30-50% of my energy is the EV. About 20% is 120V plug loads (computers, fridges, home server), ~5-10% lighting, ~15% large equipment (dryer, electric range, electric water heater), and the remainder (15-30% seasonally) is HVAC (heat pump)
Any gas appliances would bring a lot of those numbers down
American House with an EV, all electric, and no solar, I use about 1200 kWh/mo (1.2 MWh/mo) on average. This could only carry me through about 3y. Even if I had access to good public infrastructure I think best I could do is 6y (again, all-electric home).
But I digress. Lithium ion as purely load shifting is a pretty reasonable, I’d argue critical, solution for covering day/night loads, but starts to fall apart completely when it comes to seasonal (summer/winter) loads.
But what makes this plant interesting is the addition of super capacitors. The combo battery/SC plant is less about day/night load shifting and more about providing stability to a shifting grid. As supply and demand grow increasingly decoupled, and we try and shift away from expensive peaker plants always on standby, systems like this can dramatically help smooth grid performance.
~90 MW of peaker capacity is small potatoes currently, but this is a big step towards a more reliable grid future.
Supercapacitors provide ultrafast response times – specified at 0.001 seconds – and maintain over 85% capacity at –40°C, significantly outperforming lithium-ion batteries in extreme cold.
Outperform how? At being a capacitor? That’s their whole point.
On the energy side, 85% of 29 MW-min is 0.41 MWh. Even if the batteries lose 99% of their capacity at -40 °F, last I checked .42 MWh > 0.41 MWh.
These are two different tools for two different purposes, I’m not sure how you compare their “performance” under this metric.
I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.
You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.
Like with most things in life, it depends.
Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn’t overwhelming on it’s own, but it is “cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi” kinda money.
A capacitor has ~1% of the storage capacity of a battery of similar power rating.
Saying its storage performance is better because its holds a larger % of that capacity at low temperatures is nonsense because its storage performance objectively sucks (and not what it’s designed to be good at)
It’s like saying a Tesla is better than a 747 because it can go from 0-60 faster. A technically true statement but a meaningless performance comparison.