1) Electricity costs around $50/mwh. The comes to $0.05/kwh, which is a solid wholesale price for electricity, which will sell to the consumer for $0.15/kwh.
2) Large scale storage batteries will cycle once per day.
3) the current cost for the batteries is $120/kwh. That is $120,000/MWh. The battery will last 20 years. It will be cycled around 7,500 times. So, it costs $16 per cycle.
4) The $50/mwh is what it costs to generate the power, so the $16 per cycle is added to the $50/mwh. You also lose power in storage, about 10%.
5) That means your power costs, from the battery will be about $70/mwh. That gets you to $0.21/kwh to the consumer, a 50% price hike.
6) That assumes of course you cycle once per day, but as wind and solar add more and more battery capacity, what if you assume the battery cycles every 3 days? Every 10 days? How about once a year? That $0.21/kwh starts ballooning up very rapidly.
7) Again, this is over and above other management charges added to handle an unstable grid.
There are other ways of storing energy other than with batteries. Pumped storage, for example.
Of course, pumped storage has the same issue as with hydro--only so many places one can put lakes and dams due to the environmental impact, and more fundamentally the geography.
Lastly, due to the unique safety concerns of nuclear (seismic activity, distance from population centers*, etc.), nukes aren't necessarily a drop-in solution for fossil plants. A better (albeit space-limited) approach would be adding reactors to existing plants like Southern Company and its co-owners did with Vogtle. I think SoCo and team are considering the same for Hatch.
On the other hand, gas is an easy conversion for a coal plant and cuts CO2 emissions in half. SoCo has been doing a lot of this in Georgia.
*Although TVA's Sequoyah is pretty much in metro Chattanooga, for one example, to take advantage of the Tennessee River.
Worst case. I've seen it happen in Colorado, generally once or twice every other year. But with electrical power, you need to provide for the outliers.
There's no end to outliers that we "must" plan for. 3 day storms every 12 days every other year seems highly improbable. That's 30 days every other yearm
Do you want to explain to the residents of Colorado, when it's 5 below zero in the middle of the day, you only have to survive for 3 days once every other year?
I'll give you an idea for a column.
1) Electricity costs around $50/mwh. The comes to $0.05/kwh, which is a solid wholesale price for electricity, which will sell to the consumer for $0.15/kwh.
2) Large scale storage batteries will cycle once per day.
3) the current cost for the batteries is $120/kwh. That is $120,000/MWh. The battery will last 20 years. It will be cycled around 7,500 times. So, it costs $16 per cycle.
4) The $50/mwh is what it costs to generate the power, so the $16 per cycle is added to the $50/mwh. You also lose power in storage, about 10%.
5) That means your power costs, from the battery will be about $70/mwh. That gets you to $0.21/kwh to the consumer, a 50% price hike.
6) That assumes of course you cycle once per day, but as wind and solar add more and more battery capacity, what if you assume the battery cycles every 3 days? Every 10 days? How about once a year? That $0.21/kwh starts ballooning up very rapidly.
7) Again, this is over and above other management charges added to handle an unstable grid.
You should be writing a blog! I'm happy to use your ideas but you should be writing these up as you've got a lot of good ideas.
Picking a nit: coal is not a hydrocarbon. It's just carbon.
There's always one in every crowd 😊
There are other ways of storing energy other than with batteries. Pumped storage, for example.
Of course, pumped storage has the same issue as with hydro--only so many places one can put lakes and dams due to the environmental impact, and more fundamentally the geography.
Lastly, due to the unique safety concerns of nuclear (seismic activity, distance from population centers*, etc.), nukes aren't necessarily a drop-in solution for fossil plants. A better (albeit space-limited) approach would be adding reactors to existing plants like Southern Company and its co-owners did with Vogtle. I think SoCo and team are considering the same for Hatch.
On the other hand, gas is an easy conversion for a coal plant and cuts CO2 emissions in half. SoCo has been doing a lot of this in Georgia.
*Although TVA's Sequoyah is pretty much in metro Chattanooga, for one example, to take advantage of the Tennessee River.
Which parts of the world get 3 day storms every 12 days?
Worst case. I've seen it happen in Colorado, generally once or twice every other year. But with electrical power, you need to provide for the outliers.
There's no end to outliers that we "must" plan for. 3 day storms every 12 days every other year seems highly improbable. That's 30 days every other yearm
Do you want to explain to the residents of Colorado, when it's 5 below zero in the middle of the day, you only have to survive for 3 days once every other year?