I’d like to take a moment to praise the writing here. Rigorous, dense, and well-organized; communicative rather than coughing up tables of raw figures in prose form.
I’d refer to the source studies, but at $9,990 per region… Ms Pickerel’s overview seems plenty informative for me.
Regarding EMEA:
> Grid-scale battery storage costs are now decisively cheaper than gas peaking across the region. [and price will fall another 33% in the decade ahead]. This shift means storage is displacing open-cycle gas turbines on cost in every gas market across the region, marking a significant structural turning point for power system planning across both the Gulf and Africa.
The analyst’s bottom line:
> From Latin America to Asia Pacific, the combination of falling storage costs and world-class renewable resources is closing off the economic case for new gas peaking capacity, while long-term contracted renewables increasingly set the ceiling rather than the floor on power costs.”
Heady times! For all the gnashing of teeth about regulating our way out of combustion-based production—it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants, no arm-twisting required. “Not with a bang, but a whimper”…
> In the Middle East and Africa, where utility-scale solar already leads at $37/MWh, four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035
I'm struggling to understand the numbers here. How does a fall of 33% on $37 make it $80?
I think the $37 might be the cost of producing the energy via solar, and it’s the grid-scale batteries that are expected to get cheaper:
> Four-hour storage reaches $120/MWh in 2026 and is forecast to fall 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, cementing its role as the enabling technology for solar and wind integration.
Cheap or not, solar isn’t dispatchable on demand, so in and of itself it doesn’t replace the role of a peaker plant. But now that the big batteries are a viable thing, solar-plus-battery is feasible to handle the parts of the demand curve that required open-cycle gas plants before.
Horses for courses, right? They build these entire peaker power plants to sit idle most of the time, just to handle the couple dozen or hundred hours of maximum load in the year.
4 hours at a time hopefully buys you your way through such a peak, even if it doesn’t get you through weeks at a time… and presumably you can top it up from base load after demand peaks for the day, right?
In the equatorial and desert regions they’re talking about, I think both seasonal supply changes and demand profile might be more consistent than, say, dreary cold parts of Europe..
That's a big part of what drives me crazy about the papers I've seen on this work. People like to quote some levelized price of energy and say "this costs less than an AP1000" and you never see modeling of "here's the price in California, here's the price in New York"
(3) annual variation (you might get 3x the sunlight in summer than winter? do you build 180 days of storage or do you overbuild solar systems 3x and get Casey Handmer to dream up something useful to do with that excess energy that doesn't have a stupendous capital cost?)
The "have a natural gas backup plan" is worse than people think for a lot of reasons, in terms of the laws of political science and economics you're going to find that that tail winds up wagging the dog, the whole market will get designed around the needs of those turbine owners, it's going to cost the same if they are running turbines for 5 minutes a year or 20 days a year, and ultimately you're never going to get rid of it. If you really plan to run the system 5 minutes a year what are the odds it will really work when you need it? You have to not just support the turbines you hardly ever use, pipelines you hardly ever use, drilling and storage operations for gas, etc.
What political/economical problem? This has already been solved in most regulated markets. Capacity payments are already being made on many grids. Companies are already literally being paid for "doing nothing", being paid for being available for an unusual situation.
Renewables & batteries have high upfront costs but really low operating costs, so that's what you want supplying 90-98% of your power if your goal is lowest cost. (see Ember Energy reports). NatGas has low capital costs but relatively high operating costs, so yes, sitting idle and running a few days a year really is optimal.
Great comments throughout as usual. I’ll add that for the last few percent of generation that might need firm on demand combustion, gas turbines can be fed methanol, ammonia, or hydrogen, all generated from excess low carbon energy. I’d like to think that geothermal will be able to fill this gap, but only time will tell.
Yeah I think it really only works well in the central latitudes. The American South, the tropics and equatorial regions, Southern Europe, etc. that get a lot of high-angle sunlight year-round.
Otherwise you need to deal with long distance power transmission across many political jurisdictions, or local generation for night or other low-solar times. To my mind, nuclear base load with solar and batteries used for things like charging cars or demand-shifting probably makes more sense. It's really a shame that we mostly withdrew from building nuclear plants for the past three or four decades; instead we have reached the point where we have to re-learn how or recreate the tooling needed to build them and they are still too damn expensive.
nuclear base load makes sense from a pure grid engineering PoV, which i think is why it appeals to so many HN folk. Sadly, it makes no sense economically anymore, so it will probably never be built at scale.
They quit building coal burning power plants in the US at the same time and for the same reason they quit building nukes…. The cost of the steam turbine and heat exchanges. I mean, the steam generators for a PWR are bigger than the reactor vessel, it is just insane to use hot water at high pressure to boil water at low pressure.
If nuclear is ever going to be competitive it is going to have to be some kind of reactor that runs at higher temperatures with a gas turbine power set. Could be a fast breeder or HTGR or molten salt but not water cooled. Anyway it is not a bird in the hand.
Never said we should not have been developing the technology. But even with the old PWR designs you're not pumping carbon into the atmosphere, which is the main point.
Ultimately though about 50% of the cost of a PWR is in the heat handling (heat exchangers and steam turbine) and the building costs to accommodate those systems. If the nuclear part was free they'd still struggle to compete -- the BWRX300 seems to get a lot of cost reduction by eliminating the pumps and heat exchangers and stuff and going to steel-concrete sandwich construction but to do better than that you have to really do something about that steam turbine.
For that matter, it's shocking how small the actual core is for FBRs. The capital cost of FBRs was long projected to be higher because traditionally you had to add a third cooling loop and some other systems but it is projected an sCO2 system today could be cheaper overall.
It's a lot of metal! Also the first PWRs had a lot of problems with corrosion causing steam generators to fail and these had to be replaced early. Small improvements in design and better chemistry control solved this.
People are highly aware that we haven't fixed the problems construction new nuclear power plants, they are less aware that we've gotten much better at operating them on all the metrics from uptime to occupational radiation exposure.
How about overbuild and interconnect? You don't have to overbuild for your personal worst case if you can buy power from somebody else if it comes to it.
Bucky Fuller imagined we might build a superconducting power grid that connects the whole world, but... power lines are expensive too and are politically tough because you have to cross so many boundaries that involve so many stakeholders. Realistically moving energy in space as well as time is part of the solution if not the whole solution.
My crazy idea is that you could put some energy producing or consuming facilities (hydrogen factory!) on floating platforms that can move where energy is available.
Sorry for the tangent but as a German I found it interesting (and somehow amusing) to learn that "Dunkelflaute" is an English "Lehnwort" (I couldn't find a proper English translation for that, either).
> (3) annual variation (you might get 3x the sunlight in summer than winter? do you build 180 days of storage or do you overbuild solar systems 3x and get Casey Handmer to dream up something useful to do with that excess energy that doesn't have a stupendous capital cost?)
My understanding is that the first number is the "cost per MWh generated by a PV plant", the second one is the "cost per MWh accumulated and then released by a 4-hour grid-scale battery plant"
The same as the ecological impact of constructing gas tanks and pipelines. Only using electricity from batteries doesn't have ecological harms, whereas burning gas does.
How so? Both require mining, separating metal from ore and so on. Steelmaking is done in blast furnaces that burn coal. Lithium can be refined by evaporating brine in large open ponds under sunlight.
- Worldwide Li-ion battery production per year: 35GWh
- Worldwide grid capacity: 5000GWs
- Lifetime of a specific cell in a grid scale battery: 20-30 years
- Current known reserves of Lithium worldwide at current usage rates: 80 years
So even if we magically mined all known Li reserves this year, it still would only be about 14% of the grid for 1 hour or about 9 minutes total for the entire grid. You don't actually need to backup the entire grid (only about 20-30% of it), but you need to do it for at least 4 hours. Basically, it isn't even close even if we only used Lithium for this use. You can get more with Na-ion, but if you think NPPs are dangerous (they aren't)...let's just say nobody would ever insure a grid scale Na-ion battery. Just one leak and it goes up with 1000s of tonnes of TNT of explosive force.
What's the total acreage of lithium extraction ponds in China today?
As distinct, of course, from the artificial lake of sludge known as the Weikuang Dam, four square miles in size, holding rare earth processing sludge waste in Baotou (Inner Mongolia) which is not from lithium processing.
What percentage of China's land area do these tailing ponds amount to, is "great swathes" really a fair estimate?
Do you think that acreage will drop with the current rise in Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE: new technique that skips traditional evaporation ponds, using filters or membranes to pull lithium directly from brine. It's faster, uses less water, and works in areas with lower brine lithium concentrations.) ?
What's your worksheet on waste from fossil fuels V waste from battery production looking like, is it online for others to look at ?
This entire article seems to be based on an assumption that the cost of batteries will go down 33% over the next 10 years because demand is so high, but costs of gas turbines will go up over the next 10 years because demand is so high.
Neither of these assumptions are based on anything other than "That's the number we had to put in to the model to get the conclusion we want".
The cost of batteries has gone down somewhere between 60-80% over the previous 10 years (and my understanding is that trend is expected to continue due to a combination of new technologies (e.g. Sodium Ion) and increased scale). So that one seems totally reasonable. A little conservative if anything.
Battery tech and production methods are still evolving and improving way faster than turbine tech and production. Meaning this is more than just production capacity.
Battery production is being invested in heavily. There are new types of batteries (like sodium ion) that are extremely relevant to the article that it barely even mentions. The pitch for those is of course no lithium, better temperature ranges, less need for cooling/heating them, much better fire safety, better durability, etc. This all adds up to lower cost when done at scale. That all adds up to a lot less cost for especially grid storage.
I agree the 33% number is meaningless. It's probably too conservative. The article actually does not talk about new battery chemistries like sodium ion. And given that large scale factories are already producing those by the tens of gwh, I think that's more than a little oversight. Additionally, there are learning effects that explain the large differences in prices between markets that the article mentions. Those are optimizations that countries have yet to implement. Some might not get around to that any time soon (like the US seems a bit of a basket case on cost/efficiency for a lot of things).
Because of the improvements in battery cost relative to the stagnating improvements in gas turbines, gas turbine manufacturers are going to be conservative in investing in new production capacity. A lot of companies that say right now that they are going to want to buy gas turbines might no longer want to in a few years. For example the low cost and ready availability of solar+battery might be persuasive for some. Investing many billions in new production capacity that won't come online until some time next decade is highly risky if the projected demand could evaporate. The reason there is a shortage is that that's what they thought five to ten years ago as well. So, it's easy to predict that turbine shortages might continue to exist.
