For grid storage second hand batteries might be fine. If taking them out of a scrapped car is feasible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqlOlqK_ot8
2nd life use cases for cheap, mass produced batteries like this are more common than you think.
The first location I looked at (link is not working :(), it relies on building two dams on rivers (which is something we tend to do less not more) and would flood some houses ...
And there is supposedly a price estimate, but it's just an A, B, C, D or E ranking could not find some costs to make comparison with battery storage for example.
- Removed EV subsidy
- Scrapped Lake Onslow seasonal pumped hydro storage
- Removed generational smoking ban (made it to 18yo like most countries)
- Gave 50% discount to heated tobacco products (aka IQOS)
- Gave a tip whose projects will be fast tracked
- Reduced housing insulation minimums
- Terminated new inter-island ferry project to replace aging ferries (tbh this one was getting out of proportion)
- Reintroduced tax interest write-off for landlords who rent their houses
- Removed free school launches for poorest country schools
Their goal was to end government spending, but giving $2b+ to countries richest people seems opposite.
And to give them credit here's couple of good things that will definitely help property market:
- Ability to import abroad-certified building supplies (atm there's a building supply monomopoly)
- Ability to build up 60sqm backyard homes without consent
- Densification plans
Bear lake Idaho has been talking about putting in pumped storage since the 2000s. On paper, it's pretty much the perfect geography for it. However, various concerns from the impact on local fishing to the impacts on the lakebed have ground that process to a halt. It's a 20+ year project that's gone nowhere.
That's why I'm largely negative on pumped hydro. On paper it seems nice, in practice it's almost impossible to get off the ground. Batteries, on the other hand, take almost no effort to install.
Yup. It might be possible to overbuild solar/wind to solve the problem (just need enough juice to offset the night). Won't be possible with current chemistries to have enough power to cover cloudy days or snow-covered solar panels.
> it seems while folks have been gnashing teeth on how expensive they are
This to me seems like a fixed perception based on outdated information. Batteries were quite expensive and required loads of rare earth/horrible chemicals to produce... 30 years ago when NiCd was fairly prominent. Now they are dirt cheap and due to get even cheaper with sodium ion coming to market. We are already manufacturing TWh of batteries yearly. Enough that we could theoretically have a full day backup everywhere in 10 to 20 years without any growth in manufacturing capacity.
Do you mean peak powerplants will become obsolete? As far as I know, in many places peak powerplants are hydroelectric, which in the future, aided by local batteries, will allow filling the reservoir lakes to higher limits and covering greater peaks - eg. malfunctions - which in turn will make grids more stable.
The big unknown, as far as I understand, is whether or not we have enough rare minerals to cover enough TWh of the daily peaks of energy-demands so we can have a flat daily curve. I'm sure in 10-15 years time the "renewables" will look a bit different than what we expect them today.
Who are the major players in industry grade solutions for this?
Tesla? BYD? Hitachi? Siemens?
Sungrow and CATL as examples.
https://www.power-eng.com/energy-storage/batteries/spearmint...
https://en.sungrowpower.com/newsDetail/2127/sungrow-supplies...
If you have a couple of brown field acres of land next to an existing substation you can just buy and install containerized batteries. And you don't need specialized contractors to handle the job either. Pour concrete pads, forklift operators to take batteries off the truck and put them on the pad. And then standard HV techs to hook them up.
And the permitting and environmental review is nil. Go ahead try and get a pumped storage system permitted somewhere.
A fun one. Three gorges dam. You could replace the whole thing with solar and batteries for the cost it took to build it. And the area covered by solar panels would be the same as the lake behind the dam. Except you can put the solar panels on some ecologically and economically low value land where ever.
Another win is that you can put something below the solar panels, even grow shade-preferring plants below them. This is being done in many places. Otherwise it could be a storage area, a light industrial facility, a shopping mall, even a sports field. And for all the battery storage you can afford, of course.
There is a whole interest in agrivoltaics as it's become apparent that the land under the solar panels remains productive. In the western US there is a lot of completely unproductive land to put solar panels on. But in the east and midwest being able to continue to use the land for agriculture is a win.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/agrivoltaics-solar-and-agr...
Random thought about fallow land under solar panels is the soil probably absorbs carbon over time.