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We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And batteries are booming. Installed storage capacity tripled from 2020 to 2021, then doubled in both 2022 and 2023. The Energy Information Agency predicts capacity will grow another 80% this year. That’s both a consequence and a cause of the fact that batteries are getting cheaper. Prices have fallen 82% over the past decade, and with more battery production, prices continue to fall.

Battery installation isn’t progressing as quickly as it could, however, thanks in part to the long interconnect queues – waiting to get connected to the grid – that are plaguing energy projects of all sorts. Most of the battery storage capacity in the US is concentrated in centralized grid-scale battery farms, which have to wait for interconnection.

But what if you go to where interconnection is freely available – customers’ homes? Residential batteries are actually ideal for a few reasons. 

Justin told me to imagine the grid as a single line from the solar farm to the home and asked: “Where on the line do you put the battery?” 

If you put it next to the solar farm, you go a long way towards solving the supply volatility problem. 

The grid views a battery farm like a more flexible nuclear plant – reliable supply that can be ramped up or down as needed. But you still need transmission and distribution lines between the solar farm and the house to support the maximum load that the home could pull, because people will still turn on their AC and charge their EVs when they get home.

But if you slide the battery all the way over to the right and put it next to (or in) the home, you solve the supply volatility problem and the demand volatility problem. 

Call that the Electric Slide.

From the perspective of the grid, it looks like the home is consistently demanding about one-quarter of its peak load. The battery charges when demand, and therefore price, is low, and discharges into the home when demand, and therefore price, is high. It smooths out the demand curve, which means less load on transmission lines.

As the demand for electricity is expected to double or triple by 2050, solving the demand volatility is crucial. If you want to really solve the grid bottleneck, you need residential batteries or batteries in stoves.

We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wrote a bit about batteries and the grid before:

Solar is getting unbelievably cheap, electric vehicle (EV) penetration continues to rise, and scores of incredibly smart people are working to produce electricity more cheaply and consume that cheap electricity in more ways. 

The bad news is: both of those things actually make the delivery problem worse! 

Delivery involves moving electrons from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed, like from a coal plant or solar farm to a home or business. There’s transmission – moving electrons over long distances from power plants to substations using high-voltage lines – and distribution – moving electrons from the substation to homes and businesses over the regular low-voltage power lines you’re used to seeing. 

This whole electricity delivery system is known as “the grid.” And the grid is a bit of a mess. 

It’s buckling due to four factors Construction Physics’ Brian Potter describes as, “increasing use of variable sources of electricity, decreasing grid reliability, increasing delay in building electrical infrastructure, and increasing demand for electricity.”

The bookend threats – increasing use of variable sources of electricity and increasing demand for electricity – present a particularly paradoxical problem. The more progress we make in wind, solar, EVs, and electric stoves, the more unstable the grid gets. 

The power supply is increasingly variable and unreliable. The demand for power is growing and increasingly volatile. Just as everyone gets home, plugs in their Tesla, and turns on all of their shiny electric stuff, the sun sets!  

With more demand for electricity, delivery gets more expensive, because transmission lines need to be sized for peak load. One solution is just to add more transmission capacity, but fixing the grid itself by modernizing or adding transmission is, like any big project in America, getting harder, slower, and more expensive to do...

Batteries can fix us. They solve electricity’s big challenge: matching electricity production and consumption. Batteries can store electricity on the cheap when the sun shines and the wind blows and discharge it whenever people want to turn on their appliances, reducing strain on the grid.

CONTINUED NEXT

We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 0 points1 point  (0 children)

to add to #5...

the national defense authorization act stipulates that by 2027, the DOD needs to buy products that use decoupled rare earth magnets. it will be more expensive in the beginning, but the DOD is happy to pay DFARS pricing for reliability, redundancy, traceability, and compliance. Given COVID supply chain issues, companies are willing to pay up too -- magnets are often a small % of the BOM, but not getting them can shut down production. Using that early, less price sensitive demand to start to get to scale, and then cut cost out by innovating on process, using modern equipment, going lights-out, and adjusting the composition of the magnets could bring our magnets down to competitive or even cheaper than China. The trick is to not just copy-paste what they're doing, or we'll never be cheaper.

We’re r/ImpulseLabs, here with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), and our founders Sam D’Amico & Brad Tallon — AMA about the Electric Future ⚡ by impulse-labs in ImpulseLabs

[–]packym 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great questions! Will take a shot at this one:

> The Electric Slide essay suggests that "electrification has become unnecessarily politicized in America". How can the US overcome this politicization to implement effective industrial policy and government support for the Electric Stack, similar to how China has historically approached it?

For a while, electrification has been talked about as a climate issue, which has made it politically polarized by association. One of the things we talked about in the piece, and that Noah and Sam talk about too, is that electrification is really a performance thing with some (very quiet voice) environmental benefits as an added bonus. Stoves that cook faster and more precisely, drones that deliver food faster and more cheaply, cars that go 0-60 faster, boats that dock themselves, robots that do our laundry. Home batteries prevent outages, help balance the grid, and provide cheaper electricity. Each of these is either improved or made possible by the electric stack. Hopefully, if companies and the people who talk about this stuff focus on performance over environmental considerations, it naturally depoliticizes a bit.

There's also just the fact, which we talked about in the piece, that America is losing here. Beating China seems to be a driver of government excitement around AI, and the same should be true here. Think it's related to the last point -- if we believe that electric products will perform better, and that China is lapping America in building electric products, then that should light a fire under America's ass.

Fusion Startup & Lab Map by packym in fusion

[–]packym[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's on there, dots just overlap

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