Looking at what is happening in battery technology advances it doesn’t seem like it’s going to cost more to make a 5k cycle battery than a 40k cycle battery. It’s all about how the cathode and anode are manufactured, not dependent on a lot of expensive materials. In fact, some of these batteries are using very inexpensive materials so it all comes down to perfecting manufacturing technique.

These are batteries designed for storage of large amounts of power, for grid use. It’s easy to see how they might easily cycle a couple of times each day. Store up a lot of cheap wind energy at night and feed it back while waiting for the Sun to start producing. Store up solar to feed into afternoons. 20,000 cycles would give a battery good for around 30 years. If we could get a battery that lasted twice as long for the same amount, why not?

It’s time we started talking about lifetime cost of power. Even though we
tend to pay off generation/storage systems in the first 20 years of use
most systems continue to produce much longer. Solar panels are still a bit
expensive if you look at their 20 year cost of power, but not if you
average their cost over 40-50 years.

I’m off the grid, mostly solar with some gas generator backup. I’ve got my electricity usage down to somewhere between one third and one half of the average US home. (Cook and heat water with propane, heat with wood, don’t need AC, all CFL/LED lights, etc.)

I use a dozen deep cycle “golf cart” batteries to store solar/gas energy for the hours the sun isn’t shining. They cost me about $2,000 and last 5-7 years. In order for a utility company to put enough lead-acid storage in place to serve the average house with wind/solar power around the clock would probably cost $6,000 and drive up the cost of power by $100 a month.

If Aquion can produce storage at 20x less then that number drops to an insignificant $5/month.

With really cheap storage (20,000 or 40,000 cycles would take costs to no more than $1.25/month) there would be no reason to not power our grid with nothing but renewables.

Wind is already one of the two cheap (new generation) ways to provide electricity. Natural gas is the other and the price of NG will rise. Solar is now close to or below TOU rates for the hours when the Sun shines. Solar will likely drop to being as cheap as wind over time.

If you could get all the electricity you wanted from cheap wind and solar why would you tolerate coal burning?

A different company is going into production with a sodium-ion battery which has been tested at 5,000 cycles and they think they can push to 20,000 cycles.

Aquion is scouting sites for their first factory and they expect to be in production next year. They claim that their battery will be manufactured for the same amount as lead-acid batteries, but be greatly superior. (And they’ve secured $30 million start up funds.)

Aquion claims 5,000 100% depth of discharge (DoD) cycles. Deep cycle lead acid batteries are generally rated at no more than 500 50% DOD cycles.

If my math hasn’t failed me then an Aquion battery will give you –
1kWh storage x 100% x 5,000 cycles = 5,000kWh useful life.

And a deep cycle lead acid deep cycle will give you-
1 kWh storage x 50% x 500 cycles = 250kWh useful life.

If those numbers hold then the sodium-ion battery is effectively 20x cheaper than a lead-acid battery and would seem to solve the renewable energy storage problem. If Aquion can push their technology toward 20,000 cycles or Cui can develop a good anode then I think we can put a marker on the end of the fossil fuel era.