3 ms·

Do you happen to have a source for this comparison? I'm curious to know what the economics of grid scale electricity storage are.

• BenoitP 3y ago
  Cost figures are very hard to come by as: * Financing and returns are spread over 60 years for nuclear, which makes it hugely dependent on the interest rate. Which we don't know in advance, and also is at risk of irrational public perception (Leading in democracies to early closure of perfectly fine plants. That affects ROI hugely). * Nuclear too profits from scale: you have to maintain an army of competent engineers. But once done, you can copy-paste plants cheaply. And raw fuel is less than 10 of the operating cost. * LCOEs (financially Levelized Costs) are all over the place and highly dependent on plugging holes in production * Chinese solar panels are state-sponsored to an unspecified amount * Chinese solar panels are produced using coal electricity, and with lots fossil heat in the process. Models for pricing it in a CO2-free (or levelized with nuclear) are inexistent. * Even calculating the EROEI (Energy Return Over Energy Invested) is difficult as you need to define an envelope. For example: do you need to account for producing gasoline from solar energy to power the mining truck necessary for your materials. How about powering it with batteries? Which you would need more mining. * Battery storage needs are of humongous size. What's marginally fine now will probably be humongously expensive at scale. If done on lithium, we need about 180 years of mining for 28 days storage. And that's without accounting for other uses of lithium. * Having cheap or expensive energy from one source may help you get more of another. TLDR: At scale, it's a system with 150 variables dependent on each other, including geopolitical game theory hidden variables; and of course the climate crisis affecting the whole thing. But maybe we can trust physics: nuclear forces >> electric forces.
• wiredfool 3y ago
  Other recent threads have mentioned gridscale battery storage on the order of 8-10c/KWh.
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Lithium based is on the order of $100/kWhr: https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-costs-the-economics/#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20a%20lithium%20ion,costs%20of%20grid%2Dscale%20storage https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-cost....
    • wiredfool 3y ago
      FWIW, that's a different measure -- the 8-10c/kwh is for amortized cost over the lifetime of energy storage, vs the capital cost to build it.