[ggm]

Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK?

Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?

[vlovich123]

Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic where you don’t pay for the grid but rely on it being there to offload the responsibility of providing differential power when your home solution isn’t meeting your needs (this is expensive because the grid has non trivial maintenance costs that you’re not contributing to). Households will inevitably anlso under provision in the long term due to unaccounted for energy growth (eg EV vehicles). It’s also going to be more expensive because people who don’t have the capital to install their own batteries will be stuck paying the bill for grid scale batteries and maintenance anyway while richer households get to avoid that cost due to their own solar install.

As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build.

But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power.

Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.

[ggm]

Base load is a social construct used by coal and nuclear to justify the economically viable bid model which suits them. You can target the duck curve by batteries, and by demand management. People are perfectly capable of moving significant load in time, as evidenced by time of use charge models and off peak pricing.

More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.

Almost no new wind or solar can be deployed at scale in Australia now without battery deployment. Both individuals and grid scale batteries are fine. They serve different parts of the supply chain.

FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.

Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.

Networks are, and always were a public utility function. Converting to bid models was a huge mistake.

[vlovich123]

> Base load is a social construct used by coal and nuclear to justify the economically viable bid model which suits them. You can target the duck curve by batteries, and by demand management. People are perfectly capable of moving significant load in time, as evidenced by time of use charge models and off peak pricing.

Nuclear can be made to be load following and is in France. Baseload is just the cheapest way to generate power because the plants are simpler (+ demand pricing only needs to shift a small amount of power to smooth out the peak and valley caused by surges in human activity patterns instead of completely shifting night time usage which is a whole other massive amount of energy - peak to trough is typically only a ~30% drop from what I’ve seen). I think you’re being overly optimistic about people time shifting their night time load more drastically to reduce the need of batteries as there may be countervailing patterns that are unavoidable (eg if you’re not rich and work somewhere where there’s free charging at work during the day, you might need to charge your car at night when solar is most expensive - and EVs haven’t even become part of the grid story yet so any data today is horribly misleading). Demand pricing can shift things a bit but you’re not going to have a 90-95% peek to trough reduction in terms of shifting your night time usage to the day. There’s also a huge amount of industry that runs 24/7 (also hospitals) and there’s no time shifting a lot of that load (certain industrial processes can maybe shift but it varies a lot from it’s ok to 0% - it’s also typically an expensive capability to retrofit and will make those good more expensive just to accommodate solar).

> More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.

As I said, this is the most expensive way to build solar and batteries. Just because someone is doing it doesn’t change the reality that it’s a bad idea. What happens when energy usage grows over time? Think of the maintenance costs involved in upgrading a bunch of panels and batteries all over the place vs centrally installed ones in the grid. It’s a myopic short term plan. Easy to sell politically because who doesn’t love free government money. Also expect their utilities to start having serious problems operating and needing bailouts, to raise prices drastically, or risk going bankrupt as load disappears from their grid in favor of local generation. There’s a reason CPUC changed the pricing rules around selling solar back to the grid to remove the implicit subsidy homeowners were receiving from the grid (dropping rates from retail to wholesale). Even that was extremely unpopular and a political battle and doesn’t cover the fact that grid pricing isn’t broken down correctly because historically no one cared - the grid maintenance fee isn’t a mandatory tax for a dwelling and even when you pay it it’s underpriced vs how much it actually costs to maintain the grid because the electricity pricing would cover the rest.

> Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.

Nuclear would last the longest because it remains the cheapest installed capacity (eg the amount to keep the California plant going still is cheaper than any new construction of solar/wind per watt). It’s still also cheaper per watt for new construction (even including absurd cost overruns that primarily come from a crazy regulatory environment and sustained deinvestment in nuclear which are both fixable issues) than the offshore wind projects that are starting to become popular and cheaper than solar if you start to include the required storage (which no one ever does when claiming that solar is cheaper than nuclear).

> FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.

FCAS does not solve the problem of night time energy use. It’s horribly misleading to claim that this presents grid scale energy. It does not. It’s purely an arbitrage play because they can respond to changing market conditions faster than peaker plants. That’s fine and helps stabilize the grid, but it doesn’t represent sufficient capacity to power the grid at night (+ wear and tear in this usage is drastically different than charging and discharging every day).