€100 off Electricity Bills or an Investment in Batteries?

 

€200 Million spent on utility scale battery storage could make electricity cheaper and more environmentally friendly in Ireland for the future.

Australia and California have installed battery storage recently, so the technology is not unproved. They allow energy to be stored from wind, solar and hydro sources and used later. This means that the most polluting forms of electricity never have to be turned on. Offices and homes do not use much electricity at night. If we can store energy at night to use when demand is high it means wind can be a greater proportion of the grid and we don't have to use as much non green energy.

Also because the energy is stored when it is plentiful and cheap and used when it is rare and expensive the costs of producing energy overall drops. These batteries pay for themselves pretty quickly. In 2017 they "built the Hornsdale Power Reserve, for a capital cost of A$90 million" but since then it "saved South Australian consumers over $150 million." 

Based on a cost of 'The 2020 starting point of $345/kWh' this €200m would provide about 2/3 of the 666 megawatts. That is about 2/3 of Moneypoint. Or over twice Turlough Hill. Batteries supply energy for about 4 hours. But it will be clean energy from Ireland growing renewable energy production.

These are also very fast to build. '63 days between grid contract and completion'. So it is not like it would take years to bring this extra energy into the grid as it would with new power stations or even wind farms. 

Instead of giving everyone €100 off their electricity bill using that money to improve our grid to have greener and cheaper electricity is a better use of that money.