IEEFA is neither independent nor a serious research organization. The fact that they pretend to be only undermines their credibility.
The paper you link to is a joke.
They claim a cost of utility scale solar as $17 / MWh and then claim a cost of utility scale solar with battery as $22 / MWh.
How much battery backup does that $5 / MWh provide? it doesn't say, but the answer is only a few minutes.
Look at the chart of page 28 of planned installations where it shows 22 GW standalone storage being added for 60 GW of solar and wind. That means the standalone storage being installed can provide 20 minutes of backup power for the renewable resources being installed.
The cost of a renewable system with battery backup that can guarantee power for even 24 hours would probably be at least 10X the cost of bare solar, so in the neighborhood of $200 / MWh, or quadruple the target cost of NuScale (based on the chart in this paper).
Guaranteeing power for 24 hours is not acceptable though. A system like that would have regular blackouts given the normal variability in solar and wind.
Unless someone is quoting a price on guaranteed sustained power delivery they are not serious. Try selling your electricity to a data center or any other commercial buyer and see how far you get.
Or alternatively we could acknowledge that using the existing fossil fuel infrastructure for 8000 hours over the next century for the tiny minority of countries without enough hydro even in the unlikely case storage never improves is preferable to using them for 80,000 hours while waiting for nuclear plants to be built.
> The utility-scale PV-plus-battery technology represents a DC-coupled system (defined in the figure below), in which one-axis tracking PV and 4-hour lithium-ion battery storage share a single bidirectional inverter. The PV-plus-battery technology is represented as having a 130-MWDC PV array, a 50-MWAC battery (with 4-hour duration), and a shared 100-MWAC inverter. Therefore, the PV component has a DC-to-AC ratio (or inverter loading ratio [ILR]) of 1.3, which is the same as for utility-scale PV in the 2021 ATB. The assumed relative sizing is consistent with existing (but limited) data for online and proposed utility-scale PV-plus-battery systems—whose inverter characteristics (shared vs. separate) are not well known.
That very closely matches the ratio in the rollout they provide from the Berkley interconnection queue research. You don't just keep adding batteries, you add more renewable generation at the same time to maximize cost effectiveness.
This ratio is sometimes called "near firm" as it provides power when it is needed by the grid.
The paper you link to is a joke.
They claim a cost of utility scale solar as $17 / MWh and then claim a cost of utility scale solar with battery as $22 / MWh.
How much battery backup does that $5 / MWh provide? it doesn't say, but the answer is only a few minutes.
Look at the chart of page 28 of planned installations where it shows 22 GW standalone storage being added for 60 GW of solar and wind. That means the standalone storage being installed can provide 20 minutes of backup power for the renewable resources being installed.
The cost of a renewable system with battery backup that can guarantee power for even 24 hours would probably be at least 10X the cost of bare solar, so in the neighborhood of $200 / MWh, or quadruple the target cost of NuScale (based on the chart in this paper).
Guaranteeing power for 24 hours is not acceptable though. A system like that would have regular blackouts given the normal variability in solar and wind.
Unless someone is quoting a price on guaranteed sustained power delivery they are not serious. Try selling your electricity to a data center or any other commercial buyer and see how far you get.