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dgacmu

This was a little buried, so surfacing some #s that seemed interesting to put this in perspective:

- 565 MWh of storage capacity

- 185 MW of instantaneous power delivery capacity

- $219M of financing for the project

Hawaii's residential electricity price is roughly $0.415 per kWh vs a US average of $0.162.

View on HN

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-to-e...

Start where electricity is expensive and/or the revenue you steal from thermal generators (grid support mentioned, synthetic inertia, black start capability, etc) supports the economics, and work your way down as battery costs decline and you force thermal generators to become uneconomic due to compressing their runtimes. Think in systems.

Yup, absolutely. Places with high energy costs due to being geographically isolated / without a lot of local energy resources have always struck me as some of the best initial places for solar+battery.

Add to that a place that is close enough to the equator that there are no drastic seasonal shifts in PV production.

In the sub/tropics, usually there are only two seasons: wet and dry. During wet season, how much is PV production affected?

My understanding is rain/clouds don't drastically affect energy production, and sometimes the first rains can work to clear some dirt and debris off.

Generally you get less than 1/3 of ideal conditions during rain. Overcast less than 2/3 of ideal.

In Hawaii, each island has a dry side and a wet side. You can site grid-scale solar on the dry side.

I worked on a solar project a number of years back that was one of the first that was actually independently financially sustainable. It was in west Texas in an area that had a highly distributed population and very hot summers. So the existing energy sources were already higher than normal and had the added dimension of spiking demand. Perfect environment for solar to be competitive.

Except the politics of texas being pro oil and anti-renewable?

Texas is certainly pro-oil but it's also a top state for renewable electricity production. It has the most installed wind power of any state and is number two for solar power, behind only California:

https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/321

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183531/renewables-in-the...

In most states, with regulated utility monopolies that present a very limited menu of options for regulators to select from, the politics of the utility management and the regulatory board are important drivers on the generation mix. But also profit, and utilities make more profit with higher prices under the regulated monopoly model.

In Texas, with an open market for generators, profit is the primary driver of the generation mix. But the difference is electricity generators make more profit with lower cost generation methods, the exact opposite of regulated utilities.

> politics of texas being pro oil and anti-renewable

Pro-profit is an irresistible force against most other forces

You are correct. They regularly pass laws and regulations with the clear intent to hobble renewables rollout.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/power-grid-adviso...

They'd likely be doing much better if not for that.

I know I am correct, why is why getting -4 karma shows how silly HN is

Can you clarify your usage of "thermal" here? Most everything except photovoltaic is thermal.

In the US, we usually name the heat source -- coal, natural gas, nuclear -- even though these are all thermal in operation. And the word 'thermal' does not show up in any of those when we talk about them.

The only time the word 'thermal' shows up in US usage is with the 'geo' prefix, and I can't imagine compressing the runtime of a geothermal plant, it's the perfect base-load plant. Are we talking about different things?

Coal, oil, or fossil gas are traditionally considered thermal generators. Burn, make water hot, make water do work.

Examples: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aelectricitymaps%2Felectri...

https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b...

I think you’re being a bit pedantic, actually. I work in power systems in the US (though not an expert) and the term thermal being used to refer to coal, gas and nuclear, with the latter a bit flexible, is very common. For example, it’s very common to say “thermal systems provide inertia”.

In following the Ukraine war, I've come to understand that in certain usage, 'thermal' always implies 'nuclear thermal', almost like a euphemism rather than a useful descriptor that includes other forms of thermal.

So I think it's a terrible term in general and it's much more useful to describe the fuel, that's all I was asking for.

I see the word thermal used for coal/gas all the time.

I just finished a day of skiing. I am taking off my thermals. Thermal is an incredibly broad term to let yourself pigeonhole it to a first association.

One could argue concentrated solar power [1] is thermal as opposed to photovoltaics.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

shrug sure, but people don’t talk about it that way, at least around me. They use thermal to mean a power source where you burn something and get energy out.

> Most everything except photovoltaic is thermal.

Huh? Solar, Hydro and Wind are all non-thermal sources of power.

Edit: Technically I believe Solar can function as a thermal plant as well if you are using mirrors to concentrate light to produce heat.

If only the "systems" we were considering were meant to provide limitless and virtually free electricity (nuclear), which is congruence with the "systems" of reducing poverty.

