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Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpar

• 3stacks 3mo ago
  They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.
  • Scoundreller 3mo ago
    You can do similar math with building above ground oil storage tank capacity aaaaaand giving everyone free gas cans. And you can get out every drop. And it’s always ready to go. Do need to cycle your inventory. Fire departments probably wouldn’t be happy about it.
  • asdefghyk 3mo ago
    From Australlian ABC news... The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from \(\$12\) billion to as high as \(\$42\) billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). Originally announced in 2017 with a $2 billion price tag, the project has faced massive scale and logistical blowouts. The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from $12 billion to as high as $42 billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). That said , hydro systems have a LONG LIFESPAN - 100 YEARS ? Batteries need to be replaced every X years. So the ecomiomics of the comparisoan would need to be calculated ...
    • robin_reala 3mo ago
      Dinorwig[1] was opened in 1984, and is looking at a £1B refurbishment shortly for “at least another 25 years” lifespan.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station [2] https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/analysis/re-planting-the-future-how-dinorwig-and-ffestiniog-are-being-rebuilt-to-power-the-uk-for-decades/ https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/analysis/re-planting-the-...
    • angry_octet 3mo ago
      All the complexity has been in geotechnical issues, pockets of mud, sinkholes, then ultra hard rock, then loose shale, damage in blasting operations, needing to pump liquid nitrogen into the rock to deal with subterranean water flow, soluble limestone etc etc. One of the scariest industrial deaths you can imagine: cutting into a pocket of shale and the TBM and crew just vanishing into the maw of the Midgard serpent and the whole tunnel filling. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/tunnel-boring-machine-florence-stuck-again/103875910 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/tunnel-boring-machine...
  • simondotau 3mo ago
    At current battery project prices, matching Snowy 2.0’s roughly 350 GWh of energy storage capacity with Tesla Megapacks would cost around AUD $218 billion [0] and require Tesla’s entire global Megapack production capacity redirected to a single client for five years. $15 billion is far more than Snowy 2.0 should have cost. But it remains substantially cheaper than any lithium-ion battery build for bulk storage. Storage on this scale is essential in a post-coal electricity grid, and batteries are not (yet) plausible substitutes for bulk storage. [0] This assumes linear scaling. In reality, placing an order like this would grossly distort supply and demand on many levels. Thus the cost would ultimately be superlinear.
    • fragmede 3mo ago
      Yeah the battery storage story has to acknowledge the fact that global production capacity simply isn't actually high enough to deliver that many batteries so we need alternative solutions to the problem as well.
    • ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
      Snowy 2.0 has major limitations on what it can supply, the headline number is very misleading. And the comparison shouldn't be to batteries alone, but solar/wind and batteries. The former can be used directly and fill the batteries repeatedly on a timeline that is predictable. It provides no extra value for the electricity to be stored long term if for the same money you can generate and store it short term. Article on the various restrictions on Snowy 2.0: https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-cost-blowouts-might-be-ok-if-the-scheme-stored-power-more-cheaply-than-batteries-but-it-wont-266776 https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-cost-blowouts-might-be...
      • angry_octet 3mo ago
        Yes Snowy 2.0 just won't have enough water for many of the years in out future.
      • simondotau 3mo ago
        Your reply — and especially the attached article — misunderstand the reality of operating a grid at scale. Responding to you: Solar and wind are just as relevant to pumped hydro, which is really just a different kind of battery. The real question is how much short-duration storage is needed from chemical batteries and how much long-duration storage is needed from pumped hydro. Chemical batteries are essential for grid stabilisation, frequency control, and intra-hour balancing. They're necessary, but not sufficient. Pumped hydro provides something that no economically realistic combination of batteries, solar, and wind can yet deliver at scale: enough stored energy to contribute towards grid stability through consecutive overcast, low-wind days. The main alternative is to build and maintain gas-fired peaking plants for occasional backup, which is both costly and keeps us dependent on fossil fuels. Responding to the article: While there are credible doubts about the value of Snowy 2.0, the article does not establish its headline claim that batteries are a cheaper system-level alternative. Most critically, it doesn't acknowledge the role of pumped hydro as an insurance asset. The point of insurance isn't to be cost effective in normal times, it's to be cost effective against the risk-adjusted consequences of grid destabilisation. It is true that under normal conditions, Snowy Hydro would have little incentive to discharge fully because doing so could depress market prices. That is why capacity contracts, underwriting arrangements and reliability options exist. We know that strategic storage has substantial social value that its owner cannot fully capture through energy arbitrage. This is a common problem for reliability assets: their success can destroy the scarcity rents needed to finance them. Hence contracts.
  • stephen_g 3mo ago
    That was exactly the point of the project though - it was designed by the conservative side of politics in our country to try and crowd out investment in batteries and other renewables while taking enough time to build to keep coal plants operating longer in the meantime. It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages. Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.
• jeeeb 3mo ago
  Grid scale batteries and household batteries are being widely deployed. Australia is the third largest market in the world for grid scale batteries, and has the highest per-capita capacity in the world; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/21/australia-becomes-worlds-third-largest-utility-battery-market/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/21/australia-becomes-wor... Not to mention more than 200k new household batteries installed in 2025 (out of roughly 10 million households).
• Walf 3mo ago
  They are, but they still take time to build, and loans to finance. Here are two of SA's (which has the most renewable generation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://web.archive.org/web/20220523164905/https://www.electranet.com.au/electranets-battery-storage-project/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220523164905/https://www.elect...
