Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/12/12/analysis-finds-anytime-electricity-from-solar-available-as-battery-costs-plummet/

by Matrixik • 7 months ago

138 218 7 months ago

pv-magazine-usa.com

ramshanker• 7 months ago

Has any production battery become cheaper than LEAC ACID for computer UPS ? I have not seen new cheaper UPS getting launched.

fyrn_3• 7 months ago

Many "solar power stations" can be used as a UPS, with competitive switching speed. Just not sold under that label. You can even get one made entirely in the US, but it will cost you: https://enphase.com/store/portable-energy/iq-powerpack-1500-...

But yeah, the cheap chinese "power stations" run circles around most UPS capacity wise. UPS market is very complacent.

jcheng• 7 months ago

Seems like an opportunity for someone

rightbyte• 7 months ago

UPS is kinda different since they are hardly used. I haven't done the calculation but it would guess lead acid is still cheaper?

PaulKeeble• 7 months ago

Lead Acid as far as I know is about $500 per KWh of usable space due to their depth of discharge being limited to about 50% and then they last about 3 to 5 years if they kept within their 500 cycles at most. Whereas a LiPho battery will last 10-15 years, 6000 cycles and costs about £120 a KWh. So I have no idea how UPS based on lead acid is ending up cheaper, its not based on the battery tech cheapness.

literalAardvark• 7 months ago

UPS aren't really cheaper.

Sure, up front you're paying very little for that box that can run your PC for an hour.

But over 2-4 years you'll have to replace that UPS after it fails catastrophically in really dumb ways, and that's if you're lucky and it doesn't also burn your house down, whereas a proper storage system will last for a long, long time with more capability.

In my business I've never had a deskside UPS live longer than that.

And yes, we don't buy the ultra expensive ones. That's true.

Rebelgecko• 7 months ago

Some of the power stations from Ecoflow/Anker/Bluetti are competitive in terms of price and capacity while still having a fast enough switchover for UPS purposes.

They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)

Nextgrid• 7 months ago

Problem with Lithium ones is that they tend to be quite flammable. Lead acid is mostly inert I believe?

onraglanroad• 7 months ago

Weirdly, none of the many phones, tablets and laptops I've owned have ever caught on fire.

I guess I've just been lucky.

andruby• 7 months ago

LFP is a lot safer than NMC. I think it's almost on par with Lead-Acid.

SigmundA• 7 months ago

The acid in lead acid is sulfuric acid and if overcharged vents hydrogen gas, thats why they need a ventilated space typically. Sealed lead acid have safety vents that might pop if enough pressure builds.

They are most certainly not inert, they just have well established safety and charging protocols and are not used in very high quantities together because of their low energy density and cycle life.

LFP batteries which have iron phosphate cathodes are very stable compared to colbalt based batteries that tend to have catastrophic failures due to overcharge causing cathode failure. LFP have higher cycle life and are cheaper and typically whats used for storage and application where the loss in erergy density is not a big deal.

ulnarkressty• 7 months ago

Eaton and APC at least have models with LFP chemistry, with comparable prices across power ratings. The LFP will be more expensive though due to the increased longevity, at least until lead-acid ones stops being produced.

rssoconnor• 7 months ago

Do not try this at home, but I replaced the lead acid battery in my UPS with a LFP battery. From what I read online, the charging curves for lead acid batteries and LFP batteries are very similar. The LFP batteries have a slightly higher charging voltage, so I expect my LFP battery to only charge upto about 80% capacity or so due to the charging voltage being slightly too low. I'm hoping the battery will last 10 years instead of 2 or 3 years.

Do not try this at home, as changing battery chemistry is quite ill advised.

JoeAltmaier2• 7 months ago

$33 per MWh for solar. What is it for coal or natural gas? Maybe half that?

Panino• 7 months ago

Why would you think that? Solar and wind are both far cheaper than fossil fuels even ignoring the problems caused by coal and methane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

mikeyouse• 7 months ago

Fuel cost for gas/coal can be rounded to $2/MWH - so then you need to amortize the cost of the plant over all the energy produced and you get to roughly 2x fuel cost for nat gas plants and 3x - 5x for coal ones. See page 10 here for sensitivity to fuel costs though;

https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...

fyrn_3• 7 months ago

In the US as of June 2024: Gas peaker plants are: $110-228 And Gas combined cycle: $45-108

PV in the US is also more expensive than globally however: $38-171 for Utility scale with storage, when including subsidies, $60-210 when not.

