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Cost of Energy Storage in 2022

Question

Solar energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. But the big bottleneck for its use is no longer cost, but practical questions such as storage. Batteries are still the most obvious way of storing electrical energy. Lazard released a report in October 2021 analyzing multiple battery storage systems, finding the cheapest use case in a wholesale PV + storage system, at a cost of 85 - 158 $/MWh (for a geometric mean value of 116$/MWh).

Our World In Data reported in 2021 that the price of batteries fell by 97% in the past 3 decades.

The Levelised Cost of Energy Storage (LCOS) is an estimate of the full cost of building and operating an energy storage facility, relative to the expected amount of energy generated in its lifetime.

What will be the Levelized Cost of Energy Storage in 2022?

This question will resolve as the Levelized Cost of Energy Storage according to Lazard's LCOS v8.0 report, currently expected to be published in late 2022. If Lazard provides multiple estimates for different energy storage systems for different purposes, the cheapest purpose will be used for resolution; if Lazard provides a range of estimates (as in the LCOS 7.0 report for "wholesale PV + storage" at 85 - 158 $/MWh), this question will resolve as the geometric mean of the 2 endpoints of that range (which would be 115.89$/MWh in the LCOS 7.0).

If Lazard does not release a new report on battery storage by January 1, 2024, this question will resolve ambiguously. This question will close retroactively 24 hours before the report has been published.

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