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by jrabone
5004 days ago
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I don't think you necessarily need Li-ion for that - in my experience lead acid works well enough in the domestic case, is a lot cheaper and probably safer (although hydrogen venting is perhaps an issue). I built a little mixed DC (lighting) + AC (1kW inverter) system out in the garden (far enough from the flat that running a cable would be a nightmare of planning permissions & digging trenches). Since it's for intermittent use the panel is tiny (50W Kyocera) compared to the battery (110 Ah 'leisure') & inverter (1kW true sine), and it works just fine even here at 53 deg latitude. It would scale up for the entire house quite well, were it not for the fact that it's a four-in-a-block with a communal roof, and 1/2 loft space unusable due to loft conversion. |
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If we figure an average American has a lead acid car battery and maybe a laptop battery pack, we currently have more lead acid batteries than lithium ion, certainly by weight, but probably also by total watt hours.
Tesla and Nissan might end up inverting that ratio in a market where they merely have to get the battery to beat the cost of gas; and if we get to the point where every American has an 85 kwH battery pack in their car, that's multiple days of average US electrical consumption (I believe average per capita electrical consumption is about 1.5 kw, and average per capita total energy consumption around 6 kw in the US).
Meanwhile, there's no path to pushing up volumes of lead acid battery production significantly. Maybe there will be a few old lead acid car batteries getting recycled after Tesla conquers the world, but if that's all we're relying on, those recycled batteries won't power very much in the grand scheme of things.