Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What do you mean by astronomical? My back-of-the-napkin estimate is that you'd pay about $8k a year in battery costs to supply a household ($20k 18kWh battery system lasting 5 years, then double it).

Obviously that's missing commercial power, utility-scale storage, heavy industry, electric vehicle charging, etc., but it seems like factoring those in would give you a big yet feasible cost, especially if storage gets cheaper over the next decades.



The batteries alone have actually gotten quite affordable. https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-lithium-batteries-...

Here is 30kWh of LFP batteries for $9,000. Now that doesn't include the inverters or installation or anything but LFP batteries have excellent longevity, in this case 7000 cycles to 80% depth-of-discharge. That means charging and discharging the battery every day for 19 years and at that point, you still have 80% of the remaining capacity.


$20K buys closer 30kWh these days, and they last more like 10 years instead of 5, so $8k/year is a wild overestimate.

That strengths your point.

However, 30kWh isn’t quite enough for heating and cooling an all-electric off-grid house, unless you carefully monitor battery capacity, etc.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: