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Germany Finances Major Push Into Home Battery Storage For Solar
mdsolar writes with this bit of news from Green Tech Media "The German government has responded to the next big challenge in its energy transition – storing the output from the solar boom it has created — by doing exactly what it has successfully done to date: greasing the wheels of finance to bring down the cost of new technology. ... Now it is looking at bringing down the cost of the next piece in the puzzle of its energy transition — battery storage. ... KfW’s aim, according to Axel Nawrath, a member of the KfW Bankengruppe executive board, is to ensure that the output of wind and solar must be 'more decoupled' from the grid. ... This is seen as critical as the level of renewable penetration rises to around 40 per cent — a level expected in Germany within the next 10 years. ... According to Papenfuss, households participating in the scheme will spend between €20,000 and €28,000 on solar and storage, depending on the size of the system (the average size is expected to be around 7kW for the solar array and around 4kWh for the battery)."
That's only a few car batteries.
However the problem still exists the second you scale up.
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
If it was easy to store electricity efficiently, we wouldn't need all this "always-on" peak demand power generation. We'd just store everything generated at night already and then release it the next day.
Fact is, as soon as you get into storing electricity, you're into massive efficiency drops.
yeah, it is not like coal, oil, nukes, hydro, trains, planes, space crafts, cars/roads, electrification, telephony, etc ever got a hand out from a gov, esp. the American federal or state govs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.
Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.