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Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

(cleantechnica.com)
131 points mg | 1 comments | 26 Mar 21 20:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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rich_sasha ◴[26 Mar 21 22:13 UTC] No.26597628[source]▶
If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
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kleton ◴[26 Mar 21 22:19 UTC] No.26597691[source]▶
Would need $20/KWh battery storage to be competitive with nuclear for baseload according to https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 At the moment, we're at about $800/KWh.
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jxidjhdhdhdhfhf ◴[26 Mar 21 22:44 UTC] No.26597895[source]▶
Aren't car battery packs under $100/KWh? Is there some other factor which drives up the price for grid level storage?
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manfredo ◴[26 Mar 21 23:30 UTC] No.26598247[source]▶
The factor that drives up price for grid level storage is scale. Only ~300 GWh worth of batteries is produced globally each year. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity each hour. If anyone tries to install battery storage at a significant scale, demand will vastly outstrip supply and drive prices up.
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jeremysalwen ◴[27 Mar 21 00:26 UTC] No.26598590[source]▶
Assuming there aren't economies of scale. Demand for solar had gone way up in recent decades (e.g. in germany, before it was cheap), and the price subsequently went down.
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mlyle ◴[27 Mar 21 00:38 UTC] No.26598675[source]▶
It's not clear batteries will do the same. While there's been effort to make batteries less reliant on scarce natural resources and mining, there's no guarantee we really get there. If we don't, price can be expected to go up, not down, with scale.

I would bet on price going down slightly with scale, but one can't really tell now what will happen: it might go up a lot, it might go down a lot, or it might stay flat.

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pfdietz ◴[27 Mar 21 00:56 UTC] No.26598795[source]▶
There are thousands of different chemistries for batteries. The nuclear stans are betting that all of them fail.
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1. imtringued ◴[28 Mar 21 10:59 UTC] No.26609326[source]▶
These discussions are always super boring. There are dozens of technologies that can scale to the level needed but everyone goes goes lithium ion and pumped hydro as if everything else didn't exist.

Sure cell batteries might not work, we can try out flow batteries, we can try liquid metal batteries, we can try hydraulic hydro storage, we can try out hydrogen, we can try compressed air, we can try electrolyzing iron or aluminum, we can try another dozen different things and it is highly likely that at least 3 will work out just fine.