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Comment by adev_ | Hacker News Reader

> Utility scale solar + storage: $46 - $102

Oh. A private financial think tank that grossly underestimate the cost of storage when solar/wind investment actually can yield 10% ROI in some country.

I am so surprised :rolling-eyes:

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It's hard to argue they underestimate the costs when they have costed, deployments listed you can check that back up the costs. See page 21 and 22 of the linked PDF.

But if you choose not to believe them there are numerous other sources that give the similar numbers.

https://www.irena.org/Energy-Transition/Technology/Energy-st...

https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/big-battery-bonanz... (2021)

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf (2021)

None of those sources has any relevance to the bottom line accounting cost of large scale utility storage for intermittent renewable energy. You presumably have to over provision both storage and baseline power generation to assure the grid of enough reliability. The assumptions you make in doing that drive the cost of the entire solution.

Lazard has mostly ignored those costs when it tries to come up with a LCOE for intermittent renewables. A real world grid operator can't ignore those costs. To take a real world example, Germany requires dramatic subsidies to build out its renewable energy portfolio. These subsidies occur at every level of electricity grid. There is no simple way to untangle the costs and come up with a single number that can be compared to non-intermittent sources of energy. The share of biomass in the German grid is strongly suggestive of the fact that renewable energy isn't cost competitive without significant subsidies.

There is no free lunch, decarbonizing energy generation requires more expensive sources of energy.

There is not a single line mentioning the effect it would have on lithium (or vanadium) price and supply if this would be adopted at grid scale.

Which of course, like common sense would say (irony), would stay perfectly flat or decreasing when it already struggle to match the supply for EV which is two order of magnitude inferior to what would be needed.

Which make me back to my point: Yes, this is oriented garbage done by people that has financial interest in what they are selling.

It's worth noting that large scale power projects are telegraphed a lond way in advance and raw material supply can react well to that.

There's likely to be a lithium oversupply: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/bank-of-america-sees-lithium...

There's no particular shortage of Lithium in the ground - it's just matching projects to demand. I'm not familiar with vanadium.

> oriented garbage done by people that has financial interest in what they are selling

They sell consulting services.

“Financial think tank” is a weird way to say investment bank.

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