar energy all of the time, and to keep things running even if the grid goes down. They don’t catch on fire/explode like the cobalt ones, they can handle fast charging (apparently 6 minutes to full charge is available now, and there’s experimental ones that can do it in 1 minute), they are the bees knees.

Right now, the batteries cost a fortune. I checked on ebay, and a battery storing 60 Amp hours & 12 Volts is about 662 bucks. (compared to a fraction of that for lead acid) You’d need $78,152 worth of those batteries to match the pack that’s in a Tesla, and I don’t know how you would cram 118 of these things into a car at all.

But is this a temporary thing? Photovoltaic cells cost a relative fortune just a few years ago, now, suddenly, they are dirt cheap. I can remember when they were $4/watt, now they are $0.50. Is it just a matter of time before someone manages to build a large scale automated plant to spew out these incredible batteries by the trainload?

If the raw materials into that factory are cheap, and the factory has competition and can split the cost of the capital between a world-wide market starving for better batteries, our problems are over, right?

We’ll just sit cozy in our homes bedecked with solar roofs, ignoring power outages and paying a paltry access fee instead of a power bill. Our electric SUVs will trundle everywhere, powered by a big bulky pack using this battery chemistry - a pack that will easily last the 200k mile life of the vehicle. (an SUV like vehicle would handle the space/weight requirements for a large battery better than a sedan)

The factory that makes the batteries and solar panels would consume a lot of energy, but it’s a virtuous cycle, since it could power itself…

What am I missing here. What is the actual materials cost for an 18650 cell using Li/Fe/PO4 battery chemistry? Is this number low enough that if you assumed market price was 3 the raw material cost, could we use these things everywhere economically?*

2

I would like to think you are right. Bu I suspect that there is much more at play here than you have suggested.

I am not qualified to comment on the economics of it all. Suffice to say that we are dealing with a realm where there are non trivial supply/demand and regulation complexities that greatly affect the price of grid electricity, raw materials and manufacturing infrastructure. It would be a brave or foolish investor who embarks on such a mission without a really comprehensive cost analysis.

I can’t comment too much on battery design. My experience however is that lithium is not really all that cheap. And I believe there is a risk of supply running low if battery demand takes off. Sorry, no cite. Just a doco I saw concerning an as-yet untapped salt lake in Bolivia that was high in lithium salts. The comment made was that the lake represented half of the easily accessible world supply of lithium and that extraction required huge capital and energy expenditure. The documentary forecasted that the day would soon come when it was economic to exploit this resource but that if large scale electric car manufacture was the driving force then the supply would be insufficient. Again, no cite. I would be interested if someone could verify these details.

3

I should elaborate. Where I live the situation is such that if there was a cheap way to store grid electricity it would just about be an investment opportunity by itself. Prices have risen 93% in five years and 23% in the last 12 months.

The major force propelling this price rise is the need to fund government subsidies on solar cells. The government introduced generous subsidies to encourage solar cell installation and excess input back into the grid. Although they have been largely discontinued, it still costs a lot to pay those households who entered these schemes. The result now is that all those who didn’t buy solar panels are now subsidising those who did.

It’s too late to jump on the gravy train now. But there is considerable incentive for individuals to inflation-proof their electricity supply by forking out the capital for solar cells approximately double their actual need. This way they benefit from the meagre payout for feeding into the grid during the day so that they can cover their night-time electricity costs. This of course adds to the problems of cyclic supply, intensifies the need for storage and pushes up spot prices even further.

Another major contribution to the price rise is prior overcapitilisation in electrical infrastructure (lines and transmission) leading to significant debt servicing. With fewer people paying, the costs per individual have gone up. Add to this a carbon tax and there is good reason for electricity users to be crying foul.

In other words, the government has not done its maths properly in the past and we are paying for it now.

Cheap storage would be welcomed by consumers. Really welcomed! But I am sure that it would change the playing field yet again and past experience suggests that it is consumers who will pay for the upset to the equilibrium.
[end of rant]

To answer the OP, it is not just a cheap lithium batter technology that is required. (If it is possible.) Going completely off-grid, while desirable, is probably beyond the reach of most. What you refer to as a paltry access fee won’t remain that. There are bound to be levies or government controls imposed on lithium battery producers.
That doesn’t mean that it is not worth it, but an investor would want to have a proven technology, guaranteed supply and some good economic forecasting to embark on large-scale production that would significantly impact users.

4

I once read somewhere that isn’t enough copper in the world to build all the electric motors that would have to be built if all cars were electric. I don’t know if that is actually so, but even if not quite, it does give you pause when you think of how the price of copper might rise. And of any other material that suddenly becomes crucial (buy phosphorus futures). We need something based on silicon. We will not run out of sand.

