I think there are some interesting conversations to be had with regards to your first point.
Our grid infrastructure isn't cheap. We need a huge amount of equipment to do the voltage conversions to make power lines semi-sane. We also need a ton of space, maintenance and equipment to run the wiring, install the transformers, handle substations and distribution, etc...
My suspicion is that if you account for that, local storage is cheaper. But I think we're still finding out where battery tech is going to settle.
I'd be having a very different conversation if we hadn't introduced LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries, and realistically - these have only been on the market ~15 years now, and only really generally available for 5 or 6 years.
These are already pretty incredible batteries. A bank them the size of a washing machine will power most residential homes for days, cost under 10K, and be very safe. Prismatic LFP cells run ~$100/kwh (not theoretically, right now: https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/eve-mb31-grade-a-...)
If we see a similar upgrade with Sodium (and it's looking more and more real, multiple commercial products have hit the market last year) - then I think a decade from now we'll really start to wonder why we're wasting so much land and spending so much on grid equipment if you can just install a small bank of batteries for a couple thousand dollars and call it done.
Will you still have economies of scale with storage? Probably. Will those outweigh costs to transmit that to where it needs to go? My hunch is no.
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On a darker note - individual generation and storage is WAY more robust to military disruption. No central location to bomb to knock out power for a whole city.
Our grid infrastructure isn't cheap. We need a huge amount of equipment to do the voltage conversions to make power lines semi-sane. We also need a ton of space, maintenance and equipment to run the wiring, install the transformers, handle substations and distribution, etc...
My suspicion is that if you account for that, local storage is cheaper. But I think we're still finding out where battery tech is going to settle.
I'd be having a very different conversation if we hadn't introduced LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries, and realistically - these have only been on the market ~15 years now, and only really generally available for 5 or 6 years.
These are already pretty incredible batteries. A bank them the size of a washing machine will power most residential homes for days, cost under 10K, and be very safe. Prismatic LFP cells run ~$100/kwh (not theoretically, right now: https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/eve-mb31-grade-a-...)
If we see a similar upgrade with Sodium (and it's looking more and more real, multiple commercial products have hit the market last year) - then I think a decade from now we'll really start to wonder why we're wasting so much land and spending so much on grid equipment if you can just install a small bank of batteries for a couple thousand dollars and call it done.
Will you still have economies of scale with storage? Probably. Will those outweigh costs to transmit that to where it needs to go? My hunch is no.
---
On a darker note - individual generation and storage is WAY more robust to military disruption. No central location to bomb to knock out power for a whole city.