One enduring insight from Brian Potter (Construction Physics) is that the cost of manufacturing tends to go down with scale, while the cost of construction doesn't drop nearly as much. Batteries are made in a factory and then pretty much just hooked up, while gas turbines have to be built. So, the difference in forecasts makes sense if you apply that rule.
There have been some experiments with prefabricated construction, but you still run into the issue that shipping really big things is hard, as we've seen with wind turbine blades. Robotic construction might make a dent at some point, but it still seems to be basically embryonic.
> Every time the global cumulative battery production has doubled, the price has dropped by roughly 19%.
There are only a handful of gas turbine manufacturers left, with a manufacturing backlog of half a decade.
It is exceptionally obvious battery manufacturing will only continue to scale (TAM is global EV and stationary storage market), and gas turbine builders will hang on until the economics turn, which they have. Regardless, these trajectories will hold unless something exceptional occurs. Is it likely we’ll build more batteries faster? Yes. Is it likely these are the last three major gas turbine manufacturers to exist? Also yes. Last call for buggy whips.
Batteries are easy to build (ish) and pretty scalable. New capacity can come online to meet demand.
IIRC there are something like 3 companies on earth that can make gas turbine blades, as it's a particularly difficult process, and they are sold out for the foreseeable future. New capacity is severely constrained and cannot meet demand.
Swanson's law and learning rates do seem to apply to batteries more as well as the fact that their no of cycles seem to be much longer than initially thought for LFP as well as storage focused Sodium ion batteries from CATL
If you had asked me whether I see more potential for battery prices to go down than turbine prices I would 100% say that batteries have more potential. Why?
1. Because there is a lot of pressure for them to go down, in literally every form of technology, be it phones, robots, drones, EVs, ... Turbines are also important, but they have had that pressure for decades and are relatively finished. Any further improvement will give diminishing results outside of specialized applications and demands
2. Because the technology for batteries is relatively open ended in comparison. Turbine prices are mainly about how that steel can be precision engineered and while there is some innovation at this front, the gains from that innovation have slowed for a while now. With batteries however the race is still very open and it would not be naive to assume some new chemistry will be found that reduces the cost and energy density drastically.
I don't know the economics around precision engineering well enough to intelligently how high demand impacts the manufacturing cost, but I could imagine it behaving slightly different than the cost of simpler processes, especially since good CNC machines are hefty investments.
China leads the world in battery manufacturing, it's not really so hard in an absolute sense, but gee do you have to get the cost down and get the quality up so you don't have batteries blow up because of manufacturing defects.
To make gas turbines though you need to get the last bit of performance available out of metals, manufacture parts with punishing tolerances, and do it with high quality so turbines don't blow up because of manufacturing defects. At this point in time China cannot make competitive gas turbines. China's COMAC C919 airliner is 100% dependent on western engines for instance.
Supply is larger than demand for batteries and prices are going down. Demand is larger than supply for natural gas turbines and prices are going up.
But that's just the short term.
More importantly, I believe that manufacturers are more confident in the long term future of demand for batteries so are willing to continue to invest. People are going to be buying electric cars 10 years from now. The demand for gas turbines in 10 years seems a lot more murky.
SpaceX has promised to start making turbines, which would bring their price down. But it's an Elon Musk promise, so how much weight do you put on it?
The market for aircraft engine gas turbines is at least 5x the market for industrial gas turbines. We could eliminate natural gas for electricity overnight and GE would keep spinning. Even if it becomes hard to justify development of land-based gas turbines it will still be possible to repurpose jet engines for this purpose.
(Though I really want to see a fast reactor coupled to a supercritical CO2 or helium brayton cycle turbine!)
> But it's an Elon Musk promise, so how much weight do you put on it?
Zero.
And I really mean zero, not a negative value. That is, when Elon Musk promises something, it doesn't mean he won't do it, it means that it is just as likely to do it as if he didn't promise anything.
I don't understand why people listen to him when it comes to predictions, he is as close to a random generator as one can get. Even analyzing his actions come with a lot of uncertainty, though not as much as what he says, some things are too big to hide. Being able to maintain such level of uncertainty is probably part of his success, he is like a poker player no one can read.
Point on Musk's problematic delivery record. But for an extremely complex type of critical equipment, in a market this tight, I don't know if there's any provider you'd want to fully trust to deliver on time.
NO, the projections are separate from the statement that batteries are NOW cheaper than peakers in most geographies. They'll be even cheaper if those projections pan out.
TLDR: Every where but some parts of the USA, solar + battery is the cheapest source of new power generation. Tariffs and subsidies continue to prop up gas generation. 40% YOY drop in battery prices!? Solar + battery is still on the cost learning curve (no where near plateau), whereas gas (extraction, turbines, etc) plateaued a while back.
--
That episode (and Ember's report) looks back at 2025.
So it couldn't account for this year's increased prices and volatility for gas, or data centers increasing the demand for gas turbines.
Globally, solar + battery adoption continues to accelerate. In the USA, big tech forfeited their climate pledges (choosing to use gas) and new solar + battery continues to be blocked by our constipated connection queue (to the grid).
I saw a seemingly credible prediction from an energy analyst that global energy use would fall over the next five years. The rationale being that electrification can use less energy for the same work because heat pumps, EVs, etc are more efficient. Just pumping and refining oil is a huge sink of energy that disappears as more things become electrified.
The popular number is that every 18 months, China was destroying 1 million BPD demand.
Presumably that would favor large scale battery storage, right? If large scale battery storage is already cost competitive with turbines and there is still more low-hanging fruit, then presumably battery costs will continue to fall faster than for turbines?
That said, I doubt the cost of either of these technologies is driven so much by the technologies themselves so much as it is our ability to manufacture and install large volumes of them at scale. Presumably it's easier to mass-manufacture batteries in a big factory and then ship them to the site than it is to construct each gas peaker plant on location, and moreover it's probably easier (i.e. cheaper) to scale up the manufacturing process for batteries than it is to scale up the construction process for peaker plants.
> If large scale battery storage is already cost competitive with turbines and there is still more low-hanging fruit, then presumably battery costs will continue to fall faster than for turbines?
Yes, and this is the assumption that the comment I replied to seems to disagree with. I think the assumption is right and the disagreement is wrong.
> That said, I doubt the cost of either of these technologies is driven so much by the technologies themselves so much as it is our ability to manufacture and install large volumes of them at scale.
Deployment is part of the learning curve.
I think you're agreeing with me (and disagreeing with the comment I replied to) here :)
That seems fairly obvious, but afaik the problem is not bridging four hours, it’s bridging a cloudy week without wind in winter. For that gas currently seems cheaper
The article does the annoying thing of using a technical term without definining it.
An open-cycle gas turbine is the "simple" configuration that draws in air through a pressurization stage, into a combustion chamber for fuel combustion, producing high-pressure hot gases that drive a turbine and generate power, with exhaust gases released into the atmosphere.
In other words, there is no recovery of heat from the exhaust, it's basically an aircraft jet engine core mounted on the ground and connected to a generator. They aren't very efficient but they are compact, relatively cheap, and quick to spin up during peak demand times.
I guess the point is that when combined with a source of dispatchable base load power like a combined cycle gas turbine or nuclear, batteries are now cheaper than open cycle gas peaker plants for bridging short (4 hours or less) spikes in demand.
This is exactly what they are going for. To not have to build and run expensive gas plants just for a few hours in the evening. It also allows you to run the few gas plants that you do build for longer to better amortize their build costs, making them less expensive overall.
Ideally you would pair these 4-hour batteries with CHEAP sources of electricity. Fill the battery when electricity is cheap, empty the battery when electricity is expensive (ie, when demand spikes or when other sources of generation drop off the grid).
The cheapest source of electricity today is noontime solar. Batteries can fill up on noontime solar and discharge into the evening peak. They could also charge on wind or traditional baseload sources overnight, and discharge into the morning peak.
The UK relies far too much on gas turbines, rather than renewables and as a consequence we have energy costs far higher than other European neighbours.
Gas is not cheap, it basically doubles your costs.
Well the goal is to only run the backup a few hundred hours a year, the question is which technology can provide close to 100% of demand a few percent of the time in the cheapest way. Turbines or even gas motors are relatively cheap in capex and gas is easy to store in large quantities.
Gas turbines have a manufacturing backlog of at least a half decade. The longer is takes to build them, the more favorable battery storage is (as it can be installed today), and the faster more battery storage manufacturing spins up, this further drives down the cost.
> For its part, China – a battery manufacturing powerhouse – has no such supply chain issues. It dominates global lithium battery production accounting for two-thirds of it. This relative strength gives it the confidence to relentlessly amplify its BESS footprint as evidenced in the capacity build-up between 2021 and 2026.
> In fact, China’s battery storage build-out has no global parallel thanks to this one factor alone, according to Ember. It estimates that nearly all (i.e.149.8 GW) of China’s “new energy storage” consists of lithium-ion batteries.
> In terms of the future, following a June update to its 15th Five-Year Plan, China is now aiming to deploy 300 GW of new energy storage by 2030. That would keep the country’s BESS industry progression, that outgrows all other countries combined, firmly on track.
Renewables require gas in the UK. There is no realistic route to 100% renewable grid without gas currently. I did some modelling of this and you'd require something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage. We currently have 40GWh.
Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that.
Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.
Last time I did the maths based on data from gridwatch the storage capacity required dropped dramatically if you over built the on the production side.
But ok, 30 million homes, 100kWh storage each, that's 3000 GWh
A 100kWh battery is about £25k, less than 1/10th the cost of the house, and less than the average new car
The issue is you need to design for 1-2 weeks of little to no wind and very little solar in winter, when demand is it its greatest. This is what is so tricky, unlike more southern climates where you have pretty reliable solar year round (even if its reduced, its not close to 0 which is the case in the UK). Instead of storing a day or so, you need to store weeks of energy.
Also you're forgetting residential electricity is maybe 1/3rd of total demand.
You said your modelling needed "something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage"
That's not outlandish given the cost of distributed batteries.
Are you upping that model?
(If you build more generation -- for example have renewable peak generation of 80GW rather than 40GW, that reduces storage requirements drastically, as on a dull quiet winter week where you're only getting 10%, you'd be generating 8GWh in a given period of time, instead of 4GWh)
On average. That doesn't mean there aren't sunny weeks where you get a lot more, and dark weeks where you get less. For instance if you get snow, output is pretty much 0 unless you clean them.
I believe there were 7-10 days in January 2025 where both solar and wind were in the single % digit for instance.
