New Solar + Battery Price Crushes Fossil Fuels, Buries Nuclear

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/#791607705971

Cost to the utility, 25 year PPA
Under 2 cents a kWh for immediately supplied PV;
3.3 cents a kWh for supply from a battery.

NG is about 2x the cost
Nuclear (lol) is 6x the cost AFTER the government picks up the insurance and not including waste or plant closure costs
The utility did not bother to price coal -- waste of time and money

Assuming full charge and discharge once per day over 25 years and no capacity loss, that is a total value of $118.63 / kWh for the battery storage vendor over the life of the contract. Presumably the actual battery cost is much lower. No mention of the battery chemistry though.

Titanium48 said:

Assuming full charge and discharge once per day over 25 years and no capacity loss, that is a total value of $118.63 / kWh for the battery storage vendor over the life of the contract. Presumably the actual battery cost is much lower. No mention of the battery chemistry though.

Click to expand...

That was my first thought too but after some discussion at TMC I realized that I had not included FACS, arbitrage, and AM peak sales to the wholesale market from overnight charging. Hopefully the latter is from wind.

Put another way, the utility bought 4 hours a day of the battery; the battery owner is free to use the battery as they see fit for the other 20 hours a day. The details that would let us assign a firmer value to the battery owner are not available so we cannot set a battery cost ceiling.

And of course, as the site has yet to be built and cost projections are often optimistic, we'll have to see. If the company realizes at some point that they're going to take a bath they may not finish it, or will try to re-negotiate their contract. Still, very encouraging, although it hardly kills nukes - that was effectively done here in the U.S. many years ago owing to public resistance rather than cost. 4 hours of storage is fine for evening peak loads, but doesn't cover longer periods of low RE production, which will still require NG, hydro or some other source.