More stoked for when the same is said for storage.<p>Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
> <i>More stoked for when the same is said for storage</i><p>Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.
Good news: batteries on are a similar exponential curve. Just a decade or so behind.
> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler<p>The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.<p>Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.
Yeah the US will lag behind on this.<p>Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.<p>Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos
Hmm, how much of that is base load versus the dramatic rise of natural gas plants that respond to dynamic demands? Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?
I don't know why this is downvoted. Solar and wind both essentially suck at anything other than baseline throughput. That doesn't mean they're useless, it just means that solar can't be our only solution unless we have, like... 30 breakthroughs tomorrow. We otherwise need something to handle spikes, which are both common and important, as well as periods when there is extended cloud cover even for typically-dark months.<p>Even if we handwave all the science needed to build batteries big enough to power cities for <i>days</i>, I don't think it's realistic to handwave the science needed to power a city for <i>weeks</i>. We don't even have enough <i>oil</i> for that.<p>"Power when it is inconvenient" is pretty much the basis for a modern society.
Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output. And usually when it is cloudy it also tends to be a bit windy, so solar and wind nicely complement each other.<p>Heavy clouds and zero wind, for <i>weeks</i>? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...
Typical non-informed incorrect opinion.<p>The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use.<p>Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency.<p>The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution.<p>In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for.<p>The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions.
It doesnt make economic sense to serve the entirety of daytime electricity demand from solar without batteries. Youd have to tons of fossil fuel plants that turn off during the day and then back on every night. For solar to take the next step batteries are a requirement
It's not quite as bad as that, since you don't consume fossil fuel resources when plants aren't running, but this is mostly a benefit for oil/gas plants, not coal (since the coal is likely useless without the power plant consumer anyway)
Usually solar and storage are a package deal these days for grid scale solutions. Mostly, storage is not really about providing long term storage but short term. It used to be that the sweet spot that makes the most economic sense was something like 2 or 4 hours of power (relative to the maximum output of the solar panels) but these days batteries are a lot cheaper and 8 hours or more is becoming fairly common. The point of storage is not really to cover for all the downtime when the sun doesn't shine but to give grid operators enough lead time to bring online extra generation or buy capacity on the open market and adjust their planning. Mostly a few hours is all they need to ensure the grid stays up and running through daily peak usage windows.<p>In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.<p>Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.<p>The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
Diurnal storage is solved by batteries. Longer term storage will very likely be solved. For several days, cheaper batteries (perhaps with lower specific power). For longer periods, either thermal storage or e-fuels.
Agreed, e-fuels seem to be far and ahead the front-runner.<p>We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.<p>We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.<p>OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.
> Agreed, e-fuels seem to be far and ahead the front-runner.<p>For covering Dunkelflauten? Yes.<p>For seasonal storage with a prolonged discharge (so, low power/storage capacity ratio)? I think thermal storage wins there.
I just don't see it with thermal. You have to pay the Carnot tax, and you also need humongous amounts of material.<p>E.g. 100 GWh (4 days of 1GW thermal power) with a 100C temperature swing (you can't go down all the way to room temperature) will need around 3.6*10^4 tons of sand. That's a lot.<p>Honestly, power-to-gas sounds like the only reasonable way for now. In theory, with SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) for power generation, it can beat the steam cycle.
The temperature swing can be much greater than 100 C. Heat can be extracted as a wave passing through the store, then heat added back by reversing the flow. It would operate like a counterflow heat exchanger.<p>View another way: if we hook several piles in series, then lukewarm air from a first mostly discharged pile can be directed into later piles for more heating. In the continuous limit this is the concept I described above.
36000 tons... doesn't actually sound like that much? That's a ~30x30m cube of dirt.<p>But I have no reference for the cost of setting up such a storage and how it compares to battery or hydro.
Sure, thermal is great where it's possible. But there aren't that many places where district heating is viable.
My guess is seasonal will be handled with flow batteries. A big tank and cheap-ish electrolyte, with the expense being in the electrodes sized for whatever max power is required. Tanks good for multiple cubic meters worth of liquid storage aren't exactly difficult to find, nor to place in a garden.<p>Then again, I'm basing this opinion on a recent-ish video from NightHawkInLight: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw</a>
Flow batteries might be ok for a week or so, but their market window has been shrinking as Li-ion has gotten cheaper.<p>The technology I'm most excited about is ultra low capex thermal, as being done by Standard Thermal. Capital cost per unit of energy storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th), so it can work with seasonal storage and just a few tens of charge/discharge cycles over its lifespan.<p>Standard Thermal has raised $11M and is building in Germany, where they say they can deliver 365/7/24 solar resistive heat (400 C or perhaps 600 C) for half the cost of heat from burning natural gas there.
Electricity is cheaper at night but only 20% of my consumption is at night, so I wouldn't mind if the situation was reversed.<p>I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.
