{"id":40858,"date":"2018-11-23T07:37:49","date_gmt":"2018-11-23T12:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40858"},"modified":"2018-11-23T07:37:49","modified_gmt":"2018-11-23T12:37:49","slug":"the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries-included","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40858","title":{"rendered":"The cost of wind & solar power: batteries included"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cost of wind & solar power: batteries included<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

\"\"For some time now we here on Energy Matters<\/em> have been harping on about the prohibitive costs of long-term battery storage. Here, using two simplified examples, I quantify these costs. The results show that while batteries may be useful for fast-frequency response applications they increase the levelized costs of wind and solar electricity by a factor of ten or more when used for long-term \u2013 in particular seasonal \u2013 storage. Obviously a commercial-scale storage technology much cheaper than batteries is going to be needed before the world\u2019s electricity sector can transition to intermittent renewables. The problem is that there isn\u2019t one.<\/p>\n

Assumptions:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Making detailed estimates of the future costs of intermittent renewables + battery storage for any specific country, state or local grid requires consideration of a large number of variables, plus a lot of crystal-ball gazing, and is altogether too complicated an exercise for a blog post. Accordingly I have made the following simplifying assumptions:<\/p>\n

* The grid is an \u201celectricity island\u201d \u2013 i.e. no exports or imports.<\/em><\/p>\n

* It starts out with 30% baseload generation and 70% load-following generation . Renewables generation, including hydro, is zero.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

* Baseload and load-following generation is progressively replaced with intermittent wind and solar generation, with baseload and load-following generation decreasing in direct proportion to the percentage of wind + solar generation in the mix. This broadly analogs the approaches a number of countries have adopted or plan to adopt. <\/em><\/p>\n

* Annual demand stays constant.<\/em><\/p>\n

* Enough battery storage is added to match wind + solar generation to annual demand based on daily average data. Shorter-term variations in generation, which will tend to increase storage requirements, are not considered. Neither is the option of installing more wind + solar than is necessary to meet demand, which will have the opposite effect but at the expense of increased curtailment (see this post<\/a> for more details).<\/em><\/p>\n

* Transmission system upgrades are ignored.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cost of wind & solar power: batteries included For some time now we here on Energy Matters have been harping on about the prohibitive costs of long-term battery storage. Here, using two simplified examples, I quantify these costs. The results show that while batteries may be useful for fast-frequency response applications they increase the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14831,11260,23184,11990,1859,2654],"class_list":["post-40858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-alternative-power","tag-energy-matters","tag-power-storage","tag-roger-andrews","tag-solar-power","tag-wind-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40859,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40858\/revisions\/40859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}