Of those 7-10 days, how many were consecutive? A couple days of single-digit efficiency each winter would be trivial to manage with batteries. I'm sure we can figure out a solution for the snow issue, especially since panels are usually angled.
Don't get me wrong, I get where you're coming from! But especially in the last 2-3 years, it seems like people always evaluate solar under the worst 0.01% chance scenario, which other power sources never have to survive. For example, not even half the days in January 2025 had single-digit outputs, yet they're still called "close to 0".
What I'd love to know is e.g.: in 99% of years, what's the worst Dunkelflaute we can expect? How much battery storage/solar overbuilding would we need to cover that, how much would it cost, and how much will it cost in a few years (based on current development rates)? I'd argue it'd be okay to reduce power-hungry industry for at worst few days, in case a once-in-a-century year happens.
The issue is though that you are saying 0.01% chance scenario, but gas/nuclear doesn't all go down at once at the same time every year. It's a somewhat fair counter that you might have serious gas disruptions, but LNG does massively diversify potential supply (and in the UKs case we have and will have a fair amount of domestic production for the next while).
Also keep in mind the overbuilding a massive problem anyway _outside_ of those 1-2 weeks worst case scenarios. We already have highly negative prices occurring more and more, and IMO this is the definition of policy failure, because the negative prices only arise because subsidies _encourage_ plants to keep producing even though the value is quite literally negative of the output.
Finally I don't think it's once in a century, probably most years have a significant Dunkelflaute event. And not all industry can be shut down like that (eg aluminium production) without causing catastrophic damage, and even if they can it makes them an unreliable supplier.
> The issue is though that you are saying 0.01% chance scenario, but gas/nuclear doesn't all go down at once at the same time every year.
Over this summer, a huge number of nuclear plants in Europe went down all at the same time, because they either would have killed the nearby river ecosystem by overheating it, or because they didn't have enough water to operate safely. This issue is only going to get worse as climate change progresses, and unlike most Dunkelflauten, the heat & drought really affect most of the continent at once.
> Also keep in mind the overbuilding a massive problem anyway _outside_ of those 1-2 weeks worst case scenarios.
It's only a problem because power generation tech like nuclear is so expensive, and it would become even more expensive if they couldn't run as much as possible. If we had a fully renewable+battery-driven grid, the issue would disappear.
> Finally I don't think it's once in a century, probably most years have a significant Dunkelflaute event.
I think you might unknowingly be ideologically motivated, because I specified that we should build enough to cover every Dunkelflaute in 99% of years. The amount of battery storage in this scenario by definition suffices for 99% of years, which makes the point about unreliability moot.
Yes, I have no doubt we can hit even a 90-95% renewable grid. It's the last 5% that is impossible to do without gas.
The cost of those last few percent is absolutely eye watering. The current plan to get it to 100% net zero is by having gas for the final 5% then using carbon capture and storage to offset the emissions.
It is not even the final 5%, it is the final 1-2%, because you need a multi-week dunkelflaute across Europe for the gas turbines to be needed in the future. A lot will also just be curtailing. For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario.
You are making the mistake of thinking that if the grid could provide 100% renewable energy on a windy day at noon in summer, it could also provide 100% renewable energy at night in winter with no wind. Obviously that’s not accurate. Renewables provide energy in a highly volatile sine wave. It’s the bottom of the sine wave which determines the capacity required for base load and dispatchable generation, not the top of the wave.
[Gas is about 11-13x cheaper than renewables with externalities like grid restructure and volatility imputed.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) That’s not to say renewables don’t have their place in modern grids. In fact an optimal allocation is around 80% renewable in the UK. However, until battery storage becomes about 95% cheaper, it would be ASTRONOMICALLY expensive to make the grid 100% renewable. Trillions of pounds in the UK. An order of magnitude more expensive than just paying higher gas prices.
People often make the mistake of thinking that because wind and sun is free, the cost of energy generation is basically free. Those people don’t understand how many fixed and marginal costs there are. If you’re interested, the paper above provides good insights into those costs.
I'm not sure how bleak it even is. I have some solar powered lights. On a fully cloudy day they maybe are down 50-60% their usual run time by my guess. Not great but not some terrible loss that couldn't be accounted for with more solar buildout overall it would seem.
Maybe there's an argument for managed forests for charcoal energy production too. That would technically be carbon neutral.
The biggest issue with batteries is that they are not a prime source.
In a healthy grid with a diverse generation mix, batteries are almost certainly the perfect option for peak demand handling. The problem is that many grids are not healthy or do not have very diverse generation mixes.
You are effectively borrowing from yesterday (or last hour) to pay for today with batteries. Which is amazing, until it isn't. The Texas winter crisis comes to mind as an example where batteries would be regarded with intense derision. I think the current capacity market accreditation process is massively underrepresenting the tail risk of a black swan event. Four hours of battery storage should not be in the same room as a gas turbine when we are talking about capacity and multi-day emergencies.
Four-hour grid-scale batteries wouldn't have helped the Texas winter crisis much. But something like a 10 or 20kwh home battery would have helped a lot (it wouldn't sustain normal energy usage for that long, but the individual home owner could choose to ration the available power for critical functions).
Making demand responsive to supply costs is critical for increased efficiency. Part of that is making appliances smarter and educating users on loading washers/dryers/dishwashers and letting the machine handle energy usage. There are efficiencies in forecasting demand so supply can be negotiated and scheduled, and also being responsive to short term load shedding requirements.
FWIW, the latest analysis I've seen seems to suggest that biomethane is probably the way to go for last-resort long term backup. Hydrogen is just too fickle.
What does it mean for a gas to be 'fickle'? Hydrogen gets stored long term all the time. It's made in refineries and used in chemical plants all over the world every day. It's expensive to store, but it's certainly doable with the right metallurgy. If your goal is reducing carbon emission as much as possible, it's way better than methane, regardless of source.
Hydrogen is a storage medium. It's fundamentally different than natural gas. Think of it more like a more complex, expensive, and inefficient battery; with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.
Methane is basically just hydrogen gas, but with one carbon for every 4 hydrogens. This means you can do stuff like liquefy it at higher temperatures and lower pressures, and it doesn't diffuse out of materials or otherwise destroy the materials (or seals) it's stored by.
>with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.
In a vacuum, maybe; in real life, absolutely not. Hydrogen that is stabilized by a sufficient number of associated carbon atoms can be stored in plastic containers at standard temperature and pressure; naturally, we use the fuel that has just enough carbons that, while nominally a liquid, but would really rather be a vapor.
Because that stabilizer is part of that reaction, the best one from a CO2 perspective is the one that has as little of that stabilizer as possible. Which is what methane is.
The very small molecule makes it much harder to store than methane, and unlike anything else on the planet other than Helium, lost hydrogen is lost forever.
Studies have shown that hybrids have fewer issues than ICE or BEV, though for different reasons. BEVs have new technology issues, and ICE has maintenance issues. Having a mostly understood ICE car that rarely uses the ICE and has the most reliable (battery+motor) part of the BEV makes a better solution short term.
A non-carbon containing fuel that is almost entirely created by burning fossil fuels is effectively the same (and often worse) than just using the fossil fuels directly.
Biodiesel or biomethane looks at first glance to escape this, but it has serious other costs.
Is almost entirely fossil-fuel created doesn't mean it has to be almost entirely fossil-fuel created. You know, just like observing that cars are almost entirely burning fossil fuels doesn't mean cars must burn fossil fuels.
This where system thinking, or the lack there of, becomes an issue. You would be right if we only had exactly enough capacity for four hours of power. But of course with batteries now being produced by the multiple twh per year, each of them capable of cycling on a daily basis for a decade or longer, we soon will have quite a bit of battery connected to the grid. If you have a hundred of those four hour systems connected you'd blow fuses throughout the country if you dumped all that power on the grid all at once. That could be days of power under normal usage.
And grids can actually be connected together via cables now. The cliche is that solar panels don't generate at night. But if you connect grids via a long cable running east to west you can actually have solar power at night. And when you connect them north to south you can have solar power on a dark winter day as well. And when you add batteries to the mix (on both sides), you can keep those charged as well and use that power regardless of what time or season it is.
And that's ignoring wind (on and offshore), hydro, nuclear, and other clean forms of power that we currently don't use at scale (geothermal, fusion, etc.). If you add all that to the mix. And cables. And lots of battery. Grid connected car batteries, balcony solar, and all the rest, you end up with a lot of capacity.
Gas power is not going to way. But we probably already have too much of it and it shows in the poor utilization of existing turbines. Ironically, adding more gas turbines to the grid only makes that poor utilization worse for owners of these plants.
Note that the article is specific to open-cycle gas turbines. Which are somewhat cheaper than the (more complex) combined-cycle gas turbines, and can be brought online far faster - but are far less efficient. So, the open-cycle turbines have been economical only for covering short-duration demand peaks - a use case where batteries are now superior.
Vs. longer-duration needs, like a couple calm (bad for wind power) dark (bad for solar power) weeks in winter - you will need combined-cycle turbines or something for those, because installing that many batteries would cost too much.
> For onshore wind, continuous capex and opex improvements are expected to drive LCOE down 16% by 2060
What’s with the forecasts going as far out as 2060?? Given the scale of changes we’ve seen in just the last 10 years, looking forward 34 years seems absurd, and to still only expect a 16% drop in cost?
Unlike solar, wind has pretty significant construction and material costs which feel hard to diminish with scale. You still need to excavate earth, install giant pylons, enormous magnets, etc.
That being said, anyone who has predicted the future prices of renewable energy seems destined to look a fool.
Yeah, these forecasts are far too long-term, and progress would have to slow down a lot to see such small improvements over such a long time. These are guesses and I'm not at all sure that they are even educated guesses.
> four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, displacing gas peaking on cost across every gas market in the region.
This seems to be specifically in reference to "gas peakers" which are on-demand gas turbines used to pick up slack in the main grid during peak usage. They typically only run for hours at a go and commonly on very hot days when ACs drain the grid. In those use cases, batteries could be a viable replacement. They're not necessary charged by solar but by the main grid overnight.
solve the two problems with datacenters with a single solution.
solar panels & batteries in the texas oil patch or sw or mexico... morocco or spain.. australia...
everything associated with datacenters does not pay tariffs. tech leaders could lead the way here and not only provide AI but also potentially take big steps towards solving the climate crisis.
certainly cheaper than putting panels in space. (do the math)
I remember arguing with friends literally only 3-4 years ago about whether solar (plus batteries) could ever fully replace fossil fuel solutions. Some of my friends are idiots. ...Or this is just a super-remarkable development :-)
First step is to do massive vertical solar in cities everywhere. Zero cost of [land, long distance transmission lines, transmission infrastructure]. There are already structural elements of a building, dirt cheap solar panels can be hung vertically at a minimal cost, or cost nothing (after building code is updated to require all buildings to have structural features to support vertical solar.All cities have buildings, all buildings have surfaces. In addition, there are walls/fences. This adds ~4 hours of extra solar production.
