This statement rings familiar. Where have I heard that before?
That's cryptic to me. What are you saying?
I'm busy with a home project, just taking a few minutes here and there to post, didn't have time at the moment to search the specifics. But by BIG, BIG project, I think this qualifies - the SMUD Iowa Hill project (in CA), cost projection was $1.4B when they canceled it. The reservoir they needed was 6400 acre-feet of water. Capacity of 400MW, I could not find a value in MW-Hrs. That means it could supply a PEAK of 400MW, but we don't know for how long. They talked about using it from 4-7PM, but I would assume it ramps up/down through those hours. But spit-ball it at 1/2 capacity the 1st hour, full the second, and 1/2 the third, would be ~ 800 MW-Hrs each day.
For perspective, a typical coal plant can produce 800 MW all day/night long, about 24x what this big project could supply. And geography is limited for installations like this, it's just not something that can be widely implemented in the US.
I hate to add a link, but it directly speaks to your concerns ERD50. I'm not an energy expert, not an engineer, not a scientist, not a politician. I can't shout you down or convince you to agree with me. Let's get back to this discussion in 5 years. I'll leave it at that.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/16895594/colorado-renewable-energy-future
OK, I read your link. Did you? Did you comprehend it?
This gets back to that previous thread on trusting news sites - that article is mostly hype, and I suspect it misleads a lot of people into thinking solutions are right around the corner (like 5 years?).
So they see some numbers that look good to them, and run with it:
For the Tucson project, storage added about $15/MWh to the cost of the solar. Compare that to the $3 to $7 added by storage in the Xcel bids. Storage prices are plunging, and as they do, renewables become more competitive.
The figure shows median costs for Solar PV @ $29.50/MW-Hr and Solar with 'storage' @ $36.00/MW-Hr, so there is an $6.50 adder for storage in median costs (these are lifetime costs).
But does this mean that "
Storage prices are plunging,"? Well, let's see - they go on to say (bold mine this time)...
(Important caveats: The Lazard LCOE is for solar with 10 hours of storage, but we do not yet know how much storage is involved in the Xcel bids; Lazard estimates unsubsidized costs, while Xcel projects will benefit from federal tax credits; Lazard’s estimate is for 2017, while developers are effectively bidding 2023 costs. Direct comparisons are difficult. Point is, the number is vaulting down.)
That's some sad reporting. They don't know what the numbers represent, but they still can say it means the number is "vaulting down". No, you can't say that w/o a direct comparison. They only say it, because they want to believe it, and they think it is what their readers want to hear.
BTW, some perspective on those numbers of $7/MW-Hr adder for battery storage. That's a real funny number, because it is clearly (to me) based on MW-Hrs of the solar panels over their life, not the MW-Hrs of the storage itself (a number they don't know). But batteries for a Tesla run somewhere around $200/KW-Hr, but let's round down to $100. That would be an initial (not lifetime) cost of $100,000 per MW-Hr.
At that rate, backing up the equivalent of a single coal plant for a single hour would require $80 Million dollars in batteries (plus inverters, a building, etc). For a day, $1.9 B, for a week, ~$13B.
How many of their readers understand the difference? How many of their authors understand the difference? If any of their authors understand the difference, would they bother to explain it?
-ERD50