1) 532 is not a new chemistry. It's not even the lowest cobalt chemistry; there's 511 and 811 beyond that (811, or 80% nickel, 10% manganese, and 10% cobalt, is not yet technically feasible).
2) Range is decreased. 532 has lower energy density.
3) Maybe..? But nothing truly significant. The additives in this chemistry mean a lot of heat gets generated during charge/discharge. Heat is the limiting factor during charge, so swapping directly to this would mean lower top charging speed. However with better cooling... maybe? It can sustain high charge current for longer, but not as high overall.
4) The buffer for EVs is ~10%. It's not a big factor in cost or weight.
5) Yes, 5x longer lifespan. The caveat is that they havent actually tested >3 years, but IMO this is probably a 50 year battery. The paper is more conservative and gives it 20 years.
This will be pretty enormous for grid storage, since a battery that lasts 5x as long costs 5x less. It may be important for trucks and buses, since they are much higher mileage and will want to run at 100% depth of discharge. Cars on the other hand run closer to 20%, where normal batteries will also last for many thousands of cycles.
> since a battery that lasts 5x as long costs 5x less.
This is only true if there is an inflation-adjusted discount rate of 0%, which is unrealistic even in this era of low interest rates. Adjusted for inflation, paying $10 now and again at years 10, 20, 30 and 40 is better than paying $50 up front would be. (By adjusted for inflation, I mean that the $10 you pay in 10 years might actually be $11, but still $10 in 2019 dollars)
"which is unrealistic even in this era of low interest rates"
What? It doesn't seem unrealistic to me. Interest rates are increasingly negative in nominal terms, but much more frequently near zero or negative in real terms. Even in the US, 5 year real rates have averaged around zero from 2010 to present.[1]
Adjusted for inflation, paying $10 now and again at years 10, 20, 30 and 40 is better than paying $50 up front would be.
This ignores the economic realities of how projects of this nature are funded. Once projects reach a certain scale, it's much easier to find $50x once than $10x multiple times, especially when that $10x spend does not include costs that may increase over time, such as labor and regulatory compliance.
It's assuming that the item you're purchasing would maintain the same real price. If it cost $10 to start, and after 10% inflation the battery now costs $11, this holds. (Well, it holds if you have some way to beat inflation with safe returns. US government bonds often but not always meet this requirement)
In the case of batteries specifically, I think it's likely that prices drop even without adjusting for inflation. This makes the price advantage even clearer.
What you are saying doesn't even make sense. The original comment was that a battery that lasts 5x as long costs 1/5th the price over time, and your hypothetical is buying a much cheaper battery for some reason. There is no reason to play semantic games with the time value of money, it is clear what the original person was saying.
My point was that as lifetimes get longer, value does not scale linearly. Would you pay 1000x as much for a battery bank that would last until 12019, or would you assume that it would be made obsolete at some point over that period? Maybe we've all moved to fusion, and grid-scale storage is useless. Or perhaps prices decreased by 10x over the next 20 years, and so getting a 20 year battery + a 9980 year battery would only cost 2+998/10=101.8 times as much as the original 10 year instead of 1000 times.
Time value of money is important, and IMO would be enough on its own. But opportunity cost from excluding future improvements matters too - and given the improvements in battery tech over the past decade, one that would certainly be relevant over the next five decades.
It's unfortunate they call it grid storage. Apparently you can make money by connecting a battery to the grid as the one in South Australia does make money, but I have no idea how it does it. Perhaps the price goes through the roof when a coal generator trips out and a battery can react so fast it gets first dibs on the money. The one in South Australia has certainly done that. It must be something like that as the storage is so small and the batteries so expensive they would have to get an astronomical price on what they do sell.
A house battery on the other hand - that's a different matter. The price of retail electricity at is 3 times the wholesale price, and unlike the grid battery the house usually pays nothing to charge it - it comes from the root top solar. Even so batteries aren't competitive yet, as in the return you get on installing one in a house in Australia is currently negative. But if the price drops by 1/2 it will save money by adding a battery.
I struggle to see how grid batteries fit in, but house batteries (which are really a grid battery installed at the other end of the wire) seem like they are just around the corner.
> Apparently you can make money by connecting a battery to the grid as the one in South Australia does make money, but I have no idea how it does it.
It is called the ancillary market. Basically if the grid voltage or frequency drifts off target too much, the mismatch causes semi-catastrophic shutdown of connected generation. It's... Kind of like if the timing belt in your car broke? Multi-ton generators rotating at thousands of RPM suddenly start to change direction, and they would fly apart if not for safety shutdowns.
The ancillary market exists to prevent that. Standing contracts are posted to bring fast generation like hydro power or gas turbines on the second power gets too low or too high. In Southern Australia there is very little of those resources and due to technical neglect and the governments pro-coal policies, the growth in power demand led to an unstable grid. Their limited number of fast "peaker" plants just couldn't keep up. That's why the battery made money hand over fist- 1.5 years to pay for itself, a wholly unheard of thing in civil projects like this.
Note that I've elided over a lot and ancillary markets worldwide are very highly regulated. They are very complicated, require sub-second reactions, and are generally a problem of the commons. One of the major problems that lead to the SA blackouts was the government expanding the acceptable frequency window- to ~5x what the rest of the world does (iirc). Companies immediately stopped making an effort to switch quickly and made poor long term decisions, relying on undercutting competition.
> I struggle to see how grid batteries fit in, but house batteries (which are really a grid battery installed at the other end of the wire) seem like they are just around the corner.
I think nuclear is one of the likely use cases, but it requires huge changes in carbon regulation. Nuclear is also highly capital intensive and benefits just as much as renewables from storage. A carbon tax is required to make the costs make sense though.
> The ancillary market exists to prevent that. Standing contracts are posted to bring fast generation like hydro power or gas turbines on the second power gets too low or too high.
Ahhh, so that's how it works. Thanks.
> In Southern Australia there is very little of those resources and due to technical neglect and the governments pro-coal policies,
I struggle with that. South Australia is in the position it is is (50% renewable, 100% on occasions) because it has very little coal, and what they do have is low quality. In fact they import it from QLD and NSW. All that posturing from federal liberal politicians blaming SA Labor for choosing renewables is just that. In reality they didn't have much choice. It's very hard to be pro-coal when you don't have any.
> Nuclear is also highly capital intensive and benefits just as much as renewables from storage.
I've never thought about it - but that's probably correct. However I'm firmly in the camp of "if it was truly cheaper than coal or renewables, nuclear would be everywhere now". The data makes it fairly plain safety concerns are overblown - it's actually one of the safer forms of energy production. If it was cheap the loud protests from the anti-nuclear nuclear lobby would be ignored, just as the protests from the anti-wind lobby are mostly ignored.
2) Range is decreased. 532 has lower energy density.
3) Maybe..? But nothing truly significant. The additives in this chemistry mean a lot of heat gets generated during charge/discharge. Heat is the limiting factor during charge, so swapping directly to this would mean lower top charging speed. However with better cooling... maybe? It can sustain high charge current for longer, but not as high overall.
4) The buffer for EVs is ~10%. It's not a big factor in cost or weight.
5) Yes, 5x longer lifespan. The caveat is that they havent actually tested >3 years, but IMO this is probably a 50 year battery. The paper is more conservative and gives it 20 years.
This will be pretty enormous for grid storage, since a battery that lasts 5x as long costs 5x less. It may be important for trucks and buses, since they are much higher mileage and will want to run at 100% depth of discharge. Cars on the other hand run closer to 20%, where normal batteries will also last for many thousands of cycles.