this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Batteries start to rival gas on California’s electricity grid (english.elpais.com)
submitted 2 months ago by kalkulat@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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"Gas accounts for 40% of California's grid. However, its use in April registered its lowest proportion in seven years."

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[–] Limonene@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Can someone explain to me how this is economical? (The article is pretty light on facts, and the few facts that it has are suspect anyway due to the article's technical mistakes, like measuring capacity in "megawatts".)

The maximum price of electricity (that I could find) in California is $0.66/kWh . That means, if you charge at night, or at some theoretical time when electricity is free, and then sell at that maximum price every day, your round-trip profit is $0.66 for each kWh of battery capacity. Lithium-ion batteries, if I'm being generous, last up to 2000 charge cycles. Let's say they don't lose any capacity during that time, either. That means your profit $1320 per kWh, for the whole life of the battery.

The cheapest grid-tie batteries I can find are about $3000 per kWh, so about twice as much as the total lifetime profit.

Is there something I'm missing?

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 12 points 2 months ago

First of all grid scale batteries are 10x cheaper then you think they are at $300/kWh. Then they are competing with peaking gas power plants. those are inefficent, but can start up and shut down quickly. However the cost of those is at about $151–198/MWh. per kWh.. So you need 2000 charge cycles to break even. Batteries also last a lot longer then that up to 10,000 cycles under optimal conditions.

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