The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently released the the report “2018 U.S. Utility-Scale Photovoltaics-Plus-Energy Storage System Costs Benchmark”. The report provides results of NREL’s first bottom-up study to model and benchmark the installed costs of various standalone lithium-ion storage (with storage connected to the grid only) and PV-plus-storage (with storage connected to PV and the grid) system configurations. The PV-plus-storage configurations include 1) co-located PV-plus-storage systems vs. PV-plus-storage systems in different locations, and 2) direct current (DC) coupled vs. alternating current (AC) coupled battery configurations for the co-located PV-plus-storage systems.
The figure below, from the report, shows the modeled costs of standalone lithium-ion energy storage systems with an installed capacity of 60 MW able to provide electricity for several different durations. Assuming a constant per-energy-unit battery price of $209/kWh, the system costs vary from $380/kWh (4-hour duration system) to $895/kWh (0.5-hour duration system). The battery cost accounts for 55% of total system cost in the 4-hour system, but only 23% in the 0.5-hour system. At the same time, non-battery cost categories account for an increasing proportion of the system cost as duration declines.
Download the full report at,
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