Comment by pfdietz
5 years ago
> If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.
Except storage is much less useful in the old paradigm, so the motivation wasn't there. Going forward, prices will swing wildly, so storage will be more valuable.
>Except storage is much less useful in the old paradigm,
Plentiful storage would obviously have been very useful over the last several decades. There is a large variation in daily electrical usage (particularly in summer months):
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
There is also the need for extra capacity in the system because of planned and unplanned maintenance.
>...Going forward, prices will swing wildly, so storage will be more valuable.
Well yes, our economy is based on having reliable power and it would be impossible to have anywhere near the reliable power relying on intermittent power sources without a huge amount of storage. The problem is that contrary to what advocates claim, people have been looking at grid energy storage for decades and it isn't as simple as they claim.
As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...
Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.