One of your moderators posted that you essentially need 3 times the solar, wind, & battery requirement due to capacity average power and non-optimum weather constraints.

You also need more HV DC transmission lines, transformers, inverters due to numerous remote smaller MW solar farm sites. That means more land leased for both panels, turbines, and powerlines. It results in more NIMBY for those not wanting to see/hear the offending power source/lines using up farmland.

In the summer, or on bright sun or heavy wind days, you end up having too much power, driving negative prices. Curtailment and backup natural gas costs then result.

Is this any way to run an electricity grid?

As you build more renewables as a percentage of the total power required you need more powerlines & batteries. Your moderator already showed that batteries are a huge expense that will remain high despite declining costs if you want more than 4-hours backup.

I hate to say this but u/AndrewTyeFighter is right. Battery prices have not leveled off. I asked Claude and got the following for the last 5 years.

With that said, I still think we need them to drop significantly more to be able to go even 80% renewables. But we might be at the point where 60% nuclear/hydro and 40% solar/batteries will work well.

Claude:

I've been digging into how fast Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) prices have collapsed and figured this sub might appreciate the numbers in one place. Below are the global average turnkey BESS prices (per BloombergNEF's annual Energy Storage Systems Cost Survey) alongside notable real-world project examples for each year, with total project cost, $/kWh, and location.

Quick note on methodology: BNEF's benchmark is a global average turnkey price for utility-scale 4-hour systems. Real project costs vary a lot based on location (US projects are pricier due to tariffs/labor), duration, and what's bundled in (interconnection, land, EPC, etc.). For specific projects I'm pulling reported total capex where available, otherwise estimating from announced figures.

2021 — Global avg ≈ $300/kWh (BNEF turnkey, 4-hr)

• Moss Landing Phase II (Vistra) — Monterey County, California
• Added 100 MW / 400 MWh, bringing facility to 400 MW / 1,600 MWh
• Phase II reported cost: ~$150M for the 400 MWh addition
• ≈ $375/kWh

NREL's bottom-up model put a typical US 60 MW / 240 MWh project around $379/kWh in 2021, so this lines up.

2022 — Global avg ≈ $290/kWh (BNEF, slight uptick due to lithium spike — Li prices rose 400%+ from 2021 to early 2023)

• Crimson Energy Storage (Canadian Solar/Recurrent) — Riverside County, California
• 350 MW / 1,400 MWh
• Reported total project cost: ~$500M
• ≈ $357/kWh

This was the biggest BESS to come online in 2022 and a good marker for what utility-scale looked like at the lithium-price peak.

2023 — Global avg ≈ $273/kWh (BNEF turnkey)

• Moss Landing Phase III (Vistra) — Monterey County, California
• Added 350 MW / 1,400 MWh, bringing total facility to 750 MW / 3,000 MWh (largest in the world at completion)
• Reported Phase III cost: ~$400M
• ≈ $286/kWh

LCOS dropped from $150/MWh (2020) to $117/MWh in 2023. Supply chain easing, more LFP adoption.

2024 — Global avg ≈ $169/kWh inflation-adjusted (BNEF) — a 40% YoY drop

• Edwards Sanborn Solar + Storage (Terra-Gen) — Kern County, California
• 875 MW battery / 3,287 MWh paired with 875 MW solar (final phase commissioned January 2024)
• Total project capex reported around $1.5B for the battery portion
• ≈ $456/kWh (US-specific; US costs ran way above global avg due to 301 tariffs + labor)
• Bisha BESS (Saudi Electric Company / BYD) — Bisha, Saudi Arabia
• 500 MW / 2,000 MWh, came online late 2024
• Estimated cost ~$500M
• ≈ $250/kWh (lower because Chinese-supplied equipment, no import duties)

Big year. NREL's 2024 US utility-scale benchmark came in at $458/kWh for 4-hour systems, so the US/global gap was wide.