Enough sunlight lands on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. ~500-600GW of solar will be deployed in 2024 globally, and we are accelerating to 1TW deployed annually [2].

Commerical nuclear fission is unviable at this point [3], even at nimble startups [4] [5], but proponents are free to argue in support of it to anyone who will still listen. Renewables and batteries have reached an escape velocity trajectory [6].

This global energy system will eliminate energy poverty in our lifetime, and like bankruptcy, it'll happen slowly, and then all of a sudden.

[1] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye...

[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christ...

[3] https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38894631

[5] https://neutronbytes.com/2023/01/24/nuscales-smr-costs-hit-h...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924

> Enough sunlight lands on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. ~500-600GW of solar will be deployed in 2024 globally, and we are accelerating to 1TW deployed annually [2].

Enough sunlights lands on earth every two minutes to power humanity if the whole surface of the planet including ocean was fully covered by 100% efficient solar panels. How is this even remotely relevant when we don't have close to the material needed to achieve that coverage and the efficiency of panels is famously extremely low.

The deployment in 2024 is - as usual - expressed in "theoretical max power". Which is nowhere near the actual throughput, and of course orders of magnitude higher than the "when I need it" actually delivery. Again; big numbers don't mean big results; real life scenario matter here, theoretical best is far less relevant.

Additionally, quoting "pv-magazine-usa.com" on this subject must be some kind of silly joke considering that it could as well be named "lobby-webiste-with-a-clear-political-agenda-to-push-for-photovoltaic-and-prove-it-also-cures-cancer.com" and no-one wold bat an eye. Similarly, other HN comment written by yourself usually don't count as "sources" for statements.

https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 is all the land that is needed to reach net zero. Certainly, we don’t need the entire earth covered. Replacing just the ~40 million acres of corn ag in the US used to produce ethanol for vehicles would provide 1.5x annual electrical needs of the country, including all light vehicles assuming they’re EVs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856518) (solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn). The thought exercise is to demonstrate how cheap renewables are, their growth trajectory, and to guess how soon this impairs all other non renewable generation sources economically speaking. Clearly, the impairment is coming, as this post demonstrates. We’re simply arguing the time horizon.

The links to my other comments are comments that contain citations supporting the thesis, versus an unnecessary wall of text. No facts I put forth are uncited.

We have enough fissile material to support the planet for 10s of thousands of years, so the nuclear proponents can speak in theoretical maximums and still beat you. You don't have enough raw materials on planet earth to continue making solar panels for the next 10s of 1000s of years, given that you need to replace the panels every 10-20 years (optimistically).

Commercial nuclear fission is completely viable for anyone not allowing it to become unviable with lawsuits. See: China.

Downvote me all you want, but you'll live in poverty when there are no factories in your town because the lights turn off during a snowstorm.

Electricity from nuclear is neither limitless nor free. While we would have been much better off (in terms of global warming) if we had not hobbled nuclear power generation decades ago, at this point it's cheaper and faster to build out solar and wind than nuclear.

The part I hate about the math used in this argument, is that really we should be working with a goal of much cheaper energy production, to enable other green technology.

Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins. If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.

Things like EVs, electric furnaces for recycling, greener chemical plants and carbon capture mechanisms all become more viable with consistently cheap electricity.

> Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins. If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.

I'd love to see your sources for this. To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear. They used to be more comparable a decade or two ago, but solar costs have dropped dramatically since then.

Mostly the viability studies in the French reactor program.

It heaviy depends on how you set up the comparison. If you look at most current energy markets and say "how can I make money with these rules" the answer is almost always build a small amount of renewables. If you say, how should a government invest to retire coal power and achieve a low and stable energy cost, then nuclear can be viable (in some places).

I've seen several studies, none that reached the conclusion you are putting forward. The closest was one that said a lower, but still high percentage nuclear power in France is optimal for reducing CO2 emissions given the nuclear infrastructure that already exists there.

Do you have any specific studies in mind I may have missed?

Anything French on nuclear is simply suspicious, they have a massive interest in selling it - to then double or treble prices during construction, as seen with Hinckley C.

> To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear.

Only if we build reactors in the modern way rather than like the French did in the 1970s. (The reasons why its so much more expensive are complex, but mostly a regulatory ratchet and an tolerance for risk so low that if applied to the rest of life we'd close down parks as too dangerous)

Ah, you mean back when French wages were much lower?

Nuclear (and construction in general) is a victim of the Baumol Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect , where the cost of something increases over time if it does not see labor productivity improvement, simply because other sectors of the economy do see labor productivity improvement.

Inflation adjusted wages in France increased by 33% from 1991 to 2023. During that time the inflation adjusted cost of nuclear power plant construction has gone from around 1500/kWe to 4000/kWe.

It's not just Baumol.

Keep in mind that solar and wind alone can't power a single city. You need something to compensate, something like coal/natgas or storage. The amount of storage you need, depends on geography and local weather conditions. If your storage comes short, even a bit, the amount of conventional power stations you need to keep the lights on is exactly the number if power stations you would have to operate if you never had invested into wind or solar in the first place.

This is usually missing in typical cost calculations for solar or wind.

Nuclear needs the same compensation. The high fixed cost low variable cost model lends nuclear power to only run at 100%.

Take the California grid, peak energy usage is 2x minimum. Nuclear plants are insanely costly when ran at 100%. Imagine running at much lower capacity factors. Say the peaking plants run at 50%, that means the cost for consumers would be ¢2.4-4/kWh. [1]

Logically this entails that if we can solve a nuclear grid then we can solve a renewable grid since they impose the very similar constraints on the grid operators.

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...

>If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.

It loses every way. Its LCOE is 5x higher. The PR campaign to save it was about neither its cost nor the environment but economically buttressing the nuclear military industrial complex.

It's SO much more expensive in fact that it's actually cheaper to use wind/solar to electrolyze hydrogen, store it underground in a salt cavern and burn that to generate electricity.

>Things like EVs

Things like EVs are even less suited to nuclear power because they dont need constant power and can charge while electricity is cheap. Ditto electric heating.

The problem with the whole nuclear vs. renewables argument is that we don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We need a huge amount of carbon-free electricity right now, not just to meet current demand but to actively decarbonize our industry.

The only reason we can realistically get to net zero with batteries and renewables is because we export our polution abroad by having China produce everything. And we then ship it back to us using incredibly carbon-intense modes of transportation.

If we had to onshore all that production and actually count it towards our own emissions we'd have no hope of meeting our climate goals with solar panels and wind power.

This argument is clearly bogus. There's a huge set of preposterous ways of generating electricity. No one is going to say we need to do all of them. So why is nuclear not also in that set? You can't just assume it isn't.

> while electricity is cheap

Electricity is cheap mostly when there is more base load than demand; i.e. at night. I don't think you can have that concept if you want to remove base load and just make electricity when the weather lets you.

The fifties want their nuclear advertising back…

Nuclear is rather expensive and, with current technology, not „limitless“ in any sense of the word

If just the nuclear power plant companies had to fully handle their waste products from the get go, there wouldnt be the delusion today that nuclear energy is free or cheap.

If said companies were allowed to operate and dispose of waste in a way that had sane risk numbers (say, less than a hundred million dollars per life) then it could be cheap.

Heck, can literally glass the waste and dump it on the abyssal plane, job done. (You can do the maths on this easily enough, essentially zero life is effected and the radioactivity of the ocean increases negligibly)

There is so much uranium/etc dissolved in sea water already, you can skip the vitrification and just dump nuclear waste straight into the ocean without any problems. Pick a deep spot just to stop people from messing with it.

Nuclear is definitely part of the mix we need, but we can easily do multiple things.

For one thing, it's neither limitless nor free - the limit is the amount of radioactive ore we mine, and the cost is the cost of setting up a plant, running it, mining the ore, purifying it, transporting it,... The cost of nuclear is actually pretty high. I'm not talking about safety except that the cost factors in both passive and active safety mechanisms. And, they take _forever_ to build and bring to operation.

On the other hand, the price of solar (even without subsidy) is already cost competitive with _coal_ leave alone nuclear.[1] But it's intermittent, and batteries like the article are expensive.

So, the question is not either this or that, but what's the right mix...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Electric...

I'm having a hard time seeing much use for new nuclear power plants at the costs they would realistically have (vs. sales pitch costs you hear from nuclear vendors before they confront reality and fail.)

