Antinuclear

Problems and advantages of battery storage for solar energy

Will batteries blast-off or bomb?, Business Spectator, Tristan Edis 6 March 14  Battery energy storage is a hot topic for Climate Spectator readers. It seems there is an incredible appetite to learn what are the technological options and what are their costs and prospects.

This clearly indicates that there’s businesses who can see a market opportunity for batteries and are eagerly looking at how they can make the economics work………..

The beauty of many battery technologies such as lithium-ion is their compact size and portability, whereas you can’t move a pumped hydro power plant to wherever you need it. This allows batteries to offset the substantial costs of electricity network poles and wires, which make up more than half the cost of retail bills.

Those analyses which look at retail electricity rates, or take into account the potential to offset network infrastructure costs, tend to be more optimistic about the economic viability of battery technology As an illustration, the sustainable energy think tank the Rocky Mountain Institute foresees that ‘solar plus batteries’ could be a cheaper option for households as soon as 2022 in Hawaii, due to that state’s high retail electricity costs and high levels of solar radiation. If you charted a similar chart for many locations in Australia you’d find an intersection point between solar plus batteries and retail electricity prices that sits somewhere between that of Hawaii and California. Indeed, if electricity wasn’t heavily subsidised in the Ergon network in Queensland and the Horizon Power network in Western Australia, then they’d appear very similar to Hawaii.

Solar + batteries versus utility supplied electricity in different US locations ($ per kilowatt-hour) (diagram)Such differing findings suggest that we need to be extremely careful in coming to any hard conclusions about what might be the future shape of our electricity system. At present batteries look expensive. But there’s lots of clever people working on finding ways where batteries plus solar will work economically.

No one should pretend to be certain about what the technological answer will be to our future energy needs, but at least we know we’re not lacking for options. http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/3/7/solar-energy/will-batteries-blast-or-bomb

March 7, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized