Thank you for saying this. I find in technical circles, like HN, it's often underappreciated how dramatically solar, wind and stored energy are becoming cheaper year by year while production capacity continues to grow
It's funny because the technical crowd should be best situated to understand the incredible tech curves of solar, wind, and storage, as they have experienced the advancement of computer tech. However, for other technical fields, such as civil engineering, they are not used to dramatic cost drops.
Nuclear has a surprising negative learning curve. This is obvious when comparing different reactor designs over time, with ever increasing costs. But the more surprising finding is that building the same reactor multiple times get more expensive, not less. This is true even during France's successful build in the 1970s, so regulatory changes can't be the sole reason for increasing costs:
Question is whether batteries are getting better fast enough. Cost per energy stored might be coming down relatively quickly, but energy density (energy per volume) or specific energy (energy per mass) are improving only very slowly. As a consequence, I think long-range electric passenger jets, for example, are many decades off.
By "very slowly" you mean double the capacity per kg in the last decade at a tenth of the cost? Because that is more or less what happened in the last decade.
If you don't believe me, the Nissan Leaf originally had 21KWH of capacity when it launched in 2010. The smallest variant of the latest model has 41 KWH. You can also get a 60KWH version. And you can actually install new batteries into an original Leaf and double the range while slightly lowering the weight. And of course those batteries are now a fraction of the cost that they were in 2010. Back then replacing the battery would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. People are getting that done for around 5K now for a battery that is literally twice the capacity.
The discarded batteries typically end up being part of some grid storage solution.
Another doubling in the coming decade is likely. As is further reductions in price per KWH. Maybe not 10x. But probably more than 2-3x.
It's profitable now to buy expensive storage solutions for grid providers. Ten years from now that will be a lot more attractive.