Don't forget to factor in the thermal generators' owners abandoning their business way before you thought they would, decades before there's a viable replacement for on-demand power to run an advanced industrial economy.

Yup exactly! https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...

People always forget that batteries also absorb power. Having a lot of renewables means there are energy spikes far exceeding what can be used in that moment. Without batteries, that energy is lost. Having batteries means that energy can be buffered and used later (e.g. in the evening). So they improve the capacity factor of existing installed renewables. Add domestic batteries, EV batteries, etc. to the mix and you also get the potential for demand shaping where you charge those when renewable energy production is spiking and prices are low. And of course even though that is currently not utilized on a large scale, all those EVs could technically provide energy back to the grid as well.

Another point is that batteries like this are not actually intended for long term storage. They are instead about stabilizing the grid and dealing with short term spikes and dips in supply and demand of energy. Unlike a coal or gas plant, a battery can respond in milliseconds and be very cost effective for that. Spinning up coal and gas plants is expensive and slow. And they cost money when they are not running.

And while that single coal plant was able to provide so-called baseload; it would only have been able to do so if it was up and running 24/7/365. And that wouldn't be true. They are very reliable but occasionally coal plants have to be down for maintenance, repairs, etc. and this can take quite some time (weeks/months). Same with nuclear plants. So, relying on that to not happen was never a good plan.

Long term storage is always assumed to be needed to compensate for a lack of this baseload. However, baseload is actually a fuzzy notion until you express it in gwh and gw. Hawaii seems to be in the process of proving this might be a lot less than some people seem to assume. At least I'm not aware of them having any long term storage. They'll probably add more battery and resilience to their grid over time in the form of more wind and solar generation and additional batteries. But if these people modeled this correctly and did their homework, this might actually be fine as is. We'll find over time I guess.

Do we currently have enough renewables installed in (eg) the the UK for batteries to increase capacity factor? Is there ever enough renewable production that energy is lost?

Wind farms often get turned off because there is too much Wind, solar is also often throttled. There is a lot of "lost" power that could rather find its way into batteries or H2-electrolyzers.

They get turned off to avoid damage in too much wind, not to avoid overproduction. We only have a few GW of installed solar capacity so it's not hugely important to the overall picture.

In the UK it's easy to see that Wind and CCGT plants operate in inverse of one another, when it's windy most of our power comes from the wind and the CCGT are switched off. And conversely when it's calm the CCGTs produce most of the power.

Yes, but it's at a local level.

One of the benefits of batteries is that they can be spread around and used to alleviate bottlenecks. Building transmission is very expensive, so this is a good early market for them.

These are called Non-Tranmissikn Alternatives or Non-Wires Alternatives:

NTAs are programs and technologies that complement and improve operation of existing transmission systems that individually or in combination defer or eliminate the need for upgrades to the transmission system.

Hawaii, a remote island in the middle of the pacific, pays less than the 2024 pg&e prices for the bay area. PG&E are the worst.

And this is before PG&E gets around to all their deferred maintenance on lines that are likely to start deadly wildfires.

One does have to wonder where all the money has gone, and what the supposed regulators at CPUC are allowing to happen.

So, we're subsidizing rural lifestyles with our Bay Area power bills?

Yes, also with your home hazard insurance

That's also not true. Home insurance in rural areas is insanely expensive, assuming you can get it at all. The insurance companies explicitly refuse to subsidize high-risk houses with low risk premiums. This is why it's also becoming unaffordable / impossible to get flood insurance in parts of Mountain View / East Palo Alto.

On top of that the California state government has allowed the insurance cartel to form an artificial monopoly, and then funnel new plans into it, where they can charge a large multiple of fair market rates to homeowners (due to their monopoly status, and the fact that they're an association that was formed by the companies that conspired to refuse to cover the house). Of course, they provide terrible customer service and refuse to pay out after natural disasters.

Here's their web site:

https://www.cfpnet.com

Nope. Rural customers are not the issue. I can confirm they don't maintain rural lines, and they charge 5 figures for 2-3 hours of labor in rural areas, just like in the city.

Even if they were adequately servicing rural areas, that wouldn't be the root cause. If it was, then power would be more expensive in completely rural states than it is in California.

There was a lot of well-documented corruption decades ago (remember when an entire residential block exploded because they used to falsify line maintenance records and move the money into their personal accounts?) I doubt it's improved since then, and I'm pretty sure that's the root cause.

