Great article, I was just wondering about this issue w/r/t Electric Cars and demand for electricity. One question: I thought the current state of batteries that can store wind/solar wasn’t all that impressive. Has the tech improved a lot? And if it has, why isn’t building these kinds of batteries the majority of the solution, rather than just one strategy among many?
Battery tech certainly has improved dramatically over time. A quick Googling leads me to https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline, titled "The price of batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades". Based on a quick glance, the site looks at least roughly accurate. And price, capacity, etc. will continue to improve, though it's hard to predict the details, and we're seeing some temporary hiccups in the declining price curve due to growing pains in the supply chain.
As a result, we will certainly see a fair amount of battery storage on the grid; it's already starting to happen. I'm not sure exactly how large this is expected to get. The core issue is that, even with the massive decrease in cost, a grid-connected battery system isn't really economical unless you're going to use it – in the sense of charging it to fairly-full and then draining it to fairly-empty – every day, or at least close to that. So batteries are great for storing solar power at noon and releasing it at 7:00 PM when the sun is going down but ACs are still running strong. They're hopeless for carrying you through a fluky week-long period where the wind doesn't blow and heavy cloud cover impairs solar.
All of that, however, is mostly about making up for the *intermittency* of solar and wind power. To my understanding, batteries are less applicable to challenges of *transmission*. If your wind farm is in Idaho, and your power usage is in LA, the existence of batteries doesn't get around the need to run wires from Idaho – more precisely, a bunch of different places in Idaho – to LA. At best, batteries could help you get closer to 100% utilization of the wires you do run.
Great article, I was just wondering about this issue w/r/t Electric Cars and demand for electricity. One question: I thought the current state of batteries that can store wind/solar wasn’t all that impressive. Has the tech improved a lot? And if it has, why isn’t building these kinds of batteries the majority of the solution, rather than just one strategy among many?
Battery tech certainly has improved dramatically over time. A quick Googling leads me to https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline, titled "The price of batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades". Based on a quick glance, the site looks at least roughly accurate. And price, capacity, etc. will continue to improve, though it's hard to predict the details, and we're seeing some temporary hiccups in the declining price curve due to growing pains in the supply chain.
As a result, we will certainly see a fair amount of battery storage on the grid; it's already starting to happen. I'm not sure exactly how large this is expected to get. The core issue is that, even with the massive decrease in cost, a grid-connected battery system isn't really economical unless you're going to use it – in the sense of charging it to fairly-full and then draining it to fairly-empty – every day, or at least close to that. So batteries are great for storing solar power at noon and releasing it at 7:00 PM when the sun is going down but ACs are still running strong. They're hopeless for carrying you through a fluky week-long period where the wind doesn't blow and heavy cloud cover impairs solar.
All of that, however, is mostly about making up for the *intermittency* of solar and wind power. To my understanding, batteries are less applicable to challenges of *transmission*. If your wind farm is in Idaho, and your power usage is in LA, the existence of batteries doesn't get around the need to run wires from Idaho – more precisely, a bunch of different places in Idaho – to LA. At best, batteries could help you get closer to 100% utilization of the wires you do run.
This was great, thank you! The link to the canary media post about software in use to optimize energy flows was especially helpful
Electrifyingly enlightening