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points by adrianN 3 days ago | 0 comments

Solar+A couple of hours of batteries is already economically viable. The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.

[–] traceroute66 2 days ago

> The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.

It might help if the US wasn't so anti off-shore wind at the moment.

[–] shagie 2 days ago

I live 900 miles from the coast. While the Great Plains are a good source of wind power ( https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/where-wind-power-is... - Iowa is 43 billion kWh of production - https://iuc.iowa.gov/regulated-industries/electric/iowas-ele... ), I believe it is generally a mistake to assume that power solutions that work for the Atlantic coast can provide power solutions half a continent away.

[–] HDThoreaun 3 days ago

The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night. A battery with that capacity, to get through the night with no generation, would cost over a trillion dollars. Of course thered still be some generation at night, but still, using a battery just to get through the night is not even close to viable

[–] pinkgolem 3 days ago

You might want to update your numbers, 1 kwh is somewhere between 50€/kwh to 75 including electronics... No economics of scale, shipping included..

That makes 300B

Eu pricing

[–] GlibMonkeyDeath 2 days ago

That sounds like a lot right? But it isn't large compared to US wars to protect energy resources (>$4T just for post-9/11 wars), and the payback it would generate over decades to come. In fact, this level of investment is a total no-brainer, compared to the benefits it will generate (forget about even the climate benefits - just the other economic and defense benefits.)

And we can sure find those trillions when we want to: https://defensecommunities.org/2026/04/trump-requests-1-5-tr.... Or https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extend.... Or...

[–] adrianN 3 days ago

The war in Iraq cost a trillion dollars.

[–] GlibMonkeyDeath 2 days ago

More like $2 T (combined Iraq-Afganistan $4.3T) https://www.warcosts.org/compare/iraq-vs-afghanistan-cost

[–] Saline9515 3 days ago

Do you imply that it was really cheap, just like solar+batteries?

[–] adrianN 3 days ago

You generally get more return on investment if you invest in building infrastructure in your own country rather than investing in blowing up infrastructure in a different country. So I’m implying that solar and batteries are a lot cheaper than the war in Iraq.

[–] eptcyka 3 days ago

So far.

[–] shagie 2 days ago

That's referring to the Iraq and Afghanistan war with appropriations from 2003 to 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

The Iran war that we're currently in is officially at 43B and estimated at 48B. https://iran-cost-ticker.com

[–] banktops 3 days ago

1 week national battery storage is totally doable. All we need to do is convince the rest of the planet to stop making GPUs, phones, computers, and EVs for the next decade, and then give us all their rocks. 78.4TWh is about $19T (all in costs) for a national battery grid for 1 week storage, could be built over ten years but would need the US to build and own double the current global output, not even considering where all the raw materials and labor comes from.

[–] traceroute66 2 days ago

> The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night.

And if we subtract all those datacentres crammed with Nvidia GPUs ? ;)

If we're being honest here, the problem with the US is that it has always treated any sort of energy source as being infinite and has always been quite extravagant in its use of energy.

Whether a preponderance for gas-guzzling SUVs or datacentres the story is always the same. The US mentality is there will always be infinite oil in the pump and infinite electrons in the cable.

[–] jerven 2 days ago

Is that actually that much more than building 400GW worth of nuclear generation capacity (assuming 10 hours of nighttime)? I think that, that simple calculation shows that it is viable. Even a trillion is 1/32th of the US GDP. Construction over a decade should not stress the US economy at all.

I also think your trillion number is at least double the raw cell cost today.

[–] pinkgolem 2 days ago

A night goes 8 hours or so, so you need 50gw of nuclear

[–] jerven 2 days ago

500gw (Terra is 1000 Giga), which would make the nuclear story even worse.

[–] pinkgolem 2 days ago

You are right... Sorry about that comment

[–] loomy7 2 days ago

Current li-ion pricing is $19 per kwh (BYD's latest cell's pricing), so a single battery that covers all 4TWh would come in at 76 billion dollars. Still a shit ton but reasonable.

[–] fpoling 3 days ago

Just by scaling up the existing technologies the full cost including installation and maintenance of a grid-scale battery in 5 years will be below 100 usd/kwh. So the price is max 400 billions or 1% of US GDP.

[–] thelastgallon 2 days ago

US has ~250 million cars. If they are all EVs (100KWh), it is 25TWh capacity.

Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.

EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.

This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.

[–] HDThoreaun 2 days ago

I think this is a pretty decent idea and hopefully within a decade at least california will be doing it. The problem though is that the biggest advantage of an EV is that you charge it overnight and never need to worry about going to the gas station or running low on power. I think a pretty significant number of people would want 100% charge every morning which makes the total addressable battery size a good bit smaller.

[–] AnthonyMouse 1 day ago

EVs with 300 miles of range are pretty common. The average round trip commute is 42 miles, i.e. you have on average more than 7 days before you run out from a full charge. Turning that into ~5.5 days in exchange for chopping tens of dollars a month off of your own electric bill because you're paying the daytime solar price instead of the nighttime something more expensive price is going to be very popular.

And when you know you're taking a long trip you can still do a full charge without needing to do that the other 99% of the time.