It's hard to do a facile comparison. The fancy batteries from Tesla obviously lose right now against places with an existing grid and convenient site for a storage plant, but Bath County serves something like 60 million people, which is a lot of grid, with a lot of ancillary equipment in between the station and those users.
And there are reasons to expect the benefits of new pumped storage to decline over time (the best, most cost effective sites get built first, that sort of construction is well developed technology), and conversely, some reasons to expect the costs of batteries to decline over time (chemistry is still inching forward, as costs come down the number of uses goes up).
Ultimately, I can see that I'm not running out to buy solar panels and house batteries, so my real opinion on what is best right now is clear enough.
Comments
It's hard to do a facile comparison. The fancy batteries from Tesla obviously lose right now against places with an existing grid and convenient site for a storage plant, but Bath County serves something like 60 million people, which is a lot of grid, with a lot of ancillary equipment in between the station and those users.
And there are reasons to expect the benefits of new pumped storage to decline over time (the best, most cost effective sites get built first, that sort of construction is well developed technology), and conversely, some reasons to expect the costs of batteries to decline over time (chemistry is still inching forward, as costs come down the number of uses goes up).
Ultimately, I can see that I'm not running out to buy solar panels and house batteries, so my real opinion on what is best right now is clear enough.