Next is EVs as energy storage. People buy cars anyways. An EV looks, works, functions and smells exact like a gas car. Some might even say it smells better. Its not like going from horses to cars, nothing that radical. With EVs, we add a TON of storage. 20% or more solar production is curtailed, all of this can go to EVs. EVs can supply power back to the grid. Or power home throughout the night.
Finally, add BESS if needed.
28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles. Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles! EVs have humongous batteries, you can control the level of charge/discharge from the grid
People should be paid for using their EVs. They are after all providing critical, highly resilient infrastructure at no cost to govts and utilities. I don't think there is any compelling reason to make the super-billionaires like Warren Buffet richer.
Your first 2 paragraphs have a few holes before they will be adopted as easily as you pretend.
Land for solar installs isn't close to free. My condo HOA won't even consider solar for any homeowner and the HOA won't approve a giant $50k/unit special assessment (we can't even get 40% of homeowners to vote for HOA elections... which are free).
Older buildings not designed for a solar roof aren't too easy to retrofit. My office window overlooks 2 parking lot structures that were recently retrofitted with solar and it took about 6 weeks for a relatively simple install. I'm pretty sure building owners will only install if they get a cut of the solar generation revenue (so the land isn't free) or if they are able to use it to offset tax or utility costs (also not free).
EVs as batteries are neat but... (1) most owners will likely splurge only for the $500 charger station not the complex electronics which allow the EV to charge the house/grid and (2) cars are frequently driven / parked at work during the peak charging time, so they would be unavailable to absorb the majority of the peak solar generation time.
Until there is a solar EV + charging story for dense housing (apartments and condos), I think most users in my area aren't likely to be able to adopt like you seem to think. Community Solar projects seemed nearly non-existent when I searched in 2018-2020.
This won't happen overnight. Even if people stop buying gas cars, it will take 20 years for all passenger cars to be EVs.
> Land for solar installs isn't close to free.
Land for vertical solar is free. Think of all the walls and fences to start with.
> Older buildings not designed for a solar roof aren't too easy to retrofit.
If there is a building code that requires it, every building will be built with that standard. Think of all the buildings with bathrooms. Bathrooms and indoor plumbing didn't exist 100 years back, no building is now built without bathrooms.
Also, most of the world has concrete construction. Ridiculously easy to add panels.
> parked at work
work is also a building. You can charge at office. You have to demand these changes. If your employer makes you drive hours in traffic, the least they can do is provide free charging.
The world is not fixed and frozen. You can participate and make the changes needed.
i thought a balcony solar law just passed in california, might be interesting to see how that goes.
I liked laws like the fcc(?) law years ago that said you could have a satellite dish and an HOA couldn't prevent it. we need more laws like it in favor of common sense/good over HOA nonsense.
Expensive prime arable land in the UK is rentable for £200 per hectare per year. You can buy it for £20k a hectare (land value is far higher than usable value due to tax avoidance schemes -- nobody spends £20k on a field to rent it out for £200 a year)
But even if you buy 100 hectares of land for £2m, you then need to build your 60MW, which costs about £60m on top and generates 60GWh a year or £6m at 10p/unit
Your parent wasn't talking about prime arable land, they were talking about city land.
The point is the electric delivery problem is much cheaper if the power generation and the power delivery both happen within the same substation (eg in the same neighborhood). If the generation happens in rural Scotland but the consumption happens in London, then all of the transmission needs to be upgraded. The point of your parent's comment was to describe a trick to minimize additional transmission costs/development.
And London area land does cost, even if it is just borrowing a vacant building's rooftop.
I don't necessarily agree with your parent's comment, but I don't agree with your comment either.
Except the worst case demand has to be catered for -- overcast horrendous rain in winter with local solar producing near nothing yet local demand (EV, Oven, Heating, Shower) all running.
You don't get a benefit of reducing peak demand from on-building solar, so you can't do with smaller substations.
I don't know why you're replying to my comment. That comment was only clarifying the parent's conflation of the cost of city land and the cost of cheap arable land.
I don't think local solar is a solution in foggy / cold UK. I'm not going to defend it.
Even if the land cost doesn't matter, it costs a ton to build transmission network. Millions of dollars per mile. It takes decades to get all the permitting from all the landholdings it crosses, and there will be many court cases.
The legacy grid of producing power far out makes no sense. Coal, nuclear, hydro were far away and needed transmission. New grid can produce energy in the cities. Think of all the surface area available on all the buildings. Just the walls/fences between buildings is sufficient to build massive amounts of vertical solar.
Trips under a mile should not be by car are all unless you are carrying luggage or are disabled or similar.
The trips over a 100 miles are a much higher percentage of distance travelled. One 100 mile trips is the same distance as 33 three mile trips. if you look at distance travelled its dominated by longer trips on your numbers.
I assume your numbers are for the US where cars are more heavily used for commuting than anywhere else?
Come on - thats not solving all the problems that you buy GENERATORS for. 4 hour bridge is great - but emergency power or always on -- 4 hours is not enough.
Put another way, you need the gas turbines for the two week dunkelflaute (winter doldrums). Given that you have the turbines already, when are batteries cheaper than running the turbines for a few hours every evening?
A more interesting question than the cheapest 4 hour solution. I think that answer might also be batteries soon.
The point of the article is that a specific peaker technology (open-cycle gas turbine) is now less costly than a different peaker technology (batteries) that fills the same niche (short-term demand spikes).
Four hours isn't "doing a lot of work," it's the whole point of the article. It's not about dunkelflaute.
This; batteries are still ungodly expensive for seasonal or long-term storage.
And what happens if you need to satisfy peak demand for more than four hours at a time (and you will)? You still need some generators or overprovisoned batteries.
The basic unit of analysis in think tanks and media is nameplate capacity, ie a MW of four-hour battery would be compared to a MW of gas turbines.
The most important driver of power system costs is "firm capacity"; a MW of four-hour battery might be 10%-50% as valuable as a MW of gas turbines given that the latter will run for 100-1000 hours per year when the batteries are empty and the prices are much higher. This is true on the grid or behind the meter.
I’d like to take a moment to praise the writing here. Rigorous, dense, and well-organized; communicative rather than coughing up tables of raw figures in prose form.
I’d refer to the source studies, but at $9,990 per region… Ms Pickerel’s overview seems plenty informative for me.
Regarding EMEA:
> Grid-scale battery storage costs are now decisively cheaper than gas peaking across the region. [and price will fall another 33% in the decade ahead]. This shift means storage is displacing open-cycle gas turbines on cost in every gas market across the region, marking a significant structural turning point for power system planning across both the Gulf and Africa.
The analyst’s bottom line:
> From Latin America to Asia Pacific, the combination of falling storage costs and world-class renewable resources is closing off the economic case for new gas peaking capacity, while long-term contracted renewables increasingly set the ceiling rather than the floor on power costs.”
Heady times! For all the gnashing of teeth about regulating our way out of combustion-based production—it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants, no arm-twisting required. “Not with a bang, but a whimper”…
> In the Middle East and Africa, where utility-scale solar already leads at $37/MWh, four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035
I'm struggling to understand the numbers here. How does a fall of 33% on $37 make it $80?
I think the $37 might be the cost of producing the energy via solar, and it’s the grid-scale batteries that are expected to get cheaper:
> Four-hour storage reaches $120/MWh in 2026 and is forecast to fall 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, cementing its role as the enabling technology for solar and wind integration.
Cheap or not, solar isn’t dispatchable on demand, so in and of itself it doesn’t replace the role of a peaker plant. But now that the big batteries are a viable thing, solar-plus-battery is feasible to handle the parts of the demand curve that required open-cycle gas plants before.
will need a bit more than four hours of storage though
Horses for courses, right? They build these entire peaker power plants to sit idle most of the time, just to handle the couple dozen or hundred hours of maximum load in the year.
4 hours at a time hopefully buys you your way through such a peak, even if it doesn’t get you through weeks at a time… and presumably you can top it up from base load after demand peaks for the day, right?
In the equatorial and desert regions they’re talking about, I think both seasonal supply changes and demand profile might be more consistent than, say, dreary cold parts of Europe..
That's a big part of what drives me crazy about the papers I've seen on this work. People like to quote some levelized price of energy and say "this costs less than an AP1000" and you never see modeling of "here's the price in California, here's the price in New York"
I would check out these recent articles. They’ve taken the step to model the entire grid hour by hour.
This is of course not how reality will play out, since the grid is market driven, but it’s quite interesting to see the results.
Denmark 2026:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Finland 2025:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Australia 2025–26:
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
Sure.
But no one is claiming that there will only be 4h-storage
I don't see a lot of realistic talk about what the actual storage requirements are. You have to be concerned about:
(1) ordinary diurnal variation (overnight, lets say 12 hours)
(2) extremely unfavorable weather (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute)
(3) annual variation (you might get 3x the sunlight in summer than winter? do you build 180 days of storage or do you overbuild solar systems 3x and get Casey Handmer to dream up something useful to do with that excess energy that doesn't have a stupendous capital cost?)
The "have a natural gas backup plan" is worse than people think for a lot of reasons, in terms of the laws of political science and economics you're going to find that that tail winds up wagging the dog, the whole market will get designed around the needs of those turbine owners, it's going to cost the same if they are running turbines for 5 minutes a year or 20 days a year, and ultimately you're never going to get rid of it. If you really plan to run the system 5 minutes a year what are the odds it will really work when you need it? You have to not just support the turbines you hardly ever use, pipelines you hardly ever use, drilling and storage operations for gas, etc.
What political/economical problem? This has already been solved in most regulated markets. Capacity payments are already being made on many grids. Companies are already literally being paid for "doing nothing", being paid for being available for an unusual situation.
Renewables & batteries have high upfront costs but really low operating costs, so that's what you want supplying 90-98% of your power if your goal is lowest cost. (see Ember Energy reports). NatGas has low capital costs but relatively high operating costs, so yes, sitting idle and running a few days a year really is optimal.
Great comments throughout as usual. I’ll add that for the last few percent of generation that might need firm on demand combustion, gas turbines can be fed methanol, ammonia, or hydrogen, all generated from excess low carbon energy. I’d like to think that geothermal will be able to fill this gap, but only time will tell.
