IU.S. battery storage capacity has been growing since 2021 and could increase by 89% by the end of 2024 if developers bring all of the energy storage systems they have planned on line by their intended commercial operation dates
IU.S. battery storage capacity has been growing since 2021 and could increase by 89% by the end of 2024 if developers bring all of the energy storage systems they have planned on line by their intended commercial operation dates
Battery storage is in some ways the last peice of the puzzle for renewable transition. First the day storage, which this almost certainly is and the long term storage which is a problem for the near future.
Things are going to change rapidly if fossil fuels plants are going to be undercut 24/7 for days/weeks/ months at a time.
I always point at Norway and Quebec, which utilize hydroelectric heavily. Not only do they have some of the cheapest power on the planet (in terms of production costs, there are plenty of poor oil countries that provide power effectively for free), but that cheap renewable energy has resulted in 70% of home heating and a chunk of industrial use migrating to green energy.
As I always mention, electricity generation is just one form of energy use. There’s also industrial use, transportation, and home heating. If electricity generation ends up cheaper than using fossil fuels, then it becomes much simpler to move all those other forms of energy use off of fossil fuels, so it has an outsized impact even greater than just supplanting fossil fuels for electricity generation.
And, as I always point out, the opposite is true. If we force the implementation of technologies that drive the cost of electricity up, then industry, transportation, and home heating will be driven towards burning fossil fuels, which can be highly counterproductive.
There is a big problem with that and that is that the most expensive electricity source is the price of electricity. The problem for renewables and nuclear is that most of them are expensive up front, but cheap to operate. So you end up in a position were you pay for the expensive fossil fuels and for adding clean electricity, without having the lower prices of clean electricity. That becomes really bad as the things like home heating and industry are long term decisiosn. You do not replace your boiler every few years as they last for decades. So you have to have policy to drive adoption of those technologies regardless of the price of electricity. Long term that is going to be mostly cheaper, but short term that it will not.