Ok I watched his little presentation there. Though I’m no expert on the topic, my hyperbole detector started ringing.

Most of what I’ve read concerning solar/battery farms have indicated relatively modest investments on the battery side. Like maybe a few hours of peak generation worth of storage? A drop in battery costs of the kind he’s indicating could increase this to cover perhaps the whole overnight period, but if the following day is cloudy, you’re still going to have a problem.

What’s not mentioned, and I suspect is true, is that getting to successively more reliable levels of power delivery requires exponentially more storage. Like if you think oh, I’ve got 50% reliability at the moment (meaning you only have to fall back on backup generation half the time), I only need to double the storage to get to 100%, I think you’re in for a rude awakening. It is very hard to get to 100%. And even if you could get to 99%, that’s still 3 days out of the year when you need a backup. So you still need a backup.

That’s not to say this isn’t good news though. If battery storage can eliminate peaker plants, that alone would be a worthy goal, since these tend to be far less fuel efficient than base load plants.

Battery prices have collapsed by nearly 70% over the past few years

Why is he saying JUST plunged to imply a massive breakthrough

Got a link I can click?

Cool. Where can I buy one?

We’re definitely seeing the price drops at the consumer level - 5kWh server-rack-style batteries are below $800 for UL listed models, which is nuts.

Used EV batteries are getting really cheap too, you can get as much as 80kWh for around five grand and use an open source BMS to use it for home storage.

Ok, but can I use these batteries as RAM?