# Grid scale battery cost reductions - the final nail in the fossil fuel coffin?

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Just Have a Think
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR--t-eMq_Y
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/36976

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

For decades, our electricity grids relied on a familiar formula. Coal plants ran more or less constantly. Gas plants filled the gaps — especially during the critical evening peak, when demand surged just as solar generation fell away. And that evening peak was always the hardest problem. It was used to justify expensive gas peaker plants, the constant construction of new pipelines, and claims that renewables could never fully replace fossil fuels. But something remarkable is now happening in many parts of the world, especially in places like Australia and California. Giant batteries, charged up by nothing more than sunshine and wind during the day, are stepping into that evening peaker role. Not in theoretical research papers. Not in small scale pilot projects. But, in reality. Every day. Storing cheap renewable power during the day and displacing gas and coal precisely when the grid needs power the most. We talk about battery technology a lot on this channel, as you know. And we recently looked at the astonishing explosion of DOMESTIC battery storage systems down in Oz that are now helping to stabilize the power networks there. But GRID scale installations are also now really starting to change the shape of supply-demand curves, and as they displace the old technologies, their developers are even starting to find opportunities to site them in the very locations where coal and gas plants once stood, potentially providing employment opportunities for local communities. So, despite the extraordinary efforts of the fossil fuel industry to maintain its profitable, monopolistic status quo, could the new disruptors now finally be starting to win the technological battle? Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think We’ve all heard the argument of the sceptics, haven’t we? Wind turbines don’t work when it’s not windy and solar panels dark. It’s an astonishing piece of radical insight, don’t you think? Fortunately, grid system design engineers and operators who do this stuff for a living are aware of that patently obvious function of basic physics, and have been developing technological solutions to it for decades. One of the biggest challenges has been that evening peak that I mentioned earlier. No doubt you’ve seen some variation of this chart — often called the duck curve —which shows how, in sunny regions with lots of solar panels, solar power floods the grid around midday, Then, just as most people get home in the early evening, turn on lights, kettles, ovens and TVs or whatever, that solar power drops away with the setting sun —precisely when electricity demand is rising fast. The only reliable way to plug that gap, according to the fossil fuel industry, is to call upon quick-response gas-fired power stations, known as peaker plants — essentially large gas turbines designed to spin up rapidly and generate electricity on demand. These are great hulking bits of infrastructure that sit idle for most of the day, sometimes most of the year, yet still have to be paid for — a cost that ultimately shows up on consumers’ energy bills and helps keep electricity prices stubbornly high. But these new monster utility-scale batteries are changing that equation completely. The basic 101 summary looks like this: They charge up when electricity is cheapest and cleanest. They can be discharged instantly when demand spikes. They respond faster than gas turbines, even if those gas turbines are kept spinning all day long just in case. And I mean, way faster. An already spinning gas turbine still needs about thirty to ninety seconds to send electrons into the grid. And, by the way, if that turbine has to be spun up from a cold start, the lag time can be anything from ten to thirty minutes. By contrast, batteries can respond in about a hundred milliseconds –which is effectively instant. That makes them uniquely suited for grid stabilisation and nowadays increasingly attractive as an alternative to peaker plants as well, which are some of the most expensive and carbon-intensive assets on any electricity grid. Until fairly recently, the economics of building multiple megawatts worth of battery energy storage were completely prohibitive, and no-one was really suggesting them as a feasible option in the foreseeable future. Then, back in twenty-seventeen, Elon Musk had his famous bet with Australian billionaire tech bro Mike Cannon-Brookes that he could provide a one-hundred-megawatt utility-scale battery installation in South Australia in just one hundred days – a challenge that was achieved on time. And despite being mercilessly ridiculed by the mainstream media and by political luddites like Scott Morrison, independent analysis showed that the so-called Big Battery saved the South Australian grid more than a hundred and fifty million Australian dollars, or about a hundred million US dollars in its first two years of operation. Most of those savings came from improvements in response time and accuracy for something called Frequency Control Ancillary Services or FCAS, which is an essential function of grid stability. Even a small deviation in the frequency of the alternating current can

