3 ms·

You're right about #3 - it would be hundreds of trillions, not thousands.

• ben_w 7y ago
  6. Your 400 TWh number is for 24 hours, not “simultaneous no wind and nighttime”, so even if you include all power and not just electricity (even though power intended for non-electrical use can be stored in other things than batteries) you’re now talking $40 Tr, worldwide, spread over however many years you want to build this collection of batteries. Except that’s $29 Tr when using the cheapest currently available batteries that I’ve seen. 7. The lifetime cost of the battery and a PV cell is cheaper than the fuel in a coal plant even when the cost of the coal plant itself has been written off, so each incremental step of that combination is still profitable compared to that particularly fossil fuel. I’m not sure about the cost of wind or other fossil fuels, but the combined cost of PV+battery that anything else has to beat is 5¢/kWh. EDIT: 8. Land costs. The energy density of LiIon batteries is “250-693 Wh/L”. A high efficiency 1 m^2 sun-tracking PV panel with the lowest energy density battery would produce up to 400 W * 12 hours = 4800 Wh = 19.2 litres = a layer behind the PV panel of 1.92 cm thickness. Why is this supposed to be a criticism?