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> Anyway, batteries are not an energy source, just storage. Somebody has to build generating capacity.

IIUC, you can generate far more solar electricity during the day than can be consumed. But that electricity isn't available at night because storing it in batteries is too expensive right now. With cheaper batteries there are stronger incentives to build more renewable generating capacity, driving down costs further etc etc.




There's also nuclear.


Nuclear needs a lot of storage. The problem is that nuclear power plants only produce at a steady rate, they can't be brought online and shut down as demand fluctuates. (Natural gas is great for plants that need to handle peak load or spikes.)

Back in the 1960s and 1970s when the power industry thought we were going to go nuclear, they built a lot of pumped water storage systems. There's one in Western MA built under a mountain that pumps water from a river to an artificial lake at the top of the mountain. The plan was to pump water at night using extra power generated by nuclear plants, and then run generators during the day to make up the shortcoming.

My guess is that the facility now pumps water during the day to act as storage for solar power.

The efficiency is about 70 or 80%, from what I remember. Batteries are a much higher efficiency, and can be placed much closer to the load.

Thus, mass-produced low-cost batteries will really disrupt the grid, because older forms of storage, like pumped water, will be obsolete. Furthermore, because batteries can be placed much closer to load, the needs for grid capacity change because high transmission lines no longer need to handle peak load.


My favorite "SciFi-Like" power storage concept is a PowerLoop [1]

Someone could take the old Superconducting Supercollider tunnel in Texas, put in the theoretical PowerLoop infrastructure for about $500m and then it would be able to store enough power for the entire state of Texas to operate for over a day. The money it would make on the arbitrage between cheap power generated from solar & wind and times where demand exceeded baseline generation capacities would pay for the system, according to the designer, within a few weeks.

[1] http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop


You can set up nuclear plants for reasonably-fast throttling. The problem is that it's much more expensive to throttle one because a nuclear plant is mostly fixed costs while natural gas plants are mostly fuel costs.




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