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.
This reminds me of my trip to northern Honshu in Japan. I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) which was so smooth and quiet you literally had to look out the window to even realize you were moving. But then we switched to an old clunker that was shaking around and belching smoke and working so hard just to pull out of the station.
And the on-board experience was a huge contrast as well. The Shinkansen was full of people in suits minding their own business and it was clean and space-age-looking. The other train had a lived-in look and was full of chatty country folk who started asking me all sorts of questions and laughing because we could barely understand each other. My Japanese is a little iffy and they had this country drawl that wasn’t helping. But I enjoyed both trains for different reasons.