Rural customers are the ones serviced by lines close to trees, which are the ones that are sparking forest fires during hot dry summers.

Power lines cause plenty of forest fires in rural states as well. But the money involved is probably very different, and Californians are bilked for higher rates simply because they are richer than someone in Idaho or Wyoming.

If you don't maintain power lines, then they'll eventually cause fires regardless of where they are.

PG&E employees were caught skimming the money for line maintenance. At this point, the whole grid is falling apart.

The power poles in our area have over 20 degree bends in them, and are nearly as old as I am. Last year, we had dozens of trees take out the single digit mile line between ourselves and the freeway, and PG&E's availability was barely one nine. It used to make news if our area had a power outage over 12 hours. Now, it doesn't make news if the outage is under a week.

Other states in the US do not have problems like this. (Puerto Rico does, but it's not a state.)

my place in Tahoe is in California but the power comes from the Nevada grid. It costs 14c, so 3x (!!!) less. It’s pretty rural and tree dense :)

Not building Gen 4 nuclear plants conveniently close to major cities and industrial centers along the coastline where they can sink the off the coast a bit...

As a major infrastructure component electricity is one of those natural monopolies that should be socialized, with long term planning by the community (government agencies) and built by contractors on fixed price for delivering an output contracts - with a reasonable price and insurance for not building it correctly the first time included.

The cost of generation is a tiny fraction of the cost of the transmission and distribution grid in California.

We hav pricy electricity because of our "fixed" grid costs, not because of expensive generation. Utilities usually take a fixed rate of profit from T&D, and are therefore incentivized to overbuild as much as possible, and it's the regulators' job to stop that.

A socialized grid probably would be run much better than the one by PG&E, however legislation to buy them out has usually been extremely poorly timed so that the state, as purchaser, would take the biggest losses instead of the investors who backed the bad management team.

Transmission would be much less of an issue if source and demand were closer together.

I thought it couldn't get worse and then I saw my parents' San Diego electricity bills. It seems like whatever CA is doing/has done is really screwing its residents.

Granting a private company a monopoly on critical infrastructure is working out great for them eh

yeah that libertarian state government has really let the state run wild.

Oahu's average residential electricity costs $0.43/kWh[0]. My last PG&E bill shows an average cost of $0.35/kWh. Still outrageous considering the national average is less than half that, but I think your numbers are off.

Having said that, PG&E is the worst. Agreed.

[0] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...

What plan are you on? You likely are looking at old rates, they jumped almost 20% Jan 1st. See https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...

PG&E is higher: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

I think California's IOUs are selling the most expensive electricity of any major provider in the nation.

That doesn't seem right. Looked up the rates for San Mateo and San Francisco county rates[1] and they're both under $0.400/kWh. On the other hand my parents in San Diego are paying over $0.450/kWh with rates scheduled to go even higher in 2024.

[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RateComparison

Why is power so expensive in San Diego? Wiki tells me that most of San Diego is served by a separate utility (compared to SF bay area): San Diego Gas & Electric.

I don't know why, but both power and gasoline are even more expensive in San Diego than in the Bay Area or Los Angeles. My hunch is that SD is weirdly isolated from imports and hasn't kept up with very recent growth.

Those numbers are way out of date. See https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/... for the latest

In the SF Bay area, electricity prices are so high with PGE, it's more cost effective to burn gasoline in my Gen1 Chevy Volt if the price of gas is below $4.50 a gallon.

So estimating the lifetime of the battery at 5000 cycles and lets say round trip efficiency at 95% we end up with $0.082 / kWh. (EDIT: originally I claimed $0.074 which is wrong) that the battery adds.

So I'm guessing in the long run this will considerably lower the cost of electricity on the island as adding PV capacity is much cheaper than keeping a coal plant running and this battery allows to install much more and use the energy at night. Not sure whether Hawaii has much wind power but it would seem to be rather windy place.

Are you assuming zero cost for the power to charge the battery?

No. This is additional on top of energy production. Energy production cost was already in the base price quoted. The energy consumption will be roughly the same unless the price changes dramatically.

But this allows more PV generation to be put in which is the cheapest way of producing energy.

The windy side of Maui has a bunch of wind turbines.

