We tend to use between 3kWh (vacation/idle power consumption) and around 8kWh per day. If we switched to electric stove, water heater, and heat pump, and add a hot tub, that’d increase substantially. But if we added solar (on our long Todo list…), the battery in the article (60kWh) would probably be able to handle all our storage needs, and it’d fit in he garage (bonus of it can be placed outside/under a deck!). I live in a major city, but I would absolutely love to effectively be off grid.
Exciting stuff — it seems these are touted as being extremely robust/safe, which is of course important for me if it’s going to be in/near our house. Storage density not a huge concern, but price is somewhat important — let’s hope this sort of thing ticks all the boxes.
Most off the grid people live in rural areas but wouldnt an in city off-grid house be a pretty nice thing? Just seems like a cool concept.
Off power grid maybe, imagine the nightmare of urban well-digging or apartment septic tanks.
Im dont know that much about off-grid stuff(certified city boy moment) but i guess you can do power and septic town in city, idk about water. Maybe rsin collection? But thats not enough water.
Said, let me guess, Altech.
Indeed awesome. Sadly no words about recycling such a battery, though it sounds like it should be fairly recyclable.
Actually exciting battery tech that isn’t just fluff. They actually built the thing and tested it, rather than it being a theoretical, not-easily-produced thing and it worked.
As others have said, this is for grid-scale and not EVs, but still exceptional progress and very important for energy storage.
I wouldn’t write off EV usage too quickly. The lithium batteries in EVs right now are around 160Wh/kg. The sodium batteries coming out of production lines now are about the same, but are also substantially cheaper, safer, and built out of more abundant materials.
Yes, if you compare them to top of the line lithium batteries coming out of assembly lines now, they don’t look as good, but those batteries aren’t in actual cars yet. It’s very likely that we’ll see cheap EVs running sodium batteries, and they’ll often be good enough. We need more charge stations more than we need better batteries (as far as EVs go).
As others have said, this is for grid-scale and not EVs, but still exceptional progress and very important for energy storage.
I would argue that grid-scale energy storage is even more important than EV needs today.
Grid scale batteries allow for better security by distributing storage across the network and lets us store renewable energy from peak hours.
Cheap grid storage will be a game changer
And it mitigates the current red herring of the anti-solar groups complaining that solar “generates too much electricity during the day, and not enough at night”.
With an effective and balanced grid storage system across the country, we can recharge the batteries during the day and then use the power at night.
