13 July

Battery manufacturing is increasing worldwide at over 250% per year. Costs are also plummeting. Together that makes a battery plant profitable inside 2 years, unheard of in energy. The coming battle will be between, do we emphasise battery storage, or new transmission lines, to get the grid to near 100% renewable? Australia is going down the transmission line route, mostly, I think because of historical cosy relationships between political parties and grid operators. Remember ‘gold-plating’ of the NSW grid a few years ago? Most of that gold went into the pockets of the transmission line owners. It also takes a lot of time to build lots of new transmission lines, and they require significant maintenance. Some experts are predicting batteries will make that mostly unnecessary. It’s very fast to add batteries to the grid, and much cheaper. For example the US calculates it would cost them $500 billion to add enough battery storage to make the transition to renewables. That would pay for itself in only a few years. It would cost them $7 trillion dollars to do it with new transmission lines, it would take 20 years, and transmission lines never make money. Bet on batteries. (P.S South Australia’s big battery, shown below, paid for itself inside 3 years.)