Yeah I think it really only works well in the central latitudes. The American South, the tropics and equatorial regions, Southern Europe, etc. that get a lot of high-angle sunlight year-round.
Otherwise you need to deal with long distance power transmission across many political jurisdictions, or local generation for night or other low-solar times. To my mind, nuclear base load with solar and batteries used for things like charging cars or demand-shifting probably makes more sense. It's really a shame that we mostly withdrew from building nuclear plants for the past three or four decades; instead we have reached the point where we have to re-learn how or recreate the tooling needed to build them and they are still too damn expensive.
nuclear base load makes sense from a pure grid engineering PoV, which i think is why it appeals to so many HN folk. Sadly, it makes no sense economically anymore, so it will probably never be built at scale.
They quit building coal burning power plants in the US at the same time and for the same reason they quit building nukes…. The cost of the steam turbine and heat exchanges. I mean, the steam generators for a PWR are bigger than the reactor vessel, it is just insane to use hot water at high pressure to boil water at low pressure.
If nuclear is ever going to be competitive it is going to have to be some kind of reactor that runs at higher temperatures with a gas turbine power set. Could be a fast breeder or HTGR or molten salt but not water cooled. Anyway it is not a bird in the hand.
Never said we should not have been developing the technology. But even with the old PWR designs you're not pumping carbon into the atmosphere, which is the main point.
I mean yes but also there’s a lot more engineering and materials in a NPP beyond the heat exchanger part that makes it so expensive.
Ultimately though about 50% of the cost of a PWR is in the heat handling (heat exchangers and steam turbine) and the building costs to accommodate those systems. If the nuclear part was free they'd still struggle to compete -- the BWRX300 seems to get a lot of cost reduction by eliminating the pumps and heat exchangers and stuff and going to steel-concrete sandwich construction but to do better than that you have to really do something about that steam turbine.
For that matter, it's shocking how small the actual core is for FBRs. The capital cost of FBRs was long projected to be higher because traditionally you had to add a third cooling loop and some other systems but it is projected an sCO2 system today could be cheaper overall.
TIL, thanks! I didn’t realize the “routine” heat exchanger part was such a high % of cost.
It's a lot of metal! Also the first PWRs had a lot of problems with corrosion causing steam generators to fail and these had to be replaced early. Small improvements in design and better chemistry control solved this.
People are highly aware that we haven't fixed the problems construction new nuclear power plants, they are less aware that we've gotten much better at operating them on all the metrics from uptime to occupational radiation exposure.
yeah i have no objection to them apart from cost, and time to first watt.
How about overbuild and interconnect? You don't have to overbuild for your personal worst case if you can buy power from somebody else if it comes to it.
Bucky Fuller imagined we might build a superconducting power grid that connects the whole world, but... power lines are expensive too and are politically tough because you have to cross so many boundaries that involve so many stakeholders. Realistically moving energy in space as well as time is part of the solution if not the whole solution.
My crazy idea is that you could put some energy producing or consuming facilities (hydrogen factory!) on floating platforms that can move where energy is available.
Sorry for the tangent but as a German I found it interesting (and somehow amusing) to learn that "Dunkelflaute" is an English "Lehnwort" (I couldn't find a proper English translation for that, either).
“loan-word”?
> you might get 3x the sunlight in summer than winter
In the darker parts of Europe, at least, this is broadly balanced out by an increase in wind. But there are dark and still days every year.
I don't know how much storage is needed, but it's a hell of a lot more than four hours.
> (3) annual variation (you might get 3x the sunlight in summer than winter? do you build 180 days of storage or do you overbuild solar systems 3x and get Casey Handmer to dream up something useful to do with that excess energy that doesn't have a stupendous capital cost?)
what about the variation regarding winds?
My understanding is that the first number is the "cost per MWh generated by a PV plant", the second one is the "cost per MWh accumulated and then released by a 4-hour grid-scale battery plant"
$37 = utility-scale solar, now
$80 = 4h-storage in 2035, forecast
I don’t like the writing at all. The writing conflates what’s current versus what’s forecast without sufficient differentiation.
> it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants
What's the ecological impact of constructing all these batteries?
The same as the ecological impact of constructing gas tanks and pipelines. Only using electricity from batteries doesn't have ecological harms, whereas burning gas does.
Gas tanks are made from steel, which last time I looked was a lot cleaner to refine than lithium, and with a lot less energy input.
How so? Both require mining, separating metal from ore and so on. Steelmaking is done in blast furnaces that burn coal. Lithium can be refined by evaporating brine in large open ponds under sunlight.
Let's see some actual numbers.
Here are the relevant numbers:
- Worldwide Li-ion battery production per year: 35GWh
- Worldwide grid capacity: 5000GWs
- Lifetime of a specific cell in a grid scale battery: 20-30 years
- Current known reserves of Lithium worldwide at current usage rates: 80 years
So even if we magically mined all known Li reserves this year, it still would only be about 14% of the grid for 1 hour or about 9 minutes total for the entire grid. You don't actually need to backup the entire grid (only about 20-30% of it), but you need to do it for at least 4 hours. Basically, it isn't even close even if we only used Lithium for this use. You can get more with Na-ion, but if you think NPPs are dangerous (they aren't)...let's just say nobody would ever insure a grid scale Na-ion battery. Just one leak and it goes up with 1000s of tonnes of TNT of explosive force.
Your entire post is fiction. And not the good kind.
> Worldwide Li-ion battery production per year: 35GWh
This source: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... tells me China alone manufactured 1200 GWh in 2022. You're at least an order of magnitude off.
> let's just say nobody would ever insure a grid scale Na-ion battery
Well they did.
https://energiesmedia.com/3-1-mwh-grid-battery-energized/
https://www.energy-storage.news/peak-energy-launches-first-g...
Please re-check your numbers, since they’re all wrong.
For example, the world deployed 1600 GWh batteries in 2025.
Na-ion batteries are very safe?
Substantially smaller than building and running gas peaker plants
So you'd be happy with a lithium refinery at the end of your street?
Good thing lithium is transportable, eh?
Ah, I see, you don't mind the planet being destroyed as long as it's not in *your* back yard?
Batteries are 90-95% recyclable.
Gas is 0% recyclable.
That's nice that they're recyclable.
What's the runoff from the chemical processing to make the batteries like?
Or does it not matter if you poison great swathes of China?
> great swathes of China?
What's the total acreage of lithium extraction ponds in China today?
As distinct, of course, from the artificial lake of sludge known as the Weikuang Dam, four square miles in size, holding rare earth processing sludge waste in Baotou (Inner Mongolia) which is not from lithium processing.
What percentage of China's land area do these tailing ponds amount to, is "great swathes" really a fair estimate?
Do you think that acreage will drop with the current rise in Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE: new technique that skips traditional evaporation ponds, using filters or membranes to pull lithium directly from brine. It's faster, uses less water, and works in areas with lower brine lithium concentrations.) ?
What's your worksheet on waste from fossil fuels V waste from battery production looking like, is it online for others to look at ?
You think the Oil and Gas industry is cleaner?
Recylable is important because it means we don't have to mine as much.
Oh good lord -- cite something real, or stop fear-mongering.
This is what happens when you feed the sea lion.
This entire article seems to be based on an assumption that the cost of batteries will go down 33% over the next 10 years because demand is so high, but costs of gas turbines will go up over the next 10 years because demand is so high.
Neither of these assumptions are based on anything other than "That's the number we had to put in to the model to get the conclusion we want".
The cost of batteries has gone down somewhere between 60-80% over the previous 10 years (and my understanding is that trend is expected to continue due to a combination of new technologies (e.g. Sodium Ion) and increased scale). So that one seems totally reasonable. A little conservative if anything.
I can't comment on the cost of Gas Turbines.
No one believes that the increased demand for gas turbines is durable enough to want to make those kinds of investments.
But the opposite is true for batteries.
Battery tech and production methods are still evolving and improving way faster than turbine tech and production. Meaning this is more than just production capacity.
There's a bit more to it than that.
Battery production is being invested in heavily. There are new types of batteries (like sodium ion) that are extremely relevant to the article that it barely even mentions. The pitch for those is of course no lithium, better temperature ranges, less need for cooling/heating them, much better fire safety, better durability, etc. This all adds up to lower cost when done at scale. That all adds up to a lot less cost for especially grid storage.
I agree the 33% number is meaningless. It's probably too conservative. The article actually does not talk about new battery chemistries like sodium ion. And given that large scale factories are already producing those by the tens of gwh, I think that's more than a little oversight. Additionally, there are learning effects that explain the large differences in prices between markets that the article mentions. Those are optimizations that countries have yet to implement. Some might not get around to that any time soon (like the US seems a bit of a basket case on cost/efficiency for a lot of things).
Because of the improvements in battery cost relative to the stagnating improvements in gas turbines, gas turbine manufacturers are going to be conservative in investing in new production capacity. A lot of companies that say right now that they are going to want to buy gas turbines might no longer want to in a few years. For example the low cost and ready availability of solar+battery might be persuasive for some. Investing many billions in new production capacity that won't come online until some time next decade is highly risky if the projected demand could evaporate. The reason there is a shortage is that that's what they thought five to ten years ago as well. So, it's easy to predict that turbine shortages might continue to exist.
One enduring insight from Brian Potter (Construction Physics) is that the cost of manufacturing tends to go down with scale, while the cost of construction doesn't drop nearly as much. Batteries are made in a factory and then pretty much just hooked up, while gas turbines have to be built. So, the difference in forecasts makes sense if you apply that rule.
There have been some experiments with prefabricated construction, but you still run into the issue that shipping really big things is hard, as we've seen with wind turbine blades. Robotic construction might make a dent at some point, but it still seems to be basically embryonic.
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
> Every time the global cumulative battery production has doubled, the price has dropped by roughly 19%.
There are only a handful of gas turbine manufacturers left, with a manufacturing backlog of half a decade.
It is exceptionally obvious battery manufacturing will only continue to scale (TAM is global EV and stationary storage market), and gas turbine builders will hang on until the economics turn, which they have. Regardless, these trajectories will hold unless something exceptional occurs. Is it likely we’ll build more batteries faster? Yes. Is it likely these are the last three major gas turbine manufacturers to exist? Also yes. Last call for buggy whips.
https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs...
https://fgermini.substack.com/p/heavy-duty-gas-turbines-the-...
Batteries are easy to build (ish) and pretty scalable. New capacity can come online to meet demand.
