My company operates two Jupiter Power owned LFP batteries in the MISO market. Each of them draws .5 - 2MW constantly for the HVAC system. If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.
This is exciting but what kinds of things are actually done to improve the price(like if people know the solution already then why not already do it?) and how do you determine 15 years?
Sodium hydroxide is main cost saving, but also there’s slightly cheaper form of graphite anode. So IIRC it’s 20% cost saving once new manufacturing process amortises.
Thing is - LFP process keeps getting cheaper and charts show it’s going to be 15 years until sodium reaches LFP cost.
My interpretation of TwiztidK's comment is that they could save the cost of that .5–2 MW power draw by switching to a battery chemistry with looser temperature requirements.
Cost of replacement? Cost of insurance against a fire? Cold weather performance may also be quite important, and not only somewhere in Alaska, but even in places like Dallas, that are hot in summer but cold during winter nights.
> in places like Dallas, that are hot in summer but cold during winter nights.
In this case I’d suggest underground installation. Use the Earth as an insulator and heat sink. Temperatures underground are a lot more stable and predictable.
Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost.
Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean.
The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.
AT grid scale, sodium quickly closes the gap on lithium. The safety overhead, active cooling, and physical spacing needed to control lithium’s thermal runaway risk eat away most of its energy density advantage. Plus, CATL is hitting cost parity between full sodium BESS and LFP BESS systems.
The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction.
Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.
> Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
The article claims much better:
> the company’s GS1.1 [Sodium Ion] system will store energy for 20 years, over roughly 20,000 cycles, and still retain 80 percent of its capacity. For LFP, a basic durability benchmark pegs them at 70 percent capacity after 8,000 cycles.
I saw an interview with I think the CATL ceo and he was saying it's quite a headache ensuring the batteries last that long. Grid storage companies want 25 or 30 year guarantees. It sounds like sodium may have the advantage there.
Net Present Value isn't quite the right thing to look at. Inflation-adjusted energy prices have been rising over time, so the thing these batteries are projected to deliver (fixed impact on that electricity grid) increases in value over time even after the NPV discount. The more important component is the "risk-adjusted" NPV, which may or may not make tech like this effectively worthless.
I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.
It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.
Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.
Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.
I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.
For something like a battery backup that last decades that doesn't need maintenance, maybe you could bury it out of the way (like under a deck or lawn?), maybe even under the frost line.
Underground is a big problem with it comes to water permeation and flooding.
The other potential problem with a lot of energy systems that use things that have hydrogen in them is running power over the systems for long periods of time can start to leak hydrogen. You'll always want to ensure you have ventilation to ensure whatever is outgassing can escape the system. You'll end up with explosions, hydrogen embrittlement, or interesting corrosion in ways you didn't think were possible.
might need to be in some special containment at that size, depending on the technology -- some sodium ion battery implementations are very toxic / highly reactive / flammable.
I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.
I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.
I live in a very rural spot with a difficult-to-deal-with Electric Association, with a Ute reservation on one side and unpowered parcels on other sides; I don't think that the easement is a typical issue.
And to be clear, I didn't count my labor in designing or implementing the system. I suspect that would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10K if I had to get a hands-off, turn-key version of this same system.
And at some point I will likely double much of the capacity, at which point I will be able to run a mig welder at night if I want...
>The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal
It matters less but it's still a big deal though. You need to inject the power near where you need it otherwise you have to upgrade everything between you and them, roughly speaking. So you can't put your battery in BFE where land is cheap.
Cost increases from that plus environmental and site development regs (which are always more in denser areas) screw you too. So between the upgrades and the overhead there might not be a valley of profitability because all the sites you could toss a battery on and the sites where someone who has a more $$ use case than you will outbid you on the raw land.
So the end result is you wind up having to shoehorn a bunch of little developments into small crappy parcels but then the fixed costs of development come back to bite you so density matters there because the more jiggling electrons you can pack in the more revenue you can have to offset your fixed costs.