Coal is so much worse in every cost metric than gas combined cycle it's not worth considering, even leaving the pollution aside.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/34-%20Exh...

xbmcuser• 7 months ago

$100+ meh for natural gas. Solar and battery is so cheap that arab countries are now building large solar and battery systems to save money instead of burning oil and gas. Where as in the US the other big oil and gas producer wholesale electricity prices for Natural Gas is around $100-150 mwh which is cheaper than coal and the major reason coal got pushed out. Then we have China and India where coal is around $40-50 mwh.

So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.

pfdietz7• 7 months ago

When we get to the point where resistive heat from PV is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, the revolution will truly shift into high gear.

toomuchtodo6• 7 months ago

Solar and storage is the cheapest form of power now. Prices for both will continue to decline.

Battery storage hits $65/MWh – a tipping point for solar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251705 - December 2025

mullingitover• 7 months ago

It's already cheaper to demolish an existing coal plant that's already paid for and replace it with solar + battery. Solar and battery brand new buildout, plus their maintenance overhead, dominates coal even when you only count coal's maintenance cost.

People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.

luqtas6• 7 months ago

Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.

you simply can't say this. despite the lobby against it, solar and wind energy have lifespans of around 20 years and afterwards, it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do. not even counting the amount of NASTY chemicals going into the production of solar panels. these are sometimes permanent and will have a great long term impact on ecology if we just start destroying plants to substitute with "green" alternatives mindlessly

one can also make a point that despite wind generators metals and batteries being almost to 100% recyclable, it's heck expensive to do and we don't have infrastructure. a comparison cosidering everything involved may show that hydroelectrics, nuclear, geo-thermal and heck even gas may have a similar or better impact depending on location

aoeusnth1• 7 months ago

Curious, where do you get your news? What gives you the impression that coal or gas would possibly be cheaper than solar?

ceejayoz3• 7 months ago

Doesn't matter; they'll keep up with the same talking points.

They're still flogging the "vast areas of the earth" one nearly two years after someone debunked it and they said "very encouraging!" to that info.

Now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259179

Early 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415988

aswegs8• 7 months ago

Am I dumb or does that sentence "Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet" make no sense grammatically?

FfejL• 7 months ago

The actual headline is:

Analysis finds "anytime electricity" from solar available as battery costs plummet.

Those missing quotes go a long way to making the headline make sense.

k1t• 7 months ago

I think they meant "viable" instead of "available"

malfist• 7 months ago

Its still really confusing. A better title would be "When solar power from batteries are available, costs plummet"

Or since power has no provenience, "When batteries are available, electricity prices fall"

evrimoztamur• 7 months ago

Baseload, ideally.

pqdbr• 7 months ago

Came in the comment section looking to see if it was just me. Had to read it 4 times

fweimer2• 7 months ago

I think “anytime electricity” is a noun phrase, and the rest is just the usual headline shortening. So something like this:

(Analysis finds ((anytime electricity) from solar) available) (as (battery costs) plummet)

In the unsuccessful parse, “anytime“ introduces a relative clause.

(Analysis finds [that] (anytime ((electricity from solar) [is] available))) ???

ttul• 7 months ago

If they were going for maximum confusion, why not write, “Solar battery costs plummet analysis findings back anytime electricity availability”?

Subject (((((Solar battery) costs) plummet) analysis) findings)

Verb [back]

Object (anytime (electricity availability))

Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.

Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.

Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.

We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.

robwwilliams• 7 months ago

Brilliant <ttul>! I would have needed help from Claude to tangle it up so well and on topic. But that last lucid sentence is rubbish.

Etheryte• 7 months ago

Falling battery prices make storing solar electricity for later use economically viable. This means we can use electricity from solar anytime around the clock. Even accounting for the cost of batteries, it's still competitive with other sources of electricity.

jt2190• 7 months ago

The source report

“How cheap is battery storage?“ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

In short: Cheaper batteries plus already cheap solar means that solar is now a cheap source of “anytime electricity”.

neom• 7 months ago

To me the context string is just a bit...lumpy or something, I don't think it's directly about the grammar. I would have written something more like: a battery costs plummet, analasis finds "anytime electricity" is now available from solar.

state_less• 7 months ago

The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.

