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> It doesn't really need to get a lot cheaper. It's already cheaper than coal. I’m tired of this claim. It’s cheaper when you ignore the necessary backup powe

> It doesn't really need to get a lot cheaper. It's already cheaper than coal. I’m tired of this claim. It’s cheaper when you ignore the necessary backup power plants, yes. That’s not a real-world system though and Germany’s electricity prices disagree with you.

epistasis 6y ago
No, it's cheaper even with battery backup: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 Stored solar, no subsidies: $81-$140/MWh Coal: $65-$159/MWh And then with solar, 40%-70% of consumption will be direct without storage, at $29-$42/MWh, which pulls the all-in cost of solar way below coal. And that's for projects deployed in 2020. Wait 5 years, the typical timeline for bidding and installation for utilities, and any utility that isnt planning for massive renewables and storage is simply bilking their customers. Germany was built a decade ago. Using it as a point of reference is deceptive.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Are there enough lithium reserves to store billions of kwh? (Ignoring their usage in cars, phones, medical devices, and everything else)
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Yes, we haven't even been looking for lithium until recently, and the availability of it has more than doubled in just a few years. (Note that a lot of lithium comes from "resources" and not from "reserves," as the latter term usually refers to mining rather than brining.) For current chemistries, cobalt is more of a concern, but that's mostly a concern for car batteries, and the concern is more about the terrible conditions of extraction (some child labor from small scale mining) than the total amount. For stationary storage, sodium behaves a lot like lithium, but is far heavier. And there are all sorts of flow chemistries that have barely been examined. However I think the lithium train has left the station, unless there's some sort of serious market interference to cause huge unexpected shortages, there's little chance for lithium competitors to catch up within the next 15 years.
- kortilla 6y ago
  What chart shows battery backup on that page? What is the sample solar field + batteries that puts out at a cheaper rate than an equivalent coal plant? Or is this just theoretical not based on any real deployment?
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Last chart on the page, and on PDF page 10. Lazard has not revealed the full details of their methodology, but there are deployments with storage all the time, they tend just not to get any press unless Tesla is involved. And until FERC's recent order 841, it was pretty much impossible to even connect storage on most grids. Here's a summary of hybrid projects (generation plus storage) as of last year (page 6): https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/Panel-1-Gorman-AD20-9-000.pdf https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/Panel-1-Gor... Most new renewables deployments in the US will contain storage of some sort in the future.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  You're double counting the without storage benefit, it's already factored in to the $81-140 price. The plant they list has 100 MW of solar, 50 MW/200 MWh of storage. Assuming a CF of 0.3 that makes it 720 MWh per day, 73% of it not touching the battery. If you built a plant that only supplies power at night it would be way more expensive. It's not yet cheaper than coal if you wanted to run the whole grid on PV + batteries, not close. You need a lot more than 2 hours of nameplate capacity storage per plant. But as you say, the costs are rapidly falling. The coming EV transition will provide significant economies of scale. And this is also valuing carbon at $0, which is a horrendous distortion.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're not correct. You seem to be saying that the "cost of storage" numbers already include averaging the storage cost between storage and not storage, but I can't get anything like that to work our to reasonably plausible numbers. Check page 8 of the PDF of their very slightly fuller explanation: https://www.lazard.com/media/451418/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-60.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451418/lazards-levelized-cost-o... The project is cheaper than wholesale arbitrage because they don't have to pay wholesale prices to charge the battery, inverters are used for multiple purposes, and most PV solar designs already throw away some electricity, so that's free. Also on that page, doing some napkin math on the project lifetime MWh of 1,260,000, and the purchase price of $600-$1000/kWh is higher than most grid batteries deployed these days. These are very conservative numbers! Lazard's numbers are difficult to compare to most actual storage payment contracts, because every one I've seen is structured around paying for capacity, in kW-months, rather than straight payments for every MWh of energy dumped on the grid. But the capacity payments end up working out to numbers that are on the low end of Lazard's cost estimates when translated.
    - reitzensteinm 6y ago
      I'm sorry, it was a mistake. You're not counting it twice, it is indeed a figure just for storage, with the assumption of daily cycling. If we use the ratio of the plant (i.e. 200 MWh storage for 720 MWh generation at a 30% capacity factor), that would leave us with (81-140 * 0.27) + 29-38 for the generation, for a total cost of $51-76/MWh. But that's still based around the idea of cycling the storage daily. Solar performs poorly on cloudy days, so you can either overbuild it significantly, build days of storage instead of hours, or keep the old power plants around as backup. Either of the three is going to bump up that cost significantly. It blows coal out of the water if you don't have to worry about days you're not producing power, but you can't build a grid around that. And coal is mostly being eaten by natural gas for price reasons anyway. Did you factor in a discount rate with your back of the napkin math? It might explain why the purchase price looks so high.
adrianN 6y ago
Nobody ever factors in damages from CO2. The German government for examples estimates those to be around 195€/ton. That adds about 18 Eurocents/kWh for coal. Its real cost is thus more than double the estimates given in the other comment.
pydry 6y ago
I'm tired of this claim. Germany's electricity prices are high because theyve front loaded capex and are decommissioning old power plants early. It gets even more ridiculous when the nuclear lobby roll it out because if they were going to go on a nuke plant building binge like France did in the 80s their electricity prices would be even higher.