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

cause serious problems like overheating, component failures and even blackouts. But it’s one thing to tickle a few electrons into the system here and there to keep things on an even keel, and a completely different thing to provide what’s known as bulk energy shifting, discharging massive amounts of energy for multiple hours at a time. That’s what the new generation of battery technologies can now economically offer though. The latest example can be found in a regional industrial town in Western Australia by the name of Collie. Collie is a coal town. Or at least it’s historically been a coal town anyway. But coal stations there are closing. And instead of replacing coal with gas, the region is being transformed into a massive battery hub. The town already has a five hundred and sixty megawatt, two-thousand- two-hundred and forty megawatt-hour battery installation, and in November twenty-twenty-five that system was augmented with a second five hundred megawatt, two-thousand-megawatt hour installation. Both of those batteries will soak up the midday sun and discharge that energy during the evening peak period where coal and gas once dominated the mix. Within four years, that last of three remaining coal plants will be closed in Collie, taking more than a thousand megawatts of capacity out of an isolated grid system with no ability to import or export to other states or countries. All of that capacity will, by then, be provided by batteries. This is no longer unrealistic symbolism. It’s real-world economics in action. According to research from the University of Western Australia, large batteries are now even outcompeting gas plants in parts of the Australian grid. The paper’s authors explain that batteries can capture price arbitrage more efficiently, which is essentially buying electricity when it’s cheap, storing it, and selling it back to the grid when prices are highest. Plus, as we saw earlier, they can also provide frequency and system services that gas plants can’t match, AND they are INCREASINGLY setting the marginal price during peaks, which should FINALLY mean lower prices for consumers. According to The Clean Energy Australia Report 2025, more than twenty three gigawatts hours’ worth of storage was under construction by the end of twenty-twenty-four, and batteries are now rapidly becoming a core pillar of Australian grid planning. Analysis by Bloomberg NEF suggests that Australia’s battery capacity could grow eight-fold in the next decade, mainly to support the retirement of coal fired power plants. And projects at former coal sites like Port Augusta are now being designed with 8-hour or longer storage, explicitly to replace fossil generation during extended peak periods. But if Australia is showing us how batteries can replace COAL for time shifting energy to peak periods, California is demonstrating how the same disruption can happen to gas peaker plants. According to the California Energy Commission, by the start of twenty twenty-five the Golden State had nearly seventeen gigawatts of grid-connected battery storage — up from almost nothing just a few years previously, and already a third of the way to its twenty-forty-five target. According to S&P Global, batteries in California have displaced nearly thirty percent of gas demand in certain peak periods, which in some cases means gas plants are running fewer hours and earning less revenue. California has of course been all in on solar deployment for many years now. Market rules there allow battery operators to earn revenue from multiple services and there are clear policy signals that gas is being phased out, not protected. No wonder Gav and Don don’t get along too well right now. Now this is all great stuff for the lucky country down under, which is one of the sunniest places on earth, and for the world’s fourth largest economy over in the West of America, which enjoys prodigious levels of sunshine pretty much all year round. But can it work in other parts of the world that are not quite so meteorologically blessed? That’s a pretty critical question, isn’t it? Well, according to this twenty-twenty-five research from Cornell University, the answer is yes — but not necessarily using exactly the same methodology. Based on their analysis of ALL the system operators across the United States, the paper’s authors point out a few other critical changes that need to happen in colder and cloudier climes for grid-scale batteries to make a real difference. First of all, total renewable penetration has to increase significantly. In many cases that means ramping up 9:30 wind power instead of solar. In wind-heavy regions, batteries can store excess wind overnight, smooth out multi-hour ramps and reduce the need for gas even without lots of solar output. Secondly, grid flexibility has to be addressed to ensure it can cope with the new influx of variable transmission plus battery storage. That means new infrastructure and additional stabilising technologies like the grid-forming inverters that we’ve looked at a couple of times in previous videos. The recent catastrophic blackout on the Iberian Peninsula appears to have been an object lesson in how not to do that, triggered by a transmission fault

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 13:00) [10:00]

that cascaded through the system in a grid with insufficient inertia and fast-acting stabilisation to arrest the disturbance before it spread. Storage duration is obviously another factor. Batteries that can discharge for eight hours or more were until very recently considered to be a expensive indulgence but with battery prices tumbling like lemmings off a cliff, and new chemistries like sodium- ion looking like they could keep those costs falling still further in the coming years, long duration stationary energy storage is rapidly becoming not just economically VIABLE but commercially COMPETITIVE with coal AND gas. And finally, say the Cornell researchers, market design needs to reflect the new reality. That means some serious soul searching by grid system operators. Policy is the hidden variable here. Where batteries are thriving, its generally because markets allow them to compete on an even playing field with fossil plants, avoiding artificial support for gas capacity, AND where they can earn decent revenue for flexibility and reliability services. We haven’t quite arrived at the holy grail of grids run on one hundred percent renewable plus energy storage just yet though, have we? In fact, we’re still some way off, not least because, in many parts of the world, those pesky multi-day low-renewable events that our friends in Germany call the Dunkelflaute, still need careful planning and robust, reliable solutions. But there’s no mistaking the trajectory of travel. Gas peakers that were once considered essential and indispensable, are now looking increasingly uneconomical. And coal, with its glacially slow response times and lack of flexibility, simply cannot compete with the new technologies. Batteries are no longer just a backup system. They’re becoming a primary tool for managing peak demand. They drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions. They can lower overall system costs, and they significantly increase reliability and flexibility. Not everyone needs California or Australia’s sunshine to make it work anymore. It’s the flexibility that really beats fossil fuel. And once grids start rewarding that flexibility correctly, then fossil fuels rapidly lose their advantage. And the evening peak that was once the stronghold of coal and gas is now becoming the moment that proves we no longer need them at all. You’ll have your view on the situation of course, and quite right too. So, as always, the place to leave your thoughts is in the comments section below. That’s it for this week though. We’re still on our march towards seven hundred thousand subscribers so don’t forget to leave your suggestion for a video topic down there in the comments section to get yourself a chance to win one of these hoodies when we hit that milestone, and while your there, make sure you hit the subscribe button to get us there as quickly as possible. You can also help keep the lights on around here by joining the amazing group of people over at Patreon dot com forward slash just have a think who support me in making my weekly videos without having to resort to ads and sponsorship messages. Most important of all though, thanks very much for watching. Have a great week. And remember to just have a think. See you next week.