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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

In 2025 storage is cheap too, it's just that there's no need for it until you already have a large amount of renewables.

2025 is the year that storage is really being deployed in a serious manner in the US, more than 18GW most likely:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964

You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.

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> You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:

It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/power-outag...

So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'

That looks to be a population map:

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Which is what you would expect of a stat of "number of outages per state". If it's not normalized for land area, population, and all the other primary contributors to the total number of outages it's a useless stat. San Francisco has more people in it that the entire state of Wyoming.

Texas' power is also cheap, so to justify batteries they would have to not raise the cost of electricity that much.

The current cost of grid batteries is hidden, but it's not too hard to find out, and it is indeed quite cheap. But if there's no mechanism to get paid, ie ability to do time arbitrage in the energy market, then they do not get deployed.

Electricity market design and the ability of ISOs/PUCs/utilities to adapt to changing technology are bigger barriers to batteries than their price.

There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history.

See https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/energystoragere... for example.

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