Now I'm having trouble following your use of units:
> Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost.
Do you mean MW here? Capacity costs is nowhere near $15 / MWh.
> For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load?
This is why storage costs include both the output and the capacity. 100 MW / 100 MWh is different from 100 MW / 400 MWh. Why would someone use a 1:1 output to capacity ratio? So that renewable builders can advertise "100 MW of storage", without actually specifying the actual capacity. In fact some plants have a output to storage ratio less than 1. I've seen 200 MW / 100 MWh facility before.
> In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
I think you're misunderstanding that figure. It's the levelized cost of energy: meaning every $200 MWh of energy stored and retrieved, you have to pay $200, or $0.20 per KWh. Existing energy costs are less than that. In the US it averaged $0.16/KWh. Storage alone would amount to more than what we currently pay for electricity, for half the energy we use. And remember you need to add generation, and transmission costs on top of that.
No, I'm saying if you offer me a contract where you give me $200 and I give you 1MWh of electricity distributed over the day proportional to demand. You guarantee my loans and I have free insurance. I can spend $30-80 of that on the energy (doubling for seasonal demand), $80 on storage and pocket $40. Then in 10 years I'll replace the worn out battery and start pocketing $160/MWh. I will also be able to sell my other variable MWh for another $15.
LCOS is presently much higher than current electricity costs, but you're not proposing current costs, you're proposing the deal the nuclear industry gets.
So let's be clear about these figures: If I have a 1 MW solar farm, it produces 1 MWh of electricity every hour of daylight - let's just ignore weather, and assume tracking solar panels so we don't care about incidence of the sun. The levelized cost of energy is answering the question, "how much did it cost me to produce that 1MWh of energy". This is mostly the construction cost, divided by the lifetime of the facility, plus operational costs.
Then there's the cost of storage: how much does it cost to store 1 MWh of electricity, and retrieve it later. The total cost of generating 1 MWh of solar energy, storing it, and releasing it into the grid later is the sum of both of these: 1 MWh of electricity is $30-40 from solar according to the Lazard doc. Then storing it and retrieving it is another $160 to $279. So it's a round trip cost of $30-40 to generate 1MWh of electricity, and $160-$280 to store and retrieve it, for a net cost of $190 to $320. But only half that energy is getting stored and retrieved, so the effective cost of producing solar energy round the clock is $120 and $180 per MWh
> you give me $200 and I give you 1MWh of electricity distributed over the day proportional to demand. You guarantee my loans and I have free insurance. I can spend $30-80 of that on the energy (doubling for seasonal demand), $80 on storage and pocket $40.
Except storage costs are more than that, and they're actually rising [1]. Furthermore you'll also need to pay money to build transmission lines to solar farms and wind farms - something not included in Lazard's estimates, it just lists transmissions costs as N/A and says it's too hard to estimate. Even at a high cost of $200/MWh, 3-4x the price of natural gas as per the Lazard doc, it's dubious you'd turn a profit.
Thus is why the vast majority of solar power is used without storage, and we just burn fossil fuels to make up for intermittency.
You said a solar facility plus a storage facility has a cost of $120-180 (this is not neccessarily correct as in some places you might need to store 70% of energy).
Then said you could not combine them (eliminating half of the conversion loss and shrinking the transforming electronics) for less than $200.
Additionally storage isn't increasing in price. Lithium is. And LiFePO4 is already being replaced for this purpose with sodium with prussian blue and carbon (which also does not need copper bus bars). Manufacturing hits GW scale next year, and price parity will follow shortly thereafter.
You are right in that solar is largely used without storage. That is because solar + storage is only marginally cheaper than heavily subsidized and insured for free nuclear and thus is unaffordable. It is also because a mix of solar and wind is a vastly better strategy for reducing emissions with limited resources than anything else.
You also haven't included electrolysers in your calculus (which have just started doing what the solar and battery market did over the last year).
Steam engines are obsolete. Throwing away 70% of your energy with a huge complex machine which wears out quickly due to operating conditions just doesn't work.
> Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost.
Do you mean MW here? Capacity costs is nowhere near $15 / MWh.
> For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load?
This is why storage costs include both the output and the capacity. 100 MW / 100 MWh is different from 100 MW / 400 MWh. Why would someone use a 1:1 output to capacity ratio? So that renewable builders can advertise "100 MW of storage", without actually specifying the actual capacity. In fact some plants have a output to storage ratio less than 1. I've seen 200 MW / 100 MWh facility before.
> In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
I think you're misunderstanding that figure. It's the levelized cost of energy: meaning every $200 MWh of energy stored and retrieved, you have to pay $200, or $0.20 per KWh. Existing energy costs are less than that. In the US it averaged $0.16/KWh. Storage alone would amount to more than what we currently pay for electricity, for half the energy we use. And remember you need to add generation, and transmission costs on top of that.