chickenbig

Foundations, maintenance, fire risk.

Land is cheap relative to a container full of cells.

> just have storage for a week of cloudy days.

1 week of storage that is cycled perhaps once or twice a year. 30 year lifetime, say, so 60 cycles in its lifetime. $50/kWh so perhaps $1/kWh for two (presumably cold and dark) weeks a year.

> Like CATL announced a cost of $19 per kwh > I think the actual cost to buy one now it more $40-60.

Plus battery assembly and installation costs (inverter, grid connection).

> If you spread $60 over 15000 cycles

A 30 year lifetime (11k cycles if charged/discharged once a day). Using a 5% discount rate the cost goes up to 0.78c/kWh for the cells. The cost goes up if it can not cycle once a day, for instance intermittent source of energy or excess capacity. And the cost goes up with all the rest of the equipment involved, and round trip efficiency.

> You can't streamline your way out of the need to have to build containments capable of surviving a fully laden Airbus A380 crashing into it from 43.000 ft.

Most of the plane is not a problem for 6ft of concrete and a steel liner. Planes are built to just about hold together. The main thing to worry about are the jet engine cores.

The AP1000 was an incomplete design, plus the aircraft impact assessment change happened. Even the Chinese had trouble constructing it.

But now there is a design, and the Chinese construct CAP1000/CAP1400 on a regular basis.

> Nuclear takes far too long (>10 years) to build.

Latency and throughput are not the same thing. 10 years to the first result, and less once the planning and construction process is streamlined.

> individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries

Good luck storing that energy in batteries through the winter. Having a portion of $50/kWh batteries that cycle once a year results in pretty high energy costs. At some point non-battery storage (e.g. generators running on diesel) take over.

Of course, if people are willing to go totally off-grid then good luck to them.

> worse rates for prosumers

Put alternatively, better rates for consumers. How should one portion the cost of the electrical system as a whole to different groups of people? If someone seldom draws electricity from the grid, and only when it is likely more expensive how much should they pay? What about the limit where everyone is a prosumer and has this usage pattern?

Another liquid metal you have to watch out for is mercury. A former employer of mine traced elevated RAM degradation in a particular datacentre to mercury contamination in the canal the used for cooling water. Mercury has an interesting way of migrating through other metals.