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The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the ex
by pranavj 8mo ago
The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the exact window where solar critics have long argued renewables fall short. If this trend accelerates (and battery prices are dropping faster than most models predicted), the "intermittency problem" starts looking more like a solvable engineering challenge than a fundamental barrier.
The next milestone to watch: when battery-backed solar becomes cheaper than gas peakers for evening demand across most of Europe. We might be closer than people think.
- bryanlarsen 8mo agoThose are two thresholds: cheaper than peakers using piped gas from Russia, and cheaper than peakers using LNG shipped via tanker ship. I imagine the latter threshold has already been met, only depending on the amortization period you choose for the battery purchase.
- mekdoonggi 8mo agoI looked into sodium-ion batteries for which factories are coming online in China. The theoretical manufacturing cost of those is very very low, which will make solar + batteries very cheap. I suspect China will reach those costs ahead of schedule.
- danny_codes 8mo agoIMO this is a classic case of underestimating how far manufacturing improvements can get you on the cost scale. You see a promising technology in the lab and it’s hard to imagine a 1 million x reduction in price, yet we see that time and time again as tech gets scaled out. What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself
- toyg 8mo ago> ow the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper By forcing oil prices to get 10x cheaper, at the barrel of a gun. See: Venezuela and Iran. Will it work? I would not bet on it.
- matthewdgreen 8mo agoSeems unlikely that we'll be selling oil for $5, unless fossil fuels are completely replaced and it becomes a side-of-the-road novelty.
- ljlolel 8mo agoThen it loses economies of scale and capital wasted so price won’t go down
- matthewdgreen 8mo agoAt that point, who really cares? As scale goes down and economies of scale go away, it just becomes an irrelevant novelty. But the actual question is: how much will industrial applications matter.
- monero-xmr 8mo agoI mean where are all the factories making batteries in Europe? It’s not like the US is purposefully preventing battery tech. It’s why all of the government-funded solar companies imploded as well. The manufacturers do not compete
- troyvit 8mo agoThey're in Europe and they produce a lot of batteries. The caveat is that 80% of the investment money came from LG, a South Korean company. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/europe-has-solid-basis-battery-and-electric-vehicle-manufacturing-growth https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/europe-has-solid-basis-batt...
- monero-xmr 8mo agoThere’s the former darling Northvolt. Took a lot of state money and then imploded https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/ev-battery-startup-northvolt-files-for-bankruptcy-in-sweden https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/ev-battery-...
- slavik81 8mo agoThe comments on Reddit from folks who claim to have worked for Northvolt are pretty wild. I would take them with a grain of salt, but they're interesting to read. https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1fl8d4y/comment/lzjsaeh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1fl8d4y/c...
- xorcist 8mo agoSome people like to say they did, but when you look at the money it was almost all private capital, from big banks and large infrastructure and private pension funds. That does not make the investment any better. Private capital can be misallocated too.
- mlrtime 8mo agoUS has Gigafactory Texas and Lithium Refinery now too.
- crote 8mo agoEasy: the GOP doesn't care about future competitiveness. They are currently getting lobbied by oil executives, who are trying to maximize short-term profit while they still can. The wider industry doesn't have the long-term vision to preemptively outlobby them, so the GOP is doing what oil wants. Dealing with competition in a post-oil world is a problem left for the next generation: the current GOP will be long-dead by then and will have enjoyed the fruits of accepting decades of oil bribes.
- mlrtime 8mo agoNot true, energy is cheap in the US. Politicians rise and fall with energy prices, fossils fuels are still cheaper. America (outside of California which is not governed by the GOP) has some of the cheapest energy costs of competitive countries.
- tremon 8mo agoAnd the Grand Old Pedophile party will ensure that fossil fuels remain the cheapest by killing all alternatives before they reach scale.
