alt Hacker News> In the Middle East and Africa, where utility-scale solar already leads at $37/MWh, four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035
I'm struggling to understand the numbers here. How does a fall of 33% on $37 make it $80?
Replies
esposm03 • today at 5:33 PM
My understanding is that the first number is the "cost per MWh generated by a PV plant", the second one is the "cost per MWh accumulated and then released by a 4-hour grid-scale battery plant"
I think the $37 might be the cost of producing the energy via solar, and it’s the grid-scale batteries that are expected to get cheaper:
> Four-hour storage reaches $120/MWh in 2026 and is forecast to fall 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, cementing its role as the enabling technology for solar and wind integration.
Cheap or not, solar isn’t dispatchable on demand, so in and of itself it doesn’t replace the role of a peaker plant. But now that the big batteries are a viable thing, solar-plus-battery is feasible to handle the parts of the demand curve that required open-cycle gas plants before.