I’d like to take a moment to praise the writing here. Rigorous, dense, and well-organized; communicative rather than coughing up tables of raw figures in prose form.

I’d refer to the source studies, but at $9,990 per region… Ms Pickerel’s overview seems plenty informative for me.

Regarding EMEA:

> Grid-scale battery storage costs are now decisively cheaper than gas peaking across the region. [and price will fall another 33% in the decade ahead]. This shift means storage is displacing open-cycle gas turbines on cost in every gas market across the region, marking a significant structural turning point for power system planning across both the Gulf and Africa.

The analyst’s bottom line:

> From Latin America to Asia Pacific, the combination of falling storage costs and world-class renewable resources is closing off the economic case for new gas peaking capacity, while long-term contracted renewables increasingly set the ceiling rather than the floor on power costs.”

Heady times! For all the gnashing of teeth about regulating our way out of combustion-based production—it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants, no arm-twisting required. “Not with a bang, but a whimper”…

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sam-cop-vimes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> In the Middle East and Africa, where utility-scale solar already leads at $37/MWh, four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035

I'm struggling to understand the numbers here. How does a fall of 33% on $37 make it $80?

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alwa 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the $37 might be the cost of producing the energy via solar, and it’s the grid-scale batteries that are expected to get cheaper:

> Four-hour storage reaches $120/MWh in 2026 and is forecast to fall 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, cementing its role as the enabling technology for solar and wind integration.

Cheap or not, solar isn’t dispatchable on demand, so in and of itself it doesn’t replace the role of a peaker plant. But now that the big batteries are a viable thing, solar-plus-battery is feasible to handle the parts of the demand curve that required open-cycle gas plants before.

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PaulHoule an hour ago | parent [-]

will need a bit more than four hours of storage though

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alwa an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Horses for courses, right? They build these entire peaker power plants to sit idle most of the time, just to handle the couple dozen or hundred hours of maximum load in the year.

4 hours at a time hopefully buys you your way through such a peak, even if it doesn’t get you through weeks at a time… and presumably you can top it up from base load after demand peaks for the day, right?

In the equatorial and desert regions they’re talking about, I think both seasonal supply changes and demand profile might be more consistent than, say, dreary cold parts of Europe..

	▲	PaulHoule 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's a big part of what drives me crazy about the papers I've seen on this work. People like to quote some levelized price of energy and say "this costs less than an AP1000" and you never see modeling of "here's the price in California, here's the price in New York"

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Garlef an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure.

But no one is claiming that there will only be 4h-storage

	▲	PaulHoule 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't see a lot of realistic talk about what the actual storage requirements are. You have to be concerned about: (1) ordinary diurnal variation (overnight, lets say 12 hours) (2) extremely unfavorable weather (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute) (3) annual variation (you might get 3x the sunlight in summer than winter? do you build 180 days of storage or do you overbuild solar systems 3x and get Casey Handmer to dream up something useful to do with that excess energy that doesn't have a stupendous capital cost?) The "have a natural gas backup plan" is worse than people think for a lot of reasons, in terms of the laws of political science and economics you're going to find that that tail winds up wagging the dog, the whole market will get designed around the needs of those turbine owners, it's going to cost the same if they are running turbines for 5 minutes a year or 20 days a year, and ultimately you're never going to get rid of it. If you really plan to run the system 5 minutes a year what are the odds it will really work when you need it? You have to not just support the turbines you hardly ever use, pipelines you hardly ever use, drilling and storage operations for gas, etc.

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esposm03 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My understanding is that the first number is the "cost per MWh generated by a PV plant", the second one is the "cost per MWh accumulated and then released by a 4-hour grid-scale battery plant"

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Garlef an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

$37 = utility-scale solar, now

$80 = 4h-storage in 2035, forecast

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kccqzy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t like the writing at all. The writing conflates what’s current versus what’s forecast without sufficient differentiation.

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ErroneousBosh an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants

What's the ecological impact of constructing all these batteries?

	▲	avianlyric an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Substantially smaller than building and running gas peaker plants
	▲	triceratops 33 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The same as the ecological impact of constructing gas tanks and pipelines. Only using electricity from batteries doesn't have ecological harms, whereas burning gas does.
	▲	theshrike79 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Batteries are 90-95% recyclable. Gas is 0% recyclable.