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Comment by megax | Hacker News Reader

It’s curious to see this topic on HN as I just came across an article about the impeding energy crisis in Ontario that sheds light on how the province is leveraging underground compressed air storage[1] as a tactic in their energy storage mitigation strategy.

[1] “Beyond the sprawling nuclear plants and waterfalls that generate most of the province’s electricity sit the batteries, the underground caverns storing compressed air to generate electricity, and the spinning flywheels waiting to store energy at times of low demand and inject it back into the system when needed.” https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/12/26/ontario-electricity-e...

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Given how ludicrous the rest of the article is, I have trouble trusting anything else that they wrote.

Using electric vehicles and reverse chargers to stabilize the grid will never be economically viable; it will always be cheaper to buy dedicated batteries for that purpose because vehicle batteries are limited by charge/discharge cycles, not age.

> vehicle batteries are limited by charge/discharge cycles, not age.

LFP batteries from the last few years are not limited by cycles. If you're charging every few days to weekly, it would take 50 years to hit the 3000-5000 cycle limits. Thermal degradation will happen a lot faster.

Is the amount of thermal degradation a function of use? Or a function of environment (like leaving the car outside in the cold)?

Just a name for the effects of temperature and time. Heavy use contributes, but is mostly accounted for under the 'cycle count at high charge/discharge rate' heading.

It's very hard to wear a new LFP battery with a controller that keeps it in the 20-80% range out now unless you cycle it several times a day or use it in harsh conditions.

We'll probably start seeing manufacturers cost cut and increase cycle depth or decrease cooling.

I've been curious lately about living off grid where I'd have a reasonable amount of land. One concern I had was with battery lifetime and this seems like a way to have a long lived system, at the cost of some efficiency. So I found this article and decided to share.

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