IIRC there are something like 3 companies on earth that can make gas turbine blades, as it's a particularly difficult process, and they are sold out for the foreseeable future. New capacity is severely constrained and cannot meet demand.
Swanson's law and learning rates do seem to apply to batteries more as well as the fact that their no of cycles seem to be much longer than initially thought for LFP as well as storage focused Sodium ion batteries from CATL
If you had asked me whether I see more potential for battery prices to go down than turbine prices I would 100% say that batteries have more potential. Why?
1. Because there is a lot of pressure for them to go down, in literally every form of technology, be it phones, robots, drones, EVs, ... Turbines are also important, but they have had that pressure for decades and are relatively finished. Any further improvement will give diminishing results outside of specialized applications and demands
2. Because the technology for batteries is relatively open ended in comparison. Turbine prices are mainly about how that steel can be precision engineered and while there is some innovation at this front, the gains from that innovation have slowed for a while now. With batteries however the race is still very open and it would not be naive to assume some new chemistry will be found that reduces the cost and energy density drastically.
I don't know the economics around precision engineering well enough to intelligently how high demand impacts the manufacturing cost, but I could imagine it behaving slightly different than the cost of simpler processes, especially since good CNC machines are hefty investments.
It's a different kind of manufacturing.
China leads the world in battery manufacturing, it's not really so hard in an absolute sense, but gee do you have to get the cost down and get the quality up so you don't have batteries blow up because of manufacturing defects.
To make gas turbines though you need to get the last bit of performance available out of metals, manufacture parts with punishing tolerances, and do it with high quality so turbines don't blow up because of manufacturing defects. At this point in time China cannot make competitive gas turbines. China's COMAC C919 airliner is 100% dependent on western engines for instance.
Supply is larger than demand for batteries and prices are going down. Demand is larger than supply for natural gas turbines and prices are going up.
But that's just the short term.
More importantly, I believe that manufacturers are more confident in the long term future of demand for batteries so are willing to continue to invest. People are going to be buying electric cars 10 years from now. The demand for gas turbines in 10 years seems a lot more murky.
SpaceX has promised to start making turbines, which would bring their price down. But it's an Elon Musk promise, so how much weight do you put on it?
The market for aircraft engine gas turbines is at least 5x the market for industrial gas turbines. We could eliminate natural gas for electricity overnight and GE would keep spinning. Even if it becomes hard to justify development of land-based gas turbines it will still be possible to repurpose jet engines for this purpose.
(Though I really want to see a fast reactor coupled to a supercritical CO2 or helium brayton cycle turbine!)
I can see it now. Fully self driving humanoids powered by gas turbines.
Made from bullet proof glass!
> But it's an Elon Musk promise, so how much weight do you put on it?
Zero.
And I really mean zero, not a negative value. That is, when Elon Musk promises something, it doesn't mean he won't do it, it means that it is just as likely to do it as if he didn't promise anything.
I don't understand why people listen to him when it comes to predictions, he is as close to a random generator as one can get. Even analyzing his actions come with a lot of uncertainty, though not as much as what he says, some things are too big to hide. Being able to maintain such level of uncertainty is probably part of his success, he is like a poker player no one can read.
Point on Musk's problematic delivery record. But for an extremely complex type of critical equipment, in a market this tight, I don't know if there's any provider you'd want to fully trust to deliver on time.
NO, the projections are separate from the statement that batteries are NOW cheaper than peakers in most geographies. They'll be even cheaper if those projections pan out.
Regrettably, the authority you crave (linked reports) are paywalled.
https://www.woodmac.com/reports/power-markets-north-america-...
Here's a prior take on this topic:
The big stories from the last year in electricity [2026-04] https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-big-stories-from-the-last-year
Global Electricity Review 2026 https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
TLDR: Every where but some parts of the USA, solar + battery is the cheapest source of new power generation. Tariffs and subsidies continue to prop up gas generation. 40% YOY drop in battery prices!? Solar + battery is still on the cost learning curve (no where near plateau), whereas gas (extraction, turbines, etc) plateaued a while back.
--
That episode (and Ember's report) looks back at 2025.
So it couldn't account for this year's increased prices and volatility for gas, or data centers increasing the demand for gas turbines.
Globally, solar + battery adoption continues to accelerate. In the USA, big tech forfeited their climate pledges (choosing to use gas) and new solar + battery continues to be blocked by our constipated connection queue (to the grid).
Yeah. Would’ve been cool if it was more economical now because of the Iran war, I’d actually have been surprised.
The demand for energy is the only thing we can be sure will grow.
Is the conduit batteries or gas turbines, who knows.
There’s still a fuckton of oil in the world, imo there’s still giant undiscovered reserves in the Arctic and Canada in general
If you’ve got interesting reads on gas vs green/battery in 2026 post Iran war feel free to post below
I saw a seemingly credible prediction from an energy analyst that global energy use would fall over the next five years. The rationale being that electrification can use less energy for the same work because heat pumps, EVs, etc are more efficient. Just pumping and refining oil is a huge sink of energy that disappears as more things become electrified.
The popular number is that every 18 months, China was destroying 1 million BPD demand.
Energy as in oil energy right, I saw that too. And it happened — the Chinese are liquefying coal!!!
I mean electricity, energy, power, how the hell do we even refer to this correctly? Generated electrical output? lol
It’s just an extrapolation of existing long term trends. Unless we hit some sort of hard cap we’ll probably get there.
Wouldn't you agree that we're much further along the learning curve for turbines than for large scale battery storage?
Presumably that would favor large scale battery storage, right? If large scale battery storage is already cost competitive with turbines and there is still more low-hanging fruit, then presumably battery costs will continue to fall faster than for turbines?
That said, I doubt the cost of either of these technologies is driven so much by the technologies themselves so much as it is our ability to manufacture and install large volumes of them at scale. Presumably it's easier to mass-manufacture batteries in a big factory and then ship them to the site than it is to construct each gas peaker plant on location, and moreover it's probably easier (i.e. cheaper) to scale up the manufacturing process for batteries than it is to scale up the construction process for peaker plants.
> If large scale battery storage is already cost competitive with turbines and there is still more low-hanging fruit, then presumably battery costs will continue to fall faster than for turbines?
Yes, and this is the assumption that the comment I replied to seems to disagree with. I think the assumption is right and the disagreement is wrong.
> That said, I doubt the cost of either of these technologies is driven so much by the technologies themselves so much as it is our ability to manufacture and install large volumes of them at scale.
Deployment is part of the learning curve.
I think you're agreeing with me (and disagreeing with the comment I replied to) here :)
That’s fair. I probably lost the context of the thread.
That seems fairly obvious, but afaik the problem is not bridging four hours, it’s bridging a cloudy week without wind in winter. For that gas currently seems cheaper
They're talking about open-cycle gas turbines which have a specific set of jobs to do for the grid. And which batteries are better at now.
Those turbines aren't great for longer periods, they're pointlessly inefficient if you don't need their ability to peak for short periods.
The article does the annoying thing of using a technical term without definining it.
An open-cycle gas turbine is the "simple" configuration that draws in air through a pressurization stage, into a combustion chamber for fuel combustion, producing high-pressure hot gases that drive a turbine and generate power, with exhaust gases released into the atmosphere.
In other words, there is no recovery of heat from the exhaust, it's basically an aircraft jet engine core mounted on the ground and connected to a generator. They aren't very efficient but they are compact, relatively cheap, and quick to spin up during peak demand times.
Aren’t they also cheaper to built? Cheap backup capacity seems more important than efficiency and cost to run for Dunkelflaute scenarios to me
Gas turbine plants?
Maybe, right now (even as battery prices keep falling), if you can wait 10 years for your plant.
They’re also a lot more expensive to operate.
I guess the point is that when combined with a source of dispatchable base load power like a combined cycle gas turbine or nuclear, batteries are now cheaper than open cycle gas peaker plants for bridging short (4 hours or less) spikes in demand.
This is exactly what they are going for. To not have to build and run expensive gas plants just for a few hours in the evening. It also allows you to run the few gas plants that you do build for longer to better amortize their build costs, making them less expensive overall.
Ideally you would pair these 4-hour batteries with CHEAP sources of electricity. Fill the battery when electricity is cheap, empty the battery when electricity is expensive (ie, when demand spikes or when other sources of generation drop off the grid).
The cheapest source of electricity today is noontime solar. Batteries can fill up on noontime solar and discharge into the evening peak. They could also charge on wind or traditional baseload sources overnight, and discharge into the morning peak.
The UK relies far too much on gas turbines, rather than renewables and as a consequence we have energy costs far higher than other European neighbours.
Gas is not cheap, it basically doubles your costs.
Well the goal is to only run the backup a few hundred hours a year, the question is which technology can provide close to 100% of demand a few percent of the time in the cheapest way. Turbines or even gas motors are relatively cheap in capex and gas is easy to store in large quantities.
Gas turbines have a manufacturing backlog of at least a half decade. The longer is takes to build them, the more favorable battery storage is (as it can be installed today), and the faster more battery storage manufacturing spins up, this further drives down the cost.
https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs...
https://www.energyconnects.com/opinion/thought-leadership/20...
> For its part, China – a battery manufacturing powerhouse – has no such supply chain issues. It dominates global lithium battery production accounting for two-thirds of it. This relative strength gives it the confidence to relentlessly amplify its BESS footprint as evidenced in the capacity build-up between 2021 and 2026.
> In fact, China’s battery storage build-out has no global parallel thanks to this one factor alone, according to Ember. It estimates that nearly all (i.e.149.8 GW) of China’s “new energy storage” consists of lithium-ion batteries.
> In terms of the future, following a June update to its 15th Five-Year Plan, China is now aiming to deploy 300 GW of new energy storage by 2030. That would keep the country’s BESS industry progression, that outgrows all other countries combined, firmly on track.
(battery storage printer goes brrr)
Renewables require gas in the UK. There is no realistic route to 100% renewable grid without gas currently. I did some modelling of this and you'd require something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage. We currently have 40GWh.
Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that.
Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.
Last time I did the maths based on data from gridwatch the storage capacity required dropped dramatically if you over built the on the production side.
But ok, 30 million homes, 100kWh storage each, that's 3000 GWh
A 100kWh battery is about £25k, less than 1/10th the cost of the house, and less than the average new car
That doesn't seem unrealistic.
The issue is you need to design for 1-2 weeks of little to no wind and very little solar in winter, when demand is it its greatest. This is what is so tricky, unlike more southern climates where you have pretty reliable solar year round (even if its reduced, its not close to 0 which is the case in the UK). Instead of storing a day or so, you need to store weeks of energy.
