A report from Ernst & Young (EY) shows that despite inflationary pressures, solar remains the cheapest source of new-build electricity. The global weighted average levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for PV is now 29% lower than the cheapest fossil fuel alternative.
Lcoe doesn’t include storage does it? But with that much of an advantage, it might still be cheaper with some storage.
It is just electricity generation, but it is also important to add, that it is the global average price of solar being 29% lower then the global average price of fossil fuel power generation. That means in good locations it would be even cheaper.
As for storage batteries are starting to kill gas power plant projects for cost reasons. That mainly happens in Europe with higher gas costs and emissions pricing, but there are some US examples as well. Both solar and batteries are rapidly becoming cheaper as well.
No, no storage, but you can calculate LCOE with storage, and that is pretty close too, problem is scaling it up, we don’t have enough mining capacity to scale it up to replace fossil fuels entirely, either we find multiple types of batteries so we can distribute load away from lithium nickle and cobalt, or we start to scale nuclear, those are our options.
Actually large grids are another option as well and a really good one. Basically it is always sunny or windy somewhere and when you can transport the electricity you avoid storage. Also there are other types of none battery storage like hydro from reservoirs and pumped, chemical storage with hydrogen or something similar and well stuff like biomass.
It really starts to scale nicely with a bit of overcapacity, a bit of storage, a good grid and a lot of different types of renewables placed over a large area.