That said, anything that lets you tell the NFPA, the environmentalists and the local screeching Karens to take their setbacks and shove them hugely improves density, especially on small sites, so the reduction in cooling needs and runaway protection that sodium gets you might make it denser once the tech is fully vetted. Every foot you can shave off the effective footprint of a battery (after accounting for fire setbacks, service space, etc) hugely increases the number of sites that are developable.
> You need to inject the power near where you need it otherwise you have to upgrade everything between you and them
Or you install them near your solar/wind farm (or where the power connects to shore, if it’s offshore). If it’s a shore install, you might run a desalination side business when you have surplus energy.
A dystopian possibly impractical dream..
imagine a pyramid like structure in every neighborhood, made from blocks of such cheap sodium ion batteries, the outside of the pyramid is covered in soil and greens, the top which could even be a windmill. The green space is for walking around, kids playing, a few bike trails, whatever fun.
The whole neighborhood is power buffered through this pyramid.
The national power grid only needs to supply these pyramids.. with renewable energy.
The houses, parking lots etc have solar panels that feed into the pyramid.
Not too long after Parler was kicked off AWS, I was on a call with hundreds of representatives from power utilities about a modeling tool we were transitioning to. It was mentioned that the tool was hosted on AWS and someone suggested they have a fallback plan in case they got kicked off like "other companies".
Elon Musk's companies are doing great under the democratic administration he publicly rails against. He's back on top of the richest list. Peter Thiel's portfolio seems to be doing great. PLTR is up 350% in the past five years. Facebook altered it's policies in a pro-conservative way by allowing falsehoods in political ads, and they're doing fine. Right-wing content has flourished there for years. Oracle and Larry Ellison are doing better than ever. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are financially healthy and not in crisis.
Now twitter is doing badly, but that's not because of their political slant, it's because they're operating the business with ideology first, business acumen second approach. That's not politics, that's plain old bad execution.
None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.
About Musk, once he took over Twitter, that mostly solved the Social Media "Free Speech" problem, because as long as the most popular gathering place in the world is free we're [mostly] all free. So you're right, there's lots of reasons for Conservative optimism.
> None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.
None of those businesses are part of the culture war, or if anything they're 'woke' businesses.
Thiel doesn't make money being conservative, he makes money on venture capital and running a big government surveillance business. Larry Ellison makes money price gouging on licensing. Elon Musk's main source of income is a 'woke' EV business. Rupert Murdoch makes money on tabloids, of which Fox News is just one flavor - and the tabloids are arguably 'woke' as they mainly pitch conspiracy theories that the 'normies' don't know about.
Twitter under Musk is no more free speech than it has ever been. They comply with the vast majority of censorship requests from authoritarian governments[1]. They most recently rolled over for Brazil's demands and are now fumbling their execution on paying the fines Brazil levied against them. Musk also censored Ken Klippenstein's account when he published a link to his Substack article about the JD Vance opposition research dump. So no, "free speech" on Twitter is just a slogan and a marketing campaign for low information news consumers, and it's working.
I wasn't classifying those businesses as "part of culture war" or not. I'm just saying it's a fact that conservatives have been, and still are, under attack, and are nonetheless "winning".
Insofar as Musk not being a Free Speech Absolutist (which I'm not either), that's not news to me or anyone else who knows and respects him like I do. Musk is doing everything he can to keep legal speech from being censored, whereas the prior owners would cancel people permanently for trite trivial things like a mis-gendering (that wasn't even done out of malice), or simply claiming there's two genders.
Regarding Democrats getting censored themselves: While I'm a strong advocate of Free Speech as a general rule, I think after what the Democrats did for a decade (on censorship) they SHOULD be forced to reap what they sowed. So for example, I would've been perfectly in favor of Musk, as a one time act, permanently cancelling everyone who had in the past called for censorship of others. Those people didn't want Free Speech when they held power, and thus they are the ones who don't deserve to have Free Speech after they've lost their power.
