Can anyone break down why it is still so expensive to get battery storage at my house?
A single Tesla Powerwall is something like $10000 (before incentives) for 13 kWh capacity. I regularly see articles about battery costs being ~$150/kWh now. Thats about $2000 and yet the Powerwall is 5x that cost. Even if it was $200/kWh that doesn't get close to adding up.
Is it all installation costs? extra hardware costs? Or something related to trade where we just can't get cheap batteries here in the US?
You can find much cheaper batteries. But they will require additional components that are included in the Powerwall, will be less integrated, less pretty to look at, the mobile apps not as pretty, more complex to purchase, etc
I vaguely recall a youtube comparison of "Ford F-150 lightning vs 3x Tesla Powerwall" and that the lightning was a better deal for the same amount of backup, even if you left it parked. (Different spot on the curve, you can't buy a third of an F-150... but at the time, actually getting 3 powerwalls actually delivered was a challenge too.) So there are definitely opportunities to push the consumer price down quite a bit further...
I'm still surprised that there isn't a remotely affordable consumer friendly solution for "I want these batteries to take over when my power goes out". I don't need an app or something pretty to look at. I want to insert my credit card and a couple weeks later someone has installed it in my house and I rarely have to think about it again.
> there isn't a remotely affordable consumer friendly solution for "I want these batteries to take over when my power goes out".
That's called a UPS. You can buy them in stores. Closer fit for this purpose might be solar-charging portable power stations, which are also COTS hardware that similarly costs a few hundred dollars each.
Anything more elaborate than that needs to be wired into your breaker box, requiring licensed electricians and inspections. Not terribly expensive, though. Installing an automatic transfer switch in your home is pretty common in rural areas with frequent power outages, for generator installations.
The fancy app is just something extra you get for close to no cost. Vertical integration is where Tesla is really strong at. An app or something pretty to look at is almost guaranteed once you get the rest right, IMHO.
There are European suppliers selling LiFePO4 cells for €100/kWh, but you need electronics to support the cells - battery management system, charger controller, inverter and so on. You are also paying for the brand name
This is almost certainly a standard supply/demand curve problem. Especially when you factor in that the supply side is in rather heavy flux and that the optimization side of supply has not caught up to the advancement side of it.
Did you mean to say you are working on a project or that the link is a working project? Because (a) 115.9V is some no-kidding-don't-touch-the-wrong-wire (b) that linked page cites a bunch of extra thermal management stuff which presumably its source EV managed but in any such home setup someone else is going to have to manage
The link is one of the batteries im using in a project for home power wall. You are correct, 100+ volts, and 1000+amps and fire if things go wrong is no joke. Im EE so doesnt make me fire proof but can appreciate the scope of the safety measures required for the project.
The short version is residential scale anything usually isn't cost-effective. Roof top solar panels are the one exception and it's marginal - basically coz the land is worth more then the panels by a lot.
What's the go to rack mount inverter charger to go along with that? Asking for a friend...who only needs about 800 watts of capacity to act as the certified hacker version of a UPS. I've only done Victron stuff in the past, and those are not rackmount nor is there a 48V in 120V out model of less than 3000VA capacity.
same reason massive video streamers pay $0.0005/GB for cdn bandwidth while you and I are paying $0.05/GB for aws egress.
the demand at the grid and commercial scale is so huge right now that anyone putting cells into suburban-home sized systems and dealing with that type of customer (the absolute worst kind) are practically throwing money away when they could be doing 1 - 10 big deals with competent (electrical and financial) counterparties. in a supply constrained world there's no point in serving the bottom of the market. talking to you is an opportunity cost.
it'll come soon though as production ramps. the recent inflection of EV growth below expectations has created the slack for it to be possible, but it'll still be a few years as those are all NMC lines.
Why would you expect a Tesla product to have a competitive price? This is like saying: the CPU costs $100, the RAM costs $50, the flash costs $20, so why does an iPhone 15 cost $900?
Other competing companies in this space charge similar rates for home batteries.
Also, the Tesla Model 3 and Y are currently some of the most affordable EVs on the market. It's only the X, S, and Cybertruck that are the high priced ones.
> Also, the Tesla Model 3 and Y are currently some of the most affordable EVs on the market.
Different markets - here in Oz BYD is half to two thirds the price of "equivalent" Tesla.
