The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.
It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past.
Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.
I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.
>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.
You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected and then flip a switch from third world country to superpower.
Damn my hot coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?
Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range).
But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).
But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.
Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.
> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago
This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is.
German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.
When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.
Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.
I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.
> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.
> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago
Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.
I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example.
Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself.
Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.
If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this observation is so old that it's hard to find the higher quality initial graphs)
Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.
In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drastically reshape energy production. Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.
I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons).
Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.
All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?
Nuclear plants, like most large thermal plants, are almost always located near large bodies of water and return that water downstream so it doesn't really matter?
It matters when the level of that body of water drops by a lot in summer and the water temperature rises at the same time. Add environmental laws (cooking the fish is discouraged), and your nuke plant needs to go into safety shutdown pretty reliably every summer.
Wind power. Mix with emergency reserves running on open cycle gas turbines, if deemed necessary, preferably with carbon neutral fuel. Optimize for lowest possible CAPEX.
That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.
This probably depends a lot on how close you are to the equator. Here in Germany output of solar in winter is negligible, and if there is no wind, which can happen for several consecutive weeks, we need a backup. No utilities company will build a fossil power plant that will be used only a few weeks per year, so our government will have to step in to make sure this happens.
On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.
Here are some numbers: January 2025, the output of solar was ~1500 GWh, it peaked in June at 10500 GWh. So the lowest output was about 15% of the maximum, this year.
Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar power generation, there is never no wind, though looking at those charts there were 4 weeks in the late summer of 2023 when production was low consecutively, between 700 and 1000 GWh.
Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country?
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
Distributed. New transmission lines have big nimby issues, and many existing corridors are already getting overloaded. There are recurring attempts to reform the permitting process (in the last Congress it was called EPRA/energy permitting reform act), but… we’ll see.
Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.
We don't put all our coal and gas plants out in the desert, they're next to and within our cities.
Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.
Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.
On the GB (UK mainland) grid only ~2% of energy is lost in transmission; distribution is more typically ~5%. And we did put most of our big thermal power generation in the middle of the country, which is now causing difficulties as we need to rijig transmission to accept offshore wind and interconnectors.
Solar PV on rooftops is great, injecting power directly at the load, eliminating transmission and distribution losses until there is excess to spill back to grid. It would be helpful if we stopped running an entirely artificial timetable in winter that demands heavy activity well outside daylight hours, so that demand better matched availability.
Casey Handmer is a huge solar bull and his estimate is that solar becomes cheaper than any other form of electricity even when generated from northern states by 2030 (likely sooner)
Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.
However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.
So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^
With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available)
But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.
High voltage transmission lines are really quite efficient, and concentrating generation is usually the right choice.
That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.
Eaton and APC at least have models with LFP chemistry, with comparable prices across power ratings. The LFP will be more expensive though due to the increased longevity, at least until lead-acid ones stops being produced.
There are different LIPO chemistries. LFP in particular has little problem with being fully charged. You'll see it get swapped in for lead acid chemistries even in places like car/motorcycle batteries.
If you want an Lithium power supply then the keyword to look for is "LFP".
Lead Acid as far as I know is about $500 per KWh of usable space due to their depth of discharge being limited to about 50% and then they last about 3 to 5 years if they kept within their 500 cycles at most. Whereas a LiPho battery will last 10-15 years, 6000 cycles and costs about £120 a KWh. So I have no idea how UPS based on lead acid is ending up cheaper, its not based on the battery tech cheapness.
Sure, up front you're paying very little for that box that can run your PC for an hour.
But over 2-4 years you'll have to replace that UPS after it fails catastrophically in really dumb ways, and that's if you're lucky and it doesn't also burn your house down, whereas a proper storage system will last for a long, long time with more capability.
In my business I've never had a deskside UPS live longer than that.
And yes, we don't buy the ultra expensive ones. That's true.
Some of the power stations from Ecoflow/Anker/Bluetti are competitive in terms of price and capacity while still having a fast enough switchover for UPS purposes.
They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)
The acid in lead acid is sulfuric acid and if overcharged vents hydrogen gas, thats why they need a ventilated space typically. Sealed lead acid have safety vents that might pop if enough pressure builds.
They are most certainly not inert, they just have well established safety and charging protocols and are not used in very high quantities together because of their low energy density and cycle life.
LFP batteries which have iron phosphate cathodes are very stable compared to colbalt based batteries that tend to have catastrophic failures due to overcharge causing cathode failure. LFP have higher cycle life and are cheaper and typically whats used for storage and application where the loss in erergy density is not a big deal.
Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.
Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.
Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.
We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.
This doesn’t really capture their meaning though. They are describing a change in how the solar generated electricity can be treated due to the changing battery prices.
Arguably your edit is more factual. But part of the job of the title in an editorial like this is to tell you what their perspective is.
I assume the intended meaning is “reduced battery costs make around-the-clock solar-generated electricity possible”. I don't think it's possible to predict how technical changes in electricity production and storage impact prices.
Ember’s report outlines how falling battery capital expenditures and improved performance metrics have lowered the levelized cost of storage, making dispatchable solar a competitive, anytime electricity option globally.
To me the context string is just a bit...lumpy or something, I don't think it's directly about the grammar. I would have written something more like: a battery costs plummet, analasis finds "anytime electricity" is now available from solar.
Falling battery prices make storing solar electricity for later use economically viable. This means we can use electricity from solar anytime around the clock. Even accounting for the cost of batteries, it's still competitive with other sources of electricity.
It's already cheaper to demolish an existing coal plant that's already paid for and replace it with solar + battery. Solar and battery brand new buildout, plus their maintenance overhead, dominates coal even when you only count coal's maintenance cost.
