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2020 Energy Storage Report

svetz

Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
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The 2020 ESGC report came out in December, the big winner is compressed air:

...The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Storage Grand Challenge (ESGC) is a comprehensive program to accelerate the development, commercialization, and utilization of next-generation energy storage technologies and sustain American global leadership in energy storage....

TechLCOE $/kWh 2020LCOE $/kWh 2030
Compress Air$101$100
Pumped Hydro$220$220
Hydrogen$312$161
Lead Acid$356$305
LFP$385$270
Vanadium redox$399$319

A peaker plant is currently around $175, so currently Hydrogen might be the big winner since caves aren't readily available and possibly housing unique inhabitants. Of course, could be any number of new tech break throughs changing things.
 
The 2020 ESGC report came out in December, the big winner is compressed air:



TechLCOE $/kWh 2020LCOE $/kWh 2030
Compress Air$101$100
Pumped Hydro$220$220
Hydrogen$312$161
Lead Acid$356$305
LFP$385$270
Vanadium redox$399$319
Interesting report. Thanks for posting it.
I can't say I studied the report but I did read through it. A few things jumped out at me.

1) There are a LOT of assumptions made. This is not to say it was a bad report. They had no choice but to make assumptions. However, because of the assumptions, the actual costs running a system could be a *lot* different than what is in the chart @svetz showed. As an example, they assumed only 2000 cycles for LFP, but many folks claim it can be much higher than that (4K-5K). This could make a huge difference in the annualized cost of a system.
2) It looks like they did as well as someone could expect in comparing several very different technologies. However, because of the assumptions mentioned before, I look at the listed costs as primarily valuable in their relative values to each other not as absolute numbers.
3) For projecting they did an estimated % change for each component of the costs. More mature things (like water turbines) have a much lower projected change in price than emerging things like lithium batteries. However, when looking forward, projecting change is rarely accurate and often results in an estimate that is way high or low. When you combine the assumptions made even for the 2020 costs with the complete unknown of the technology advances, the 2030 estimated costs are probably not very useful. (But I give them credit for at least trying to project)
4) For their comparison they used $.03/KWh for the cost of electricity to 'charge' the storage. This was necessary for making comparisons, but there are times in CA (And I think TX) where renewable production exceeds demand and the cost goes to zero or even negative. This would make the operating cost of some of the less efficient storage technologies less of a factor in the overall cost. I wish they would have done some charts that showed how different costs of the incoming power affected the relative price of output power.
3) One thing that does not make a lot of sense is that Compressed air is so much lower than others and yet the report says there are only 2 production level compressed air installations in the world... I have a bit of a hard time reconciling that.
 
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