5

Don’t sell short grid storage, or Li-ion technology. While Solar used to mean storage in battery banks, that is becoming rare, and most excess power is (as you state) pumped back into the grid.

There is a issue with storage, but home based batteries may not be the best solution. Advanced batteries certainly can help, and there may be situations that it may be economical to store power to sell back later. One source of possible grid battery storage that has been looked at is electric vehicles, where the owner can decide to sell back the stored power to the grid, and buy it back later at a cheaper rate.

At one time there were plans around NYC to use power to pump water uphill during low power demand times, and then release that water through turbines to generate power when demand was high, that particular project (Storm King Mountain), was never implemented, but perhaps others were.

The short of this is it appears better, at least for now, to work together as a community in terms of sharing generation and storage, as opposed to go individual which introduces extra inefficiencies.

6

This sentence doesn’t give me any confidence in the accuracy of the numbers you ran. First of all, the power company mostly doesn’t charge for watts, which are a unit of power. They charge for units of energy, which means you need to multiply your unit of power by a unit of time, such as an hour. Second, the price for power in Texas certainly isn’t ten cents per watt-hour; you probably meant ten cents per kilowatt-hour.

7

Run the numbers yourself instead of criticizing my post for minor typos. Maybe I screwed up the math, but that would be a much more valid criticism than dunning me for typing “watt” instead of “kWh”.

Similarly, if you make the calculations yourself and discover that my 7 year estimate is about right (for DIY installation), then just maybe I do understand the difference between units of measurement for energy…

8

This is a fascinating example of unintended consequences. Finally solar becomes affordable, and it messes things up. I assume you live in Germany?

I see the problem : if the batteries ever drop in price enough, it could exacerbate the problem. People would start unplugging their homes from the grid completely, which would in turn raise rates for everyone else, making it even more economical to unplug.

Then again, big storage arrays might have the opposite effect, smoothing out prices again.

9

Well, you have this in China, but 36mwh of storage still isn’t a lot in the scheme of things. At best it can be used to smooth short term fluctuations.

10

Using “watt” in place of “kilowatt hour” isn’t a minor typo-- It’s huge, and the sort of thing that usually indicates deep errors in understanding.

11

They sure were. Wikipedia has a list of a few dozen of the largest of these pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations. It notes that people started building them in the 1890s, and the first in the US was in New Milford CT in 1930.

They say the “reported energy efficiency varies in practice between 70% and 80%, with some claiming up to 87%”, and it’s “currently the most cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy on an operating basis” once you’ve built the infrastructure required.

12

If that’s the case then store the energy in concrete. Lift it with an electric winch powered by solar cells.

13

The US government decided that China was flooding the market with finished solar panels and put anti-dumping duties over 100-123 percent on imported panels. I beleive the EU had already done that before as they had a larger manufacturing base so it was not able to keep up. So both Europe and the US took a few jobs (not sure EU, but US it is a few hundred at most) and put the A.D. duties on them way over what it should have been. Working the system like that is wrong, really wrong, sure they have limited access to records and the econics are hard with it being falsified by the Chinese government but still…it is increasing the cost of solar panels when they should be going rock bottom dirt cheap. That is not bad…cheap enough for everyone to afford yet still make a profit, but still an investment that would be slow and not stop the big power companies.

Lithium batteries…I am going to look it up but major problems. You have to have a lot. There is not enough right now to do much to replace and where are you going to get more? It is a battery, sure it lasts but you mention it still needs to be charged (actually that makes it kinda viable, power companies are happy) so you are still paying for something, get an alternator on it and it can get back some for basically free but not enough. Even with electronics using less power there is more and more of them.

Any power source we have with current tech is not really a long term solution. You have to mine lithium, or mine areas that will get you lithium. Even if you take out the rest of the parts of the battery you have to weigh that enviromental impact on the benefits. Windmills are not getting approved in areas because they kill birds and are big and scary so they are short term but may for the long term push migratory birds out of their path.

14

An advantage of water is you can build a dam and just wait for it to rain. With concrete, instead of needing some concrete for a dam, you’d have to supply concrete whose mass equals that of all the water behind the dam. The specific gravity of concrete is around 2.3, so instead of filling a valley with water, you’d be filling about 40% of it with concrete blocks to the same depth. That’s a lot of concrete. And I’m guessing you’d need many, many winches to lift it. One winch isn’t going to lift a single block of concrete that weighs as much as a lake.

In short, water seems much better than big blocks of concrete for this purpose. I guess that’s why they use it.

15

Oh absolutely, I was referring to home use of a solar cell and a weighted lift.