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I want to replace peaker plants with storage. Somehow I don't think the economics work out. Do you disagree? Even if we rebuild the whole continental US power
by nordify 11y ago
I want to replace peaker plants with storage. Somehow I don't think the economics work out. Do you disagree?
Even if we rebuild the whole continental US power grid (that's a lot more than $50 billion) to cope with the demands of using storage, it is unclear to me if we can build enough hydro to replace peaker plants. Apparently all other storage technologies other than hydro are cost-ineffective and/or do not have enough scale to solve the problem. Do you know if there is enough geography to go around for all the hydro we need or if there really are any cost-efficient alternatives?
- Retric 11y agoYou don't need to replace the grid, just add more capacity. The economics for ~100% up-time only work out when utility's are regulated to act that way. That means spare capacity and backups for your backups. As such I feel a few Peaker plants are actually a good idea. They should not be turned on every day and should be able to pick up the stack when unexpected things happen. In terms of hydro, we can build them to store ~12 hours worth of US electricity demand. Past that the geography still works just fine, but excess production becomes cheaper than excess storage. PS: Don't forget we already use pumped hydro. It's just a maximization problem where cost of excess capacity vs. extra storage.