I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!

ak2174• 7 months ago

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

sdoering• 7 months ago

Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range).

But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).

But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.

Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.

api3• 7 months ago

It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past.

Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.

I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.

calvinmorrison• 7 months ago

good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!

antonvs3• 7 months ago

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate …

Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

alexose• 7 months ago

In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.

Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.

I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.

venturecruelty• 7 months ago

We are the petro-state, and they're our aging leaders.

pfdietz7• 7 months ago

cycle 10000 times

This is truly important, allowing the plummeting cost of the batteries to be amortized over so many cycles.

jasondigitized• 7 months ago

I take solace in the invisible hand which, in the longer term, ultimately directs greedy capitalists. Water finds its level, etc. etc.

chrisweekly• 7 months ago

Yes! It's awesome!

(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)

epistasis6• 7 months ago

You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this observation is so old that it's hard to find the higher quality initial graphs)

https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/

Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.

solarengineer• 7 months ago

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

10 new plants at USD 2.7 Billion each. They take six years to build. USD 2/Watt. They have standardised designs, have invested in grownig their manpower and know-how.

ZeroGravitas2• 7 months ago

Original source of that observation was Auke Hoekstra nearly a decade ago:

https://x.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1730992987021226002

jauntywundrkind• 7 months ago

In general it's obvious this is the trend & amazing.

It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...

codersfocus• 7 months ago

Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country?

e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?

hn_throwaway_99• 7 months ago

High voltage transmission lines are really quite efficient, and concentrating generation is usually the right choice.

That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.

epistasis6• 7 months ago

Concentrating generation made sense when transmission was cheap in comparison.

But one effect of ever cheaper solar is that transmission costs start to dominate generation costs, because transmission is not getting cheaper.

Cheap solar and storage requires rethinking every aspect and all conventional wisdom about the grid. Storage in particular is a massive game changer on a scale that few in the industry understand.

estimator7292• 7 months ago

We don't put all our coal and gas plants out in the desert, they're next to and within our cities.

Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.

Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.

DamonHD2• 7 months ago

In the GB (UK mainland) grid only ~2% of energy is lost in transmission; distribution is more typically ~5%. And we did put most of our big thermal power generation in the middle of the country, which is now causing difficulties as we need to re-jig transmission to accept offshore wind and interconnectors.

Solar PV on rooftops is great, injecting power directly at the load, eliminating transmission and distribution losses until there is excess to spill back to grid. It would be helpful if we stopped running an entirely artificial timetable in winter that demands heavy activity well outside daylight hours, so that demand better matched availability.

coryrc2• 7 months ago

Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country.

Depends on the country.

In Washington state, our power sources are not next to our population centers; in fact many are in the center of our state! And our state would be the 87th-biggest-country out of 197 in the world.

USA averages 6% transmission loss. New long-distance transmission lines are HVDC and have far less loss over distance. But people oppose them for dumb and good reasons; why would I in Washington state want to have good connections to California so the local producers can reduce supply and drive up prices?

aaronblohowiak• 7 months ago

technically or politically?

bilbo0s• 7 months ago

Don't know about either of those? But militarily, it's suicide to set up all your generation in one area.

Always overwhelm the enemy when possible. Even when he's planning.

ericd• 7 months ago

Distributed. New transmission lines have big nimby issues, and many existing corridors are already getting overloaded. There are recurring attempts to reform the permitting process (in the last Congress it was called EPRA/energy permitting reform act), but… we’ll see.

Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.

wrsh072• 7 months ago

Casey Handmer is a huge solar bull and his estimate is that solar becomes cheaper than any other form of electricity even when generated from northern states by 2030 (likely sooner)

Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.

However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.

So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^

With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available) But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.

^ but not others! Eg if you're willing to discuss tradeoffs you might find dozens of gw available most of the time https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air

^^ patio11 has a good podcast about this https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-ai-energy... Disclaimer: my employer apparently sponsored that episode

DamonHD2• 7 months ago

IMHO "efficient" isn't really the right term in your second para. The PV generation per W incoming is actually a little lower at higher ambient temperatures, but is otherwise fairly constant.

