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California secretly struggles with renewables
"California has hooked up a grid battery system that is almost ten times bigger than the previous world record holder, but when it comes to making
renewables reliable it is so small it might as well not exist.The new battery array is rated at a storage capacity of 1,200 megawatt hours (MWh); easily eclipsing the record holding 129 MWh Australian system built by Tesla a few years ago. However, California peaks at a whopping 42,000 MW. If that happened on a hot, low wind night this supposedly big battery would keep the lights on for just 1.7 minutes (that’s 103 seconds). This is truly a trivial amount of storage.
Mind you this system is being built to serve just Pacific Gas & Electric. But they by coincidence peak at about half of California, or 21,000 MWh, so they get a magnificent 206 seconds of peak juice. Barely time to find the flashlight, right? There is no word on what this trivial giant cost, since PG&E does not own it. That honor goes to an outfit called Vistra that does a lot of different things with electricity and gas. But these complex battery systems are not cheap.
This one reportedly utilizes more than 4,500 stacked battery racks, each of which contains 22 individual battery modules. That is 99,000 separate modules that have to be made to work well together. Imagine hooking up 99,000 electric cars and you begin to get the picture.
The US Energy Information Administration reports that grid scale battery systems have averaged around $1.5 million a MWh over the last few years. At that price this trivial piece of storage cost just under TWO BILLION DOLLARS. At 103 seconds of peak storage that is about $18,000,000 a second. Money for nothing."
California secretly struggles with renewables
California has hooked up a grid battery system that is almost ten times bigger than the previous world record holder, but when it comes to making renewables reliable it is so small it might as well not exist.
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They are approaching an asymptote of ~$500/megawatthour - completely impractical for serving as the coveted cure for intermittency, the Achilles' Heel of renewables underachievement.
I'd love to see $500/MWh Bob but I'm guessing you meant $500 per kWh.
Also, interesting that you understand that prices are much lower than the $1,500,000 per MWh you use in your calculations but you still continue to use that number. Talk about propaganda...
Cost for car batteries are now below $200 per kWh and continue to drop rapidly but somehow you think batteries for energy storage should be more than twice as expensive and will not have a learning curve. Love it Bob - the more you say the better batteries will do.
By the way Bob - I forgot to mention. You said:
Mind you this system is being built to serve just Pacific Gas & Electric. But they by coincidence peak at about half of California, or 21,000 MWh,
A couple of things - the peak should actually be in MW not MWh. Also, what year are you writing about here? Because in 2021 - PG&E has lost responsibility for more than half of their generation to CCAs... PG&E generation is getting smaller every year.
CCAs don't generate any energy. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that nearly all energy purchased by CCAs in PG&E's service area is either: 1) generated by a PG&E subsidiary, or 2) purchased by PG&E, then resold to CCAs so they can add their completely useless, fictional markup to rip off CA electricity customers.
Wow Bob you're right - I am surprised. You really do have some inside information there.
Below is a list of some storage agreements that CCAs have recently signed...for those solar/storage projects where they pretend that the solar is charging the storage.
Are the sellers on this list "secret PG&E subsidiaries" or are these sellers lying and the buyer is really PG&E?
Is sPower a PG&E subsidiary? EDF? Clearway? Goldman Sachs? Next Era? or for example did Recurrent Energy really sell the Slate project to PG&E and not MBCP/SVCE?
One other thing Bob - are you saying that these "secret PG&E subsidiaries" own generation that is not included in PG&E annual 10K as reported to the SEC?
Nathan - you said:
Using Joe's $589/kWh EIA-2019 number, the battery for a 200-300 mile electric car (50-75kWH) would cost about $29k-$44k. That's within a factor of two of being economical for a big fraction of the market.
Let's be clear the $589/kWh is not "Joe's number". I was just pointing out that EIA had come out with published numbers that are much lower than the EIA numbers Bob continues to use for his blatant misinformation.
If I was going come up with a current price for batteries - I would estimate around $250/kWh. Perhaps you missed an article from last month where I mentioned that Tesla has come out with a pricing page for their Megapacks. Their price is $278/kWh - which would have some built in margin. My assumption would be that other developers can build systems for slightly less.
As for your other assumptions -
Assuming (for nuclear comparison's sake) that the battery is replaced at 10, 20, and 30 years
Not a good assumption - the PPAs these storage providers are assigning are for 20+years. Also, I hope you understand that these systems are very modular - if part of the battery fails or loses performance then that module can easily be replaced. No need to replace the entire battery.
A much cheaper grid solution would be to use batteries with 30-60 minutes of capacity.
Well as you can see from my chart in earlier comment it appears that most developers are using batteries with a duration of 4 hours. I'm guessing this because early adopters can take advantage of large amount of arbitrage between morning and evening prices on CAISO and the evening price spike currently last 3-4 hours. However, in the medium/long term the evening prices should flatten out more as storage amount grows.
Related to your comment - when LS Power added their 250 MW Gateway project last year it had only one hour of duration but they planned for more.
"We built Gateway as a shorter duration project, but we built it so we had room in the buildings... to expand that capacity when we had customers for that capacity," King said.
Makes sense to add the tough and more expensive interconnection first and extend duration later with batteries that are further down the cost curve.
We now have a rapidly expanding WW battery ecosystem. Prices are gonna continue to fall rapidly and the technology is gonna continue to improve. The main issue I see for the short-term is gonna be the competition between automakers and storage developers for limited capacity until production scales.
By the way, I would recommend reading the full recent EIA Report - Battery Storage in the United States: An Update on Market Trends. Closer to reality than most of the stuff EIA comes out with.
Joe, again: the performance of all lithium-ion batteries quickly deteriorates. They rarely "fail" - and when one module does, it does so spectacularly, taking many others along with it:
So just to be clear Bob - are you saying that performance of each of the "modules" in the Tesla Moss Landing installation below will basically be the same over the next x years? and that they will all be replaced at the same time?
It is replaced. The price of that module has doubled, hasn't it?
Gotcha Bob - so if a system has 10 modules the
cost to replace a single module =
- the total system cost/10.
Am I doing that calculation correctly?
Are you also saying that if I were to take one of the 3.0MWh megapacks in the photo and replace it with a new megapack either one month, one year, five years or ten years from now it will cost the same as original installation?
Couple of more arithmetic questions for you Bob -
Vistra just increased the size of its Moss Landing installation from 300 MW/1200 MWh to 400MW/1600MWh. Should I assume that the cost of this battery upgrade was 1/3 the cost of original battery?
Vistra has further plans to upgrade this installation in the future:
Morgan continued, “What’s great about this particular site is that it has the space to support even further expansion – up to 1,500 MW/6,000 MWh – while responsibly utilizing our existing site infrastructure, including existing transmission lines and grid interconnection.
This second expansion would be 4400/1200 or 3.66x as big as original system. Should I multiple the cost of original system by 3.66 to get cost of this expansion? Would that be correct?
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