The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.
You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this observation is so old that it's hard to find the higher quality initial graphs)
Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.
In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
In general it's obvious this is the trend & amazing.
It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...
Too put the facts crudely, the world would be fucked climate change wise without China. The oft heard "why do anything while China is the problem" would be hilarious, if people repeating bald-faced bullshit didn't grate so much.
Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drastically reshape energy production. Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.
I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons).
Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.
Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.
> Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible.
Not at current power densities.
The bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives is quite high; the power delivery of station wagon filled with batteries is on the low side compared to a wire made from the same material as that station wagon and buried under the road the wagon would have been driving along.
Even for liquid and gas fuels, people make dedicated pipelines rather than doing it all by truck and train.
All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?
Not having to burn gas is cheaper than burning gas. There will be a decade or two of transition with rarely used gas turbines getting their yearly packet in a short amount of time. Eventually other tech will take over, or the gas infrastructure will pare down and be cost optimized for its new role or rare usage.
Europe, and Germany and the UK in particular, are really poorly suited to take advantage of this new cheap technology. If these countries don't figure out alternatives, the countries with better and cheaper energy resources will take over energy intensive industries.
This is not a problem for solar and storage to solve, it's a problem that countries with poor resources need to solve if they want to compete in global industry.
Wind power. Mix with emergency reserves running on open cycle gas turbines, if deemed necessary, preferably running on with carbon neutral fuel. Optimize for lowest possible CAPEX.
That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.
From a global perspective, people living in temperate areas are actually the exception, not the rule (if a disproportionately economically successful exception).
The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.
This probably depends a lot on how close you are to the equator. Here in Germany output of solar in winter is negligible, and if there is no wind, which can happen for several consecutive weeks, we need a backup. No utilities company will build a fossil power plant that will be used only a few weeks per year, so our government will have to step in to make sure this happens.
On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.
Possible things are to over provision solar, and set it up further south with a high voltage dc cable. We almost had a Morocco - UK power setup but the current government said no to it.
Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country?
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
Distributed. New transmission lines have big nimby issues, and many existing corridors are already getting overloaded. There are recurring attempts to reform the permitting process (in the last Congress it was called EPRA/energy permitting reform act), but… we’ll see.
Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.
We don't put all our coal and gas plants out in the desert, they're next to and within our cities.
Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.
Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.
Casey Handmer is a huge solar bull and his estimate is that solar becomes cheaper than any other form of electricity even when generated from northern states by 2030 (likely sooner)
Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.
However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.
So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^
With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available)
But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.
If you would have a high voltage DC transmission line already, linking the dessert and the clouded cities far away, then it makes sense. I think it is worth building them, but it is a big investment. Many lines are proposed, some already build, but with the current US administration I don't think it is a priority.
High voltage transmission lines are really quite efficient, and concentrating generation is usually the right choice.
That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.
Lead Acid as far as I know is about $500 per KWh of usable space due to their depth of discharge being limited to about 50% and then they last about 3 to 5 years if they kept within their 500 cycles at most. Whereas a LiPho battery will last 10-15 years, 6000 cycles and costs about £120 a KWh. So I have no idea how UPS based on lead acid is ending up cheaper, its not based on the battery tech cheapness.
Do not try this at home, but I replaced the lead acid battery in my UPS with a LFP battery. From what I read online, the charging curves for lead acid batteries and LFP batteries are very similar. The LFP batteries have a slightly higher charging voltage, so I expect my LFP battery to only charge upto about 80% capacity or so due to the charging voltage being slightly too low. I'm hoping the battery will last 10 years instead of 2 or 3 years.
Do not try this at home, as changing battery chemistry is quite ill advised.
Some of the power stations from Ecoflow/Anker/Bluetti are competitive in terms of price and capacity while still having a fast enough switchover for UPS purposes.
They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)
Eaton and APC at least have models with LFP chemistry, with comparable prices across power ratings. The LFP will be more expensive though due to the increased longevity, at least until lead-acid ones stops being produced.
Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.
Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.
Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.
We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.
Falling battery prices make storing solar electricity for later use economically viable. This means we can use electricity from solar anytime around the clock. Even accounting for the cost of batteries, it's still competitive with other sources of electricity.
To me the context string is just a bit...lumpy or something, I don't think it's directly about the grammar. I would have written something more like: a battery costs plummet, analasis finds "anytime electricity" is now available from solar.
It's already cheaper to demolish an existing coal plant that's already paid for and replace it with solar + battery. Solar and battery brand new buildout, plus their maintenance overhead, dominates coal even when you only count coal's maintenance cost.
People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.
