4-hour battery storage is cheaper to install than gas turbines all across globe

That seems fairly obvious, but afaik the problem is not bridging four hours, it’s bridging a cloudy week without wind in winter. For that gas currently seems cheaper

• pixl97 · 1 hour ago

  >For that gas currently seems cheape Well, other than destroying the planet, but hey, let's just hide those costs.

  • dec0dedab0de · 1 hour ago

    Still significantly better than running everything on fossil fuels burned by the power company.

    • happymellon · 1 hour ago

      Are you saying that gas turbines don't burn fossil fuels?

      • pfdietz · 59 minutes ago

        They can burn non-fossil fuels.

  • adrianN · 1 hour ago

    Hydrogen is a gas too and you can make it without emitting carbon. If you want you can also make methane from atmospheric carbon and water.

    • cassepipe · 1 hour ago

      I don't think parent was against gas because of its physical but rather because it's a fossil fuel

      • tcfhgj · 41 minutes ago

        but not all gas is fossil

    • olau · 1 hour ago

      FWIW, the latest analysis I've seen seems to suggest that biomethane is probably the way to go for last-resort long term backup. Hydrogen is just too fickle.

      • tcfhgj · 42 minutes ago

        biomethane aka methane from rotting plants? extremely inefficient and requires intensive agriculture

      • idiotsecant · 24 minutes ago

        What does it mean for a gas to be 'fickle'? Hydrogen gets stored long term all the time. It's made in refineries and used in chemical plants all over the world every day. It's expensive to store, but it's certainly doable with the right metallurgy. If your goal is reducing carbon emission as much as possible, it's way better than methane, regardless of source.

    • jandrese · 1 hour ago

      Hydrogen is a storage medium. It's fundamentally different than natural gas. Think of it more like a more complex, expensive, and inefficient battery; with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.

      • pfdietz · 1 hour ago

        Of course. But the point was that it could also be burned in these turbines, and is also storable underground like methane.

• happymellon · 1 hour ago

  The UK relies far too much on gas turbines, rather than renewables and as a consequence we have energy costs far higher than other European neighbours. Gas is not cheap, it basically doubles your costs.

  • adrianN · 1 hour ago

    Well the goal is to only run the backup a few hundred hours a year, the question is which technology can provide close to 100% of demand a few percent of the time in the cheapest way. Turbines or even gas motors are relatively cheap in capex and gas is easy to store in large quantities.

    • toomuchtodo · 51 minutes ago

      Gas turbines have a manufacturing backlog of at least a half decade. The longer is takes to build them, the more favorable battery storage is (as it can be installed today), and the faster more battery storage manufacturing spins up, this further drives down the cost. https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs... https://www.energyconnects.com/opinion/thought-leadership/20... > For its part, China – a battery manufacturing powerhouse – has no such supply chain issues. It dominates global lithium battery production accounting for two-thirds of it. This relative strength gives it the confidence to relentlessly amplify its BESS footprint as evidenced in the capacity build-up between 2021 and 2026. > In fact, China’s battery storage build-out has no global parallel thanks to this one factor alone, according to Ember. It estimates that nearly all (i.e.149.8 GW) of China’s “new energy storage” consists of lithium-ion batteries. > In terms of the future, following a June update to its 15th Five-Year Plan, China is now aiming to deploy 300 GW of new energy storage by 2030. That would keep the country’s BESS industry progression, that outgrows all other countries combined, firmly on track. (battery storage printer goes brrr)

  • martinald · 51 minutes ago

    Renewables require gas in the UK. There is no realistic route to 100% renewable grid without gas currently. I did some modelling of this and you'd require something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage. We currently have 40GWh. Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that. Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.

    • bencord0 · 39 minutes ago

      I think you need to update your numbers. For us in the UK, we're already significantly well on our way to a 100% renewable grid. https://withouthotair.org/chap28 We regularly reach a 50% renewable grid. Today we hit 55.9%. Gas is getting more expensive. That trend is only going upwards. There already are plans to spend a few hundred billion pounds on renewable infrastructure (hard bit being grid connections, and waiting for north-south interconnect upgrades within the next 5 years).

      • martinald · 37 minutes ago

        Yes, I have no doubt we can hit even a 90-95% renewable grid. It's the last 5% that is impossible to do without gas. The cost of those last few percent is absolutely eye watering. The current plan to get it to 100% net zero is by having gas for the final 5% then using carbon capture and storage to offset the emissions.

        • oezi · 20 minutes ago

          It is not even the final 5%, it is the final 1-2%, because you need a multi-week dunkelflaute across Europe for the gas turbines to be needed in the future. A lot will also just be curtailing. For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario.

• Ajedi32 · 1 hour ago

  I guess the point is that when combined with a source of dispatchable base load power like a combined cycle gas turbine or nuclear, batteries are now cheaper than open cycle gas peaker plants for bridging short (4 hours or less) spikes in demand.

