| The reason renewables are the cheapest source of energy today is at least in part because Germany made a big investment early on. Ensuring that there is demand allows investment to be made in production, which allows competition and learning, and acceleration of the decrease in cost. Batteries are halving in cost every handful of years because there is a guaranteed market that allows construction of more production facilities. Batteries are currently being deployed very cost-effective for replacement of gas peaker plants and for frequency regulation. They are also being deployed on the grid as "non-wires-alternatives" to transmission upgrades. As we transition to a carbon-free grid, they will find even more use. A huge fraction of planned solar farms in the US have storage built in, because of the efficiency of reusing the same DC to AC inverters, and because for quite a while now, panels have been cheap enough that some panel generation capacity is thrown away in order to get more output at other times of the day. It is a mistake to think of batteries as needing some sort of technological leap to serve our needs. If we had to, we could deploy them at current prices and build a renewable, carbon-free grid more cheaply than we could with nuclear. But we are only installing them as necessary as we replace aging infrastructure, rather than shutting down existing infrastructure that hasn't worn down. As the cost of storage+solar drops below the fuel+operations expense of natural gas, we will start shutting down natural gas plants before their natural end of life, resulting in wasted costs. I have a feeling that any naturals gas turbine installed today will be considered a boondoggle within 5-10 years. The future is now, when it comes to storage, we just haven't had time for reporting to catch up. |