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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I think is notable. Solar and wind installations performance tends to just degrade instead of going 100% offline like traditional plants. And batteries greatly improve grid reliability. I suspect they can add power to the grid faster than breakers will trip.

Also we're working towards a system where demand can be controlled. Think your electric car stops charging or your air conditioner kicks off for 10 minutes when there is a problem.

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Great point, How much battery capacity and energy the utility will require (big expense for project proponent they have to inevitably recover from ratepayers) for solar or wind farms is another Aspect that has to be studied

What I've read and seems to be backed up by how fast utility batteries are being installed is the drop in price of batteries means that suddenly the payback period for batteries is a couple of years.

Batteries exist in a different economic regime than rate payers. Where the price per megawatt varies by 2X or more. Which makes it easier for batteries to make money be arbitrage. As in buy power at 10am for $40/MWH, sell it at 7pm the same day for $80/MWH.

My benchmark for utility scale solar is the installation in Australia that was 100MW and 129MWH and cost about 100 million

So making $40/MWH * 100 MWH/day = $4000 per day * 365 day/yr = 1.4 million revenue per year. Not enough to pay back $100 million.

Like you said The economics of it keep improving though Imp

I think that thing makes money because utilities will pay though the nose for a reserve of instant on demand power.

Right, so then we are back to that cost being recovered from ratepayers.

But they're paying less for that than before. The price power commands depends a lot on how flexible the power source is. Batteries because they provide grid stabilization can charge a premium price.

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