• michaelt 3mo ago
  I think it's less a question of batteries being economical, and more a question of the relative economics of batteries vs solar panels. After all, if the highest demand is between 16:30 and 19:00 you could use batteries to store power at 12:00 and sell it at 18:00 - or in famously sunny Australia you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand. If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment. (Also, from a politican's perspective, making batteries highly economical is how you get batteries built. And an awful lot of pro-environment policies involve raising taxes, banning things and creating new chores; it's nice to have some green policy announcements that actually benefit voters in the short term.)
  • danmaz74 3mo ago
    You won't get 12% return if your panels generate electricity which is only paid between 18 and 19, because there is already overcapacity between 16:30 and 18.
  • perilunar 3mo ago
    > you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.
    • sevenseacat 3mo ago
      I mean in the dead of winter, yes. For six months of the year? Definitely not.
      • perilunar 3mo ago
        Definitely so. Unless you are on the equator, the sun is up for less than 12 hours a day from the autumnal equinox to the spring equinox. The sun will set before 18:00 local solar time. So apart from funkiness with time zones and summer time (which extends a couple of weeks past the autumnal equinox in Aus), yes, roughly half the year.
• josephcooney 3mo ago
  One of my co-workers (I'm Australian) has 500 kilowatt-hours of storage at home...which is wild. Much more common is the 10-20 kilowatt-hours of domestic storage for a house.
  • jondwillis 3mo ago
    What is their fire suppression setup like??? Granted I guess they could be doing pumped hydro storage lol
    • defrost 3mo ago
      If they're in a rural / industrial area setting it could quite literally be a fire break around the battery area (bare dirt and no overhanging trees). Fire control in Australia is first and foremost about limiting spread - the bush in Australia goes off if it catches hard. "Mini" pumped hydro is a thing here (in places): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-01/australian-first-mini-pumped-hydro-scheme-wa-walpole/104655498 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-01/australian-first-mini...
      • sire-vc 3mo ago
        'Is a thing' - obviously, stalled due to red tape. As an immigrant to Australia I am repeatedly amazed at how long anything involving the the government takes.
      • josephcooney 3mo ago
        Yeah, he is in a rural area. The batteries are off in a metal shed away from everything else.
  • BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
    More details please, do they have a website that explains their setup? Are they a hoarder of old car batteries and the like?
    • josephcooney 3mo ago
• pjc50 3mo ago
  Affordability is always relative. Australia can't afford that much battery storage, it has to spend $368bn on nuclear submarines. /s (did you mean 20kwh per user, or 20GW overall?)
  • angry_octet 3mo ago
    The submarines will be in port so much of the time, we may as well hook up their nukes to power the grid.
• numpad0 3mo ago
  Maybe they just don't work? Otherwise someone's leaving tons of money on the table. Which implies nobody is.
• jofzar 3mo ago
  > but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.
  • ghiculescu 3mo ago
    They are super economical… which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?
    • embedding-shape 3mo ago
      Is it so out of the ordinary that a government tries to help people save money or what's the question? Sounds like you've only had the American experience in life unfortunately.
      • AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
        If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless. Meanwhile the government doesn't have any of its own money, so it can't really give you something that was yours to begin with, all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you? Instead of subsidizing something you can make up your own mind about whether you want, they should just lower your taxes by the amount of the subsidy and let you use your money for that or something else at your choice.
        • master-lincoln 3mo ago
          Think about people who could not afford the initial investment. It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
          • AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
            > Think about people who could not afford the initial investment. This is what loans and installment plans are for, the payments for which come out of the savings on the utility bill. > It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all. Which has nothing to do with batteries. If you want to do that then provide them with a refundable tax credit that allows for a negative tax rate in cases where that's deemed desirable. And even that doesn't apply to the majority of people who are currently paying a non-negative amount of tax. Why attach strings to the money going to a middle class homeowner who should have just been allowed to keep that portion of their own salary?
• xbmcuser 3mo ago
  Yeah this is why a lot of people were thinking that the Australian opposition asking for spending $40-50 billions for nuclear that would come online in 20-30 years and to keep using coal and gas till then were being stupid.
  • ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
    It's not stupid if they are paid off by the people selling the coal and gas. It's just a treasonous level of corruption. Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.
  • thedays 3mo ago
    It wasn’t $40-50 billion. It was estimated to cost $116-$600 billion to build 7 nuclear reactors https://smartenergy.org.au/nuclear-fallout-116-600-billion-to-build-7-nuclear-reactors/ https://smartenergy.org.au/nuclear-fallout-116-600-billion-t... I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
    • xbmcuser 3mo ago
      I am talking about the $30 billion that the opposition was making up. My point was that even those made up numbers for nuclear were still more expensive than installing solar and batteries.
• rswail 3mo ago
  They are, and they are being rapidly rolled out and the "post sunset" spikes are rapidly being flattened by both grid storage and "behind the meter" home batteries.
• christina97 3mo ago
  One issue with grid scale batteries is that the solar is predominantly generated in the suburbs, but the grid wasn’t built for a huge “generator” in the suburbs. It requires retrofitting the grid for this huge excess. It would be better to instead store it in the suburbs in household batteries (which they are also building out like crazy).
• thatsit 3mo ago
  Well, i can only be cheaper to shift demand to high production hours then building a battery. Especially as you don’t only need an inverter for the battery but also the charger or MPPT to suck up the peak solar power which is only lasts for about 3 hours. So you can save building a lot of excess batteries