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by epistasis
2 days ago
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Definitely! However I frequently encounter people on energy discussion forums that assume that we need 2-3 months of battery storage, perhaps because they see natural gas or other storage and assume that batteries need exactly the same thing, so I'm perhaps overly eager to respond to claims about month-long battery storage. I had previously been hopeful that battery storage would allow more shared used of land, but the fire risks of batteries have been pretty severe. And since the land usage requirements are fairly low, there's no need to enhance the risk by putting batteries, say, in enclosed spaces of former natural gas generation facilities [1]. I'm hopeful that we'll see a lot more storage, say a shipping container's worth, at the end of distribution feeders, which helps suck up residential solar with minimal resources, but solving the problem of "who pays for the benefits for all" when the utility is incentivized to keep grid costs high means that nobody is knocking down doors to make that happen... [1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/moss-landing-fire-battery-s... |
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But the beauty of battery and solar/wind is that it can be far more distributed. This of course means far harder to take out -- a wildfire near a nuclear power plant could knock out 3GW of capacity, a wildfire near one of 50x 60MW solar plants would knock out 60MW of capacity.
Solar might not be the only solution in a country at a high latitude, but for the contiguous 48 states even in winter solar produces more than enough power per hectare that when coupled with an appropriately sized battery can generate the entire needs.
1 hectare in sourthern california generates about 3.5MWh a day in December. In North Dakota about 1.5MWh a day, battery size for that is a tiny amount of land.
To generate enough solar energy to power the entire US electric needs, on a bad winter day, the US would have to have 60,000 square km of solar+battery.
The US currently uses 150,000 sqkm just to grow corn ethanol
You'd need a decent HVDC connectors from the southern states to the more demanding northern ones.
But even factoring in current prices of wind, solar, battery, and grid, it would only cost somewhere in the $6T range. Over 30 years that's $200b a year, or about $80 per MWh
New nuclear is about $150 per MWh before decommissioning costs