Around here late morning to mid afternoon (11 am to 4 pm) is now off-peak, alongside the old 10pm to 6 am.
There's also, like... winter. I'm fairly sure there's a calculation somewhere you could determine the number of deaths this will cause with pretty good accuracy.<p>Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to. We shouldn't hinge our future on half of a technology.
Fusion, I hate to say it, is a pipe dream. Why? Because any fusion reactor loses a ton of energy to fast neutrons, which have the added negative of destroying the reactor. So-called aneutronic fusion (eg using He3) isn't zero neutrons. It's just fewer neutrons.<p>Stars don't have this problem because they're very large so there's only so far neutrons can go.
Aren’t lead acid batteries great for this purpose? They have advantage over lithium in stationary setups because weight is not an issue and they can be “daisy chained” many many times.
I’m unaware of more cutting edge alternatives and the way the electrical companies handle solar is confusing IME
I dumped my 24V dual LA battery setup for a single 24V LFP battery for my inverter/UPS backup. LFP supposedly has a 10-15y life based on the 4-5000 charge cycles most cells claim. Sodium ion is on the way as well. My setup gives me about 10-12h of backup for critical loads (my PC, lights, fans).<p>I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.
Lead acid batteries don't much like being cycled heavily. Even the ones explicitly designed for it (the average car battery is not) have about a tenth of the lifespan of lithium ion.<p>LiFePO4 is probably the chemistry best suited to it ATM. Lasts a long time, more stable, pretty cheap, and just a bit less energy density than other lithium ion options. Sodium-ion is looking promising but only just entering the market AFAIK.
They're not great.<p>LiFePo4 however is excellent and reasonably low cost these days
The cheaper solar gets the more of a gold rush there has been to develop projects/technologies that take advantage.
We can simulate storage with overcapacity and broader geographical distribution networks, even if storage doesn’t become as cheap.<p>Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.
It's encouraging- when one part improves usually the others follow.
Most of our chemistries are targeting things like cars and consumer electronics.<p>Ideally we see people like Form Energies, using iron-air (rust) batteries, for much easier to scale storage. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-climate-tech-companies-to-watch-form-energy-iron-batteries/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-cli...</a>
<a href="https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-growing-strongly-and-so-are-the-supply-risks" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...</a><p>- Battery energy storage has grown at an exceptional pace, with global installations increasing more than 20-fold in storage capacity over the past five years. This growth has been driven by falling battery prices, abundant supply and relatively short project lead times. As variable renewable generation expands in many markets, battery storage is becoming an important source of flexibility and resilience for power systems, while also representing a growing commercial opportunity for battery manufacturers.<p>- However, more than 90% of battery storage applications rely on LFP batteries that are almost exclusively supplied from China, which accounts for almost all global manufacturing capacity and the associated technical expertise. Korean producers are investing to scale up LFP battery production that can offer an alternative, but they face intense competition from established, lower-cost Chinese producers in an oversupplied market.<p><a href="https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-up-and-taking-on-a-larger-system-role" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-...</a><p>- Battery storage now accounts for around 18% of installed dispatchable capacity in Australia, compared with 7% in China, 5% in the United States and 4% in Europe – underlining how rapidly batteries are becoming an important part of the electricity systems in some regions.<p><a href="https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/02/global-battery-additions-reached-108-gw-in-2025-according-to-iea/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/02/global-battery-additions...</a><p>Battery storage is right behind the solar adoption curve. Net zero in five years? Probably not. Ten to fifteen years? Almost assured considering rate of change and the overall economics (assuming ~1TW/year of solar PV deployment and enough battery storage to soak up that low carbon generation while also providing grid services to replace thermal generation grid support [voltage, frequency, etc]).<p>(China is curtailing renewables equal to the annual combined generation of Spain and the Philippines every six months, and India about ~100-120GW/month due to not enough battery storage, for example)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198882">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198882</a>
I am desperate to find a battery inverter that can be used to supplement my existing grid-tied home solar setup. I only need about 5kW and 10kWh of batteries, but everything I can find is geared towards whole-home power at like 12kW. Way way more than I need. I understand I’m in the minority and there’s probably not a market, but I’d love to find something
Unfortunately, the market is somewhat bifurcated between what Anker, Jackery, Ecopower provide and stepping up to Base Power, Powerwalls, and other bigger system components.<p>My recommendation would be to see if Ecopower storage and inverters are a good fit for your use case. If you're feeling adventurous, you could build your own battery pack, but I only recommend if you are knowledgeable and confident. This comes with substantial property and life safety risk, only proceed if you know what you're doing and understand the risk (I'll work on my high voltage EV battery packs, but only with a helper nearby holding a 2x4, for example).<p><a href="https://hackaday.com/tag/battery-pack/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/tag/battery-pack/</a>