Re:In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms t...
by Brakenshire on Sunday August 18, 2019 @09:37AM
(#20730050)
At the moment Lithium batteries are cost effective for about 2-4 hours of storage, if you halve costs that would go down to 4-8 hours, but the point is that it’s very unlikely that you will ever get reductions large enough to store energy over weeks or months. Even 2 days would require costs to fall to 10% of where they are now.
Re:In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms t...
by lovemenot on Sunday August 18, 2019 @09:52AM
(#20730128)
There seems to be an error in those assumptions.
Halving costs need not be equivalent to doubling of economic capacity. It might just as well cause an order of magnitude or higher of increased capacity.
I would not be able to estimate those factors, but it's almost certainly incorrect to assume a linear relationship between cost and productive capacity.
Re:In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms t...
by Brakenshire on Sunday August 18, 2019 @01:17PM
(#20731490)
Each halving in cost doubles the amount of storage you can apply to any one project for the same cost. 2 hour storage on a solar or wind farm costs around about £5 per MWh, levelized over the batteries lifetime. There is no way to get around that, as far as I can see.
From an engineering point of view, this statement probably should be correct. Hydrogen in particular has such wonderful potential.
But, we have to consider future economies of scale in production. We don't know how long it's cost-performance may continue to improve, but of the three technologies mentioned, unfortunately only LiIon is currently on an improvement curve that makes it feasible for large scale storage in the short-to-medium term.