Note also Javier Blake column BP Is on Borrowed Time to Change – Or Else www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

BP Is on Borrowed Time to Change – Or Else

If there’s an all-hands-on-deck response at the oil major’s headquarters, that message seems to be lost in translation for concerned investors.

The main thing to note apart from the overall costs is that renewables have almost zero marginal cost: most of the cost is fixed/capital costs.. that creates a different economic dynamic which the UK’s CFD structure optimises for customers.

Here’s Hoekstra’s piece In short batteries are a huge deal open.substack.com/pub/aukehoek...

Batteries: how cheap can they get?

How dirt cheap batteries will completely transform our electricity grid, paving the way for solar and wind and replacing grid reinforcements with grid buffers.

Batteries are making intermittent power from solar and wind firm, making previous inflexible power from nuclear flexible, and - through the use of batteries eg in cars and homes- making demand more elastic. And all this means we need less grid investment than we might otherwise need.

…and make sure your electricity use never peaks during the day, that your voltage hardly fluctuates, and that you will never experience a blackout again. Companies and business parks will buy larger batteries that quickly solve their grid congestion woes.”

“I predict that long before 2030 we will have long lasting batteries for less than $50/kWh everywhere. Your house will get a 20 kWh battery costing just $1000 that will earn itself back in less than three years and …

In this piece below, Auke Hoekstra , Director of NEONresearch at the University of Eindhoven reflects on the implication of developments in sodium batteries

And this trend in prices is reinforced by the fact that costs of new technology like solar and wind have fallen below the cost of fossil technology and that grid capacity can be improved using practices like dynamic line rating which involve little increase in capital expenditure.

But developments in battery technology are changing all of this, opening the way for the industry to carry inventories for the first time and creating incentives to reduce the amount of both generation and grid capacity that is required. In the long term this can only mean lower electricity prices.

That has meant a need for real time matching of supply and demand, necessitating the need for excess generating capacity over demand, overbuilding grid systems and complexity in contracting arrangements (which in turn had made credit supply a critical issue).