That may be true, but GE had "just a manufacturing problem" with delamination of their anodes in 2012 with a lithium air battery. At the 2011 NY State BESS conference NYBEST the GE guys said "you all can do what you want but in 2 years we'll put you all out of business." By 2013, the entire GE battery division was cut... to the point where after GE decided to rebuild, the current GE BESS group uses LG Chem LH4's. Just sayin'.

"Using" in the sense that you have a press release from them from October saying they are going to do this. Many Telsa reservation holders will refuse when they understand that it will probably end access to "ludicrous mode" and will decrease their cold weather range.

It is also unknown when they'll be able to get enough CATL cells to actually do this, since the Gigafactories don't make LFP cells. CATL cut the 2021 outlook for production from 10GWh to 3GWh which left many established BESS companies like Powin scrambling; as far as I know all CATL cells for the 2022 year are allocated. Assuming they completely solved their production problem and make 10GWh, that's 50,000 cars if they got about 50% of the otal production (I know Fluence has a share of several GWh of the CATL production and other BESS vendors claim to as well.) EVE and BYD are not as long lived as CATL at this point which is ok for a BESS with an augmentation strategy but not ok for a car (CATL was about 6500 deep cycles to 80% original DOD, EVE is currently 4500), so I doubt that's a good solution for Tesla.

I think this news story is mostly hype.

LG Chem batteries (speaking here as both the owner of a Bolt and the VP of Engineering for a company that does large scale stationary batteries, many of which are LG Chem) are particularly flammable. The NMC cells used in cars are more volatile than the BESS formulation - at this point we're no longer trying to do 1 hour BESS systems, so they need to dispatch a given MW usually for 4 hours. Even for solar smoothing that's a pretty gentle operation compared to a car - where my 66kWh battery pack in my Bolt could go from putting 90kW to absorbing 30kW in 3 seconds when I crested the top of my mountain in the Catskills.

So cars, particularly the NMC used by Chevy and the NCA used by Tesla, are going to be more flammable. For the BESS batteries we use there's a testing regime called UL9540A, and that looks at how flammable the cells, modules, and racks are, and how like a fire is to spread. But it also does something else, which is look at the LFL concentration of explosive gases off-gassed when cells hit thermal runaway, and one of the most crucial pieces of that analysis is whether we can get to a deflagration event, particularly a detonation, where "a fire is moving faster than the speed of sound". I can assure you, we have paid extra money for deflagration panels, gas sensors, and manual purge systems to lower LFL, and explosion is absolutely a possibility. If it is possible for a BESS, it is more likely for a car because the chemical formulations of a NMC for BESS are less volatile than the NMC for a car pack. It is possible that the nature of the pack container on a car does not allow the gas buildup that causes this, but I doubt that... since there's a passenger compartment right above the pack.

This is cell and pack specific. So for example, the Samsung E3 is a NMC battery that is largely immune to propagating fire. The LG Chem JH4 on the other hand results in "a puddle of molten aluminum" when it burns one vendor's container "down to the screws". As noted below, LFP is largely immune to this problem, and so is LTO, but both of those chemistries are probably not dense enough for cars even in the future, although one company in China is using LTO for buses.

Also... working in the biz I never really trusted these. I've got 15kW of solar with SolarEdge's StorEdge inverter, and it was supposed to use the LG Chem RESU battery - but I never trusted them enough to mount it in my garage. I put my charger on the outside of my garage and I park it at least 8 feet away. That's probably far enough, though Tesla NCA batteries can flame out of a Megapack about that far, and the next one over is metal clad... unlike my garage... if you've got metal siding that's probably good enough to make it a problem the fire department gets a chance to deal with before you lose your garage.

Your Bolt has a "hilltop reserve" - the purpose of this is to not charge the battery to 100% if the first few miles (like at my house in Schoharie, at 2000 feet) is going downhill. I regularly leave my house at 90% and basically gain miles on my way to the highway for 10 miles. Anyway, their patch was to not fill the battery past 90%, and hilltop reserve does the same thing. Hilltop reserve can be set to be always on, only at home, or only away. So when they offered the recall I told them to fuck off and I just left it in Hilltop Reserve so that when I need to I can charge the last 10% and get the full mileage.

