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How far can batteries go?
image credit: Gavin Mooney
As recently as a few years ago, grid-scale battery storage was widely considered too expensive to be rolled out at significant scale.
But plummeting prices have changed all that. Lithium-ion battery storage costs have fallen from $1,200/kWh in 2010 to $151 in 2022, according to BloombergNEF.
Countries around the world are now ramping up energy storage. China plans to install more than 30 GW by 2025, an 8x increase on what it currently has. In the US, 4GW of battery storage was added in 2022, nearly matching the 4.7GW that had been installed in previous years.
By the end of 2023, global battery storage will have more than doubled in 3 years to 37 GW, according to the latest data from Global Data. By 2030 it is expected to hit 354 GW.
BNEF has it even higher, at 411 GW by 2030.
However, neither of these projections is enough to meet the 610 GW the IEA says is needed to be on track for net zero.
Having said that, these sorts of projections have a habit of underestimating the speed of the transition. In 2022 BNEF itself more than doubled its estimates for energy storage deployments from 2025 to 2030 across Europe compared with previous forecasts.
The current rise in raw material prices is also not expected to be an issue. "We expect battery prices to remain in the same range in 2023, and from 2024, we are going to start to see a decline again."
Discussions
Figures can be misleading. Denmark imported 20.1 TWh of electricity last year, up 2 TWh from the year before. That is 17% of their total consumption.
Australia's utility system is only about 28% renewable so South Australia can import energy during a renewable shortfall. It doesn't make them GHG free, especially when most of the imported energy is from coal.
https://www.energy.gov.au/data/australian-electricity-generation-fuel-mix
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Thank Gavin for the Post!
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