Solar + Batteries/Storage are cheap to build today. No need to choose a worse technology in every way now, that only becomes less viable as time goes on.
And yet the existing battery facilities that could keep a smallish region (or a single city) supplied for 15 minutes or more are exceedingly rare.
Maybe they aren't as cheap as you claim. Australia is recently building a 1200 MW battery in New South Wales for 2.4 billion dollars - a cost comparable to a new nuclear reactor.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/05/world...
Even the battery factories are in their early stages right now.
Do you have a reference for the storage capacity of that NSW battery? Because every newspaper I’ve found talking about it, only talks about megawatts (power) not megawatt-hours (energy), and it’s the latter which is expensive for batteries, not the former.
"The 300 MW / 450 MWh battery will consist of 210 Tesla Megapacks covering an area smaller than the football oval at Geelong’s GMHBA Stadium"
20 million cars in the UK are parked on peoples drives overnight. Vast majority don't need a full charge for the following day and people will be delighted to buy electric during the day for 10c/kWh and sell it overnight for 20c/kWh
If they were all electric with 60kWh of storage and can drop to 30kWh that's 600 GWh of storage. The UK's grid usage overnight is about 20GW from memory, so over 16 hours is in the order of 300-400GWh of overnight storage.
Assuming Germany has similar car and demand characteristics, as long as there's enough power during the day to cope with demand and recharging, there should be plenty of storage for overnight usage.
It is doable, yes, but I cannot concur with the OPs idea that it is cheap.
The other problem with using cars to feed the grid is that you need inverters large enough to do so in each house. That's not a cheap solution and it takes a lot of space.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/too-slow-too-expensive-why-nucle....
https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/sites/default/files/re...
"The spread of projected and reported capital costs is unsurprisingly broad. In Australia the most recent public assessment is provided by the GenCost2018 report by CSIRO and AEMO.10 It assumes the capital costs for SMR technology is $16,000/kW in 2020 (and experiences no major price decline over time). We note this number is more than double other cost estimates worldwide. We have sought additional clarification on the basis for this costing. Initial advice is that the number is based on a GHD estimate for AEMO of costs for a future Gen IV reactor to be constructed in 2035 and not for the type of reactor which would most likely be deployed in Australia."
Anyhow, that 16k estimate is for power, not for energy... It's unclear over which timespans comparisons are being made (since a lot of it depends for how long power plants will be kept operational... A huge cost is the initial investment).
I've seen energy estimates as low as 30$ per MWh, for Nuclear energy plants built with interest rates of 3%
Further north and solar get displaced by wind as the primary source of energy, and wind do not have a day cycle. It has weeks/months long period of low and high amount of wind. A battery solution that last hours is just a drop in the supply bucket. At the same time, rather than being discharge (and thus generating profits) each day, a wind battery solution will only generate profits a few times each year depending on how large the capacity is. The only way that will be profitable is if it several order times cheaper than the batteries for solar, or if the cost isn't directly linked to capacity. The technology that Germany and other "wind" countries is constantly talking about here is green hydro, but which is yet to be economical viable.
One alternative is to build massive transmission lines from Africa and use solar power + batteries from the Sahara desert, through there are political, technological, and economical problems over designing such energy grid for EU.
Thus for now the political winds are blowing towards natural gas and wind, despite the ecological issues of burning a fossil fuel.
Would you sell your setup for 10k euros, or is the value of your setup possible worth more than the cost of doing it yourself. 10k to be free of the electric company for all future seems like a very good deal if purchasable at that price, and if offered I think there would be quite a few homes willing to take you up on it.
Oh, you do not heat with electricity? I hope you counted that heat source in CO2e...
Although battery storage may still be located close to generation. One benefit of this is that you get more benefit from your grid connection. Without batteries you can just export for a part of the day. With batteries you can export when it is sunny/windy, export when it is dark/not windy, and even import energy when wholesale prices are cheap. The expensive grid connection is better utilised.
That claim is baseless.
That’s all it takes for adoption to dramatically increase. Market forces will shift things around as ever more solar comes online, but as long as daytime rates are above nighttime rates solar is an obvious win for electric companies.
Well - no.
The $100 is up front capex. Add interest rate over 10 years and the price doubles. This is just the module/pack price, and you need to add installation, cabinets, fire suppression, AC/DC and controllers. Which probably add 50% to 100%.
Like wise the headline 2c/kWh is probably for ideal projects with ideal land/transmission/regulation/geography. It is also 70% generated in summer, and only 30% in the winter months.
Renewable energy is important, getting cheaper and accelerating and This-Is-Good (TM), But real physics and economics still matter.
At scale batteries are effectively a fuel that needs continuous replacement, though related equipment can last much longer. Also, module/pack prices dominate installation and operating costs as PV operates on DC and therefore needs a DC/AC converter etc.
Summer vs winter depends on geography, it’s largely meaningless between the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. It does become increasingly important further north, though offset by the relative need for AC. By the time you’re seeing such wide production swings from summer to winter you are simply in a bad location for solar.
PS: Actual charge vs discharge cycles of course vary widely as to various other costs.
1 KW Gas is 0,0639€ 1 KW Lithium Battery is ~105€
There is an incoming lithium shortage which means either the price will rise sharply, or you have to build other types of batteries.
KW = power, kWh = energy = integrated power over time
Batteries are reusable. I see claims varying from 2,000, to more than 10,000 times. That reduces the battery cost to between €0.0525 and €0.0105 / kWh.
It's not illogical to compare a battery with the production it's supposed to replace.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Isn't my comparison totally wrong on all levels?
I compared batteries, which are storage(or "power plants") with the price of the thing the gas power plant uses.
A better comparison would be the cost of battery storage, cost of filling it up, versus building a gas power plant and then producing the same energy.
If I find a good article on that I will link it.
In addition, for Europe, the key part of removing Russia from the energy equation is worth a hell of a lot of money.
In principle I prefer antipodal transmission lines for the grid and batteries for transport — grid is cheaper and a trade opportunity — but at global scale, such a grid will take a while to build.
On average that's 136GWh per day, lets assume that was spread so that it's say 36GWh per day in winter and far more in summer.
It consumes 500TWh a year.
Lets assume consumption is 1,400GWh per day evenly across the year. Consumption is higher in the day, so even with shorter days in winter lets make that half during daylight and half at night, 700GWh each.
If Germany increased its solar to 50 times as much as it currently has to generate 1800GWh a day in winter, it would require 700GWh of storage and a total of 1400GWh during the day.
There are 48 million cars in Germany, lets assume that 65% of them are parked overnight and connected to the electric grid, making it 30 million cars. Make them all electric, with with about 30kWh of "flexible" capacity for draining overnight (50% capacity) and filling up in the day per car. That's about 1,000 GWh of storage available overnight, enough to provide for the entirety of German electric consumption overnight.
During the summer when solar capacity would be three times as much, that excess capacity could be used to generate green hydrogen through electrolosis, used to do things like aluminium production, could be exported to neighbouring countries.
Now sure switching cars to fully electric would increase total usage of energy, about 2,000 kWh per car per year, say 100 TWh a year extra, but then there's a lot of wind generation in Germany (>100TWh) now which would offset that.