And how much would you have to pay people to take those thousands of Home Depot systems, string them all together, build a facility to hold all this, then hook it to the grid?
it’s a flow battery, so it keeps charge basically indefinitely (when not in use energy-bearing parts are separated). you can run it as hard as you need and it will not degrade in use-dependent way, at least not as hard as lead or lithium batteries
to elaborate on durability, there’s no capacity loss with these batteries. so if design intention is to run these batteries from full to empty and back every day, and maybe a bit more* they can handle it no problem, because everything that happens, happens in liquid phase that can’t degrade. lithium battery will degrade fast with such usage, but this one won’t. on balance, there’s need for pump and electrolyser maintenance, but at least you won’t need to rip apart everything and replace all batteries every 3 years. per kwh per year of use it might be cheaper this way
* they might want this battery to provide energy in the morning, before solar panels kick in, soak up excess energy from noon peak, then discharge it in the evening. that might be 500ish cycles per year, and they can run it at full tilt
$1 per WH or almost that is pretty terrible. You can get battery systems for 1/4 of that $/WH at Home Depot.
Grid connected storage in the US goes for some 220 USD/kWh at scale. It’s some 100 USD/kWh in China.
And how much would you have to pay people to take those thousands of Home Depot systems, string them all together, build a facility to hold all this, then hook it to the grid?
And how long are those systems expected to last compared to those in the article?
When you build bigger stuff, costs per KWH are lower than you pay at Home Depot, higher.
https://vipenergyservice.com/energy-storage/cost-of-battery-storage-per-kwh/
People girls just use them in their homes and businesses.
it’s a flow battery, so it keeps charge basically indefinitely (when not in use energy-bearing parts are separated). you can run it as hard as you need and it will not degrade in use-dependent way, at least not as hard as lead or lithium batteries
to elaborate on durability, there’s no capacity loss with these batteries. so if design intention is to run these batteries from full to empty and back every day, and maybe a bit more* they can handle it no problem, because everything that happens, happens in liquid phase that can’t degrade. lithium battery will degrade fast with such usage, but this one won’t. on balance, there’s need for pump and electrolyser maintenance, but at least you won’t need to rip apart everything and replace all batteries every 3 years. per kwh per year of use it might be cheaper this way
* they might want this battery to provide energy in the morning, before solar panels kick in, soak up excess energy from noon peak, then discharge it in the evening. that might be 500ish cycles per year, and they can run it at full tilt
Yeah, I agree that decentralization of the grid and self-consumption is better than these mass baseload solutions…but they will only get cheaper.