Currently;

[1] https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/batteries-and-energy-storage/n...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-24/community-battery-yac...

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-05/community-battery-in-...

'Community' local area batteries are $1 million (AU) and service ~ 200 homes (at $5,000 per home across a decade) with some 280 kilowatt-hours of storage, soaking up power during the day from rooftop solar | wind and feeding it back at night | during lulls.

These complement hybrid smart grids and greatly reduce fossil fuel usage at approx $500 per home per year.

Early days, time will tell.

> Renewables without grid scale storage are a pipe dream.

Renewables don't technically need storage, as long as you overbuild them and expand the grid to average over regional variability. Storage just obviates the need for expanding the grid. This was all known decades ago when I was studying engineering. The technology is not the problem, the political will has always been the problem.

It's funny how you sweep _trillions_ of investment to get back to 2010 levels of electric supply as lack of political will.

It's funny how you sweep the _tens of trillions_ spent on invasions in the middle east to achieve that stable 2010 electric supply, to say nothing of the millions of lives lost.

Yeah, "lack of political will" is exactly the problem, because the incentives to continue spending in the current manner are considerable.

> Western Australia putting 1,000 PV-plus-battery standalone power systems into remote and rural areas

https://www.energy-storage.news/western-australia-putting-10...

That's wonderful. Now they only need to build another 299,000 of those units to meet the current energy demand in Western Australia.

No they don't, but if they did, then they could use the money they have saved by rolling these out today to pay for some of them.

> The initial rollout seeks to replace reliance on about 762km of overhead power lines, in the process freeing up land for agricultural use and crucially reducing the risk of bushfires caused by problems with power infrastructure going to remote areas.

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

Suggests you'd need enough batteries to run Western Australia for 1 hour and enough green hydrogen produced to power the region for 11 days. But mostly it would be wind and solar.

If for whatever reason you think Australia isn't about to start making Green Hydrogen at scale, they also provide numbers if you want to go hard on batteries.

You'd use 150% more solar and 10x more batteries, but 6% less wind (and no power-to-x turbines) this would cost a whopping 50% more overall and be 10 hours of battery storage.

> No they don't, but if they did, then they could use the money they have saved by rolling these out today to pay for some of them.

Wonderful, they spend $37 million on 1,000. Now they just need to use the savings from the $37 million to offset the next 130 trillion dollars needed for the next 299,000 installations.

The savings come not from how much you spend, but how much you save.

So, they don't need to buy and burn fuel, they don't need to build or maintain transmission, they don't need to fight as many bushfires, they get to sell the land that was previously occupied by pylons etc. etc.

The claim was that batteries didn't exist and/or were too expensive.

And yet here, as in EVs, there is a situation were cold hard cash dictates that rolling out batteries is a good idea. And that's what's driving the massive global expansion of battery production.