2025 — Global avg $117/kWh (BNEF turnkey, 4-hr) — another 31% YoY drop

• Oasis de Atacama (Grenergy) — Atacama Desert, Chile
• Multi-phase build, ultimately 4.1 GWh+ (BYD-supplied)
• Total announced investment: ~$1.4B for the storage portion
• ≈ $130/kWh (close to Ember's $125/kWh all-in benchmark for global markets outside US/China)
• Ember Oct 2025 benchmark: $125/kWh all-in capex for 4hr+ utility-scale projects outside US/China ($75/kWh core Chinese equipment + $50/kWh install/connection)
• BNEF also broke out stationary storage battery pack prices alone at $70/kWh in 2025 — the cells/modules themselves, not the full system.

TL;DR table:

Year	Global Avg ($/kWh, turnkey)	Notable Project	Location	Total Cost	$/kWh
2021	~$300	Moss Landing Phase II	California, US	~$150M	~$375
2022	~$290	Crimson Storage	California, US	~$500M	~$357
2023	~$273	Moss Landing Phase III	California, US	~$400M	~$286
2024	~$169	Edwards Sanborn (battery)	California, US	~$1.5B	~$456
2024	~$169	Bisha BESS	Saudi Arabia	~$500M	~$250
2025	$117	Oasis de Atacama	Chile	~$1.4B	~$130

Headline takeaway: turnkey BESS prices have fallen ~60% in 5 years, with a steep cliff in 2024–2025 driven by LFP cell prices, Chinese manufacturing overcapacity, 4+ MWh container designs, and "plug and play" AC-block integration cutting install costs. BNEF projects 4-hour turnkey systems will hit $41/kWh in China, $101/kWh in Europe, and $108/kWh in the US (using Chinese cells) by 2035.

The US is now structurally more expensive than the rest of the world thanks to Section 301 tariffs — a gap that may widen or shrink depending on trade policy.

Sources: BloombergNEF Energy Storage Systems Cost Survey 2025, Ember "How cheap is battery storage?" (Oct 2025), NREL ATB 2024, project company press releases.

As a pro-green, pro-nuke Dane, I am grateful to the Swedes for the cold shower they are willing to give Brussels, Berlin and Copenhagen.

Thank you (no /s).

Overbuild renewables + gas backup for low renewable days. On overproducing days, electricity is dumped into making synthetic natural gas. Natural gas does not have the engineering challenges of hydrogen. The infrastructure and generating capacity for it is already mostly there. This would allow for carbon-neutral gas generation and energy/fuel independence. The round trip efficiency is pretty low with a single cycle gas turbine, maybe around 10%. I'm not sure how the economics pencil out but the energy independence and decarbonization seem like they could be worth a premium.

So last week our neighborhood lost power for ~ 8 hours. And did we care? Nope. With rooftop solar and batteries we were good for another 11 hours by the time power came back on.

Granted mostly it was the battery. We had a snow storm and so our solar wasn't producing diddly squat. Xcel pushed power to the battery before the storm.

When it happened my wife wanted to turn off everything. Lights, computers, etc. I convinced her all we had to avoid was the stove/oven, dishwasher, & washing machine (our dryer is gas). With a snow storm we weren't going to be running the A/C.

Anyways, I still think home rooftop solar for most units, including ours, is an inefficient way to generate power. But it sure is convenient.

And I appreciate all of you that don't get it subsidizing those of us that do. Rob from the poor to give to the rich - something the Democratic and Republican parties agree on!

Sunlight is renewable. Wind is renewable. A solar panel is not, or at least not yet. It's silicon refined at 1500–2000°C in carbothermic arc furnaces, silver paste screen-printed onto a cell, aluminum smelted in Hall-Héroult cells, EVA encapsulant cracked out of naphtha, tempered glass melted in natural gas furnaces at more than 1000°C. That said, roughly 75% of the world's polysilicon is made in China, where about 60% of the grid is still coal. So when one reads "25–50 g CO₂eq/kWh" for utility-scale PV, that number is conditional on the manufacturing mix. If the mix decarbonizes, the number drops. If it doesn't, the fossil substrate stays embedded in every panel.

