Comment by Veedrac
1 day ago
I'm not really following. You said, "I don’t think we can scale up storage enough at any reasonable cost." We checked the math. The math said that even with pessimistic numbers, that assume no cost improvement and that everything deprecates as fast as the batteries, the amount of storage needed was readily affordable. You agree that there's a reasonable chance the price could go down, and agree that parts other than the battery chemistry do indeed last much longer.
Isn't that the whole debate? What are we arguing about at this point?
> the amount of storage needed was readily affordable.
I'm sorry, I don't think that cost is readily affordable!
> You agree that there's a reasonable chance the price could go down
I think the most likely outcome is that the price goes down. But I also think it's possible that the price goes up (decreasing returns to scale) as you try to build more.
> agree that parts other than the battery chemistry do indeed last much longer.
We often depreciate substations at 40 years despite parts inside lasting longer, and we have a whole lot of experience to value that. We don't have a lot of experience with long term lifecycle of batteries. E.g. recycling and decommissioning of batteries at scale is still a big unknown.