Also you're forgetting residential electricity is maybe 1/3rd of total demand.
You said your modelling needed "something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage"
That's not outlandish given the cost of distributed batteries.
Are you upping that model?
(If you build more generation -- for example have renewable peak generation of 80GW rather than 40GW, that reduces storage requirements drastically, as on a dull quiet winter week where you're only getting 10%, you'd be generating 8GWh in a given period of time, instead of 4GWh)
Where do you get "close to 0"? From what I read the output is still 15-30% of the summer peaks, which is very different from "close to 0".
On average. That doesn't mean there aren't sunny weeks where you get a lot more, and dark weeks where you get less. For instance if you get snow, output is pretty much 0 unless you clean them.
I believe there were 7-10 days in January 2025 where both solar and wind were in the single % digit for instance.
Of those 7-10 days, how many were consecutive? A couple days of single-digit efficiency each winter would be trivial to manage with batteries. I'm sure we can figure out a solution for the snow issue, especially since panels are usually angled.
Don't get me wrong, I get where you're coming from! But especially in the last 2-3 years, it seems like people always evaluate solar under the worst 0.01% chance scenario, which other power sources never have to survive. For example, not even half the days in January 2025 had single-digit outputs, yet they're still called "close to 0".
What I'd love to know is e.g.: in 99% of years, what's the worst Dunkelflaute we can expect? How much battery storage/solar overbuilding would we need to cover that, how much would it cost, and how much will it cost in a few years (based on current development rates)? I'd argue it'd be okay to reduce power-hungry industry for at worst few days, in case a once-in-a-century year happens.
The issue is though that you are saying 0.01% chance scenario, but gas/nuclear doesn't all go down at once at the same time every year. It's a somewhat fair counter that you might have serious gas disruptions, but LNG does massively diversify potential supply (and in the UKs case we have and will have a fair amount of domestic production for the next while).
Also keep in mind the overbuilding a massive problem anyway _outside_ of those 1-2 weeks worst case scenarios. We already have highly negative prices occurring more and more, and IMO this is the definition of policy failure, because the negative prices only arise because subsidies _encourage_ plants to keep producing even though the value is quite literally negative of the output.
Finally I don't think it's once in a century, probably most years have a significant Dunkelflaute event. And not all industry can be shut down like that (eg aluminium production) without causing catastrophic damage, and even if they can it makes them an unreliable supplier.
> The issue is though that you are saying 0.01% chance scenario, but gas/nuclear doesn't all go down at once at the same time every year.
Over this summer, a huge number of nuclear plants in Europe went down all at the same time, because they either would have killed the nearby river ecosystem by overheating it, or because they didn't have enough water to operate safely. This issue is only going to get worse as climate change progresses, and unlike most Dunkelflauten, the heat & drought really affect most of the continent at once.
> Also keep in mind the overbuilding a massive problem anyway _outside_ of those 1-2 weeks worst case scenarios.
It's only a problem because power generation tech like nuclear is so expensive, and it would become even more expensive if they couldn't run as much as possible. If we had a fully renewable+battery-driven grid, the issue would disappear.
> Finally I don't think it's once in a century, probably most years have a significant Dunkelflaute event.
I think you might unknowingly be ideologically motivated, because I specified that we should build enough to cover every Dunkelflaute in 99% of years. The amount of battery storage in this scenario by definition suffices for 99% of years, which makes the point about unreliability moot.
[dead]
Yes, I have no doubt we can hit even a 90-95% renewable grid. It's the last 5% that is impossible to do without gas.
The cost of those last few percent is absolutely eye watering. The current plan to get it to 100% net zero is by having gas for the final 5% then using carbon capture and storage to offset the emissions.
you don't even need to use carbon capture and storage if you use green gas instead of fossil gas.
It is not even the final 5%, it is the final 1-2%, because you need a multi-week dunkelflaute across Europe for the gas turbines to be needed in the future. A lot will also just be curtailing. For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario.
> For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario.
Or indeed when petrol runs out as happens occasionally (in 2022 most recently). Of course there's also the problem of gas supplies stopping
You are making the mistake of thinking that if the grid could provide 100% renewable energy on a windy day at noon in summer, it could also provide 100% renewable energy at night in winter with no wind. Obviously that’s not accurate. Renewables provide energy in a highly volatile sine wave. It’s the bottom of the sine wave which determines the capacity required for base load and dispatchable generation, not the top of the wave.
[Gas is about 11-13x cheaper than renewables with externalities like grid restructure and volatility imputed.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) That’s not to say renewables don’t have their place in modern grids. In fact an optimal allocation is around 80% renewable in the UK. However, until battery storage becomes about 95% cheaper, it would be ASTRONOMICALLY expensive to make the grid 100% renewable. Trillions of pounds in the UK. An order of magnitude more expensive than just paying higher gas prices.
People often make the mistake of thinking that because wind and sun is free, the cost of energy generation is basically free. Those people don’t understand how many fixed and marginal costs there are. If you’re interested, the paper above provides good insights into those costs.
I'm not sure how bleak it even is. I have some solar powered lights. On a fully cloudy day they maybe are down 50-60% their usual run time by my guess. Not great but not some terrible loss that couldn't be accounted for with more solar buildout overall it would seem.
Maybe there's an argument for managed forests for charcoal energy production too. That would technically be carbon neutral.
The biggest issue with batteries is that they are not a prime source.
In a healthy grid with a diverse generation mix, batteries are almost certainly the perfect option for peak demand handling. The problem is that many grids are not healthy or do not have very diverse generation mixes.
You are effectively borrowing from yesterday (or last hour) to pay for today with batteries. Which is amazing, until it isn't. The Texas winter crisis comes to mind as an example where batteries would be regarded with intense derision. I think the current capacity market accreditation process is massively underrepresenting the tail risk of a black swan event. Four hours of battery storage should not be in the same room as a gas turbine when we are talking about capacity and multi-day emergencies.
Four-hour grid-scale batteries wouldn't have helped the Texas winter crisis much. But something like a 10 or 20kwh home battery would have helped a lot (it wouldn't sustain normal energy usage for that long, but the individual home owner could choose to ration the available power for critical functions).
Making demand responsive to supply costs is critical for increased efficiency. Part of that is making appliances smarter and educating users on loading washers/dryers/dishwashers and letting the machine handle energy usage. There are efficiencies in forecasting demand so supply can be negotiated and scheduled, and also being responsive to short term load shedding requirements.
>For that gas currently seems cheape
Well, other than destroying the planet, but hey, let's just hide those costs.
Hydrogen is a gas too and you can make it without emitting carbon. If you want you can also make methane from atmospheric carbon and water.
FWIW, the latest analysis I've seen seems to suggest that biomethane is probably the way to go for last-resort long term backup. Hydrogen is just too fickle.
What does it mean for a gas to be 'fickle'? Hydrogen gets stored long term all the time. It's made in refineries and used in chemical plants all over the world every day. It's expensive to store, but it's certainly doable with the right metallurgy. If your goal is reducing carbon emission as much as possible, it's way better than methane, regardless of source.
biomethane aka methane from rotting plants? extremely inefficient and requires intensive agriculture
Alternatively: captured cow farts, rotting food waste.
Remember, it is only needed for a few dozen hours a year. It doesn't need to scale.
I don't think parent was against gas because of its physical but rather because it's a fossil fuel
but not all gas is fossil
Just almost all of it to a staggering percent.
not sure about the accuracy of that, but it can change anyways.
Thank goodness that around 99% of our current hydrogen is made from fossil fuels!
If your going to burn the power turning it into hydrogen then you save a shitload of that power by putting it in batteries instead.
Hydrogen is a storage medium. It's fundamentally different than natural gas. Think of it more like a more complex, expensive, and inefficient battery; with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.
Well, not really.
Methane is basically just hydrogen gas, but with one carbon for every 4 hydrogens. This means you can do stuff like liquefy it at higher temperatures and lower pressures, and it doesn't diffuse out of materials or otherwise destroy the materials (or seals) it's stored by.
>with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.
In a vacuum, maybe; in real life, absolutely not. Hydrogen that is stabilized by a sufficient number of associated carbon atoms can be stored in plastic containers at standard temperature and pressure; naturally, we use the fuel that has just enough carbons that, while nominally a liquid, but would really rather be a vapor.
Because that stabilizer is part of that reaction, the best one from a CO2 perspective is the one that has as little of that stabilizer as possible. Which is what methane is.
With enough stabilizing carbon you can even store hydrogen as plastic containers.
Of course. But the point was that it could also be burned in these turbines, and is also storable underground like methane.
The very small molecule makes it much harder to store than methane, and unlike anything else on the planet other than Helium, lost hydrogen is lost forever.
Hydrogen leaked into the troposphere is quickly oxidized back to water. Only very little makes it to the very upper atmosphere where it can escape.
Storage of hydrogen in underground caverns is demonstrated technology.
Interesting, thanks. I really should have double checked before posting on HN.
i suspect that thinking is similar to the ideas people had that got them to buy hybrid cars because of EV range anxiety.
but hybrid cars are saddled with a maintenance heavy complex system that isn't used much.
nowadays we know the solution is just a bigger EV battery.
Studies have shown that hybrids have fewer issues than ICE or BEV, though for different reasons. BEVs have new technology issues, and ICE has maintenance issues. Having a mostly understood ICE car that rarely uses the ICE and has the most reliable (battery+motor) part of the BEV makes a better solution short term.
hmmm... looked up current stuff. I didn't know all the issues.
Looks like 5 year reliability: ICE > non-plugin hybrid > pure EV > plugin hybrid
But EVs seem ok 5+ years
I found this article interesting:
https://autoedgeview.com/ev-reviews/consumer-reports-ev-reli...
Still significantly better than running everything on fossil fuels burned by the power company.
Are you saying that gas turbines don't burn fossil fuels?
No, I'm saying that using a gas generator as a backup for solar is better than not using solar at all.
They can burn non-fossil fuels.
A non-carbon containing fuel that is almost entirely created by burning fossil fuels is effectively the same (and often worse) than just using the fossil fuels directly.
Biodiesel or biomethane looks at first glance to escape this, but it has serious other costs.
Is almost entirely fossil-fuel created doesn't mean it has to be almost entirely fossil-fuel created. You know, just like observing that cars are almost entirely burning fossil fuels doesn't mean cars must burn fossil fuels.
Those don't really happen at continent scale.
I believe we just had one last winter in Europe. They happen from time to time and you don't want people to freeze once every couple of years.