I put the word equivalent in quotes because everyone has an opinion on what a product is worth and what equivalency means. Honestly, when I eventually get to buy an EV I will avoid both brands like the plague so I'm not about to argue any points in this regard.
Firstly, I will admit some reasons aren't entirely rational in terms of economic self interest. I am fortunate enough to be able to choose.
Secondly, my reasoning is in the context that I don't think the time is right to buy one now. I bought a car 3 months ago, second hand. My EV alternative was twice the already quite large price. My conclusion was that buys me 10 years of running costs and the difference after taking depreciation into account made it more.
But reasons against are as follows with some weighting.
Tesla: 100% no.
50% The technology "integration" and all that comes with it. I don't want my car connected to the internet. I don't want an app for my car. At this point I have the perception Tesla is the "Apple of Cars" - an ecosystem built around car ownership that is overpriced and restrictive. I don't need my experience being monitored or reported or collected.
25% With Apple it seems you get good customer service for your $. I haven't heard similar for Tesla.
20% Engineering. Tesla is building a car. There are many other car manufacturers that have been doing this for much longer. Yes going electric is a big change, but the many years of solid domain experience will count.
5% I don't want my $ going to Musk or anything to do with him. Seriously, at this point I would think the best thing Tesla could do would be to quietly cut any ties with him. Note this is 5% weighting because it is more a "bad taste" thing than anything.
BYD 120% no. Yup, 20% more No than Tesla.
50% Same technology integration as the Tesla. Lessened due to lesser perceived (note I have not studied every aspect) reliance on that integration but greater due to data concerns with China. I have greater concerns with China because every company is literally state apparatus when it comes to information. At least the US is slightly separate between corp and state - slowing things in an ever so minor practicable sense.
40% chinese engineering. Don't get me wrong, I see the huge strides in improvement Chinese manufacturing has made but I have seen too much stupid chinese engineering in my lifetime. That "perception debt" is costing them.
30% I don't want to support China's destruction of world capability in manufacturing. BYD is significantly subsidised by the State which goes a long way to why they are so cheap.
If I had to spend money on an EV today, I'd seriously check out Hyundai.
Isn't the Tesla Powerwall a fully integrated system with multiple MPPTs, inverter, and charger? (Maybe I'm confusing the new one with the older versions) I imagine that's where the cost comes in.
Where I live in Europe I can buy a lifepo4 cell for 97€ from a trusted supplier, 300Ah x 3.2V = almost a kWh. For a full battery you need to add the cost of a BMS and a balancer.
If you buy a 16 cells to make a 48V battery than yeah the vast majority of the cost would be the lithium cells, a 16s 250A BMS should be around 150€, an active 16s balancer 50€.
What I don't understand is why the focus for stationary batteries is still on lithium. I don't really care about energy density (weight / volume) because I don't have to carry it around. Aren't there cheaper and safer solutions for stationary batteries?
This is what I'm excited about. I think lithium still wins in this space due to the economies of scale driven by cars and smaller electronics. But as the market for stationary storage grows, there will be more paths to scale technologies that wouldn't be competitive for mobile use cases, but are a good fit for stationary ones.
A lot of discussions of the learning curves for batteries seem to bundle all of this together, but I think there are two or three different learning curves that are at different points: The most visible one is mobile batteries, where lithium-based technologies dominate and have preferred quite far down the learning curve. But then I think there is a separate curve for stationary storage, which is at a much earlier stage, with huge room for improvement, and a number of promising technologies that exist but haven't yet made it to commercial scale. And I think there's another, separate and even more nascent curve for stationary and long duration storage, where there are initial indications that some of the initial technologies might be scalable, but it's still years away, and I think it's so early that we may well see entirely different approaches come out of the labs and win this market.
LFP batteries are cheaper, very safe, and currently the most popular for storage and cars which don't need maximum range - the standard range Teslas are using them too.
But Sodium based batteries are coming into the market and would be even cheaper.
It’s a little off topic, but it’s probably a good thing that it’s not very accessible while it would be lithium. When they burn they are almost impossible to put out. Which isn’t too much of an issue with your phone or other small appliances, but things like cars (and especially buses) are a real hazard.
Maybe it’s not so much of an issue in the US where cities are designed for a lot of cars, but here in the EU it’s actually quite dangerous. If a car catches fire it’ll have to be dumped into a specialised container of sorts, which works ok for cars. If a bus catches fire on the wrong street it’ll risk burning the entire street down.
