alt Hacker NewsAnalysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet
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It’s somewhat humbling that this is essentially entirely done by one country.
For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.
Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drastically reshape energy production. Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.
All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?
Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country?
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
Has any production battery become cheaper than LEAC ACID for computer UPS ? I have not seen new cheaper UPS getting launched.
For about $100 the black friday, i got a ridiculous overkill LFP battery for my router and fiber modem. Would last about a week with no power.
Am I dumb or does that sentence "Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet" make no sense grammatically?
$33 per MWh for solar. What is it for coal or natural gas? Maybe half that?
The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!