As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the fact that we had bet a certain % of the base load would have been supplied by all the new wind farms, but in reality we had to fire up every peaker plant in the state, and even request assistance from other grids in order to meet demand. The wind simply wasn't blowing. If more of our mix had been natural gas, even just 5-8%, that event would have been completely mitigated.
Adding just 10%, to Nat Gas plants, would be 5,000 MW on the Texas grid. Given that wind farms were operating at 1/5th of capacity during this Texas grid events, you would need something like double the current installed wind farm base to be able to deliver 5,000 MW at that 1/5th capacity utilization. It has taken decades to get to the current, rough, 24,000 MW nameplate capacity for Texas to get to where it is.
So help me with the costs here. Adding 25,000 MWh (5,000MW * 5 hours emergency supply) of lithium battery storage would cost... what? As compared to constructing and operating new natural gas plants? I can't get clear numbers that I trust.
The largest battery farm on earth is 100MWh and it cost about 90 million dollars. For a 25GWh battery installation, you'd be looking at 22~23 billion dollars using basic linear extrapolation, and I still question if this is enough reserve capacity for our summer peak demand.
Wow. That's quite a lot. I've seen price estimates as low as $387/kWh, which seems to come from NREL [1]. At that price it comes to something like $9.6bn. That's huge, but maybe doable. Alternatively, couldn't Texas just build some HVDC lines to other parts of the US grid to get more stability, as China is doing?