I assume that you mean higher kWh/y/kWp, ie you get more generation out of a given solar panel in the south each year.

grensley• 7 months ago

The transmission network is underbuilt, so it's mostly best to generate closer to where it's consumed (especially for data centers).

We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale

There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.

lukan3• 7 months ago

If you would have a high voltage DC transmission line already, linking the dessert and the clouded cities far away, then it makes sense. I think it is worth building them, but it is a big investment. Many lines are proposed, some already build, but with the current US administration I don't think it is a priority.

So decentral is the current way to go.

That is the current state in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#/map/3

empiricus• 7 months ago

All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?

Carlseymanh• 7 months ago

One of the few problem of nuclear is summer time water use. Combining solar with nuclear would be the best option in my opinion.

datadrivenangel• 7 months ago

Nuclear plants, like most large thermal plants, are almost always located near large bodies of water and return that water downstream so it doesn't really matter?

Zigurd2• 7 months ago

Historically the biggest impediment to nuclear power has been incompetent construction management and project management. Incompetent is a strong word for it but nuclear power plants are the largest capital equipment purchases on the planet. Even modern so-called modular designs can't save poor project management, and learn as you go engineering.

That so mundane and should be easy to fix, right? That's why I bring up scale. Nobody has experience running projects that big. Some things are just too big to manage.

jansan• 7 months ago

This probably depends a lot on how close you are to the equator. Here in Germany output of solar in winter is negligible, and if there is no wind, which can happen for several consecutive weeks, we need a backup. No utilities company will build a fossil power plant that will be used only a few weeks per year, so our government will have to step in to make sure this happens.

On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.

morsch2• 7 months ago

Here are some numbers: January 2025, the output of solar was ~1500 GWh, it peaked in June at 10500 GWh. So the lowest output was about 15% of the maximum, this year.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar power generation, there is never no wind, though looking at those charts there were 4 weeks in the late summer of 2023 when production was low consecutively, between 700 and 1000 GWh.

ViewTrick10022• 7 months ago

Wind power. Mix with emergency reserves running on open cycle gas turbines, if deemed necessary, preferably running on with carbon neutral fuel. Optimize for lowest possible CAPEX.

That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.

tootie• 7 months ago

The next hot thing (pun intended) is geothermal. The tech to drill deep enough opens up the possibility of extracting geothermal energy in most of the world. The tech exists and is deployed. Scaling is not yet proven but is very plausible. Geothermal runs 24/7 and can be clean base load power.

epistasis6• 7 months ago

Not having to burn gas is cheaper than burning gas. There will be a decade or two of transition with rarely used gas turbines getting their yearly packet in a short amount of time. Eventually other tech will take over, or the gas infrastructure will pare down and be cost optimized for its new role or rare usage.

Europe, and Germany and the UK in particular, are really poorly suited to take advantage of this new cheap technology. If these countries don't figure out alternatives, the countries with better and cheaper energy resources will take over energy intensive industries.

This is not a problem for solar and storage to solve, it's a problem that countries with poor resources need to solve if they want to compete in global industry.

rgmerk2• 7 months ago

From a global perspective, people living in temperate areas are actually the exception, not the rule (if a disproportionately economically successful exception).

The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.

tim3332• 7 months ago

Possible things are to over provision solar, and set it up further south with a high voltage dc cable. We almost had a Morocco - UK power setup but the current government said no to it.

buckle80174• 7 months ago

Ok now shift summer sun into winter.

gpm5• 7 months ago

Just build more solar. You generate excess electricity in summer and enough in winter. This isn't a problem.

Youden• 7 months ago

I live in Switzerland and my house currently consumes 35-40kWh of electricity each day. I'm in the process of installing as many panels as possible on my roof and right now in winter, they're forecasted to produce ~18kWh on a good day.

While it'll be possible for me to be more than fully self-sufficient in summer, I'd need roughly 3x more panels to come close to having a chance in winter, plus far more battery storage than is reasonable.

I suspect it might be more doable somewhere with milder winters, like Italy but especially as you go further north and the days get shorter, there's just no chance.

For it to work in places with large seasonal differences, we need something else (e.g. nuclear) and/or storage.

buckle80174• 7 months ago

The over build causes these rosey projections about power prices from solar to turn on their heads.

