Getting to 100% renewables requires cheap energy storage. But how cheap?

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One of the most heated and interesting debates in the energy world today has to do with how far the US can get on carbon-free renewable energy alone.

One faction believes that renewables can supply 100 percent of US energy, with sufficient help from cheap energy storage and savvy management of demand.

Another faction believes that renewables will ultimately fall short and need assistance from nuclear power and natural gas or biomass with carbon capture and storage.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886/renewable-energy-storage-cost-electricity

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Domestic Solar, Home Batteries and EVs will have increasingly important roles in helping to flatten the demand for electricity and share power to reduce peak demand.

 

Domestic Solar and home energy storage is expanding. Around 30% of Australian homes have rooftop solar.

 

Increasingly new EVs come with Bidirectional Charging giving access to battery storage with discharge rates of 4.5kW in the BYDs and 3.6kW with Hyundais and Kias. We are not talking about running your 80kWh car battery dry, just discharging a few kWhs at times of peak demand.

 

Tesla is expanding into Solar Microgrids and Virtual Power Plants with owners being paid $2/kWh

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/29/tesla-expanding-solar-microgrids-virtual-power-plants/

 

What is needed is Smart energy tariffs and feed-in rates that track the market  rate for electricity.

 

 

 

 

 

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The gist of the article linked to is that it would take an average cost of a battery to be $20 per KWH of capacity for a 100% renewable system. At the time this was predicted, it was expect that such a battery wouldn't be available before 2030. But already it seems likely that such batteries will be available well before 2030.

One company, Form Energy is building a $750,000,000 in West Virginia that they project will eventually produce batteries well below that mark.

 

And as the authors of the original research reported,

 

Storage Requirements and Costs of Shaping Renewable Energy Toward Grid Decarbonization

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9

 

the $20 mark is only necessary if you count on batteries to supply all the deficiencies in power supply. Even dropping from 100% to 99.9% increases the feasible ceiling of battery costs.

 

Form Energy's ultra-cheap iron-air batteries to get $760M factory

https://newatlas.com/energy/form-energy-iron-battery-plant/

 

And if other methods are being deployed, such as displaced power consumption, improved transmission line connectivity, and virtual networks. the ceiling becomes much higher.