Just imagine what power walls would do to neighbourhoods where buildings are close to each other. You’d frankly burn an entire town-part down of every home had a power wall and just one of them caught fire.
Data from the National Transportation Safety Board showed that EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-coordinatio...
Statistics from 2015 showed that 174,000 vehicle fires were reported, and almost all of them involved gasoline vehicles. Tesla claims that gasoline cars are 11x more likely to catch fire than a Tesla, and that the best comparison of safety is fires per billion miles driven. If we compare using this method, there are approximately five EV fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars: https://driveelectriccolorado.org/myth-buster-evs-fire/
These stats always get trotted out, but they're not an apples-to-apples comparison for a few reasons:
1) the fleet average is around 12 years old, when most EVs are new enough to still be covered by factory warranty.
2) incidents and risk in cars is coupled with driving patterns and trip length. There's no analysis to tell us whether or not it's the EVs themselves that are safer, or the way they're driven. This is also why the claim of incidents per billion miles needs further qualification. It assumes the driving profile matches the fleet driving profile, but that may not be the case due to charging requirements.
3) a lithium battery fire isn't the same as a gasoline car catching fire, and we shouldn't pretend that they are. Even taking it at face value that EVs catch fire less often, the metric for most people isn't "will my car catch fire?" but rather "will this kill me?". If an EV is actually five times less likely to catch fire, but you're six times more likely to die, that's a net loss in safety. And given the nature of some of the battery fire deaths that have occurred, alongside the -- until recently -- relative scarcity of EVs, I wouldn't fault someone for waiting to see how things shake out.
4) regardless of what stats collected by those in the industry say, you're still paying a higher premium to insure an EV. And I get that there are multiple factors that go into determining that, but I trust the people who's job it is to make money by evaluating risk more than I trust companies trying to sell me an EV.
The way I see it, any improvements to the safety of batteries when things go wrong is a good thing. Even if it's the case that batteries are already better, an improvement that eliminates the horror fires that stick in people's minds, even if those fires are incredibly rare, is a big gain in public perception.
> 1) the fleet average is around 12 years old, when most EVs are new enough to still be covered by factory warranty.
Does factory warranty prevent fires?
> 2) incidents and risk in cars is coupled with driving patterns and trip length. There's no analysis to tell us whether or not it's the EVs themselves that are safer, or the way they're driven. This is also why the claim of incidents per billion miles needs further qualification. It assumes the driving profile matches the fleet driving profile, but that may not be the case due to charging requirements.
So, its the drivers fault the car catches fire? But its not the gas car drivers fault, but only EV car drivers fault?
> 3) a lithium battery fire isn't the same as a gasoline car catching fire, and we shouldn't pretend that they are.
Most of the newer cars have LiFePO4 batteries, which don't have the same risks as Li-Ion cars.
Non-flammable electrolyte: LiFePO4 batteries use a non-flammable electrolyte that does not catch fire even if the battery is punctured or damaged. The electrolyte is a mixture of lithium salts and a solvent that is less volatile and less flammable than the organic electrolytes used in other types of lithium-ion batteries.
High safety: LiFePO4 batteries have a lower risk of overheating and catching fire due to their more stable cathode material and lower operating temperature. They also have built-in protection circuits that prevent overcharge, over-discharge, short-circuit, and physical damage.
> 4) regardless of what stats collected by those in the industry say, you're still paying a higher premium to insure an EV. And I get that there are multiple factors that go into determining that, but I trust the people who's job it is to make money by evaluating risk more than I trust companies trying to sell me an EV.
All new cars have higher insurance because they cost more.
In the US, we pump natural gas directly into most homes, which is extremely dangerous. Yet NG still causes very little death compared to, say, cars, and we tolerate NG in homes and >100 car deaths a day.
I can't speak to the EU risk profile, as the EU has far less fire deaths in home than the US, but we here in the US will tolerate home lithium batteries just fine.
A single Tesla Powerwall is something like $10000 (before incentives) for 13 kWh capacity. I regularly see articles about battery costs being ~$150/kWh now. Thats about $2000 and yet the Powerwall is 5x that cost. Even if it was $200/kWh that doesn't get close to adding up.
Is it all installation costs? extra hardware costs? Or something related to trade where we just can't get cheap batteries here in the US?