$100+ meh for natural gas. Solar and battery is so cheap that arab countries are now building large solar and battery systems to save money instead of burning oil and gas. Where as in the US the other big oil and gas producer wholesale electricity prices for Natural Gas is around $100-150 mwh which is cheaper than coal and the major reason coal got pushed out. Then we have China and India where coal is around $40-50 mwh.
So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.
state_less|2 months ago
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
ak217|2 months ago
epistasis|2 months ago
https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/
Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.
alexose|2 months ago
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
chrisweekly|2 months ago
(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)
jauntywundrkind|2 months ago
It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...
apexalpha|2 months ago
For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.
rstuart4133|2 months ago
Too put the facts crudely, the world would be fucked climate change wise without China. The oft heard "why do anything while China is the problem" would be hilarious, if people repeating bald-faced bullshit didn't grate so much.
pfdietz|2 months ago
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-has-invented-a-whole-new...
(partially behind paywall, sorry)
nutjob2|2 months ago
jmward01|2 months ago
gpm|2 months ago
Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.
laurencerowe|2 months ago
Transmission: $41.50 per MWh per 1,000 miles. https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf
Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.
ben_w|2 months ago
Not at current power densities.
The bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives is quite high; the power delivery of station wagon filled with batteries is on the low side compared to a wire made from the same material as that station wagon and buried under the road the wagon would have been driving along.
Even for liquid and gas fuels, people make dedicated pipelines rather than doing it all by truck and train.
Now, if someone figures out how to get something like metastable pumped hafnium isomers working… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
empiricus|2 months ago
epistasis|2 months ago
Europe, and Germany and the UK in particular, are really poorly suited to take advantage of this new cheap technology. If these countries don't figure out alternatives, the countries with better and cheaper energy resources will take over energy intensive industries.
This is not a problem for solar and storage to solve, it's a problem that countries with poor resources need to solve if they want to compete in global industry.
ViewTrick1002|2 months ago
That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.
rgmerk|2 months ago
The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.
jansan|2 months ago
On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.
tim333|2 months ago
Carlseymanh|2 months ago
codersfocus|2 months ago
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
ericd|2 months ago
Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.
estimator7292|2 months ago
Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.
Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.
wrsh07|2 months ago
Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.
However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.
So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^
With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available) But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.
^ but not others! Eg if you're willing to discuss tradeoffs you might find dozens of gw available most of the time https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air
^^ patio11 has a good podcast about this https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-ai-energy... Disclaimer: my employer apparently sponsored that episode
grensley|2 months ago
We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale
There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.
lukan|2 months ago
So decentral is the current way to go.
That is the current state in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#/map/3
hn_throwaway_99|2 months ago
That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.
aaronblohowiak|2 months ago
neuroelectron|2 months ago
ramshanker|2 months ago
fyrn_|2 months ago
But yeah, the cheap chinese "power stations" run circles around most UPS capacity wise. UPS market is very complacent.
PaulKeeble|2 months ago
rssoconnor|2 months ago
Do not try this at home, as changing battery chemistry is quite ill advised.
Rebelgecko|2 months ago
They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)
ulnarkressty|2 months ago
rightbyte|2 months ago
Nextgrid|2 months ago
buckle8017|2 months ago
apexalpha|2 months ago
We could start with those ~3 billion people.
Also wind has proven to be a very good supplement to pv.
gpm|2 months ago
aswegs8|2 months ago
FfejL|2 months ago
Analysis finds "anytime electricity" from solar available as battery costs plummet.
Those missing quotes go a long way to making the headline make sense.
ttul|2 months ago
Subject (((((Solar battery) costs) plummet) analysis) findings)
Verb [back]
Object (anytime (electricity availability))
Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.
Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.
Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.
We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.
pqdbr|2 months ago
jt2190|2 months ago
“How cheap is battery storage?“ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
In short: Cheaper batteries plus already cheap solar means that solar is now a cheap source of “anytime electricity”.
Etheryte|2 months ago
neom|2 months ago
fweimer|2 months ago
(Analysis finds ((anytime electricity) from solar) available) (as (battery costs) plummet)
In the unsuccessful parse, “anytime“ introduces a relative clause.
(Analysis finds [that] (anytime ((electricity from solar) [is] available))) ???
JoeAltmaier|2 months ago
fyrn_|2 months ago
PV in the US is also more expensive than globally however: $38-171 for Utility scale with storage, when including subsidies, $60-210 when not.
Coal is so much worse in every cost metric than gas combined cycle it's not worth considering, even leaving the pollution aside.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/34-%20Exh...
mullingitover|2 months ago
People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.
Panino|2 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
toomuchtodo|2 months ago
Battery storage hits $65/MWh – a tipping point for solar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251705 - December 2025
xbmcuser|2 months ago
So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.
aoeusnth1|2 months ago