alt Hacker NewsIt would be interesting to read up on the economics of power storage.
As to what price points for the batteries equates to different usage patterns.
Peak shaving, morning and evening peaks, occasional discharge.
Batteries can make money also by taking negative price electricity.
Once gas has been run out of the market more battery power availability could support carbon free steel I imagine where it is just electrochemistry.
At each point they’d be ruptures in the market, where some forms of electricity just can’t compete.
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electricity peaks are probably reduced over time by hourly electricity prices. If a lot of people can save money by using electricity at cheaper hours the peak demand is reduced.
Plugging in your EV might charge to 40% immediately. When it charges to 80% doesn't matter if it has that charge in the morning. So it probably charges somewhere in the night.
Starting your dishwasher, washing machine dryer on a timer before you go to work, so it runs when energy is cheaper.
This doesn't eliminate the need for storage, but reduces its need.
The trouble with "use free electricity" schemes is that the capital cost never sleeps: you have built a fixed plant, on a piece of land, and paid for that, regardless of whether it runs or not. So there's usually a fairly high minimum duty cycle to make it economically viable.
You could make the argument in the other direction: the AI training datacenters could run for 23/24 hours, saving electricity at the peak time when it's most expensive and when they're pushing up the cost of electricity for everyone else the most .. but of course all those GPUs are too expensive to leave idle.