The point is not that the "true" price in the sense of what it ought to be. It is the "true" price in the sense of what the market is actually paying for the service.
When people put out the number $23, they compare it with the cost of power and wonder why, if it is so much lower, it doesn't already swamp the current solution.
So the purpose of the comment is to explain that it is not a complete solution, and not reflective of the total ("true") bill.
Why should I worry about a complete solution?
That's why.
If I move to a house with solar panels, I budget on power costs = cost of grid connection + X * grid power price + (1-X) * solar price (which is the capital cost of the panels smoothed out over their useful life).
The issue here is that I can't maneuver into a situation where my power price = solar price without sacrificing my ability to do anything after sundown without candles. Clearly, the true cost of power in a solar-enabled house is going to be higher than the cost of the solar panels.
The grid will switch to solar + battery if it becomes cheaper than alternatives (gas, coal, nuclear, etc.)
It's such a damned shame that so many decades of potential progress in nuclear power were stymied by misguided FUD.
We have a moderate sized portable generator, but running off that for weeks becomes a very unpleasant experience. Certainly far better than not having power, but unpleasant.
Driving 2 hours away to the nearest place we knew had unlimited fuel, turning my car into a rolling bomb on the trip back with dozens of gallons of fuel in gas cans, etc. And the endless droning of the thing running.
If those sorts of disasters are not a major concern for you, I don't think a battery makes much sense.
You can also store quite a lot of propane in a small footprint without some of the issues that come with gas or diesel.
That's a crass state, what causes these outages? Is it a investment backlog of the power grid?
You can also size your panels such that you never produce excess energy but you will be leaving a lot of roof space that could be making energy to waste. A sunny winter day still makes a ton of energy.
Which was the point you misunderstood: dedicated storage installation are not needed at current production levels, and can be avoided even when solar's share of the energy mix grows.
Among the possibilities are "smart" appliances scheduling their demand to production peaks (dishwashers can often wait a few hours, cars might not need to charge right away). The same is true for industrial usage, where smelters, for example, have the natural capacity to store energy as heat.
A growing fleet of electric cars could also serve as distributed storage: if your car is parked for the night, it could feed energy back into the grid (partially, if you are paranoid).
More than batteries they utilize gas peaker plants, inefficient, dirty and expensive plants that can ramp up and down quickly to match demand.
By coal standards?
You seem to be referring exclusively to solar photovoltaic.
Solar thermal generation has quite a different, evening-friendly, distribution curve.
I haven't followed closely recently but my impression was solar thermal has not delivered as promised. Things like Ivanpah was relying on natural gas more than expected. Is this an accurate impression?
Yet confusingly the article chose images of solar thermal. It's a bit of a worry when the journalists aren't conscious of the most basic aspects of the industry they are covering.
Perhaps, but we're better than conflating solar pvc with solar thermal - especially when we talk about large scale deployments, and even more especially when we talk about systems that incorporate Big Storage (batteries or otherwise).
Parent (to your comment) wasn't specifically PVC, parent (to them) wasn't either (more about true cost), and parent to them was bemoaning the common misunderstanding around how pricing works, rather than ethics / feasibility / ambiguity around underlying technology.
> I haven't followed closely recently but my impression was solar thermal has not delivered as promised. Things like Ivanpah was relying on natural gas more than expected. Is this an accurate impression?
My impression is that solar thermal is going to provide a much more scalable solution, especially in terms of avoiding the duck curve (or at least mitigating the impact of same). I see PVC + batteries being one of those tech combinations that works reasonably well in front of, as well as behind, the meter ... but solar thermal's definitely grid-level.
It is swamping the current solution - it just takes a while for new plants to be built and old plants to go offline.
Which is to say, for example, that a grid supplied by solar and wind will need proportionally less storage per megawatt as the geographical size of the grid increases. A larger grid "averages out" the intermittent sources better as it gets bigger.
A state sized utility solar installation is non-trivial and that's why you don't yet see utilities providing solar themselves to the grid, and even if they did the price would be different.
So you don't see everyone using it because it's expensive to get started and because utility providers have yet to build solar plants capable of supplying a state. I don't think anyone has.
In time though, a combination of rooftop solar and utility scale battery/renewable systems to cover baseline load will probably be how we power the nation. Perhaps some gas or other generators will stick around to provide the baseline.