6.5 cents/kWh is pretty good, 65 cents though is terrible.

Actually difference is more than 10:1 too

apexalpha3• 7 months ago

A very large part of the people on this planet have (almost) no winters.

We could start with those ~3 billion people.

Also wind has proven to be a very good supplement to pv.

buckle80174• 7 months ago

Those people already use almost no energy compared to everybody else.

jmward012• 7 months ago

Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drastically reshape energy production. Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.

gpm5• 7 months ago

I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons).

Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.

pfdietz7• 7 months ago

The point being made is that if smoothing over time becomes sufficiently cheap then smoothing over space is supplanted.

It would be nice if this happened before the next Carrington Event (or the next nuclear war with orbital EMP weapons.)

jmward012• 7 months ago

I think there is a calculation that makes the point a little clearer. There is some distance, x, where it is cheaper to transport the electrons mechanically than it is to push them over a wire. Every month that distance gets shorter as battery prices drop. This gets even more advantageous for batteries when you start talking about variable use and generation since it is easier to change the destination or source of a battery container than it is to change the destination or source of transmission lines. My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly. Imagine a small city getting a local electricity provider. I actually think the way it is likely to go is that energy consumers (cities, factories, etc) will start installing backup power via battery shipment and then slowly start disconnecting from the larger grid as the cost of the battery container delivered power dips below the cost for transmission line delivered. The infrastructure is just so much more efficient for most use cases because we already have that infrastructure for shipping other goods.

laurencerowe• 7 months ago

I don't think this makes sense. Rail freight is about 20x more expensive than transmission at current battery densities.

Transmission: $41.50 per MWh per 1,000 miles. https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf

Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.

adrianN5• 7 months ago

You probably don’t want to use regular batteries for that. I’d go with shipping energy as aluminum or something like that and use aluminum-air batteries. But regular hvdc seems really hard to beat with shipping of any kind.

ben_w9• 7 months ago

Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible.

Not at current power densities.

The bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives is quite high; the power delivery of station wagon filled with batteries is on the low side compared to a wire made from the same material as that station wagon and buried under the road the wagon would have been driving along.

Even for liquid and gas fuels, people make dedicated pipelines rather than doing it all by truck and train.

Now, if someone figures out how to get something like metastable pumped hafnium isomers working… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy

ndsipa_pomu3• 7 months ago

Surely batteries will be used in conjunction with solar, and as solar is already distributed (except for high latitudes), the need for power distribution will diminish as once you're setup with solar and batteries, you only really need the transmission lines to sell any excess power. Presumably, once solar is rolled out at scale, there will be little demand for purchasing excess power.

neuroelectron• 7 months ago

For about $100 the black friday, i got a ridiculous overkill LFP battery for my router and fiber modem. Would last about a week with no power.

apexalpha3• 7 months ago

It’s somewhat humbling that this is essentially entirely done by one country.

For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.

nutjob23• 7 months ago

It's amazing what you can achieve when you control everything in a nation and can execute anyone who disagrees.

ponector• 7 months ago

If it was a real reason of their success we would see amazing results in russia and their friends: Iran, Korea and other countries.

ben_w9• 7 months ago

Of "control everything" and "execute anyone who disagrees", only the former is useful; the latter is kinda why Russia (and the USSR before it) are failing despite also having a government that could control everything.

You only achieve greatness when your control gets you to do the correct thing. Strong governments make decisions faster, not better. Freedom to debate, to speak out against bad governance, to speak truth to power, democracy, all that's a system to keep a government pointing in the right direction, it slows down decision making but (generally) also increases the accuracy of that decision making.

Same deal with free markets in capitalism: its a feedback mechanism, Tim Cook can announce the Vision Pro and Zuckerberg the Metaverse, direct their teams to spend whatever number of billions was necessary to develop them, market says no.

alsetmusic• 7 months ago

Name checks out.

pfdietz7• 7 months ago

They have a new kind of R&D organization that may be worth emulating.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-has-invented-a-whole-new...

(partially behind paywall, sorry)

rstuart4133• 7 months ago

Yes. It's amazing, isn't it.

Too put the facts crudely, the world would be fucked climate change wise without China. The oft heard "why do anything while China is the problem" would be hilarious, if people repeating bald-faced bullshit didn't grate so much.

Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

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