Also, in terms of C rate a level 2 charger (240Vac, ~32A, 7.6kW) is around 1/8 C... you can't really get much lower (I guess a level 1 120Vac plug at around 1kW) and the rate isn't the issue. If it was a) they'd be telling us not to use DC fast chargers and b) the house plug-ins wouldn't be the issue they'd be trying to avoid. Large station scale BESS batteries aren't programmed generally to do slower than 1/4 C rate, and many I've worked on that are LG Chem are 1/2 C rate, and NYPA's NCES 20MW battery was 20MWh - 1C.

I think it's a total state of charge, or a problem with the charger supplying small amounts of power for a long time to keep at whatever the SOC target is.

That was the recall's solution - 90% max state of charge. The fact that this is happening after the recall means that they've no idea how to make these safe with any state of charge.

I also own a 2017 Bolt. As it happens I'm also the lead engineer on a bunch of large stationary batteries that use LG Chem, and we've known for some time that they need to recall all of the LH4's, so the idea that this was just a manufacturing problem cause by one facility in Korea is bullshit... they will eventually need to recall all of them. We've got three different BESS manufacturers (NEC, Lockheed Martin/Gridstar, and GE) who are all trying to figure out the best way of dealing with the flammability and more importantly the explosions that can happen after flammable gas buildup - two of them (LM and NEC) are now effectively out of the business.

The fact that we can't make these batteries safe enough to put in a city after several years and a very controlled environment means that the car situation is going to be at best very hard to fix. I think they're trying to time it because they've got a lot riding on the Ultium battery stack also from LG Chem (using a newer cell). All of the BESS batteries are a tiny sliver of the market compared to GM.

The people who owned the facility before Greenidge LLC were not able to operate it profitably as a power facility on the wholesale bulk power market. They went out of business and the site was acquired by the bitcoin mining company. I did the P&C engineering for the reconnection of this plant in 2018-2020. I tried to get Grist and others interested in this story before it got re-licensed, but I guess it wasn't interesting until it was operational.

It was four coal units originally (I don't know about the boilers), and they were eliminated during the 90's gas upgrade. Only unit 4 is still operational electrically, but the transformers from 3 and 4 at the edge of the plant still work. Units 1 and 2 floor spaces in the main hall are now mining facilities.

Overall, when this plant was a 4 unit coal plant it would have produced far more heat (since the turbine is combined cycle there's a lot less waste heat per MW; however less of it is going up the stack and more into the lake.) Anyway, since the plant went off-line twice there's nothing about its original operating mandate that still stands - the amount of heat going into the lake is not grandfathered from the coal plant.

I also did that! so fun. (We knew it was going to be bad to be close so we did this at a distance but it was like a M80).

We use current limiting fuses for that in large scale batteries, so if the battery management system or DC/DC converters don't stop it the fusing will. Main thing is no thermal runaway mechanism, and if that's true this is really helpful.

It is planned in the sense that if you wish you can swap cheap N type semiconductor panels with 2% infancy light base degradation and higher annual degradation for P type with much lower degradation and except in hard to reach spots like carports it is not economical to do so. We havent fixed the problem because it isnt economical to do it.

Incorrect. There are many merchant plants built during the gas boom with a 20 year design life... don't believe me, just ask GE.

SATs (single axis trackers) have moving parts but they make a solar install much more effective for the duck curve (afternoon to early evening) and with bifacial panels the extra production when you need it is worth the maintenance.

Btw, your merchant gas combined cycle plants are also a 20 year design... much like a car, everything will start falling apart about 20 years in. They are designed around a 20 year replacement horizon.

Solar panels have a planned degradation rate. At 20 years they can be replaced but dont necessarily need to be. Similarly, a large scale ground mount system could just be repanneled but if probably wont be because the new trackers are better (more robust and less O&M) and new panels are much larger. You can expect that after replacements until about 2035 the replacements will be about 50% of the original build cost (no need for new grading or ground grid balance of plant is good to 40 years, but posts need to be changed out for new rows.) This year's installs likely get a much much lower replacement cost in 2041 because designs are faily mature now.

That is not how a retail net metering agreement works. You are describing curtailment for generators bidding into the ISO markets.