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Which is why the title calls out battery storage, and the article spend about a third of it's word count talking about it. The price of battery storage has also
by simonh 5y ago
Which is why the title calls out battery storage, and the article spend about a third of it's word count talking about it. The price of battery storage has also fallen dramatically.
One knock often made against solar+battery is the cost of replacing battery storage over the lifetime of the plant, but such criticisms often don't take into account the fact that replacement batteries in 5 and 10 years will likely cost a fraction of what they do now.
The fact is a lot of countries already have enough gas plant capacity to act as 'peaker' plants to top up solar+battery.
- pfdietz 5y agoThe cost of electrolysers is also falling rapidly, with China exports available for less than $300/kW. Green hydrogen is at the moment cheaper than gray hydrogen in Europe and the Middle East(!), and China. https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/ukraine-war-green-hydrogen-now-cheaper-than-grey-in-europe-middle-east-and-china-bnef/2-1-1180320 https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/ukraine-war-g...
- pydry 5y agoElectrolysis was never the issue. The high cost of storing hydrogen and the high level of wastage is the main problem.
- pfdietz 5y agoHydrogen is very cheap to store, when stored underground, two orders of magnitude cheaper than storing energy in batteries (per kWh of storage capacity). As for wastage, if you are talking about round trip efficiency, that becomes relatively unimportant when renewable energy is cheap and the storage use case has few charge/discharge cycles (not daily storage, but long term, even seasonal, storage, and rare event backup, and of course supplying hydrogen to already existing industrial users of the gas.) Capital cost of electrolysers was indeed the issue, if you want to use overproduction from renewable sources to power them.