epistasis 6y ago

No, it's cheaper even with battery backup: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 Stored solar, no subsidies: $81-$140/MWh Coal: $65-$159/MWh And then with solar, 40%-70% of consumption will be direct without storage, at $29-$42/MWh, which pulls the all-in cost of solar way below coal. And that's for projects deployed in 2020. Wait 5 years, the typical timeline for bidding and installation for utilities, and any utility that isnt planning for massive renewables and storage is simply bilking their customers. Germany was built a decade ago. Using it as a point of reference is deceptive.

missedthecue 6y ago
Are there enough lithium reserves to store billions of kwh? (Ignoring their usage in cars, phones, medical devices, and everything else)
- epistasis 6y ago
  Yes, we haven't even been looking for lithium until recently, and the availability of it has more than doubled in just a few years. (Note that a lot of lithium comes from "resources" and not from "reserves," as the latter term usually refers to mining rather than brining.) For current chemistries, cobalt is more of a concern, but that's mostly a concern for car batteries, and the concern is more about the terrible conditions of extraction (some child labor from small scale mining) than the total amount. For stationary storage, sodium behaves a lot like lithium, but is far heavier. And there are all sorts of flow chemistries that have barely been examined. However I think the lithium train has left the station, unless there's some sort of serious market interference to cause huge unexpected shortages, there's little chance for lithium competitors to catch up within the next 15 years.
kortilla 6y ago
What chart shows battery backup on that page? What is the sample solar field + batteries that puts out at a cheaper rate than an equivalent coal plant? Or is this just theoretical not based on any real deployment?
- epistasis 6y ago
  Last chart on the page, and on PDF page 10. Lazard has not revealed the full details of their methodology, but there are deployments with storage all the time, they tend just not to get any press unless Tesla is involved. And until FERC's recent order 841, it was pretty much impossible to even connect storage on most grids. Here's a summary of hybrid projects (generation plus storage) as of last year (page 6): https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/Panel-1-Gorman-AD20-9-000.pdf https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/Panel-1-Gor... Most new renewables deployments in the US will contain storage of some sort in the future.
reitzensteinm 6y ago
You're double counting the without storage benefit, it's already factored in to the $81-140 price. The plant they list has 100 MW of solar, 50 MW/200 MWh of storage. Assuming a CF of 0.3 that makes it 720 MWh per day, 73% of it not touching the battery. If you built a plant that only supplies power at night it would be way more expensive. It's not yet cheaper than coal if you wanted to run the whole grid on PV + batteries, not close. You need a lot more than 2 hours of nameplate capacity storage per plant. But as you say, the costs are rapidly falling. The coming EV transition will provide significant economies of scale. And this is also valuing carbon at $0, which is a horrendous distortion.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're not correct. You seem to be saying that the "cost of storage" numbers already include averaging the storage cost between storage and not storage, but I can't get anything like that to work our to reasonably plausible numbers. Check page 8 of the PDF of their very slightly fuller explanation: https://www.lazard.com/media/451418/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-60.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451418/lazards-levelized-cost-o... The project is cheaper than wholesale arbitrage because they don't have to pay wholesale prices to charge the battery, inverters are used for multiple purposes, and most PV solar designs already throw away some electricity, so that's free. Also on that page, doing some napkin math on the project lifetime MWh of 1,260,000, and the purchase price of $600-$1000/kWh is higher than most grid batteries deployed these days. These are very conservative numbers! Lazard's numbers are difficult to compare to most actual storage payment contracts, because every one I've seen is structured around paying for capacity, in kW-months, rather than straight payments for every MWh of energy dumped on the grid. But the capacity payments end up working out to numbers that are on the low end of Lazard's cost estimates when translated.
  - reitzensteinm 6y ago
    I'm sorry, it was a mistake. You're not counting it twice, it is indeed a figure just for storage, with the assumption of daily cycling. If we use the ratio of the plant (i.e. 200 MWh storage for 720 MWh generation at a 30% capacity factor), that would leave us with (81-140 * 0.27) + 29-38 for the generation, for a total cost of $51-76/MWh. But that's still based around the idea of cycling the storage daily. Solar performs poorly on cloudy days, so you can either overbuild it significantly, build days of storage instead of hours, or keep the old power plants around as backup. Either of the three is going to bump up that cost significantly. It blows coal out of the water if you don't have to worry about days you're not producing power, but you can't build a grid around that. And coal is mostly being eaten by natural gas for price reasons anyway. Did you factor in a discount rate with your back of the napkin math? It might explain why the purchase price looks so high.

adrianN 6y ago

Nobody ever factors in damages from CO2. The German government for examples estimates those to be around 195€/ton. That adds about 18 Eurocents/kWh for coal. Its real cost is thus more than double the estimates given in the other comment.

pydry 6y ago

I'm tired of this claim. Germany's electricity prices are high because theyve front loaded capex and are decommissioning old power plants early. It gets even more ridiculous when the nuclear lobby roll it out because if they were going to go on a nuke plant building binge like France did in the 80s their electricity prices would be even higher.