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Plunging Battery Prices Expected To Spur Renewable Energy Adoption
Lucas123 writes: Lithium-ion (Li-on) and flow battery prices are expected to drop by as much as 60% by 2020, making them far more affordable for storing power from distributed renewable energy systems, such as wind and solar, according to a recent report by Australia's Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). The 130-page report (PDF) shows that Li-on batteries will drop from $550 per kilowatt hour (kWh) in 2014 to $200 per kWh by 2020; and flow battery prices will drop from $680 per kWh to $350 per kWh during the same time. Flow batteries and Li-ion batteries work well with intermittent energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines because of their ability to be idle for long periods without losing a charge. Both battery technologies offer unique advantages in that they can easily be scaled to suit many applications and have high cycle efficiency, the ARENA report noted. Li-ion batteries more easily suit consumer market. Flow batteries, which are less adaptable for consumer use because they're typically too large, scale more easily because all that's needed to grow storage capacity is more electrolyte liquid; the hardware remains the same.
More importantly, will the cost drop? There is so much meddling in the market nowadays that you may pay less for things that are costing more to make, and vice versa.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I bet you another battery tech will beat both in price and performance, over the next 5 years battery tech is going to take off (it's already started) and what we use today will be primitive in comparison.
Not to mention fusion will finally be feasible which will spin this whole discussion.
Properly calculated kWh has the voltage drop baked into the calculation, amp hours don't (and what would it even mean?). More simply though, kWh is a measure of energy stored, amp hours isn't without doing that time volts calculation. So kWh is a lot easier to compare different technologies with. We still regularly compare an online for like comparisons like phone batteries, where the voltage curves are similar.
The going rate for residential electricity in the U.S. is about $0.11/kWh. So basically if these batteries charge/discharge once per day (as the case would be for solar), and you want the batteries to only add (say) 20% to the price of the generated electricity in order for it to remain cost-competitive (note: wind is nearly cost-competitive, solar is still about 2x-3x more expensive), then it currently takes $550 per kWh / ($0.11 per kWh * 20% * 365 cycles/yr) = 68.5 years for these batteries to pay for themselves, but by 2020 it will take 27.4 years. Yay progress?
Unless the levelized price for renewable generation drops substantially below that of coal, I don't see how this will "spur renewable energy adoption" except for regions where electricity prices are substantially higher (e.g. Hawaii, $0.30/kWh)