Telsa Energy and Grid Storage

[engine ear]

Elon has said that Tesla Energy will scale to match the size the the auto business.

There has been on and off discussion of this in other threads, but I wanted to have a single thread to focus on this topic. It is a deep topic and many interesting developments are underway.

To get things started:

Tesla has just completed their 182MW/730MWh Moss Landing project in California:

PG&E commissions 182.5MW/730MWh Tesla BESS at Moss Landing

PG&E has commissioned the 182.5MW/730MWh battery energy storage system supplied by Tesla at its Moss Landing substation.

www.energy-storage.news

Including the latest Tesla battery, Califonia now has 2.7GW and expected to reach 4GW in June. These are
mostly 4 hour batteries. Peak load is about 50GW, so storage can cover about 8% of peak load. This is
20x growth in installed capacity about 2 years.

“Re-imagining the grid:” California reaches record 97.6% renewable share

California system operator says new record of 97% renewables gives glimpse of zero carbon grid of the future.

reneweconomy.com.au

 

[engine ear]

I have been thinking about high renewables grid. There are some major challenges on the transmission side. Grid storage can help optimize utilization of existing transmission resources, but that won't be enough to solve the issue.

The current grid in most places uses natural gas pipelines to transmit energy to a power plant close to the load centers. If you turn off the natural gas plants you need another way to transmit energy into the load centers. Building more power lines is possible but has challenges, including costs and difficulty in getting a new right-of-way approved. Getting approval for an underground pipeline seems less problematic than overhead powerlines and generally a pipeline has much greater power capacity than a power line which further reduces impact.

This paper says transmitting energy long distances over power lines is about 8x more expensive than using a hydrogen pipeline:
"Cost of long-distance energy transmission by different carriers"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221014668

Hydrogen can also be used for both transmission and storage. Geologic hydrogen storage in particular is about 1000x cheaper than li ion storage for the energy component. Hydrogen has additional costs for the electrolyzers and fuel cells to convert electricity to/from hydrogen. The biggest issue is the lower efficiency caused by these conversions. However, if you save enough money on the grid and on storage it can play a role in tomorrows grid. Efficiency is less of a concern if used for backup power and reliability rather than for the main source of power. If you can also use hydrogen for ammonia production and other industrial uses then that helps the overall economics of the system.

A high renewables grid will need both intra day storage and multi day storage. Li ion is great for intra day storage. The best solution for multi day storage is less clear. When comparing different solutions for multi day storage, the potential transmission advantages of hydrogen are rarely discussed but it might be important at the system level.

 

[engine ear]

CATL is working on a sodium ion battery that is comparable to li ion. Cell cost is about 10% cheaper and about 10% lower energy density than LFP. The biggest advantage is that is is much easier to source sodium than lithium. If this works, not only will it be a big help for ramping up stationary storage, but it will mean there is more lithium available for EVs which will help EVs ramp up as well. Since CATL is already a Tesla supplier, we might see Tesla Megapacks with sodium ion in the future.

CATL Unveils Its Latest Breakthrough Technology by Releasing Its First Generation of Sodium-ion Batteries

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (CATL) successfully held its first online launch event “Tech Zone” on July 29. Dr. Robin Zeng, chairman of CATL, unveiled the company’s first-generation sodium-ion battery, together with its AB battery pack solution - which is able to integrate...

www.catl.com

 

[MC3OZ]

Building more power lines is possible but has challenges, including costs and difficulty in getting a new right-of-way approved.

One option is to run HDVC cables in the sea, buried underground or some combination of both. The gear on each end of a link is expensive ,so these tend to be long distance point-to-point.

I have a hunch Tesla's project to extract Lithium from clays is important, I think that will allow Tesla to make LFP batteries which are ideal for energy storage at good prices. As you mention, CATL Sodium batteries are another option.

There are other energy storage options including Pumped Hydro, Compressed Air, Flow Batteries, Heat Storage etc. Also Hydrogen/Ammonia.

Ammonia in particular, can be made off grid and simply transported in tankers.

But 9 months of the year, I see Solar and Batteries doing the bulk of the work in most places and that means investment in other options is more to cover winter, unusual weather etc.

When Elon mentions 3 TWh of cell production by 2030 I think at least 1 TWh is energy storage batteries.

In the long run the energy business includes:-

• Solar Sales
• Battery Sales
• Autobidder and battery contracts.
• VPPs
• new products, e.g. home HVAC.,

I think the energy side of the business can grow fast, because it is coming off a low base, energy storage batteries to date have been "cell staved", and because the solution required, hence total demand, is very large.

Energy is more complex because there is a greater range of competing products and many established players with some "home field" advantage.

But LFP batteries at the right price will fly off the shelf, at all levels, home, business, community, grid.

I have to give Elon and Tesla credit here, because I think they see what is needed, and what is coming, most don't.

 

[engine ear]

Antora Energy is clever implementation of thermal storage. They use blocks of graphite heated by resistive heating. They describe it as like a big toaster. It costs very little to dump a lot of power into resistive heating and heat the blocks as high as 2500 C. The blocks are stacked in insulated containers about the size of a shipping container. The graphite blocks will glow white hot and they extract the energy using radiative heating. Either to use directly as a heat source for up to 1500C industrial heat or it can be converted to electricity using thermal pv.

An advantage of thermal pv is there are no moving parts or pumping of high temperature fluids. Due to the high intensity of light, the thermal pv cell can be much smaller and therefore less expensive than a solar pv cell of the same power rating. They demonstrated an efficiency of 40% and are targeting 50% .

Storage cost of $10 per kWh electric. This targets long duration storage, so not the same market as li ion.

This slide deck is a great summary of their technology:

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/09%20Day%201-Justin%20Briggs_Antora%20Energy%20-%20reduced%20file%20size.pdf

This Stanford Energy presentation is excellent too:

 

[engine ear]

'Getting ahead of the market': Mitsubishi Power Americas on Li-ion, long duration and green hydrogen storage

Energy-storage.news interviews Mitsubishi Power Americas' senior VP for Energy Storage Solutions Thomas Cornell.

www.energy-storage.news

In the interview, they discuss the cost adder of going from 4 hours to 6 hours for a 10MW li ion battery they installed in San Diego:

“going from four to six hours really was really just a single-digit-type percentage additional cost to the project”

So instead of 50% more as you might expect if battery pack costs dominate, it was not more than 9% (single digit). If you do the math the other way, in a 4 hour battery, the battery pack makes up not more than 18% of system costs and all the other stuff makes of 82% of system costs.

I am not sure if this is a special case or this is representative of the whole industry. Maybe this just reflects the costs of ramping up and maybe non-pack costs will improve over time as they gain experience and more vendors enter the market?

I didn’t think there was much value in going beyond 4 hour batteries since there are only so many hours of peak solar production per day when power is cheap so you need to fill the battery quickly if you want to cycle it daily using the cheapest power. But if the cost adder is 4.5% per hour beyond 4 hours, then maybe longer than 4 hours makes sense.

 

[engine ear]

Vast Solar Signs Letter of Intent to Purchase 13,500 Sodium-Ion Batteries from Natron Energy in 2023

Vast Solar Signs Letter of Intent to Purchase 13,500 Sodium-Ion Batteries from Natron Energy in 2023

www.businesswire.com

This is a new battery chemistry being used for grid storage. It a type of sodium ion battery, but a different chemistry than what other sodium ion companies, such as CATL are working on. This one uses prussian blue analogues for both cathode and anode and an aqueous electrolyte.
This results in a very safe chemistry but at a lower energy density that is more suited for stationary storage.

Their patent has more details:

US20140220392A1 - Prussian Blue Analogue Anodes for Aqueous Electrolyte Batteries - Google Patents

A system and method producing electrodes in an aqueous electrolyte battery that maximizes energy storage, reduces electrochemical decomposition of the electrolyte, and uses Prussian Blue analogue materials for both electrodes, with an anode electrode including an electrochemically active...

patents.google.com

But more fun to watch what happens when you shoot one of these batteries:

This site has a nice overview of their technology, including a description of a data center battery product:

Natron Energy ($57M for Prussian blue Na-ion battery) - Technology Wealth

Natron Energy develops high-performance rechargeable sodium-ion batteries thanks to their advancements in prussian blue electrodes and electrolytes. Their

technologywealth.com

BlueTray 4000 from Natron Energy in a standard 1U 19-inch rackmount configuration delivers 4 kW at 48 V DC over a 2-minute discharge with a 6 kW peak power rating, recharges in 8 minutes, and can cycle >50,000 times.

 

[Buckminster]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1631083264352874496