Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

Post by mgbmtl » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

anonuser123456 wrote: post #36

krferriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, es…

You are probably conflating window insulation with window air leaks. The best windows generally available are R-5 at best on initial installation and degrade over time as The argon leaks. They are also extremely expensive. Not a very good investment. But most energy losses in older buildings are from leaking air not thermal conductance. So upgrading to R-1 but sealed and we'll installed Windows can do a lot without h…

Post by dv_dt » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

xbmcuser wrote: post #30

driverdan wrote: post #13

> In March, an analysis of more than 7000 global storage projects by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 months, to $187 per MWh. I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles…

They are comparing it with building a new power plant costs for which are calculated similarly for 20-30 year life cycle. Same is for Solar and wind power plants. Many people assume that prices of grid scale solar and wind power are coming down because of technology improvements that is partly true but another reason for the price decreases is that the investors are finding out the calculated life of these is actuall…

Post by F_r_k » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

laser wrote: post #62

How is the battery storage only $0.013 per kWh? Is that a misprint and they meant $0.13 per kWh? Or is there some fancy accounting where they're storing only a small percentage of the total energy output and giving a diluted price with the partial storage cost spread over the total output? Or is it truly possible with massive scale to achieve battery costs this low? I can't see how this adds up without some sleight o…

Post by jdhn » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

onetimemanytime wrote: post #59

jedberg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. A lot of our houses were built when a/c wasn’t necessary so you actually wanted to let heat in. The average summer high in LA was in the mid 70s during the 1950s. Now it’s in the high 80s and sometimes hits 100+. The house my dad grew up in he no a/c. We had to install it in the 1980s. Now it would be unlivable without. But the thermal profile is terrible. It’s designed to bring heat inside year round.

>> The average summer high in LA was in the mid 70s during the 1950s. Now it’s in the high 80s and sometimes hits 100+. 10 degrees plus in changes over a few decades?

Post by volkl48 » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

dv_dt wrote: post #58

Animats wrote: post #7

$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…

> Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. In general, yes, but if you look for a term called the duck curve which characterizes that frequently the load comes up after peak output, or even after sunset. For coastal CA wind often helps fill that offset as winds frequently come up near sunset, but it's not always a guaranteed thing. So there does need to…