[pfdietz]

The point being made is that if smoothing over time becomes sufficiently cheap then smoothing over space is supplanted.

It would be nice if this happened before the next Carrington Event (or the next nuclear war with orbital EMP weapons.)

[gpm]

I get that, I'm just disagreeing that we should be looking forwards to storage becoming that cheap. Particularly when our cheap energy sources (solar, wind) have a lot of location specific variability over time.

With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it

[algo_trader]

The original report by Ember [1] is decent but clearly biased.

They assume each battery cycles entirely EVERY day - even in winter. They also assume PV is never curtailed - not even in summer. They of course ignore multi-day weather anomalies. Like wise for weekend/holiday demand variations. etc.

The best part of the report are real world bids of 2025 ESS projects.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

[pfdietz]

I do look forward to local storage getting that cheap. If Standard Thermal (here I am hawking them again) succeeds, we could see local PV-generated seasonally stored 600 C heat at as little as $3/GJ -- competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.