- mlrtime 8mo ago>What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself I almost paid < $1USD/gal gas a couple months ago ($1.20 89 octane). My electric is ~ $.12USD/kwh. Gas is just as inexpensive. Where in the EU can I get energy for 10x cheaper?
- bee_rider 8mo agoIntermittence really has always had the flavor of an engineering problem instead of a physics problem (it is about putting the energy when/where humans want it, rather than having enough of it). IMO load shifting seems like a cleverer and more engineer-y solution. Imagine a giant smart system where all of our appliances talk to each-other and can optimize the timings of their workloads. It’s a magnificent society-wide scheduling problem! The papers we could write! Throwing batteries at it is a kind of blunt and uninteresting solution (I guess the market will prefer that one!).
- epolanski 8mo agoI ain't gonna use the dishwasher when the system wants me to, but when I can or want. I pay low energy prices during night than day, that's normal, but I'm still not gonna do laundry at 9 pm, I'd rather pay the 10/20 cents more during the day.
- bee_rider 8mo agoIf I had a combined washer/dryer and could just load the clothes up and say “do it whenever” I’d go for that. But that’s very dependent on only needing to do one load per day.
- matthewdgreen 8mo agoA typical dishwasher load requires 1-3kWh, so you'll just use your home battery and do it whenever you want.
- DoctorOetker 8mo agoa lot of that energy could have been recuperated with a heat exchanger when the water is refreshed, also in laundry machines.
- matthewdgreen 8mo agoThat's more or less what heat pump clothes dryers do. They draw in air, heat it, and then blow the humid air back over the cold side of the heat pump loop to condense it. They save tons of energy. I don't think there's anything similar for water (in clothes or dish washers) but the quantities might just be too small to bother with.
- IshKebab 8mo agoThe problem with solar isn't the night. Getting enough batteries to cover that is totally doable. The issue is the winter. And not even because of fewer daylight hours - on sunny winter days there is usually still a good amount of solar. The problem is its often very cloudy in the winter. In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days in a row where solar output is virtually zero. I don't know what the answer to that is. In a calm cloudy winter week all renewables and battery storage are totally screwed. Space based solar is a scam. Maybe we just have to live with it until fusion works (if it ever does). (But it's still academic at the moment because we're still far from the point where building more renewables is a bad idea.)
- KaiserPro 8mo ago> In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days True, but then for the UK solar power isn't the right thing for winter, hence why we need a massive mix of other stuff. Also we have the advantage that france isn't that far away. In the UK battery is about grid stabilisation, as in making sure that it hums at 50hz rather than 49.
- kieranmaine 8mo agoBattery revenues are shifting away from stabilisation now from https://cn-cob.com/info-detail/2026-uk-energy-storage-market-analysis https://cn-cob.com/info-detail/2026-uk-energy-storage-market...: > the focus of energy storage has shifted from frequency services to energy arbitrage. Due to market saturation, the share of frequency services in the revenue stack has significantly declined, from 80% in 2022 to just 20% in 2024. Looking ahead to 2030, we expect energy arbitrage to dominate the revenue stack, with most revenue coming from participation in the balancing mechanism.
- KaiserPro 8mo agoIndeed, in the same way that solar has now peaked in spain/portugal in its current config. They are moving to solar+battery to absorb solar mid day and replay that in the morning/evening. (that doesn't really apply in the UK because of the rain) As more renewables come on stream and the grid gets more complex, batteries are going to plug holes. Energy Arbitrage is usually a good thing, so long as its regulated to for the customer, not the battery people. the point is that battery capacity is being deployed to even out the 5-9pm peak, which means that we are much much less dependent on gas turbine generators (which means less price pressure linked to LNG prices, if you're not into the co2 aspect)
- epolanski 8mo agoA huge part of this calculus though is that the gas we buy since Russia disappeared as a provider is insanely high. Our economics may not match Canadian or US ones.
- Gibbon1 8mo agoFor an example one can look at California. Batteries deleted the duck curve.