Actually, it seems like a great time to get involved with the grid (at least in the US). In order to comply with FERC Order 881, all transmission operators need to adjust their line ratings based on ambient temperatures with hourly predictions 10 days into the future by mid 2025. Seems like that would present a great opportunity to work directly with the ISOs (which have regional models and live data) on improving weather data.
I’d expect the opposite. All companies controlling equipment that is part of the “Bulk Electric System” have to be NERC CIP compliant and are audited regularly with large fines for non-compliance. Doesn't guarantee perfect (or even good security) but it’s more likely to be a priority.
It also perverts incentives such that no utility will communicate perhaps helpful information to other utilities or government when said information can leave them liable for fines.
Until there's some kind of hold-harmless agreement, the various industry & government security information sharing groups can only be of limited effectiveness.
The management at the utility doesn’t want to be recognized for being a deficient operator that doesn’t meet standards, so they hire employees to ensure they are compliant
A fine is a black eye for a utility where people pride themselves on the reliability of the service they provide
Making logins required to view twitter was the ultimate bed shitting move. The whole point of twitter was to be a broadcast medium. Tweets were viewable without following or logging in. There is a huge vacuum in that space now.
For most (social media) platforms really. Management believes it would force users to sign up, but in reality the platform just becomes less relevant because of that limitation. Not even talking about search crawlers.
An all around stupid decision. That said, if management is that shitty, the platform probably won't be attractive for long anyway.
Facebook/Instagram were successful despite that to a degree, but this decision probably still did a lot of damage to their relevancy and user numbers.
I don't really agree with that. Facebook was originally about mirroring your real-life social network. In the mid 00's nobody was trying to get likes from strangers on Facebook.
Instagram is closer to broadcast, but it was always closely tied to the mobile app experience and the "follower" mentality. People didn't really share links to Instagram posts in other online venues in the beginning.
Twitter was always unique. It existed before smartphones, and there was a good chunk of years where people without smartphones would read twitter posts on desktops. Its producer/consumer distribution is much more skewed, many twitter users never post. Tweets were always getting posted to places like HN, reddit, discussed in news articles, etc.
I think Twitter's (former) position as a broadcast medium à la TV, radio, and newspapers is unique among social networks. There's a reason why Twitter was the place for journalists, politicians, academics, fire departments, web service status alerts, etc.
> Facebook/Instagram were successful despite that to a degree, but this decision probably still did a lot of damage to their relevancy and user numbers.
FB/IG/Whatsapp have half of humanity logging into their services once per month, so I'm not sure how much better they could be doing if they didn't have a login wall.
Meanwhile, Twitter (with no login wall) never broke 500mn. Like, personally I totally take your point about status updates but I'd have used my Twitter account a lot more if I'd needed to log in to see the content.
I'm really curious how this would've looked if he'd taken a mid-range budget approach to vision instead of being able to throw (tens of?) thousands of dollars of industrial motion capture cameras at it. Something like 2-4 global shutter cameras, all running a similar vision filter to what he first demo'd, feeding a kalman filter/state estimator to determine the ball's position. I can't blame hime for following the mantra of "don't build what you can buy (or get from a sponsor)" but it would be cool to see some affordable solutions (or attempted solutions) to this problem.
(I'm the person who made it) Yeah that's fair, but at least for me I wanted to focus on the interesting part of "making a foosball robot" which is the "foosball" part, not the "fiddle with a home built vision system that doesn't actually work" part. I realize this is a bit ironic given my channel name though haha (From Scratch).
Shows fuel mix, load, and price data for all of the ISOs. It's been really exciting to watch lately because you can see the huge uptick in solar and battery deployments in markets like CAISO and ERCOT.
I have a Google Photos album (shared with a few close family members) that automatically adds photos of my daughter and syncs them with the Aura frames her grandparents have. We've had this setup for the last two years and it works really well. I think it's literally the use-case Aura is targeting.
I don’t use Google any more but it looks like they have the same functionality for iCloud. I’ll have to give that a try since it’d be perfect for our older relatives.
