| Not just charge a small battery and discharge it 3 months later, but to store 3 months worth of production. And using batteries, the cost of that is currently bonkers. The lowest cost large-scale BESS projects that have been completed are in China, with the record-holder currently being ~$51k/MHh. As a comparison, OL3, the most expensive nuclear plant in the world, and which is generally held up as an example of nuclear plants being too expensive to be worth it, cost a total of €11B. It produces net 1600MW electric. That is, if you have the lowest construction, labor and battery costs in the world for the battery project, if you want to store more than ~6.5 days of production, it makes more sense to instead build the world's most expensive nuclear power plant and idle it when you don't need the power. > sounds more efficient than electrolysis NOBODY CARES ABOUT EFFICIENCY. Nobody should care about efficiency. If you care about efficiency, you do not understand the problem. If you can get capital costs low enough, your competition for that power is curtailment. The cost of input electricity can be assumed to be zero. BESS is useful and important for stabilizing the grid, and for leveling production/consumption over a day. Hydrogen solves a different problem, namely, how to run your entire grid on renewables without using coal or nuclear as baseload, and without natural gas as peakers, when your production varies greatly over time. |