[Retric]

It doesn’t matter if prices are falling if you make more money this year than you save by waiting an extra year. That’s the issue with hypothetical alternatives, they can’t make you money until you can actually buy them.

As to location. All the equipment you need for moving solar power around the grid like long distance power lines is exactly the same equipment you need for moving battery power at that location around the grid. Even better batteries charged with solar power get to avoid DC>AC inefficiency selling solar to the grid and AC>DC inefficiency charging the batteries. They get to skip out on equipment like redundant DC>AC inverters etc. You are even moving power through cooler power lines that therefore have less resistance.

[ncmncm]

Money not spent on storage (that you cannot charge anyway) does not evaporate. You can instead spend it on something else more useful, like more panels. Money is always that way.

And, storage adjacent to the point of use is less at risk of being wholly unavailable, e.g. if there is a problem with the cable. So, you need good reasons to put it somewhere else. That is not to say there cannot be such reasons, but what they are is of interest.

[Retric]

It isn’t easy to just dump unlimited money into panels, you need a distribution network to support such instillations and these batteries are leveraging that.

Storage closer to consumers has a huge number of issues being more expensive to manage, harder to scale, less efficient, etc etc. It sounds vastly more useful than it is because you end up increasing failure modes and make failing safe much harder.

[ncmncm]

Remarkably, all of those assertions are wrong.

[Retric]

Try and back up what your saying. What do you think happens if you build a 100GW solar panel farm without talking with the local electric utility?

[ncmncm]

That wasn't the topic. At issue is whether putting storage at one end or other of a massive transmission line makes any difference. Storage at the receiving end of a transmission line will be extremely common, worldwide, because a transmission line is the conventional backup for local storage, and is also how you top up local storage during supply peaks when you haven't got a local surplus.

In fact, as this particular transmission line will be feeding into the UK national grid, its normal role will be backup for offshore wind.

That somebody else at the end of a different transmission line might want access to the battery would be a good reason to site it where those lines meet. Another might be that you need to minimize fluctuations on power going through your transmission line. But whatever the reasons, they certainly will not be trivial, and might be revelatory. Trivially dismissing the question adds no light.

[Retric]

> Storage at the receiving end of a transmission line

Require vast investments to add the capacity to handle storage and would be less efficient.

Your proposal is basically to spend 20% to 30% more money, loses and extra 4-7% electricity every charge discharge cycle and gains effectively nothing which is why nobody is doing it.

> how you top up local storage during supply peaks when you haven't got a local surplus.

Peak + filling storage requires extra transmission capacity which costs money to build and energy to use.

> At the end of a different transmission line.

Transmission lines work in either direction and are generally set up as an interconnected mesh. You want redundancy from the solar power plant to customers, but you also want redundancy from batteries to customers.