How does the cost and difficulty of storage for solar power figure into this? My sense was that while solar power generation was growing rapidly cheaper, we still need more innovation in batteries to provide reliable power at scale, particularly given seasonal variability in sunlight.
How does the cost and difficulty of storage for solar power figure into this? My sense was that while solar power generation was growing rapidly cheaper, we still need more innovation in batteries to provide reliable power at scale, particularly given seasonal variability in sunlight.
the good news is that battery costs are now on the same plummeting curve--and new tech is emerging pretty fast. (iron replacing lithium for big utility scale batteries for instance)
Work like that at Oxfordis being done by Jessika Trancik at her lab at MIT, by her and Micah Ziegler and their team, on the learning curveтАЩs for photovoltaics and lithium ion batteries and renewables, and determining the key drivers, which seem to be in those cases particularly electric vehicle scaling for batteries; private and government research and development (esp materials science imho), and IтАЩm sure subsidies were crucial as well. Batteries are dropping 7-10% per year in cost/KWH capacity, so halving in price every 10 years or less.. That decline is bringing battery storage where PV+(Wind+)storage can compete as dispatch peaking source with gas OGCT peaked plants; and someday if trend continues as dispatchable baseload replacing even gas CCGTs.
How does the cost and difficulty of storage for solar power figure into this? My sense was that while solar power generation was growing rapidly cheaper, we still need more innovation in batteries to provide reliable power at scale, particularly given seasonal variability in sunlight.
the good news is that battery costs are now on the same plummeting curve--and new tech is emerging pretty fast. (iron replacing lithium for big utility scale batteries for instance)
Work like that at Oxfordis being done by Jessika Trancik at her lab at MIT, by her and Micah Ziegler and their team, on the learning curveтАЩs for photovoltaics and lithium ion batteries and renewables, and determining the key drivers, which seem to be in those cases particularly electric vehicle scaling for batteries; private and government research and development (esp materials science imho), and IтАЩm sure subsidies were crucial as well. Batteries are dropping 7-10% per year in cost/KWH capacity, so halving in price every 10 years or less.. That decline is bringing battery storage where PV+(Wind+)storage can compete as dispatch peaking source with gas OGCT peaked plants; and someday if trend continues as dispatchable baseload replacing even gas CCGTs.
These imho are both good&pertinent:
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee01313k
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435119303009