Is the price of home batteries going to fall soon?

chrisgeller

Correct me if I'm wrong, but some of the best prices/kWh at the moment for home batteries are Tesla Powerwalls at about £8500 for 14kWh. Obviously that's quite high and will take a very long time to pay for itself.
On the other hand, there's lots of batteries kicking around for not much money. For example, this Nissan Leaf
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/202006099941263?price-from=500&radius=1500&advertising-location=at_cars&price-to=6000&postcode=ng15ga&model=LEAF&onesearchad=New&onesearchad=Nearly%20New&onesearchad=Used&make=NISSAN&sort=price-asc&page=1
is only £5,300 and has a 24kWh battery (probably a bit degraded).
If someone could break it up, as well as selling off some of the non-battery bits, that would leave plenty of battery available for a low cost.
Between sources like this, and LFP batteries from China for around $100/kWh, surely we're on the age of seeing much cheaper batteries for home storage?

Solarchaser

Same arguments have been around for a while tbh.
If anything, they are getting a bit more expensive 

ABrass

The price won't drop much in the near future. Even at current prices the home storage people are selling everything they can make. That means theres no drive to reduce price much to increase sales.

Also battery prices are much higher than the cell cost. The cells in a power wall probably cost less than $2100 of that £8500. Even if it dropped in cost by half for the cells and that cost was passed on it wouldn't make a huge difference to the price of the unit.

Perhaps if some utterly huge Lithium Iron plants are built to pump out terra watts of cells, but not on the next few years.

michaels

Get the second hand leaf and get on a V2g/v2h trial - I think the OVO one is now closed for new signups but Western Power Networks DNO are running one if you are in their service area.

JKenH

At the moment it costs in the region of £8400 for a 13 kWh Tesla Powerwall, that’s £646/kWh. You can buy a  brand new 40 kWh Nissan Leaf for around £23000, that’s £575/kWh and you get a free car thrown in. 

I had read somewhere that Tesla are getting close to the magic £100/kwh battery cost so why is the Powerwall so expensive?

JKenH

Mickey666 said:

Perhaps Tesla are the Apple of the battery marketplace

Perhaps. They do have that reputation that their stuff just works. If I was going to spend say £8k on a battery I would probably go for the Powerwall in preference to any other manufacturer. I can see why some of the other battery systems discussed on here appeal to those who like to mess around with stuff to save a few bob but I am not very tech savvy so that’s not an option for me. It is a premium product that attracts a premium price. Batteries are too expensive for me at the moment though.

I had hoped that V2G would prove a viable alternative to the Powerwall for Nissan Leaf owners like myself but the OVO trial doesn’t inspire confidence. I think Nissan have missed a trick not rolling V2G out here as they have done in Japan. Tesla are looking to do V2G shortly and I bet when that is rolled out it will just work straight out the box. 

joefizz

I said on the battery thread last year that prices were probably as low as they were ever going to be and invited people to explain to me why they thought they would fall, mostly all the same reasons mentioned above. And yet here we are...

The falling cost of applied tech (applied, not direct, i.e. tesla, apple etc) is a myth. If tech 'improves' by 4x and yet they only charge 2x official figures have that as a cost reduction....

As JKenH says above, if you arent tech savvy then you will pay a premium and that is what you are paying for, someone else to do all the tech stuff for you, the applied tech, not the physical cost of the tech itself. The applied tech still has inflation, wages, tax (well maybe not apple or tesla), subsidies etc etc applied so the physical makes up a lot less of the final percentage.

Tracking the cost of the likes of the pylontech is a good reflection of the actual costs and any developing trade war/brexit etc will be priced in as time progresses.

NigeWick

JKenH said:

 If I was going to spend say £8k on a battery I would probably go for the Powerwall in preference to any other manufacturer. I

I've got one and am well pleased with it at £7,000 fitted along with adding two 300W panels to my solar system. VAT was 20% for just the battery and 5% as part of a system. One thing I didn't know until a storm was due is that it has a "Storm Watch" facility that fills the battery if one is due so that we can be cut off from the grid with about a day's supply of electricity.

michaels

JKenH said:

Mickey666 said:

Perhaps Tesla are the Apple of the battery marketplace

Perhaps. They do have that reputation that their stuff just works. If I was going to spend say £8k on a battery I would probably go for the Powerwall in preference to any other manufacturer. I can see why some of the other battery systems discussed on here appeal to those who like to mess around with stuff to save a few bob but I am not very tech savvy so that’s not an option for me. It is a premium product that attracts a premium price. Batteries are too expensive for me at the moment though.