  • jandrese · 58 minutes ago

    This is exactly what they are going for. To not have to build and run expensive gas plants just for a few hours in the evening. It also allows you to run the few gas plants that you do build for longer to better amortize their build costs, making them less expensive overall.

• ZeroGravitas · 1 hour ago

  They're talking about open-cycle gas turbines which have a specific set of jobs to do for the grid. And which batteries are better at now. Those turbines aren't great for longer periods, they're pointlessly inefficient if you don't need their ability to peak for short periods.

  • SoftTalker · 39 minutes ago

    The article does the annoying thing of using a technical term without definining it. An open-cycle gas turbine is the "simple" configuration that draws in air through a pressurization stage, into a combustion chamber for fuel combustion, producing high-pressure hot gases that drive a turbine and generate power, with exhaust gases released into the atmosphere. In other words, there is no recovery of heat from the exhaust, it's basically an aircraft jet engine core mounted on the ground and connected to a generator. They aren't very efficient but they are compact, relatively cheap, and quick to spin up during peak demand times.

Come on - thats not solving all the problems that you buy GENERATORS for. 4 hour bridge is great - but emergency power or always on -- 4 hours is not enough. Battery is load balancing not generation.

> For onshore wind, continuous capex and opex improvements are expected to drive LCOE down 16% by 2060 What’s with the forecasts going as far out as 2060?? Given the scale of changes we’ve seen in just the last 10 years, looking forward 34 years seems absurd, and to still only expect a 16% drop in cost?

• 0cf8612b2e1e · 51 minutes ago

  Unlike solar, wind has pretty significant construction and material costs which feel hard to diminish with scale. You still need to excavate earth, install giant pylons, enormous magnets, etc. That being said, anyone who has predicted the future prices of renewable energy seems destined to look a fool.

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”…

• sam-cop-vimes · 39 minutes ago

  > 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?

  • alwa · 28 minutes ago

    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.

  • esposm03 · 25 minutes ago

    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"

solve the two problems with datacenters with a single solution. solar panels & batteries in the texas oil patch or sw or mexico... morocco or spain.. australia... everything associated with datacenters does not pay tariffs. tech leaders could lead the way here and not only provide AI but also potentially take big steps towards solving the climate crisis. certainly cheaper than putting panels in space. (do the math)

This entire article seems to be based on an assumption that the cost of batteries will go down 33% over the next 10 years because demand is so high, but costs of gas turbines will go up over the next 10 years because demand is so high. Neither of these assumptions are based on anything other than "That's the number we had to put in to the model to get the conclusion we want".

• nicoburns · 39 minutes ago

  The cost of batteries has gone down somewhere between 60-80% over the previous 10 years (and my understanding is that trend is expected to continue due to a combination of new technologies (e.g. Sodium Ion) and increased scale). So that one seems totally reasonable. A little conservative if anything. I can't comment on the cost of Gas Turbines.

  • sroussey · 7 minutes ago

    No one believes that the increased demand for gas turbines is durable enough to want to make those kinds of investments. But the opposite is true for batteries.

• toomuchtodo · 27 minutes ago

  https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline > Every time the global cumulative battery production has doubled, the price has dropped by roughly 19%. There are only a handful of gas turbine manufacturers left, with a manufacturing backlog of half a decade. It is exceptionally obvious battery manufacturing will only continue to scale (TAM is global EV and stationary storage market), and gas turbine builders will hang on until the economics turn, which they have. Regardless, these trajectories will hold unless something exceptional occurs. Is it likely we’ll build more batteries faster? Yes. Is it likely these are the last three major gas turbine manufacturers to exist? Also yes. Last call for buggy whips. https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs... https://fgermini.substack.com/p/heavy-duty-gas-turbines-the-...

• newyankee · 25 minutes ago

  Swanson's law and learning rates do seem to apply to batteries more as well as the fact that their no of cycles seem to be much longer than initially thought for LFP as well as storage focused Sodium ion batteries from CATL

• sanderjd · 17 minutes ago

  Wouldn't you agree that we're much further along the learning curve for turbines than for large scale battery storage?

• bryanlarsen · 13 minutes ago

  Supply is larger than demand for batteries and prices are going down. Demand is larger than supply for natural gas turbines and prices are going up. But that's just the short term. More importantly, I believe that manufacturers are more confident in the long term future of demand for batteries so are willing to continue to invest. People are going to be buying electric cars 10 years from now. The demand for gas turbines in 10 years seems a lot more murky. SpaceX has promised to start making turbines, which would bring their price down. But it's an Elon Musk promise, so how much weight do you put on it?

• atoav · 8 minutes ago

  [delayed]

The "4 hour" is doing a lot of work here. Put another way, you need the gas turbines for the two week dunkelflaute (winter doldrums). Given that you have the turbines already, when are batteries cheaper than running the turbines for a few hours every evening? A more interesting question than the cheapest 4 hour solution. I think that answer might also be batteries soon.

Title should include that the battery is also installed all across the globe.