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Douglas_Knight comments on Stupid Questions May 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why isn't sea-based solar power more of a thing? Say you have a big barge of solar panels, soaking up energy and storing it in batteries. Then once in a while a transport ship takes the full batteries to land to be used, and returns some empty batteries to the barge.
Storing energy in batteries is a net loss. Even at retail prices, the total electricity stored in the battery over its entire lifespan will not pay for the upfront cost of the battery. Even if the electricity were free.
Batteries are a generic technology. If they were useful for grid energy storage, they would be used for it already, not just useful for exotic future energy generation methods. In particular, wind power is terrible because it is erratic (and badly timed where it has trends) and would be the existing technology to most benefit from improved storage.
That hasn't stooped Musk planning to couple batteries with solar power.
The question was about the present, not the future. Maybe Musk will be able to lower the price of batteries in the future, but his current price is pretty much what I said. What he has achieved is to make lithium batteries about as cheap as existing consumer batteries, not even as cheap as the sodium-sulfur batteries that power companies use at the moment, let alone what is necessary for widespread deployment.
Musk is claiming orders of magnitude reduction in cost.
*Orders of magnitude"?? which means at least a hundred times? Methinks you're mistaken.
Meaning more than 1 order of magnitude, which necessitates the plural.
I think Musk speaks of roughly 8% improvement in battery cost per year. At that pace it takes three decades to get them 1 order of magnitude cheaper.
The prices Musk is quoting is a full 10x less than analyst estimates of what those batteries should cost. Tesla would not offer the product unless they felt they could make a sufficient profit, so their costs must be lower still. That is what I was talking about.
Can we see some links? These claims don't make sense to me. Musk didn't achieve any breakthroughs in battery technology.
It's improvements in manufacturing, not underlying technology, that Musk is claiming is responsible for the decreased costs. My analyst source was not online so I can't easily provide a link..