Comment by phil21
4 months ago
It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point.
The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.
The storage needed to turn solar into a reliable (as any comparable fossil fuel power plant) dispatchable source of power, plus the cost of the solar in the first place, costs less than other sources of dispatch-able power (like gas) in sunny places per kwh.
It also scales down better (though not perfectly).
Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a sunny place.
Ignoring sunk capital costs into other energy infrastructure of course. If you already have a working nuclear power plant you're not going to save money by randomly turning it off and switching to something else, for instance.
Well, I certainly can’t make a couple weeks of battery storage pencil out vs. a fossil fuel generator at this point.
The math actually gets worse once you get into combined cycle natural gas at scale.
You I suppose could make an argument that load curtailment is cheaper than planning for the current grid reliability everyone has gotten used to over the past 50 years, but it would be a societal shift.
Seasonal energy storage is what is interesting to discuss, and of course is where that last 2% of grid reliability comes from. It’s also the most expensive part of running a grid. The first watts are basically free, the last are very expensive.
I’d love to be proven wrong within the next decade though! I just personally don’t see the battery storage price going down at the same rates it has been simply due to structural raw material input cost reasons - short of a breakthrough in chemistry. I think we are getting close to the maximum savings achieved by economies of scale with current technology.
You shouldn't need a couple weeks of battery storage - if you're in a sunny place. For example Las Vegas should be able to reach 97% uptime of constant energy supply (greater than your typical fossil fuel plants uptime) by building ~17 hours worth of storage and ~6x the amount of power needed in the nameplate capacity of the solar panels. Even a slight bit of curtailment, the kind already done on western grids, to reduce load when the weather calls for a bunch of clouds, or uncorrelated energy production (e.g. wind, which won't necessarily go down on the odd cloudy day, or for on-grid cases just transmission lines to solar somewhere else, or a backup generator), pushes that much further to 100%.
Seasonal energy storage is uninteresting, you just overbuild the energy production instead. This is already done for every existing type of energy production to account for seasonal variation in demand.
If batteries became cheap enough where you could do days instead of hours affordably it pushes this sort of calculus into less sunny places as well, and there's every reason to think that they will become that cheap (perhaps not cheap enough to make weeks reasonable though).
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