People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.
> Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.
you simply can't say this. despite the lobby against it, solar and wind energy have lifespans of around 20 years and afterwards, it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do. not even counting the amount of NASTY chemicals going into the production of solar panels. these are sometimes permanent and will have a great long term impact on ecology if we just start destroying plants to substitute with "green" alternatives mindlessly
one can also make a point that despite wind generators metals and batteries being almost to 100% recyclable, it's heck expensive to do and we don't have infrastructure. a comparison cosidering everything involved may show that hydroelectrics, nuclear, geo-thermal and heck even gas may have a similar or better impact depending on location
Sure, and none of that amounts to even close to the damage from stripping vast areas of the earth to dig up coal, grinding and transporting it to power plants, then setting it on fire, and releasing tons of CO2, and then disposing of tons of unburnt waste full of NASTY chemicals.
And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.
In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.
Fuel cost for gas/coal can be rounded to $2/MWH - so then you need to amortize the cost of the plant over all the energy produced and you get to roughly 2x fuel cost for nat gas plants and 3x - 5x for coal ones. See page 10 here for sensitivity to fuel costs though;
$100+ meh for natural gas. Solar and battery is so cheap that arab countries are now building large solar and battery systems to save money instead of burning oil and gas. Where as in the US the other big oil and gas producer wholesale electricity prices for Natural Gas is around $100-150 mwh which is cheaper than coal and the major reason coal got pushed out. Then we have China and India where coal is around $40-50 mwh.
So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.
I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.
You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected and then flip a switch from third world country to superpower.
Damn my hot coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?
But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).
But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.
Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.
This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.
Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time.
https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye...
When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.
Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.
I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.
> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.
> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
We win or we learn.
So when are they giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.
Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.
If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
What happened to Blitzkrieg?
How would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their ivory McMansions?
https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/
Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.
(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.
On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar power generation, there is never no wind, though looking at those charts there were 4 weeks in the late summer of 2023 when production was low consecutively, between 700 and 1000 GWh.
And 8280 GWh the previous June for those wondering roughly how much of this was due to more solar panels being deployed.
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.
Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.
Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.
Solar PV on rooftops is great, injecting power directly at the load, eliminating transmission and distribution losses until there is excess to spill back to grid. It would be helpful if we stopped running an entirely artificial timetable in winter that demands heavy activity well outside daylight hours, so that demand better matched availability.
We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale
There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.
Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.
However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.
So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^
With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available) But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.
^ but not others! Eg if you're willing to discuss tradeoffs you might find dozens of gw available most of the time https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air
^^ patio11 has a good podcast about this https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-ai-energy... Disclaimer: my employer apparently sponsored that episode
That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.
But yeah, the cheap chinese "power stations" run circles around most UPS capacity wise. UPS market is very complacent.
If you want an Lithium power supply then the keyword to look for is "LFP".
Sure, up front you're paying very little for that box that can run your PC for an hour.
But over 2-4 years you'll have to replace that UPS after it fails catastrophically in really dumb ways, and that's if you're lucky and it doesn't also burn your house down, whereas a proper storage system will last for a long, long time with more capability.
In my business I've never had a deskside UPS live longer than that.
And yes, we don't buy the ultra expensive ones. That's true.
They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)
I guess I've just been lucky.
But what might happen when they fail - thermal runaway is no joke with lithium-ion, ask any firefighter.
They are most certainly not inert, they just have well established safety and charging protocols and are not used in very high quantities together because of their low energy density and cycle life.
LFP batteries which have iron phosphate cathodes are very stable compared to colbalt based batteries that tend to have catastrophic failures due to overcharge causing cathode failure. LFP have higher cycle life and are cheaper and typically whats used for storage and application where the loss in erergy density is not a big deal.
Subject (((((Solar battery) costs) plummet) analysis) findings)
Verb [back]
Object (anytime (electricity availability))
Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.
Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.
Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.
We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.
Analysis finds "anytime electricity" from solar available as battery costs plummet.
Those missing quotes go a long way to making the headline make sense.
Or since power has no provenience, "When batteries are available, electricity prices fall"
Arguably your edit is more factual. But part of the job of the title in an editorial like this is to tell you what their perspective is.
Ember’s report outlines how falling battery capital expenditures and improved performance metrics have lowered the levelized cost of storage, making dispatchable solar a competitive, anytime electricity option globally.
“How cheap is battery storage?“ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
In short: Cheaper batteries plus already cheap solar means that solar is now a cheap source of “anytime electricity”.
(Analysis finds ((anytime electricity) from solar) available) (as (battery costs) plummet)
In the unsuccessful parse, “anytime“ introduces a relative clause.
(Analysis finds [that] (anytime ((electricity from solar) [is] available))) ???
PV in the US is also more expensive than globally however: $38-171 for Utility scale with storage, when including subsidies, $60-210 when not.
Coal is so much worse in every cost metric than gas combined cycle it's not worth considering, even leaving the pollution aside.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/34-%20Exh...
People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.
you simply can't say this. despite the lobby against it, solar and wind energy have lifespans of around 20 years and afterwards, it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do. not even counting the amount of NASTY chemicals going into the production of solar panels. these are sometimes permanent and will have a great long term impact on ecology if we just start destroying plants to substitute with "green" alternatives mindlessly
one can also make a point that despite wind generators metals and batteries being almost to 100% recyclable, it's heck expensive to do and we don't have infrastructure. a comparison cosidering everything involved may show that hydroelectrics, nuclear, geo-thermal and heck even gas may have a similar or better impact depending on location
I love that this is followed by “so go nuclear!”
And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.
In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
Battery storage hits $65/MWh – a tipping point for solar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251705 - December 2025
So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.