General Discussions

[LP]

Interesting:  A cut-and-paste attack on electric vehicle batteries and renewables is spanning the globe. But is it right? The Guardian.

Actually, I think the battery situation is much worse than even the message tries to portray.

You can look into the longevity of Lithium Ion batteries and solar cells and find out what happens to them at the end of life and work this out for yourself. Also, for your peace of mind investigate the Lithium Ion battery MTBF, and note this MTBF accumulates just from a battery existing in time and space and has nothing to do with operation or duty cycle.

A car battery is made up of thousands of individual cells, how many have to fail (MTBF considered) before the battery performance is reduced or shuts down due to risk of overload?

Solar PV; In Victoria there are now warehouses overflowing with unrecycled redundant solar panels that have been replaced or removed from roofing due to problems well before the claimed design life is reached. The companies that sold them are long gone, having cashed in on the subsidies and departed.

Batteries in cars are fundamentally no different to the batteries in your phone, laptop or power tools, how many of them still hold a full usable charge a decade later. What do you do when the battery you installed no longer holds enough charge to meet the demand, replace it, what happens to the old ones, will you have a garage full of old car batteries like you probably have a drawer full of old device batteries?

It's why up in Qld and NT where conditions suit the government is now preferentially sponsoring Green Hydrogen for small scale power generation(Up to 3000 homes) ahead of Solar PV Battery, in a bid to replace Diesel power generation which is ubiquitous in the top end. This will be coupled with Hydrogen powered vehicle subsidies, to give the residents the very same usability as the current Diesel Power / Transport combination. Unfortunately, at this stage it still does not address the issue of Solar PV longevity, which ironically is even worse in areas that deliver peak performance.

I'm afraid I'm very cynical, I expect the Solar PV / Battery industry to go full Nicotine in response to the risk that their subsidies might be cut.