For wind and solar to become a bigger part of energy production, battery storage is needed for periods of peak production. So how costly would this be and would it work?

Green new deal, fact vs fiction link

Why batteries are not a viable solution, new energy economy report link

fact vs fiction link

* The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory, could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for every pound of battery produced.

Report, grid scale storage impacticle link

Why a battery revolution is not on the way MIT Technical Review link

Bill Gates slams the idea of batteries and intermittent power link

Grid scale storage, can it solve renewable intermittency problems link

Tesla batteries in Australia link

Provides power for 30,000 homes. 6 minutes worth of Australian electricity.

30,000 homes for one hour, 8,000 homes 24 hours ($7,500 a home)

$2,000 a home, 30k.

 The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory, could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for every pound of battery produced.

Second is the Tesla PowerWall v2. made in their gifafactory..... Excluding the power electronics it presently costs $6700 for 13.5 KWh    $496,000 per MWh, 

The price of natural gas at Henry Hub ($25.47/MWh) was below the price of Central Appalachian coal ($38.05/MWh) on a $/MWh basis

 As we know, Elon Musk sold his 100MW battery storage system to South Australia a couple of years ago. 100MW sounds impressive, but as his own specifications made clear the maximum output was only 129 MWh. And for this tiny amount of storage, the Australians paid an estimated US $60 million.

To put storage into perspective, let’s take a typical 5MW wind turbine, the sort we see plastered across the countryside.

Based on utilisation of 28%, one turbine would, on average, generate 1022 MWh/month.

Now, suppose that we had a month with relatively little wind, and output declined to 10% of capacity. This is not an unrealistic assumption, as we went a full week earlier this month with wind power down to that sort of level.

In this scenario, output during the month would fall to 365 MWh, leaving a shortfall of 657 MWh against the norm.

If this single wind turbine was to provide enough storage to make good this shortfall, how many Tesla batteries would be needed?

 Tesla’s South Australian storage system can provide, as we have seen, 129 MWh. So we would need five of these, at a cost of $300,000,000 US, to make up the supply difference for 30 days.

Remember, this is to guarantee supply for just one tiny wind turbine.

The Australian scheme consists of around 600 Tesla Powerpacks, each rated at 210 KWh, and each about the size of a large fridge.

Our local 5MW wind turbine need some 3000 of these. Apart from filling up the countryside with millions of fridges, the cost of providing this sort of storage would kill wind projects stone dead, if they had to pay the cost themselves.

What the public at large, represented by Mr Truth, don’t seem to understand is just how limited the amount of energy that can be stored really is. link