This where system thinking, or the lack there of, becomes an issue. You would be right if we only had exactly enough capacity for four hours of power. But of course with batteries now being produced by the multiple twh per year, each of them capable of cycling on a daily basis for a decade or longer, we soon will have quite a bit of battery connected to the grid. If you have a hundred of those four hour systems connected you'd blow fuses throughout the country if you dumped all that power on the grid all at once. That could be days of power under normal usage.
And grids can actually be connected together via cables now. The cliche is that solar panels don't generate at night. But if you connect grids via a long cable running east to west you can actually have solar power at night. And when you connect them north to south you can have solar power on a dark winter day as well. And when you add batteries to the mix (on both sides), you can keep those charged as well and use that power regardless of what time or season it is.
And that's ignoring wind (on and offshore), hydro, nuclear, and other clean forms of power that we currently don't use at scale (geothermal, fusion, etc.). If you add all that to the mix. And cables. And lots of battery. Grid connected car batteries, balcony solar, and all the rest, you end up with a lot of capacity.
Gas power is not going to way. But we probably already have too much of it and it shows in the poor utilization of existing turbines. Ironically, adding more gas turbines to the grid only makes that poor utilization worse for owners of these plants.
Note that the article is specific to open-cycle gas turbines. Which are somewhat cheaper than the (more complex) combined-cycle gas turbines, and can be brought online far faster - but are far less efficient. So, the open-cycle turbines have been economical only for covering short-duration demand peaks - a use case where batteries are now superior.
Vs. longer-duration needs, like a couple calm (bad for wind power) dark (bad for solar power) weeks in winter - you will need combined-cycle turbines or something for those, because installing that many batteries would cost too much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant#Plant_ty...
> For onshore wind, continuous capex and opex improvements are expected to drive LCOE down 16% by 2060
What’s with the forecasts going as far out as 2060?? Given the scale of changes we’ve seen in just the last 10 years, looking forward 34 years seems absurd, and to still only expect a 16% drop in cost?
Unlike solar, wind has pretty significant construction and material costs which feel hard to diminish with scale. You still need to excavate earth, install giant pylons, enormous magnets, etc.
That being said, anyone who has predicted the future prices of renewable energy seems destined to look a fool.
Yeah, these forecasts are far too long-term, and progress would have to slow down a lot to see such small improvements over such a long time. These are guesses and I'm not at all sure that they are even educated guesses.
Im a noob to this area, but why is the article picking up on 4 hour batteries? Why not 8 or 12 hour batteries (nights, cloudy days)?
> four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, displacing gas peaking on cost across every gas market in the region.
This seems to be specifically in reference to "gas peakers" which are on-demand gas turbines used to pick up slack in the main grid during peak usage. They typically only run for hours at a go and commonly on very hot days when ACs drain the grid. In those use cases, batteries could be a viable replacement. They're not necessary charged by solar but by the main grid overnight.
Because the comparison is to peakers.
solve the two problems with datacenters with a single solution.
solar panels & batteries in the texas oil patch or sw or mexico... morocco or spain.. australia...
everything associated with datacenters does not pay tariffs. tech leaders could lead the way here and not only provide AI but also potentially take big steps towards solving the climate crisis.
certainly cheaper than putting panels in space. (do the math)
I remember arguing with friends literally only 3-4 years ago about whether solar (plus batteries) could ever fully replace fossil fuel solutions. Some of my friends are idiots. ...Or this is just a super-remarkable development :-)
Title should include that the battery is also installed all across the globe.
The title really needs the word “peaker” in it to make sense.
First step is to do massive vertical solar in cities everywhere. Zero cost of [land, long distance transmission lines, transmission infrastructure]. There are already structural elements of a building, dirt cheap solar panels can be hung vertically at a minimal cost, or cost nothing (after building code is updated to require all buildings to have structural features to support vertical solar.All cities have buildings, all buildings have surfaces. In addition, there are walls/fences. This adds ~4 hours of extra solar production.
Next is EVs as energy storage. People buy cars anyways. An EV looks, works, functions and smells exact like a gas car. Some might even say it smells better. Its not like going from horses to cars, nothing that radical. With EVs, we add a TON of storage. 20% or more solar production is curtailed, all of this can go to EVs. EVs can supply power back to the grid. Or power home throughout the night.
Finally, add BESS if needed.
28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles. Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles! EVs have humongous batteries, you can control the level of charge/discharge from the grid
People should be paid for using their EVs. They are after all providing critical, highly resilient infrastructure at no cost to govts and utilities. I don't think there is any compelling reason to make the super-billionaires like Warren Buffet richer.
Your first 2 paragraphs have a few holes before they will be adopted as easily as you pretend.
Land for solar installs isn't close to free. My condo HOA won't even consider solar for any homeowner and the HOA won't approve a giant $50k/unit special assessment (we can't even get 40% of homeowners to vote for HOA elections... which are free).
Older buildings not designed for a solar roof aren't too easy to retrofit. My office window overlooks 2 parking lot structures that were recently retrofitted with solar and it took about 6 weeks for a relatively simple install. I'm pretty sure building owners will only install if they get a cut of the solar generation revenue (so the land isn't free) or if they are able to use it to offset tax or utility costs (also not free).
EVs as batteries are neat but... (1) most owners will likely splurge only for the $500 charger station not the complex electronics which allow the EV to charge the house/grid and (2) cars are frequently driven / parked at work during the peak charging time, so they would be unavailable to absorb the majority of the peak solar generation time.
Until there is a solar EV + charging story for dense housing (apartments and condos), I think most users in my area aren't likely to be able to adopt like you seem to think. Community Solar projects seemed nearly non-existent when I searched in 2018-2020.
This won't happen overnight. Even if people stop buying gas cars, it will take 20 years for all passenger cars to be EVs.
> Land for solar installs isn't close to free. Land for vertical solar is free. Think of all the walls and fences to start with.
> Older buildings not designed for a solar roof aren't too easy to retrofit. If there is a building code that requires it, every building will be built with that standard. Think of all the buildings with bathrooms. Bathrooms and indoor plumbing didn't exist 100 years back, no building is now built without bathrooms.
Also, most of the world has concrete construction. Ridiculously easy to add panels.
> parked at work work is also a building. You can charge at office. You have to demand these changes. If your employer makes you drive hours in traffic, the least they can do is provide free charging.
The world is not fixed and frozen. You can participate and make the changes needed.
i thought a balcony solar law just passed in california, might be interesting to see how that goes.
I liked laws like the fcc(?) law years ago that said you could have a satellite dish and an HOA couldn't prevent it. we need more laws like it in favor of common sense/good over HOA nonsense.
Land is peanuts.
Expensive prime arable land in the UK is rentable for £200 per hectare per year. You can buy it for £20k a hectare (land value is far higher than usable value due to tax avoidance schemes -- nobody spends £20k on a field to rent it out for £200 a year)
But even if you buy 100 hectares of land for £2m, you then need to build your 60MW, which costs about £60m on top and generates 60GWh a year or £6m at 10p/unit
The land cost doesn't matter.
Your parent wasn't talking about prime arable land, they were talking about city land.
The point is the electric delivery problem is much cheaper if the power generation and the power delivery both happen within the same substation (eg in the same neighborhood). If the generation happens in rural Scotland but the consumption happens in London, then all of the transmission needs to be upgraded. The point of your parent's comment was to describe a trick to minimize additional transmission costs/development.
And London area land does cost, even if it is just borrowing a vacant building's rooftop.
I don't necessarily agree with your parent's comment, but I don't agree with your comment either.
Except the worst case demand has to be catered for -- overcast horrendous rain in winter with local solar producing near nothing yet local demand (EV, Oven, Heating, Shower) all running.
You don't get a benefit of reducing peak demand from on-building solar, so you can't do with smaller substations.
I don't know why you're replying to my comment. That comment was only clarifying the parent's conflation of the cost of city land and the cost of cheap arable land.
I don't think local solar is a solution in foggy / cold UK. I'm not going to defend it.
Even if the land cost doesn't matter, it costs a ton to build transmission network. Millions of dollars per mile. It takes decades to get all the permitting from all the landholdings it crosses, and there will be many court cases.
The legacy grid of producing power far out makes no sense. Coal, nuclear, hydro were far away and needed transmission. New grid can produce energy in the cities. Think of all the surface area available on all the buildings. Just the walls/fences between buildings is sufficient to build massive amounts of vertical solar.
Trips under a mile should not be by car are all unless you are carrying luggage or are disabled or similar.
The trips over a 100 miles are a much higher percentage of distance travelled. One 100 mile trips is the same distance as 33 three mile trips. if you look at distance travelled its dominated by longer trips on your numbers.
I assume your numbers are for the US where cars are more heavily used for commuting than anywhere else?
> Trips under a mile should not be by car are all unless you are carrying luggage or are disabled or similar.
Persuade my city to install some sidewalks, please. I can't leave my neighborhood safely on foot.
Yes, its not your fault, its your city's. It still should be happen - they need to fix it.
I am more used to dealing with places that go too far the other way and think you should be cycling even if you have multiple suitcases to carry.
[flagged]
Come on - thats not solving all the problems that you buy GENERATORS for. 4 hour bridge is great - but emergency power or always on -- 4 hours is not enough.
Battery is load balancing not generation.
The "4 hour" is doing a lot of work here.
Put another way, you need the gas turbines for the two week dunkelflaute (winter doldrums). Given that you have the turbines already, when are batteries cheaper than running the turbines for a few hours every evening?
A more interesting question than the cheapest 4 hour solution. I think that answer might also be batteries soon.
The point of the article is that a specific peaker technology (open-cycle gas turbine) is now less costly than a different peaker technology (batteries) that fills the same niche (short-term demand spikes).
Four hours isn't "doing a lot of work," it's the whole point of the article. It's not about dunkelflaute.
Whoops, typo. I meant that batteries are less costly than gas, not the other way around.
This; batteries are still ungodly expensive for seasonal or long-term storage.
And what happens if you need to satisfy peak demand for more than four hours at a time (and you will)? You still need some generators or overprovisoned batteries.
Then it isn’t a peak, it is an increased base load and you install or build something else.
The basic unit of analysis in think tanks and media is nameplate capacity, ie a MW of four-hour battery would be compared to a MW of gas turbines.
The most important driver of power system costs is "firm capacity"; a MW of four-hour battery might be 10%-50% as valuable as a MW of gas turbines given that the latter will run for 100-1000 hours per year when the batteries are empty and the prices are much higher. This is true on the grid or behind the meter.
The word peaker left out of the title makes your complaint meaningless.