4-hour battery storage is cheaper to install than gas turbines all across globe

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

• pixl97 · 31 minutes ago

  >For that gas currently seems cheape Well, other than destroying the planet, but hey, let's just hide those costs.

  • dec0dedab0de · 28 minutes ago

    Still significantly better than running everything on fossil fuels burned by the power company.

    • happymellon · 26 minutes ago

      Are you saying that gas turbines don't burn fossil fuels?

      • pfdietz · 15 minutes ago

        They can burn non-fossil fuels.

  • adrianN · 28 minutes ago

    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.

    • cassepipe · 24 minutes ago

      I don't think parent was against gas because of its physical but rather because it's a fossil fuel

    • olau · 22 minutes ago

      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.

    • jandrese · 20 minutes ago

      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.

      • pfdietz · 16 minutes ago

        Of course. But the point was that it could also be burned in these turbines, and is also storable underground like methane.

• happymellon · 27 minutes ago

  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.

  • adrianN · 23 minutes ago

    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.

    • toomuchtodo · 6 minutes ago

      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.

  • martinald · 7 minutes ago

    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.

• Ajedi32 · 22 minutes ago

  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.

  • jandrese · 14 minutes ago

    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.

• ZeroGravitas · 18 minutes ago

  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.

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.

> 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?

• 0cf8612b2e1e · 7 minutes ago

  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.

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”…

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)