I’m not making the bad faith argument that “but renewable energy sources emit too!”, indeed, PV's carbon payback is genuinely only 1–4 years against a 25–30 year lifetime. And coal is 820–1000 g/kWh in equivalent LCAs.

What I think gets lost many times is that the energy transition isn't really a substitution of generation sources, but likely a reconfiguration of the industrial base that builds the generation sources. And that base, i.e., steel, cement, petrochemicals, aluminum, refined copper, is still roughly 35-40% of global energy-related emissions today.

Take the cement as an example. About 65% of cement’s direct CO2 emissions come from the calcination reaction itself, not from fuel combustion, so even fully decarbonized heat does not eliminate most of its process emissions. Offshore wind, transmission, batteries, and solar all depend on steel, cement, aluminum, copper, and other materials whose production remains emissions-intensive today.

That is also why supply-chain constraints matter. The IEA’s net-zero pathways require a major scale-up in solar PV and wind, and mineral demand for clean energy technologies rises sharply, with lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, and copper all facing strong growth and potential bottlenecks.

Don´t take these arguments against the energy transition; I think electrification is necessary. But the honest framing is that electrification doesn't end our resource dependence; it restructures it. It trades a flow problem (burning fossil fuel) for a stock problem (mining and refining vast quantities of metals once, then hopefully recycling them well). Those are different problems with different politics, different geographies, and different bottlenecks. Pretending it's just "clean vs dirty" makes the policy worse.

I wrote a longer piece (for now in Spanish) working through the material chain, the LCA boundary problem, and the supply-gap numbers with citations. If anyone wants the deeper version, check raw-science. org

Is this a major issue obstructing the all-electric transition? Same for potential cut-off switches on solar panels & inverters made in China.

You can always have a backup diesel generator running gas pumps if the electronics aren't fried or can be repaired. Does natural gas power have similar vulnerability?

If nothing else, it shows the vulnerability to AI data centers and the reason why Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.

The Duane Arnold (nuclear) Energy Center

For decades, the Duane Arnold Energy Center operated quietly along Iowa’s Cedar River, providing steady electricity to the region. The reactor began commercial operation in 1975 and achieved a lifetime capacity factor of 78% (far below the 95% nuke bros love to use). As Iowa’s only nuclear power plant, it supplied dependable baseload power through oil crises, economic recessions, and decades of changing energy policy.

Wind Power Changed the Economics

By the 2010s, Iowa had become a national leader in wind generation. Larger turbines, federal incentives, and falling construction costs drove renewable electricity prices sharply downward.

In 2018, NextEra Energy Resources and Alliant Energy reached an agreement to cancel the nuclear power purchase contract. Alliant chose to pay $110 million to cancel the agreement five years early, shifting its energy strategy toward expanding wind generation and purchasing lower-cost electricity from renewable sources.

The company projected the decision would save customers roughly $300 million over time.

For the nuclear plant, however, the lost contract meant lost revenue. Even though the reactor remained licensed and capable of operating safely, it could no longer compete economically in a market increasingly shaped by inexpensive wind power.

From Nuclear Power to Pleasant Creek Solar

After closure, the site entered a new phase. Portions of the property surrounding the former reactor were redeveloped into a large solar installation known as Pleasant Creek Solar, transforming land once dedicated to nuclear generation into another form of renewable energy production.

The transition symbolized a broader shift underway across the Midwest: from centralized, mostly-on generation toward networks of wind and solar resources supported by modern grids.

The story of the Duane Arnold Energy Center is therefore not one of technological failure. The plant operated successfully for decades. Instead, it reflects how changing energy economics — particularly the rapid rise of wind power in Iowa — reshaped decisions about which sources of electricity would power the future.

Where a nuclear reactor once defined Iowa’s energy landscape, turbines and solar panels now carry forward the same goal: producing electricity without carbon emissions, but through a new generation of technologies