alt Hacker NewsThis is indeed nice for a well-to-do home. But there is a tragedy of the commons issue here.
The grid needs to be up 24/7. And while peak usage is just that, the grid capacity still needs to support peak usage.
This can theoretically be done using batteries but not for an extended amount of time. To say we can have batteries for 2 weeks of normal consumption is highly improbable.
The metals do build those batteries do not exist. Or put in a worse way, the mines do not exist.
An off the cuff calculation of costs and the massive amount of batteries required in the context of Sweden can be found (you need to translate) here: https://www.tn.se/naringsliv/40181/utrakning-60-globen-batte...
In other words, 60 full scale Globen arenas of batteries to replace current Swedish nuclear production.
So for small houses these investments can make sense currently. But from a larger perspective it's not that interesting.
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What makes you think I need batteries for 2 weeks of normal consumption?
Residential solar with batteries greatly aids the grid and reduces costs for the entire system.
> The metals do build those batteries do not exist. Or put in a worse way, the mines do not exist.
Lithium and sodium, the two most promising battery metals, are not usually mined, though in Australia I hear there is mining. It's more of a brine process. All across the US, frackers are finding that all that water they are pulling out is a fairly rich lithium brine.
The amount of metal needed for 2 weeks of batteries is pretty trivial compared to the system we've built for extracting fossil fuels, and iron, etc. The bigger demands for electrification are acutally copper! Gotta wire everything....
Grid batteries on the GWh scale make a ton of sense financially and environmentally, and are revolutionizing the grid. Never before has the grid had a way to store electricity on a grand scale, which changes the entire nature of the beast. It's was one of the only massive systems we had where there wasn't buffering!
With storage, we can alleviate congested transmission without super costly transmission upgrades. On exist lines, we can the usage massively, reducing costs, because now we can buffer across time to shave off the peak demand.
Batteries are easy to build, environmentally friendly, and like a swiss army knife in their number of applications. We will be producing TWh of batteries a year in modern economies, and they last ~20 years, meaning that for the foreseeable economic growth in the coming decades, we'll easily have a peta-watthour of battery storage in use at a time.