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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons).

Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.

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The point being made is that if smoothing over time becomes sufficiently cheap then smoothing over space is supplanted.

It would be nice if this happened before the next Carrington Event (or the next nuclear war with orbital EMP weapons.)

I get that, I'm just disagreeing that we should be looking forwards to storage becoming that cheap. Particularly when our cheap energy sources (solar, wind) have a lot of location specific variability over time.

With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it

The original report by Ember [1] is decent but clearly biased.

They assume each battery cycles entirely EVERY day - even in winter. They also assume PV is never curtailed - not even in summer. They of course ignore multi-day weather anomalies. Like wise for weekend/holiday demand variations. etc.

The best part of the report are real world bids of 2025 ESS projects.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

I do look forward to local storage getting that cheap. If Standard Thermal (here I am hawking them again) succeeds, we could see local PV-generated seasonally stored 600 C heat at as little as $3/GJ -- competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.

I think there is a calculation that makes the point a little clearer. There is some distance, x, where it is cheaper to transport the electrons mechanically than it is to push them over a wire. Every month that distance gets shorter as battery prices drop. This gets even more advantageous for batteries when you start talking about variable use and generation since it is easier to change the destination or source of a battery container than it is to change the destination or source of transmission lines. My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly. Imagine a small city getting a local electricity provider. I actually think the way it is likely to go is that energy consumers (cities, factories, etc) will start installing backup power via battery shipment and then slowly start disconnecting from the larger grid as the cost of the battery container delivered power dips below the cost for transmission line delivered. The infrastructure is just so much more efficient for most use cases because we already have that infrastructure for shipping other goods.

> My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly.

That seems physically unlikely to me. Sure, burying and maintaining cables costs money, but other than that transferring energy in a very fundamental and solid state way is going to be much easier than packaging it up and transporting it with heavy machinery.

This is definitely a case where your argument only works if it is supported by the actual calculation.

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