Another angle is that, as your battery fleet grows, incremental batteries are getting much lower utilization than the first ones, so they're a lot less economic to add (even when you have wind as well as solar to balance seasonality). Batteries cannibalize batteries quite fast.

Norway's road transport energy use is now highlighting a really important effect: primary energy consumption falling even while people travel more.

Why? Because electrification is energy efficiency.

Chart by @robbieandrew.bsky.social

You all MOCKED George Lucas and said this was boring or dumb but who’s laughing now???

Tiny/moderate up downs are the issue. Rectifiers and transformers are among the most important components to an electrolyzer system (not the cell stack) and that’s where costs have ballooned, offsetting cell stack manufacturing gains.

Batteries are great, they just add multiple cents per kWh.

New research out today from my team @rhodiumgroup.bsky.social & MIT CEEPR with our Q3 update to the Clean Investment Monitor:

Clean investment is at an all time high in the US, with $71 billion invested in Q3 2024 across manufacturing, energy & industry, and retail segments.

This. Producing hydrogen via electrolysis is energy intensive, and even if the capex on a project were zero, grid-supplied power is too expensive for most hydrogen use cases to pencil out.

I think part of the game now is to figure out the Real Value of ultra cheap solar/ batteries and keep the ball moving on the other pieces of the tech stack where possible. Sharpen the arguments and business models, look global where required.

That later category has way more business model risk, is going to be less willing to make long-term commitments, is probably asking for maximum power for the site without tenants to back it up, etc.