Can you explain your logic a bit more? I'm struggling to understand how you calculated the $0.074, and what you are saying it represents.

Edit: I suspect your calculations just represent depreciation over the batteries lifetime, which is only one of the costs involved.

The capacity of the battery is 565 MWh.

The cycle life of these kinds of batteries is about 5000. Meaning they get about 5000 charge and discharge cycles before their useful life is over. It could be 2000 it could be 10000 and the definition of useful is also dependent on application.

So in it's lifetime this battery can store 5000 * 565 = 2825000 MWh

The cost of the system was $219M.

About 5% of energy is going lost due to inefficiencies.

$219M / (5000 * 565 * 0.95) = $81.6/MWh = $0.082 / kWh.

I am sorry for calculating the efficiency incorrectly in the original post.

This does not take into account the maintenance cost.

Thanks! No need to apologise, it's fun to run the numbers.

On top of maintenance costs we probably need to account for finance costs (5% interest rate means repayments of 100mil over 10 years) and the fact batteries don't tend to ever get charged/discharged 100%.

Presumably if you built this you'd want a bit of return on your investment, so you'd have to charge more on top.

TBC: I think these batteries make economic sense (even more so if coal/petrol had externalities baked into their costs), but we don't want to oversell things

Unless these are special a "useful life" rating of 5000 cycles mean that after 5000 cycles your battery will be down to about 80% capacity compared to their original MWh rating.

But full cycle is probably not the complete picture when it comes to grid scale storage since they have some control over the charge/discharge rate and they can optimize their usage, a bit like how electric cars allow you to stay in the 20-80% range instead of going all the way up to 100%.

Good point. In 0% to 100% capacity cycle, the battery will be dead long before 5000 cycles. OTOH, listed capacity may already take into account a more gentle 20% to 80%, or less, cycle. https://www.tesla.com/megapack doesn't provide specs, though.

I wonder how much the one-time costs were for this project, compared to the cost of the batteries themselves:

- land acquisition

- earthworks

- civil construction

- grid hookup

At least in theory it should be possible to recondition these batteries to make them useful again, I'm not sure who/when/how much but I suspect they will never be completely worthless.

That's close to my guesstimates of about $0.10/kwr. So I tend to believe it.

The important thing is battery storage is competitive with peaking plants over a period of hours. And lowest cost when it comes to short term supplies on the order of seconds to an hour.

Also the logistics of containerized batteries is great. You need a place to put them and a grid connection. And nothing more than that.

rountrip is closer to 85% and you have to add the power electronic, also the graph is cell cost of module/pack/gigapack and security systems...

Typically at the moment we talk about a price of about $15 a MWH for Wind and $14 for Solar (last year anyway). So around $0.15 p/KWH for the power to charge and discharge it. Assuming the wind/solar is only going for a third of the day that brings the average price up to about $.209 p/kwh when we take into account battery wear cost. That is definitely economically viable in a very large number of places in the world.

Incidentally the totals work out about the same on a home solar system, my battery is 0.09 p/kwh and the Solar output averages out to about 0.07p/kwh but get paid for export at 0.15 p/kwh.

You misplaced a zero, $15/MWh is $0.015/kWh.

it won’t make any impact on the prices there because it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what they spend importing oil and diesel to burn for the majority of their electricity

What I don't get is that this is meant to replace a 180MW coal plan, so we are talking about 3h worth of electricity at full load. Not sure how volatile is the weather in Hawaii, but in Europe, when there is no wind, it can last days not hours.

$219,000,000.00 / 185,000 kwh = $1,183.78 per kwh.

Seems kind of on the expensive side, but maybe it's reasonable for this kind of project -- and there might be some big one-time costs like connecting the site to the power grid.

Seems like there's a lot of room to drive costs down though. Some company could plausibly buy the batteries for $100/kwh, sell a completed power station for $200/kwh, and still make a profit.

You mixed up Power and Energy.

Ah, you're right, I copied the wrong number. It's 565 MWh of storage not 185MWh.5.

$219,000,000.0 / 565,000 Mwh = $387.61/kwh. That's a bit more reasonable. That's not that far out of line with paying retail prices for reputable-brand LFP cells in the U.S.

https://www.thunderstruck-ev.com/calb-l173f163b.html

565 MWh = 2 TJ

Fat Man was 88 TJ

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