alt Hacker NewsThis project won't do anything (as you likely already know). The reason electricity is so expensive is because it's tied to gas prices, which is an entirely political decision.
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Batteries will reduce the number of times gas sets the marginal price, so they will have a near immediate impact on that.
They'll also likely reduce the balancing costs by relieving congestion.
Probably too small to notice among all the other costs and changes, like deploying more renewables and starting to pay in advance for new nuclear.
The current marginal market price is not the same as the current average price being paid for all electricity delivered. A lot is delivered via fixed price arrangements of one sort or another (CFDs, PPAs, etc) and then there are things like the Balancing Mechanism which is paid as bid, and capacity payments which are outside the marginal cost per kWh part of the system.
Gas prices are a political decision, too in Europe. For demand to reduce and for other sources to be more competitive prices have to be and remain high.
In the UK I believe it is policy for electricity prices to be high in general for thse reasons and to encourage lower usage.
Isn't the price tied to the marginal price, rather than the price of gas?
Even if they're typically the same, because CCGT is the best for on-demand generation, flattening the demand curve ought to slightly reduce that marginal cost.
I've seen the UK generation market attacked quite a lot lately, but to me it makes sense to price everything at the marginal cost, and doing so also helps encourage capital investment in generation that can have lower generation costs themselves, because the marginal cost is only slowly impacted rather than a boom and bust model.