Cost Analysis of a 30kWh Smart Photovoltaic Energy Storage Container for Field Operations

Are battery storage costs based on long-term planning models?

Battery storage costs have evolved rapidly over the past several years, necessitating an update to storage cost projections used in long-term planning models and other activities. This work documents the development of these projections, which are based on recent publications of storage costs.

How do you convert kWh costs to kW costs?

The $/kWh costs we report can be converted to $/kW costs simply by multiplying by the duration (e.g., a $300/kWh, 4-hour battery would have a power capacity cost of $1200/kW). To develop cost projections, storage costs were normalized to their 2022 value such that each projection started with a value of 1 in 2022.

Why do we use units of $/kWh?

We use the units of $/kWh because that is the most common way that battery system costs have been expressed in published material to date. The $/kWh costs we report can be converted to $/kW costs simply by multiplying by the duration (e.g., a $300/kWh, 4-hour battery would have a power capacity cost of $1200/kW).

Do projected cost reductions for battery storage vary over time?

The suite of publications demonstrates wide variation in projected cost reductions for battery storage over time. Figure ES-1 shows the suite of projected cost reductions (on a normalized basis) collected from the literature (shown in gray) as well as the low, mid, and high cost projections developed in this work (shown in black).