I had hoped that V2G would prove a viable alternative to the Powerwall for Nissan Leaf owners like myself but the OVO trial doesn’t inspire confidence. I think Nissan have missed a trick not rolling V2G out here as they have done in Japan. Tesla are looking to do V2G shortly and I bet when that is rolled out it will just work straight out the box. 

I think OVO works fine for the majority, not surprisingly it is those with problems who post on the facebook group (he says having had his install just over a week ago and no problems so far )
At the end of the trial you get to keep the charger, if it can be integrated with the Octopus export tariff I suspect electric may be something I make money on rather than pay for.

Martyn1981

michaels said:

JKenH said:

Mickey666 said:

Perhaps Tesla are the Apple of the battery marketplace

Perhaps. They do have that reputation that their stuff just works. If I was going to spend say £8k on a battery I would probably go for the Powerwall in preference to any other manufacturer. I can see why some of the other battery systems discussed on here appeal to those who like to mess around with stuff to save a few bob but I am not very tech savvy so that’s not an option for me. It is a premium product that attracts a premium price. Batteries are too expensive for me at the moment though.

I had hoped that V2G would prove a viable alternative to the Powerwall for Nissan Leaf owners like myself but the OVO trial doesn’t inspire confidence. I think Nissan have missed a trick not rolling V2G out here as they have done in Japan. Tesla are looking to do V2G shortly and I bet when that is rolled out it will just work straight out the box. 

I think OVO works fine for the majority, not surprisingly it is those with problems who post on the facebook group (he says having had his install just over a week ago and no problems so far )
At the end of the trial you get to keep the charger, if it can be integrated with the Octopus export tariff I suspect electric may be something I make money on rather than pay for.

Have you budgeted for the purchase cost at the end of the trial? Is it 1p or £1?

Coastalwatch

With so much focus being placed upon EV batteries it took a while to find an already existing thread in which to post the piece below. Perhaps just one of many batteries being developed at present but this storage solution does appear to offer possibilities eventually for the home at affordable cost. It wasn't until the last paragraph that it mentioned costs of circa $50/kWh going as low as $20/kWh eventually. That is if I'm reading it correctly!

Urban Electric Power’s long-term storage solution takes battery storage back to the basics

Using a modified version of the same technology used in AA batteries, Urban Electric Power was accepted into EPRI’s Incubatenergy Labs program to prove their technology’s worth in front of some of the nation’s top utilities.

On a quest to set themselves apart and find the optimal storage solution, companies have toyed with existing battery chemistries and invented their own. One startup, backed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), has found an approach that’s been in front of us the whole time.

That company is Urban Electric Power and its technology is alkaline batteries – think AA in a flashlight. Just saying “alkaline” doesn’t tell the full story, however, as Sanjoy Banerjee, CEO and Ann Marie Augustus, VP of operations told pv magazine.

Urban Electric is actively installing one large-scale demonstration project. The installation is at a San Diego State University data center, which needed a backup solution, Augustus said. The center’s previous backup provided about 15 minutes of power, but the center needed two hours. Space was limited, which meant the center couldn’t explore diesel capacity, or the number of racks that would be required with other battery chemistries.

Urban Electric’s chemistry became the solution, because it allowed the center to achieve 2 MWh of storage indoors, with no risk of fire or toxic leaks, and at a lower cost per kilowatt-hour than the center’s owners paid for their previous lead acid battery system. What’s more, the solution was compatible with the existing inverters and racking.

Following this pilot and with the support from the Incubatenergy Labs program, Banerjee and Augustus said that the company is, moving rapidly into commercialization and building out its development pipeline, with the goals of offering a battery system below $50/per kWh in the near future, and ultimately below $20/per kWh.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/06/30/urban-electric-powers-long-term-storage-solution-takes-battery-storage-back-to-the-basics/?utm_source=USA+|+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2f19c8d394-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_80e0d17bb8-2f19c8d394-159341337