Comment by martinpw
5 days ago
From your first link:
They will also pull forward the economic tipping points for longer duration 8 hour to 10 hour systems needed to shore up ‘Round The Clock’ renewables use cases, which disproportionately stand to benefit.
I never understood the difference between standard systems that deliver the power over a 4 hour interval versus longer duration systems of 8 hours or more. The amount of energy delivered is the same, it is just delivered more slowly. What is the factor that makes delivering over 4 hours more cost effective than 8 hours?
X hour batteries is mostly because battery people think in MWh and grid people talk in MW (and confusingly both call that capacity.)
The hours designation is the MWh / MW i.e. how fast you can empty the battery into the grid at full throttle.
The economics comes in because batteries are expensive and you want to target the highest and lowest prices during the day, charging and discharging totally to maximize revenue via price abitrage. A 1 hour battery is going to be shaving the very peak prices of each day soaking up solar at noon and displacing expensive gas peaker plants in the evening.
As the battery MWh gets bigger, but not the ability to put it all on the grid, that implies you'll be charging and discharging for 4 or 8 hours each day which means you'll be paying and getting paid closer to the average prices in both directions.
It only works economically if the battery is itself cheaper (and/or there's more renewables pushing down prices for longer periods of the day)
Yeah I’ve never understood this for lithium ion systems. Maybe some parallel or series the cells differently to get different total max power outputs? But I don’t expect that would affect cost either way.
With flow batteries there are definitely differences since the power and energy components of the system can each be scaled independently from each other. Ie need more total energy then just expand the amount of liquid electrolyte storage you have.