Submitted by lughnasadh t3_yw53j1 in Futurology
Reply to comment by doesnothingtohirt in Italian startup Energy Dome claims its CO2 grid storage batteries are cheaper than lithium-ion, and need no rare minerals, being made from just off-the-shelf steel components, water & CO2. It's opening its first 200 MWh facility in Sardinia in 2023 by lughnasadh
You have to be careful with efficiencies though the only important metric is really cost usually because I mean keep in mind like a solar panel is only 20% efficient but it's super cheap so who cares.
Efficiency is very important for batteries.
It's important in context as well.
If I have the same energy source and in storage and retrieval I lose 50% then yes that's horrible.
But if I'm grounding wind and solar in the day because I just make so much that I don't need it. And at night burn coal because the sun goes away. Storing energy, even at a 50% loss is a huge win.
Efficiency is important as it relates to cost.
A battery that's 98% efficient at a cost of $350 per kWh is less cost-effective at scale than a battery that has 70% efficiency at a cost of $50 per kWh.
You also have to consider real world factors unrelated to direct efficiency such as scalability, supply chain, and complexity of manufacturing.
An extremely efficient battery that requires the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world, using materials from a dozen different mines spread across 3 continents, is going to be much more difficult to scale than an average efficiency energy storage solution that uses (relative to industrial projects) ubiquitous off the shelf components.
In our current situation perfect is very much the enemy of good enough.
Also efficiency is largely irrelevant if system cost is low and we are talking about storing renewable energy. Pumped hydro is considered viable and it’s far less efficient than 70% but it uses already existing technology and can use existing infrastructure as well (pumping water uphill into a reservoir to later be put through an already existing hydro plant for example).
Right but of the battery is 70% then you are actually only getting 70% of 20% not even including the wasted power that the user has. Every step is a chance for more and more to be lost so we want to minimize that loss as much as possible.
Just to be contraion, but when the spot price of electricity is negative (which happens often in Australia) it actually pays to be inefficient.
Wait they pay you to waste electricity in Australia sometimes?
Yes. The coal plants fight wind and solar for the right to not turn off and make it up for when the sun goes down. However they can't pay rooftop to turn off, so they are month by month losing the war. In Aus we install 200MW every month of rooftop. If everyone had rooftop as cheap as us they could do the same.
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